Naming the Baby: Sterne, Goethe, and the Power of the Word

1.

Early in The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt identifies a single element of the eighteenth-century novel as an exemplary innovation, namely "the way that the novelist typically indicates his intention of presenting a character as a particular individual by naming him in exactly the same way as particular individuals are named in ordinary life." ¹ Pamela Andrews, Charles Grandison, Moll Flanders, and Tom Jones could not, Watt reminds us, have appeared in the seventeenth-century world of allegorical figures and general types. These are characters who can be mistaken for real individuals and whose names are intended "to symbolize the fact that the character is to be regarded as though he were a particular person and not a type." ² Names such as Pamela, which, as Watt points out, break with the tradition of taking names from either the Bible or the Calendar of Saints, are evidence that characters are "christened" in the way that real individuals are, with elements of aesthetic preference, chance, and tradition converging on a choice of word. As the novelist reproduces the real life choice of parents at the level of fiction, he or she inscribes this tangibly human and secular process of deciding on a name in the novel, making the fictional character more real, but also abandoning the claim that names arise outside fiction, in the patterns and types they resemble.

The change in the way characters are named corresponds to a change in the way they are read—no longer as strictly designating destinies to which the reader appeals for moral example, but as instances much more loosely related to a patterned or prophetic understanding of the world outside the novel. While Fielding's Blifil or Richardson's Mr. B. suggest the ongoing use of names as codes or ciphers for characters designating the unfolding of a single trait, they appear alongside characters like Tom Jones and Pamela, who, even at their most representative, resist both the code-cracking practice of reading allegory and the identification of real history required by typology. If characters' names function in this new context as clues to what kind of people they are, or what we can expect from them, these names appear as signs within the reality of the novel; the significance they accumulate has to do with their place within a system and not with their referencing universal truths to which the novel is answerable. If, for instance, we analyze the importance of the names given by Fanny Burney to Evelina Anville, a character whose fate depends on her search for her name, and whose names "Evelina" and "Anville" both suggest interesting fields of meaning within the novel, we can learn much about the way Burney imagines her character. But this is not the prophetic situation Paul Korshin describes where "as soon as a reader identified and classified a fictional person as a representation of a known 'character,' he or she would be able to predict the person's behavior." ³ Although certain eighteenth-century writers continue in that long and ongoing tradition of exemplary naming, a new possibility emerges in the eighteenth century, which is that names reveal language as a meaningful system of human signs rather than a divine or natural transcript.

I am describing a shift in ways of thinking about language that applies broadly to the eighteenth-century, rather than just to the ways writers name their characters. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), to give perhaps the most important example, argues that words are used to signify and communicate ideas "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea" (111.2.1). ⁴ Words, Locke stresses, are ways to describe the ideas we acquire through experience...