‘What Kind of a Name Is That?’: Samuel Beckett and his Strategy for Giving Names

Takeshi Kawashima

While at the beginning of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell interrogates the logical function of a ‘name’, modernist writers devise critical strategies for the ‘names’ of characters. The ‘name’ is an area which occupies the attention of literature as well as philosophy. This tendency foreshadows the notion that characters are unstable, and subjectivities are dissolved in modernist fictions. The names of characters serve not only to symbolize their attributes and personalities, but also to reflect authors’ elaborations of narrative structures, dismissal of linear narrative, and displacement of subjectivity. When Joyce names his hero (Stephen Dedalous) after Homer’s character (Daedalus), the name indicates the subjectivity of multiple personalities, and reflects Joyce’s strategy of parallelism between contemporary life and a mythic imagery. Samuel Beckett is one of the few who have realized Joyce’s nomenclature. In Dante…Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, Beckett demonstrates Joyce’s uses of rhetoric by using the idea of “type-names”, which blurs the distinction between the common noun and the proper name, between the abstract and the concrete. Furthermore, the notion of “type-names” is applied to Beckett’s own writing. Beckett’s exploration of naming seems to reach its climax in particular when The Unnamable describes the speaker’s struggle for “nameless images” or “imageless names”. This in fact anticipates Beckett’s later prose featuring nameless characters in abstract spaces. However, we cannot ignore the existence of the character “Belacqua” in Beckett’s earlier fictions. Like Joyce’s “Dedalous”, “Belacqua” has an eponymous character in the canon of literature, as his name comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here, Beckett’s nomenclature is something more than the superimposition of Dante’s character on his own. Rather, the name reflects Beckett’s scheme of rhetoric and complex structures of prose, which are clearly distinguished from his pursuit of nameless entities and abstract spaces. By comparing Beckett’s system of naming with Joyce’s naming, and considering Bertrand Russell’s philosophical investigation of names, I would like to examine the way in which Beckett treats proper names. My intention is to identify Beckett’s originality of naming in the history of the modernist nomenclature of characters.

Waseda University

Borderless Beckett: International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006 September 29 – October 1