Naming and Believing Practices of The Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Naming and Believing: Practices of the Proper Name in Narrative Fiction
Author(s): Uri Margolin

Source: Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2 (May, 2002), pp. 107-127
Published by: Ohio State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20107279 .
Accessed: 02/09/2014 16:22
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Ohio State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Narrative.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 131.111.7.113 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014 16:22:11 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Uri
Margolin
Naming
and
Believing:
Practices of the
Proper
Name
in Narrative Fiction
BELIEF
WORLDS,
PROPER
NAMES,
AND NAME USAGE
1.1 The
power
of discourse to construct realities is
widely
asserted in contem
porary literary theory.
But what
exactly
is this
power? Surely
it is
only
the divine
word which can call into existence a
mind-independent,
external
reality
which we
can all
experience
in our common life world! The constructive
power
of discourse in
purely
human circumstances is much more
modest,
and could be characterized as the
ability
to
give
rise to mental
(cognitive) representations,
discourse
domains,
or belief
worlds in the minds of
individuals,
or to belief worlds shared
by
members of a
group.
Such discourse domains
may
be construed as worlds of the
mind,
which
may
or
may
not
correspond
to
any external,
intersubjective reality.
Semiotic means of some kind
(sounds, letters, words,
phrases,
sketches, etc.)
serve in all such cases as both initia
tors and
underpinnings
of the resultant mental
representation.
One
particular
kind of
mental
representation
or discourse domain consists of
spatio-temporal
frameworks
containing
both individual entities with their
properties
and relations and
dynamic
situations,
that
is,
changing configurations
of the relations between these entities.
Such
dynamic
frameworks are the
cognitive
correlate of the narrative discourse
type,
be it factual or fictional. For it is not the semiotic or
cognitive
dimension as such that
distinguishes
the factual from the
fictional,
but rather the
correspondence,
or lack
thereof,
between a mental
representation
and an external situation. The
power
of dis
course to
give
rise to a
cognitive
domain is most evident when we have access to the
mental
operations through
which this domain
gets
established and
subsequently
modified,
and when these
operations
occur in a well-defined and well-circumscribed
Uri
Margolin
is Professor of
Comparative
Literature at the
University
of
Alberta, Edmonton,
Canada.
His current research focuses on
narratology, possible
worlds
semantics,
and the use of
logical
and
cogni
tive models for the
analysis
of narrative. He has
published
close to
fifty
articles in collective volumes and
international
journals.
NARRATIVE,
Vol.
10,
No. 2
(May 2002)
Copyright
2002
by
The Ohio State
University
108 Uri
Margolin
setting.
This
power
is enhanced if the
given
discourse is the
only currently
available
source of information for the
corresponding cognitive
domain
construction,
and it is
maximal when the discourse is the
only possible
source of information about a
given
domain?namely,
when we are
dealing
with a
pure
verbal
invention,
with a world
whose
very (mental)
existence
depends crucially
and
exclusively
on a
specific
semi
otic
object (discourse, picture,
film, etc.).
This
dependency
is of the same nature
whether the
pragmatic
status of the discourse is that of a lie or of a creative artistic
invention. The difference between the two will manifest itself rather in the different
behavioral
disposition
the
cognitive
frame evokes in the individual in whose mind it
exists,
once she has
assigned,
at least
pro tempore,
a
pragmatic
status to the corre
sponding
discourse.
