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initial that furthers our understanding of the character.
Philip K. Dick’s obsession with duality (probably
originating from the fact that his twin sister died when
only a few months old) led him to invent some gloriously
unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator
(as with a lot of Dick’s novels, it is hard to tell) is called
Horselover Fat. ‘Philip’ is Greek for ‘lover of horses’;
‘Dick’ is German for ‘Fat’. Similarly, for close watchers
of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick
Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised
suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from
deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail & I.
Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis
Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to
the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/
BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified
obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where
Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who
turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer.
If there is one author who best exemplifies a predilection
for names and games of the distinctly literary
type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there
is paronomasias (a “verbal plague” as Nabokov describes
it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an
anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by
their very nature these “delicate markers” will bypass
the inattentive reader and that “well-wishers will bring
their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to
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my little party” and concludes that in the end “it is only
the author’s private satisfaction that counts.” It was this
“wayside murmur” that pleased him the most when
rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correction.
etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee
jump (especially first person narratives) where we may
become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story
that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov
had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for
kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on
the ropes and shouting down, “You idiots!”
James Wood, in comparing young American and
English writing, recently argued for a fiction of unknowingness
and against one of omniscient authorial
intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov
is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author
manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from
this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What
varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds
patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some
people don’t like the pedagogical voice in modern
fiction, don’t like being ‘lectured to’, and some don’t
like being told they’re being ‘lectured to.’ Fine. But
Woods, and even more recently, the children’s writer
Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal,
goes too far in implying that any type of Postmodern or
self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they
conceive as a ‘pure storytelling’ form.
360
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