{"id":94218,"date":"2016-02-08T14:06:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T19:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94218"},"modified":"2016-02-08T16:36:19","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T21:36:19","slug":"what-kind-of-name-is-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/08\/what-kind-of-name-is-that\/","title":{"rendered":"What Kind of Name Is That?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to name\u00a0your fictional characters.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Characters in need of names.<\/p><\/div>\n

To me the most embarrassing part of writing fiction, aside from telling people about it, is naming your characters. Of course, even \u201creal\u201d names are made up, but in life our names are things we can alter only with a great deal of paperwork; in fiction, writers can line up names and identities as they please, dropping or trading them on a whim. Contriving a name for a contrived person seems terribly precious to me, akin to naming a doll. You want your characters to have names that aren\u2019t too convenient but still memorable and meaningful, which isn\u2019t easy. I spent about a year with a manuscript populated by memorable characters like [[ROOMMATE]]<\/em> and ???????\u2019s dad<\/em>, swapping dozens of potential monikers in pursuit of the perfectly natural, unforced, graceful name. After rupturing a few blood vessels that way, I tried to figure out what other writers were doing.<\/p>\n

The question of what names mean, what they\u2019re for, has been around in the West since at least 500 B.C.<\/small>, when the Pythagoreans developed a few rules of onomancy to divine human traits from things like the number of vowels in one\u2019s name. (Even numbers signaled an imperfection in the left side of the body.) One of the earliest discussions about naming comes from Plato\u2019s dialogue \u201cCratylus<\/a>,\u201d in which Socrates oversees a debate about whether a name is \u201can instrument of teaching and distinguishing natures\u201d or whether it\u2019s just a matter of \u201cconvention and agreement.\u201d More recently, psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Stekel and Carl Jung posited that the \u201ccompulsion of the name\u201d not only reflects but determines one\u2019s future: that we\u2019re all engaged, from birth, in a nominative determinism. (Anyone quick to dismiss this as Freudian bunk should look at the abundance of Shaquilles<\/a> now entering professional sports.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cratylic names, as they\u2019ve come to be known, express something essential about a character. They\u2019re the kind we associate with Dickens\u2019s minor characters, his Murdstone, Stryver, and Slyme\u2014at every mention you\u2019re reminded of their single dominant trait. These days they\u2019re often considered unsophisticated and heavy-handed; one feels the author is trying to spoon-feed a theme or prejudice a characterization. And yet there are plenty of writers eager to impart the capital-S<\/em> Significance that comes with a cratylic name: think of Martin Amis\u2019s John Self and Lionel Asbo, or Updike\u2019s priest Jack Eccles from Rabbit, Run<\/em>. Then there are cratylic names laundered through irony\u2014as when Steinbeck names his gentle giant Lennie Small, or Evan Connell calls an alienated married couple Mr. and Mrs. Bridge\u2014and smuggled in by way of nicknames or allusions. Jonathan Franzen\u2019s Purity \u201cPip\u201d Tyler\u00a0achieves all of the above, as does Gogol Ganguli in Jhumpa Lahiri\u2019s The Namesake<\/em>, whose resentment of his name\u2019s mannered import is the novel\u2019s engine:<\/p>\n

\n

For by now he\u2019s come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hates having constantly to explain. He hates having to tell people that it doesn\u2019t mean anything \u201cin Indian.\u201d He hates having to wear a nametag on his sweater at Model United Nations Day at school. He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but, of all things, Russian. He hates having to live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second … At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear. At times he wishes he could disguise it, shorten it somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had got people to call him Jay. But Gogol, already short and catchy, resists mutation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Notwithstanding these self-aware exceptions, two dominant camps of nomenclature have displaced the cratylic: the \u201crealistic\u201d name (e.g., John Carter, Theodore Decker) and the Pynchonesque absurdonym (Pig Bodine, Perkus Tooth). Even if one strives for verisimilitude and the other eschews it, both court a kind of arbitrariness: they\u2019re names an author might defend by saying they \u201csound right.\u201d And they achieve a similar effect: to suggest as little as possible about the character, favoring an invisibility that makes it easier for readers to project, speculate, and generally make up their own minds about what kind of a character they\u2019re dealing with.<\/p>\n

But a name is a word, and it\u2019s difficult if not impossible for words to connote nothing; most names come freighted with convention, tradition, and history. The entry for \u201cHow to Name your Fictional Character<\/a>\u201d at WikiHow (always an amusing resource for complex issues<\/a>) begins with the suggestion to \u201cdetermine your character\u2019s ethnicity and appearance.\u201d Here things get dicey. Consider the white author who has to name his nonwhite characters. Though it\u2019s easier than ever to research a passable name from another culture, you still see more than enough banal stereotypes and correspondingly lame puns. Off the top of my head, there\u2019s Roald Dahl\u2019s villainous Chinese leaders Chu-On-Dat and How-Yu-Bin in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator<\/em>, or Jean Nguyen (\u201cJohn Wayne,\u201d ha?) in Cryptonomicon<\/em>, or Han Seoul-Oh in The Fast and the Furious <\/em>films, or the multiple Asian protagonists named Hiro (Snow Crash<\/em>, Heroes<\/em>, Big Hero 6<\/em>). A recent dust-up<\/a> in the Tumblrverse centered over whether Harry Potter<\/em>\u2019s Cho Chang was plausibly named, though I\u2019ll point out that a name can be both plausible and insipid.<\/p>\n

