Picking a character name is often as hard as writing the first line of a new novel or story—the kind of specific and essential task that often halts any momentum you may have built up. If you’re like me, you may find yourself spending hours googling baby names from different countries and centuries, searching for that elusive one that “feels right” and can adequately signify all the disparate aspects of this particular character.
Generally, the best character names seem to come in two very different varieties: the realistic and the symbolic. Names under the realistic category feel like they perfectly capture when and where the novel is set: we know without even having to look it up that a novel with a character named Tristram Shandy has to be set in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, whereas Theo Decker (protagonist of Donna Tartt’s 2013 novel The Goldfinch), despite being vaguely similar in its aristocrat leanings, just sounds so much more twenty-first-century than “Tristram.” Likewise, the invented name Jay Gatsby feels perfect for upper class 1920s New York society, whereas Quentin Compson clearly belongs to the Faulknerian south. When I selected names for my more realist short stories set in the twenty-first century and featuring protagonists not unlike myself, I cycled through the names of people I’d known from the mosque where I grew up, names like Saad, Imran, Haroon, and Adnan, all of which fit perfectly with the Muslim-American-San-Francisco-Bay-Area milieu I sought to depict.
But there is another kind of name which I confess I actually far prefer: the deeply—and sometimes comically—symbolic name. Dickens, of course, was the expert at this, with gems such as Abel Magwitch, Uriah Heep, and Mr. Pumblechook. But whereas Dickensian names do effectively convey the sound and feeling of a character (you can just imagine Mr. Pumblechook pumble-chooking his way across a drawing room), there is only one author I think whose symbolic names not only convey the sound and feeling of a character but also contain deep historical and political resonances—and that author is of course Thomas Pynchon.
On the surface, Pynchon’s names are delightfully silly, Dickensian but with that twentieth-century twist: Roger Mexico, Genghis Cohen, Herbert Stencil, Hugh Godolphin, Teddy Bloat, Mike Fallopian—one could spend thousands of words listing and admiring them all. But what Pynchon achieves that elevates him above Dickens is the way his names reference historical figures and thus underscore the larger and often more darker themes of his novels. Charles Hollander, an independent researcher and Pynchon expert, has written extensively and insightfully on the hidden layers of Pynchon’s names in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon’s 1966 novella about a housewife who becomes the executor of her ex-lover’s will and who in disentangling all his complex financial holdings comes across a conflict between two mail carriers that goes back centuries (Hollander’s full article, “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49” makes the intriguing though slightly outlandish case that the Crying of Lot 49 is really a subversive commentary on the assassination of JFK by the CIA).
In his article, Hollander demonstrates how the novel’s many seemingly absurd names are actually darker historical allusions. For example, Hollander notes how the law firm mentioned on the second page of the novel, the one that sets the plot in motion by sending Oedipa the letter that informs her about her ex-lover’s will, Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and MgMingus, seems at first to be nothing more than a joke making fun of law firm names—but the name Kubitschek is, according to Hollander, likely a reference to Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, a Brazilian President and social reformer forced into exile by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1964. In a narrative in which our protagonist investigates a conspiracy involving Nazis, real estate moguls, the American military-industrial complex, and a shadowy centuries-old reactionary network, such a name is obviously not just silly, but also a subtle evocation of the darker themes underlying the novel’s surface level absurdity.
Similarly, Hollander points to the name of the president of Yoyodyne, Pynchon’s fictional defense corporation and stand-in for the evils of the US military-industrial complex, Clayton Chiclitz. “Clayton,” Hollander notes, is most likely a reference to US Congressman Henry de Lamar Clayton Jr., who sponsored the eponymous Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, a Progressive-Era bill which sought to break up Gilded Age monopolies—an ironic name for the president of a large company in a very monopolistic industry. Hollander likewise close-reads the name of Dr. Hilarius, whose name he notes is not “Hilarious” as in funny, but more likely a reference to St. Hilary (in Latin Hilarius) of Poitiers, who was one of the proponents of the fourth-century Christian heresy of Arianism—an obvious pun on Aryanism, since Dr. Hilarius is eventually revealed to be an ex-Nazi. More broadly, the conspiracy Oedipa investigates seems to connect the military-industrial complex and American capitalism with the crimes of the Nazis. Once again, these apparently silly names actually point in subtle ways to the novel’s underlying political subtext.
Obviously, not all of us have Thomas Pynchon’s deep well of historical knowledge (it’s truly mind-boggling when you remember that Pynchon published Lot 49 when he was only 29 years old, and without the internet to help him Wikipedia old Christian saints), and obviously not all of us are writing novels that seek to comment on the underlying reactionary nature of American Cold War society. But even still, it’s valuable to consider the historical and political symbolism of the names we chose. When writing a historical short story set in nineteenth-century colonial India that explored religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims, I named my central character Akbar in order to evoke the sixteenth century Mughal Emperor, who had a vision for a syncretic religion that unified Islam and Hinduism, pointing to a utopianism that seemed unachievable in the story’s present but which gave narrative a symbolic subtext. Similarly, my forthcoming novel Portrait of Sebastian Khan, though set in Berkeley in 2011, needed to have an air of unreality, and so I gave most of my characters somewhat over-the-top Shakespearian names like Rosalind, Imogen, Viola, and Helena, realistic enough, but not entirely. Other characters, meanwhile, I gave highly symbolic names, like Professor Walter (a reference to Walter Pater) and Nathan Hale (an intentionally ironic name, given to a character who’s fat and ungraceful and nothing at all like the famous American spy). Not only were all these names fun to come up with, I feel like they ultimately made the novel better, giving the narrative a symbolism that traditionally realistic names alone couldn’t.