19/52: To Name or Not to Name
Borrow, borrow, borrow.
The Input:
- The Tale of The Unknown Island, José Saramago
- Enemies, Anton Chekov
- Wise Women, Joyce Tenneson
When you read a lot, becoming a writer feels like the natural course of action, right? Maybe not for all of us (certainly for me) but there’s an inevitable urge to attempt to put your own stories down on a page that comes from being inspired or influenced from the way others have done it. I imagine its the same feeling for filmmakers who watched a particular movie for the first time and felt compelled to recreate that magic, or someone who enjoyed an amazing meal wanting to learn the alchemy of what certain ingredients can do to satisfy various cravings.
However it transpires, becoming a producer of a thing is predicated on being a consumer first.
As a consumer aspiring to produce, I’ve been paying attention to the choices of writers. Their use of language, the way they structure their tales, and the techniques they employ that keep me asking, why? Why that detail? Why not say this earlier, or later? Why tell this story this way? More specifically, and because of my budding obsession with José Saramago, who writes characters simply as descriptions and actions, I’ve been wondering why some stories go the nameless route.
So, why not name your characters?
I may have briefly talked about this before in a previous newsletter but I now know that nameless characters aren’t that unusual in literature. I initially believed it had to do with an allegorical approach to storytelling. Taking the reader away from sociological identifiers and creating an imaginative environment built on the universality of the human condition. A way for the reader to see anyone in that role, to interpret the human condition away from cultural or political constraints and biases. But now that I’ve read more literature with nameless characters, something peculiar has grabbed my attention in that I’m actually anticipating something that never comes. At least not in the way that I’m expecting it. As I’m reading I find that I’m waiting for some big reveal, a definitive line that says, His name was K.J. Bowling and he lived in a magical village called Hogs Meadow. And then I can drop all of my suspended feelings about who the character might be and relax in the certainty of knowing who the author says he is.
Hangman by Maya Binyam, longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, also employed this nameless tactic. In this novel, a man returns to his original home to find and reconnect with his dying brother, whom he hasn’t seen in twenty-six years. Unlike Saramago, Binyam does tell us certain identifiers in that the original home that he is traveling to is in sub-Saharan Africa and that the country he’s traveling from is in the west. From this there is the planting of seeds of what we understand these two geographical places to be culturally, politically, and the respective people from each. As she introduces new characters, who the protagonist either doesn’t remember or know from the twenty six years he’s been away, there was an anticipation inside of me that Binyam would write a detail that would serve to orient me in the real world more than in this literary one. I wanted to know that the protagonist swallowed fufu and soup so that I could place him somewhere in West Africa. I wanted the news from the country he left to say something about the political parties so I knew which “west” he called home. Perhaps there are more eagle eyed readers who did draw something definitive from these pages, but perhaps that’s not even the point. It’s not what gets defined, but its what gets stirred up in the reader. Creating, and containing, a cyclone of interpretations so that the reader stays engaged in the narrative and an active participant in the character’s journey.
Another title that just came to mind is Recitatif by Toni Morrison, in which the two protagonists are actually named but Morrison instead keeps their racial identity ambiguous, imploring the reader to contemplate what in the human condition keeps people together as opposed to the social constructs driving us apart. This is, of course, a bit different from my proposed inquiry, so rather than getting off track, I’ll save Morrison and her brilliance for another day.
Researching reasons for this technique, I came across some articles that list titles with nameless characters, and also this analysis that describes this element of anticipation. As the writer puts it, “The absence of a name adds an air of ambiguity, as readers are left to ponder the character’s origins, motivations, and connections.”
What stories have you read that had nameless characters and what did this do to the story? What was the effect on your reading experience?
I’m also going to do something now, it’s a bit scary but I’m going to do it anyway. This week, I started writing a short story influenced by the three reads mentioned at the top of the newsletter. Borrowing the structure choice of Chekov, the nameless characters from Saramago, and the portrait of a woman who shared a brief glimpse into her inner life for a book on the wisdom of women. I put into practice the techniques I’ve been contemplating this week and while I wanted a finished, polished story to share I ran the risk of not publishing at all (for another week) because again, this wasn’t something worth sharing. However, the thought occurred to me that I could work on this story in real time, each week moving the words around, delving deeper into what the story is trying to say, and sculpting it before your very literary eyes. And perhaps, once the story feels ready, I’ll submit it somewhere.
I’m not sure how this will even work out, but I’m hitting send before I think too long and too much about it.
Here’s to learning by practicing. Trial and error to understand the reasons behind not naming characters and how that enhances the language and structure of the narrative.
PS. My apologies to you all and myself. The travel and the distractions have clearly won in the last few weeks (month?!) and I, unfortunately, got used to not posting. I’m turning the leaf though and sitting through the discomfort of posting… even when I (or the words) seem not ready.