2 .1 PERSONAL NAMING IN PRACTICE
J. HISTORICAL FAMILY NAMES
These involve Ancient history, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Modern t imes, Contemporary, political textual , surnames as names, social rank, acceptance names such as "Tycoon" (ul t imately from Ancient Chinese) and pre-historic names.
K. HAGIOGRAPHIC NAMES
These include lives of saints and variants of t heir names. Her subdivision in this regard goes as far as this. She maintains that Onomastics has more than one hundred keys to open up the 'kaleidoscopic literary onomast ic literary cr iticism' (1981:7) while focussing specifically on names.
As indicated earlier, this study investigat es mainly the diactinic family of names. It seeks to reflect the importance this class of names has in the literary works of R.J .R. Masiea.
However, where necessary, the import ance of names in other classes is revealed to give a complete picture of an author's creation.
For Ashley {1979:11) the onornastic approach is "A study of the origin and history of proper names". From the Greek term meaning
"names'' onomastics is concerned with the folklore of names, t heir current application, spellings, pronunciations, and meanings.
Literary onomastics has to do with how an examination of names and the way in which they reflect or expand the author's intentions can add to our understanding and appreciation of a work of literature. By concerning itself with the author's communication i t stresses the utilitar ian function of literature.
He is of the opinion that with literary onomastics we escape the dangers of regarding the text as pretext for Marxism, psychiatric, or other theories and consider the basic counters
of literary art, the words. We see them realizing their magic.
We see the writers ringing the changes on the logical and psychological significance of words, exploiting to the fullest the littera and controlling with purpose and power the intellectual and emotional resonance so as to produce reinforcing levels of meaning. We study how names, as well as other words, are suited to the structure in which they are arranged, first to the purpose, second to the nature and capacity of the likely
audience. He declares that we see how names help create the characters in a work of fiction and connect them with the
literary "strategy", the readership and its experience, the
"cultural context" and the rest of the real frame of reference.
We see the names reveal the success or failure of the writer in balancing freedom and control, responsibility and serenity, propaganda and art, intent and effect , the desire to play
("fooling around with words") and commitment ("no fooling"). He believes that we see how the names comment upon and judge moral and political issues in fiction and what is called "Badness" in literature. we see how names expose both the author's investment
of self in the work and the problems arising from the fact that
"the play" for instance, belongs to the public and that the
"intentional fallacy" is a trap. He suggests that we can use onomastic inventio as one measure of t hose who "want wit", not words and who fail to employ all the devices of diction, not excluding what used to be called, so charmingly, festivitas (word play) , or we can discover to our sat isfaction the verbal and psychological nuances of the names, the many meanings - polysemes - which use all the techniques from punning to psycholinguistics.
Ashley's major observation is that literary onornastics is not very different from standard approaches t o the criticism of poetry. Emerson once remarked that every word was "once a poem", in names, words carry more than ordinary words do of enriching connotations, the freight that gives poetry its complexity and intense satisfaction. Names have "vibrations" , or at least they create them or set them up in the mind of the reader. He observed that names in literature frequent ly demand to be considered as if they were complete little poems, with all the richness that i t implies. We must see in each name all of a poem's "cerebral phosphorescences", for in names writers of skill pack many connotations and "tell all the truth but tell it slant", producing little puzzles for the critic who must by indirection find direction out (Ashley, 1979:137) .
Onomastic science, then, gives us in lit erary onomastics a valuable tool for the er i ticisrn of the "poetry" in names. To Ashley (1979:264) i t is a method of critical analysis that should
be adopted by all cr it ics, whether they are concerned with historical criticism or the New Criticism, Aristotelian or revisionist, Marxist or aesthetic, psycho-analytical or sociological, formalist or rhetorical criticism.
According to Ashley (1979:264) literary onomastics works equally
well on the most didactic morality play or the most obscurantist modern poem, whether the names are invented or real or as general as Everyman or Mother. It brings out the system in a humour comedy in which Johnson undertakes to name all his rapacious
characters after beasts and birds of prey; i t explains how Hardy's "Wessex" and its various places function entirely in a world of fiction; i t simplifies the point scored by a writer of farce and shows how such a man gains instant recognition for his
"man of mode" Sir Fopling Flutter called Foible and Mincing.
Names assist us to keep track of the army of characters trooping through a fiction. Sometimes they are obvious, but at times they require more work. Sometimes they just establish social class.
Sometimes they allude to history or earlier literature.
Sometimes they create a tone of realism or fairy tale or the impressive or the absurd. Sometimes they make mood music, for every play is like a melodrama or a movie in that words (having sound} are musical. There is (as Marlowe says) Trumpet within. Sometimes they underline allegory or universality or nationality or relationship or satire.
The onomastic critic must be an expert, able to grasp both what the author intended the names to mean and what they do mean.
Modern literary onomastics demands inventiveness and restraint, skill and taste, insight and indust ry, not mere listing or translating; for in translation some other onomastic points may be lost (as some say all poetry i s}. For this reason, the conscientious writer must consider not only what he wishes a name to convey and what i t can convey in his day and age but also what misleading connotations i t may have in his own language and even those into which his work may be translated.
In this limited space of time Ashley (1979} has been able only to touch on some of the pleasures and pitfalls of the onomastic criticism and, while there are many other aspects of the subject of literary onomastics as a critical tool he claims he should like to examine, he contented himself with only a few more and concluded, hoping he should have whetted our appetite and perhaps sharpened our perception.
He chose as his examples place-names in l iterature, personal names in literature, and what he might call plot names in literature.
The work in this dissertation mainly looks at personal names and their significance in literature.