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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Names And Their Significance In Fiction 359 Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture 363 Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day 377 Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie 380 Will Oldham: Songs Of The Human Animal 382 P.J. O’Rourke: Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll 389 Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty 392 Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have Your Abortion” 394 Tim Parks: Destiny 398 N-R Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism 401 Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture 404 Richard Powers: Plowing The Dark 406 Richard Powers: Gain 408 Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon 410 Matthew Robertson: Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461) 413 Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman 415 Jacques Roubaud: The Great Fire Of London 417 358 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published August 1996] Names And Their Significance In Fiction Chris Hall The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name “Godot” is missing from any parental Book Of Names (although I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around stroking their bellies and saying: “Yes, we’re waiting For Godot…”) One can imagine the bewildered child suffering an intolerable identity problem from having his peers forever arguing about what he ‘means.’ To some, “Godot” has a kind of cosmic signifier in the duality ‘God/Eau’. Less Francophile readings have insisted it should scan as ‘Go.dot’, a reference to the mental and physical movement that must result from Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible suggestion, although the most interesting and curious, comes from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot, rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom BUY books online from and spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this has a further curious affinity with the ‘Go.dot’ reading and one of cheery Norman Tebbit’s maxims: on yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of the Tory party? Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is in this tradition that a lot of modern and Postmodern neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a name’s potential to succinctly allude to character and disposition, often spending months deliberating over the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a truly great fictional name belongs to the central character in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces: Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically onomatopoeic, suggesting indignation and outrage which, for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius loudly proclaims: “This is an abortion!”) There is also the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle 359 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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