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I will share a story that illuminates not one of my finest moments.
My wife was sharing with me one of her short stories she
wrote in high school (as a part of a project or fun, I can’t quite remember).
She told me that she picked out the names of the characters very purposefully
throughout the creative process, cross-referencing names with meanings and
origins that illuminated aspects of the plot. Truth be told, I did the same
thing in high school, writing a many-part story called “Heavy Metal Dawn,” for
which I labored months without any consideration for what I would do with the
story at its conclusion. I think it is for this reason that I ultimately gave
up on it. Anyways, I did the same thing as my wife. Taking Japanese words and
appropriating them as “names” (ie. “Guita Watarimono,” or “Guitar Wanderer”), I
achieved nigh epic heights of weeaboory (IPA - wiːəburē). And I think it is for
this reason, now that I’m older, that I remember that moment, cringing. Names
don’t mean anything. They are just things that we call ourselves, because our
parents made the choice for us.
This is a postmodern idea, that meaning is fluid and ever
changing. It is why gender, politics, race, and religion are all relative and
mean nothing anymore. Naturally, then, I would scoff now at an idea like a name
and a meaning behind it somehow appending certain virtues and traits. For
instance, my name is “Stuart.” Stuart derives from an Old English portmanteau
of stig ("house") and weard ("guard"). The later British
equivalent is “Steward” and the Anglicized version is “Stuart.” My surname,
“Warren,” is eponymous of (what according to Google Dictionary is) “an enclosed
piece of land set aside for breeding game, especially rabbits.”
Right from the get-go I am at odds with this. Though I am
trustworthy, capable of taking tasks and endeavor to please those I meet, I am
not a leader. In fact, growing up I was an outcast. My name, for the most part,
has hung around my neck as an albatross since my birth as a sign of my failure
to live up to my name’s meaning and import. And while “Warren” maintains some
regal quality to it, I hardly imagine myself to be equivalent to a labyrinthine
network of burrows, or a hunting ground for rabbits in the middle ages. Patronyms
also create names by just combining the name of your father and your sex
(Angason for boy or Agnadóttir for girl, in Icelandic). But what if your father
was an asshole? Your name is now anathema to any prospects going forward. In
any case, I must hate first
names because I’m salty as a motherfucker, I guess…
While a first name like “Agni” may confer the legacy of a
legendary Swedish king or a Hindu fire deity, the surname was typically an
embellishment of the first name. In English traditions, last names were
conferred based on the profession of your father, like Smith (From Wikipedia: refers
to a smith, originally deriving from smið or smiþ, the Old English term meaning
one who works in metal related to the word smitan, the Old English form of
smite, which also meant strike.) or Cooper
(from Ancestry.com: “a repairer of wooden
vessels such as barrels, tubs, buckets, casks, and vats, from Middle English
couper, cowper.”). But does one want to be their father? Or take their
father’s profession? That is more of a problem for today. Back then, there was
no choice in the matter. A trade brought in money that paid feudal dues.
When it comes to writing, in light of the above, I take a different
approach. Names aren’t as important to me as the experiential quality. Living
with a character throughout a story, a name like “Roberto” will imbue whatever
quality you desire. In Umberto Eco’s book The Island of
the Day Before, Roberto’s
character evolves over the course of the story, so any preconceptions about the
name “Roberto” quickly fade away. Because of this experience I have with
reading, I spend no time consulting with reference materials to find
“appropriate” names for my characters. Instead, I choose names arbitrarily
(most of the time). Because that is what life is like: random and chaotic. I
know someone named “Tabitha,” which is a traditional name. But she exudes an
eclectic style that seems in conflict with her name. Likewise, I have heard
stories of POWs and veterans naming their children after their fallen brothers,
as a way of immortalizing their memory, though their children will live their own lives, without the experiential import of their naming. So the use of naming, to me at least,
isn’t very important.
Despite all that I’ve said, we did name our daughter “Eowyn,”
which is a fictional name invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, invoking the Old English
naming methodologies. Tolkien applied this name to a character in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, who stands
down a demon king, fulfilling an ancient prophesy to smite evil. Do I
necessarily want my daughter to challenge a demon to mortal combat? Not really.
But we chose the name for her because it embodies what we wish her to be:
strong, confident, and assertive. So, at the end of all this, I’m just a
hypocrite. But who isn’t? The defining difference here is that the meaning of names
in writing can be more effectively determined due to the innate determinism
that defines writing, as opposed to real life, where meaning is in constant
flux. And to reject that determinism, in my opinion, makes the work more true to life.
