Names and Naming in Joyce

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Roy Gottfried

A work on the activity of naming in Joyce is certainly welcome, and Culleton's is an important and fruitful book -- clear, witty, and informative. One might think that the critical ideas in it would most readily obtain in reference to Ulysses and the Wake, not Dubliners, yet Culleton demonstrates that every important concept of naming throughout all of Joyce's endeavor is to be found in the stories. Thus her book starts out where Joyce does, with the very opening of "The Sisters," to note that, among the possible meanings of the word "gnomon" which puzzles the unnnamed boy is as a homonym for the Latin nomen. This sort of encrypted nomination continues along the way to the Wake's Shem, also Hebrew for name.

Culleton separates the activity of naming in Joyce into various critical contexts that involve important theoretical issues -- and she does so without falling into theory's own abstract nominalizations: naming and its allusive qualities; naming and history; naming and gender; naming as nameplay (or name-calling) and revenge; and, lastly, naming and identity.

Nearly, every point in this fine book is illustrated by examples from Dubliners. As Culleton notes, it is "increasingly, difficult to take names at face value because we have been taught, since Dubliners, how to regard names and how to read them."

Even real names taken from cultural and historical sources have a certain malleability in the earliest Joyce text, as they certainly do in the later ones. Culleton shows how the proximity of the names of Kathleen Kearney and Hoppy Holohan in "A Mother" enjamb and hide Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the name that conjures Irish culture. Similarly, the absent Captain Sinico of "A Painful Case" may represent the missing Captain O'Shea of Parnell's private story. Dubliners begins the process of co-opting history through names.

The substitutability of all names can be shown by the easy yet persistent error in the adoption of Smith and Murphy in "An Encounter." There is also subterfuge and evasion in the stories by means of suggestive abbreviations such as "T. Malone Chandler" or the book-reviewer "G. C."

Gender is complicated from the outset in the stories as well. Culleton shows how religion and allusion operate when Eveline seems to replicate the weight of Eve's choice. Mrs Sinico, trapped within her marriage to the Captain, gets her first name, Emily, only when she is a corpse in the coroner's inquest. Mrs Kearney, Culleton points out, takes her name only to spite her friends by marrying a respectable man with an income.

With names and identity, Culleton brings her critical analysis to essential postmodernist issues. Even here she finds Dubliners fully engaged. The absent present of Mangan's unnamed sister, suggesting the poet Mangan's "Dark Rosaleen," is decipherable, according to Culleton, as the emptiness that "tells the reader a lot without telling. . . . [As] an encoded name, a name that `stands for' an unarticulated something[,] the name is `readable.'" Stephen, by naming the two "vestal virgins" in "Aeolus" and by speaking the name "Dubliners," comes to write that first story, of Dubliners, "The Sisters." In another reference to the identity of the author, Culleton notes quite suggestively that the name "James" is used three times in the collection of stories, a transparent self-reference that Joyce never practiced elsewhere. Yet everything else regarding names and naming Joyce does practice first in Dubliners.