Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature by Alastair Fowler (review)

In his “Preface” to Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature, Alastair Fowler explains that the book is an expansion of his Witter Bynner lecture presented at Harvard University almost forty years ago and his F. W. Bateson lecture at Oxford University, given more recently, in 2008. He notes that he aims to present “a series of interrelated essays exploring how names have functioned in literature” (vii). In addition to chapters on naming in history, modes of naming, hidden names, assumed and imposed names, and arrays of names, Fowler gives individual attention to Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce—all men. Chapter 10 focuses on Joyce and Nabokov, “perhaps the two most eminent namers in our literature,” he says (8). He writes seven-and-a-half pages on Joyce but only examines Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, unfortunately eschewing the onomastic richness of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a missed opportunity, it seems to me. Of the Wake, Fowler asserts that it “is an immensely onomastic epic. The name of its game, in fact, is names” (224). For all its namey-gaminess, though, the Wake is boiled down in a seven-page discussion. Nabokov, the other eminent namer of our time, fares worse—his content is six pages.

Though Joyce’s chapter might leave his readers hungry for more, the book is rich throughout. It opens with a discussion of the distinctions between Cratalytic names, meaningful ones such as “Goodman,” which can be criticized for limiting character development, and Hermogenean names, which are arbitrary, ordinary, meaningless. The nine chapters that precede the Joyce and Nabokov discussions are engaging and dense with information on kinds of naming, reasons for naming, revengeful naming, duplicitous naming, catalogues of names, and so forth.

In an interesting chapter on assumed and imposed names, for example, Fowler discusses the social function of names in medieval romances, noting,

[n]ame generally meant reputation. Thus a nameless knight might have to “make a name for himself.” Or he might secretly bear a great name but choose to conceal it. In an age when kinship was of paramount importance, anonymity could temporarily confer power, or open a way to discover the attitudes of others. An inoffensive pseudonym like “The Knight of the Black Shield” might be a useful protective device.

(143)

There is also a delicious section on literary hoaxes, on the names assumed by the perpetrators, and on the elaborate schemes each writer designs to pull off and then reveal the hoax. Much of the information in this book is fascinating and brings together a variety of sources.

Fowler’s chapter on Spenser is also captivating. Spenser, he asserts, was “[o]ne of the first British poets to give full attention to fictional names. … Much of his effort must have gone into discovering and selecting names, and enriching them with multiple implications. Very often, indeed, interpreting The Faerie Queene depends on understanding its names” (53). He adds, “Spenser is brilliant at naming: more so even than Shakespeare, who had commonly to reuse names within theatrical tradition and convention” (53).

In his chapter on hidden names, I expected him to quote or allude to Stephen’s famous lecture on Shakespeare, where he tells his National Library audience that Shakespeare

has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o’Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of the greatest shakescene in the country. What’s in a name?

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