I, Lowborn Cur
Colin Burrow
Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature by Alastair Fowler
Oxford, 283 pp, £19.99, September, ISBN 978 0 19 959222 7
Oxford, 283 pp, £19.99, September, ISBN 978 0 19 959222 7
"James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name.
........................
Bertie Wooster, audibly something of a waster, has a first name which associates him with the womanising Edward VII, but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom double-barrelled names tend to be for dimbos): no one with a name quite so obviously heedless could enjoy more than a walk-on part even in a 20th-century comedy. The more delicately named Jane Eyre is both the invisible element we breathe and (finally) heir to the whopping fortune which enables her story to end as a comedy of sorts."
No comments:
Post a Comment