A Kite in the Wind by Andrea Barrett

Author:Andrea Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2011-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

In DeLillo’s work we find this same trajectory, from noisy jabber toward an ever-receding silence, an underground vocabulary of buried or secret names. “A secret name is a way of escaping the world,” says a character in—what else?—The Names (210). The alternative to the mass language of global corporate esperanto (Mita, Suntory) is a sort of cargo cult of withholding and deferral and effacement. “The withheld work of art is the only eloquence that’s left” (67). So says that consummate cult writer, Bill Gray, in DeLillo’s Mao II. Bill Gray. How much more eloquent a name for a silent artist than Bucky Wunderlick—the difference between a glib, exhibitionistic performer and a weathered and canny older one. “I’m a sentence maker,” he says, “like a donut-maker only slower” (162). Only it turns out that Bill Gray is not his real name. His real name is Willard Skansey—the name, he concedes, of “a welterweight fighting outdoors in steaming holiday weather before a crowd of straw hats” (185).

Amid such radical contemporary strategies, these parings-down and torquings-up, the cool, serene clarity of a novel like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping can come to seem the most radical departure of all. “My name is Ruth,” the narrator begins, quietly but firmly, with an unforced, deliberate echo of her biblical namesake. Ruth’s sister, from whom she will become estranged existentially but not spiritually, is named Lucille, and we can hear in the music of those two names (one shorn, stark, uncompromising; the other pretty, bright, outward-moving) as we can hear, in the ethereal, uncontainable sound of their aunt’s first name (Sylvie) and the mix of benevolence and menace in her last (Fisher), everything there is to know about the tragedy that follows. Of these names we can say they fulfill all our hopes and expectations and then some. They’re at once subtly distinctive and subtly emblematic; they refuse to unpack their own secrets, but they manifest those secrets, in the form of stubborn, incontrovertible essences, on every page.

The incantation of names casts a spell, and this spell is never neutral; it is always a function of magic and bias. Whitman speaks of repeating his own name over and over and never growing tired of it, while Kipling talks of a tendency among the “Asiatics” to throw themselves into “a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity.... In a minute—in another half-second—he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle” (233). Whisper the right word, and the door of personality swings open. But what is the right word? Does it even matter? Is it possible that any name can be the right name, if it’s whispered the right way?

There’s a concept in translation called the “hapax legomenon”—a word or phrase that, because it occurs only once in a text, is notoriously difficult to interpret. Like nonce words, the hapax legomenon has either been coined

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