Along those lines, what\u2019s often most revealing about character names is what they say about their authors. It\u2019s hardly uncommon for writers to invest their aspirations in their characters, and so too in their names. A friend once pointed out that certain ambitious male writers tend to endow their fictional surrogates with divinity and light\u2014Hal Incandenza, Rabbit Angstrom, Chip Lambert, Nathan (\u201cGod\u2019s gift\u201d) Zuckerman. And obviously a writer inclined toward metafiction would see no need to stop there. Witness the (also largely male) tendency to write oneself into one\u2019s book: Dante, Blake, Proust, Borges, Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, Sheila Heti.<\/p>\n

Introducing your own name isn\u2019t necessarily an act of egotism; if anything, it strikes me as one of many attempts to sidestep the whole mess of naming. Other writers have opted to leave their protagonists unnamed, initialized (Josef K.), or downright algebraic, as in Alexandra Kleeman\u2019s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine<\/em>, which stars A., B., and C. You might also trade one set of connotations for another, referring to your character by profession (the Judge) or appearance (the Little Red-Haired Girl). Or you can take Tao Lin\u2019s approach, borrowing names that are already so freighted with meaning that they induce cognitive dissonance from page one. As to why he named the characters Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment in his autobiographical novel Richard Yates<\/em>, Lin explains<\/a> that he \u201cchose names that would not cause the reader to feel like there was hidden meaning in them\u201d\u2014they\u2019re too loaded with superficial meaning for that.<\/p>\n

You may well decide that the question of names is trivial beside the harder task of building convincing, nuanced characters to inhabit them. I was happy to let the protagonists in my novel Private Citizens<\/em><\/a> remain nameless as I worked; inventing their names afterward had the same harmless thrill as reading their horoscopes would. Their names ended up as riffs on the conventions of naming. Linda Troland, an aspiring writer resentful of male writers\u2019 female characters, is named for a measure of light cast on the retina; the transient Henrik (\u201cruler of the house\u201d) is ironically cratylic, the dad-hating Cordelia an ironic allusion.<\/p>\n

The only Thai character, Will, proved the toughest to name, since I\u2019d dreaded being identified with him on the basis of race. On top of that, Thai surnames must by law be unique to each family, meaning I\u2019d have to devise one from scratch instead of hiding behind a common one. After discarding a number of long, difficult options, I stuck with my placeholder: Will N\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014, which he\u2019s later pressured into shortening to N\u2014\u2014\u2014.<\/p>\n

Clearly it\u2019s no coincidence that I have a long, difficult, Thai name, one that causes people to ask in what they think is a friendly tone, What kind of name is that? I\u2019ve been advised several times to change it for the sake of professional branding. Writers seem uniquely susceptible to pseudonyms\u2014on some level we\u2019re aware that our names operate much as our characters\u2019 do, subject to the same fiddling and tampering: we\u2019ve seen the blue-blooded Thomas Williams III become the folksy Tennessee Williams, and the biblical Solomon Bellows become the rowdier Saul Bellow. In both cases, the pseudonym is far more fitting than the original. I chose not to change my name, though, not only because I knew it would influence readers\u2019 perceptions of the book but because the book would alter the meaning of my name. I wanted my punishing, rebarbative last name\u2014Tulathimutte, a subject of great anxiety for most of my life\u2014to mean something different. This is, after all, what we mean when we say we want to make a name for ourselves. The name itself, whatever the reasons it was given, means less in the end than its final definition.<\/p>\n

Tony Tulathimutte\u2019s novel\u00a0<\/em>Private Citizens<\/a> is out this week.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to name\u00a0your fictional characters. To me the most embarrassing part of writing fiction, aside from telling people about it, is naming your characters. Of course, even \u201creal\u201d names are made up, but in life our names are things we can alter only with a great deal of paperwork; in fiction, writers can line up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":931,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1513,21079,14753,11479,1203,21078,689,21076,21077,71,21080,615,110,1268,9295,16046,5862,2125,1194,11693,8757,1754,4386,21081,75],"class_list":["post-94218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alexandra-kleeman","tag-artifice","tag-characterization","tag-characters","tag-charles-dickens","tag-conventions","tag-craft","tag-cratylic-names","tag-cratylus","tag-fiction","tag-invention","tag-john-updike","tag-jonathan-franzen","tag-martin-amis","tag-names","tag-naming","tag-plato","tag-process","tag-saul-bellow","tag-socrates","tag-tao-lin","tag-tennessee-williams","tag-thomas-pynchon","tag-verisimilitude","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Kind of Name Is That? 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