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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
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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
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