In fictional narrative
contexts,
it is
a basic
assumption
that the textual actual
world or matrix world is established
by
the discourse of the
narrator,
and that
many
of the domains or worlds
projected
in the
discourses,
external or
internal,
of the char
acters constitute their individual mental
representations
of this matrix
world,
or their
belief
systems
about it. This
assumption,
or basic convention of
reading,
is univer
sally accepted
when we are faced with
impersonal
narration in the
third-person past
tense,
in which the
narrating
voice has unrestricted mental access to the minds of the
characters,
that
is,
the denizens of the matrix world. In this
case,
the
narrating
voice
can
present
to us
fully
and
reliably
the information sources the characters
possess
and the
processes whereby they
form on the basis of this information
any
and all of
their mental
representations
of the textual actual world. Unrestricted mental access
also enables us to
juxtapose
and
compare differing
mental
representations
of the
same matrix world in the minds of different characters. With the minds of the char
acters
being
an
open book, we,
the actual
readers,
are able to have full and reliable
knowledge
of how and
why
a character forms a
given
mental
representation,
of its
specific
nature,
and of its
subsequent impact
on his or her
thought,
communication,
and behavior.
Finally,
the truth-functional status of
any
individual
cognitive repre
sentation with
respect
to the base or matrix world can be defined
by
its
degree
of cor
respondence
to the textual actual world as defined in the discourse of the
narrating
voice.
(On
this whole
complex
of
issues,
see the fundamental works of
Ryan
and
Werth.)
1.2 We have so far
spoken
in
general
terms about the construction of mental
representations
from verbal discourses. But what elements of
discourse,
that
is,
what
linguistic
elements,
are the essential
ones,
especially
when
dynamic
situations or
storyworlds
are concerned? Notice that the
answer,
whatever it
is,
applies equally
to
us,
the actual readers of narrative
fiction,
and to the characters inside the fictional
matrix world whenever
they
construct a mental
representation
of their life world on
the basis of a discourse.
Following
Werth
(ch. 6),
I would
argue
that
singular
refer
ring expressions occupy
a
special place
in this
context,
since
they designate
or estab
lish the individual entities that constitute the furniture of the
storyworld
and that
serve as the
objects
of all
subsequent qualifications
or
predications. Linguists
distin
guish
three kinds of
singular referring expressions: personal pronouns,
definite de
scriptions,
and
proper
names. But where
personal pronouns (e.g., "she")
and definite
descriptions (e.g.,
"the
prime
minister of
Canada") may pick
out different individu
Proper
Names in Narrative Fiction 109
als on different occasions of
use,
proper
names
(PNs)
are
unique
in
being
fixed
points
in a
changing
world.
According
to the
currently
dominant
philosophical
view
formulated
by
Saul
Kripke,
PNs are
rigid designators,
that
is,
they pick
out the same
individual at all times and in all worlds in which he
exists,
irrespective
of
any prop
erty
or
properties
he
may possess, acquire,
or lose. A PN is like a social insurance
number or an
identifying tag
that follows its referent wherever she
goes
and what
ever
happens.
From a
cognitive perspective
it is like a label of an information file we
keep
about someone. The content of this file
may change drastically
over time due to
changes
in the information available or due to
changes
in the individual in
question,
but it is still the file on the same individual. On the other
hand,
even a
slight
modifi
cation of an available PN raises serious doubts whether or not it is the same individ
ual who is
being
referred
to,
doubts which can be resolved
only through
contextual
factors such as
speaker's
or writer's intentions or noise in the channel of communi
cation. An individual is introduced into
our,
or a
character's,
mental
representation
of
a domain as soon as a PN occurs in the
corresponding
discourse,
and this is
why
writers
quite
often introduce the names of their characters
early
in the discourse. In
narrative
fiction,
we can observe the introduction of a new
entity
into the
cognitive
map
a character has of the textual actual world as a result of the occurrence of a PN
in a verbal or written discourse about this world that the character is
exposed
to. A
separate,
but
crucial,
issue to be resolved on the basis of the narrative voice's dis
course is whether an
entity corresponding
to this PN
actually
exists in the matrix
world.
I have characterized a PN as a label of a mental file we
keep
about someone.
This
computer analogy
is useful to
clarify
several relevant
cognitive operations por
trayed
in narrative. The introduction of a PN would
correspond
to the
opening
of a
new
file,
and
acquiring any
information about the individual associated with this PN
would be like
updating
or
modifying
the file. The occurrence later in the discourse of
a somewhat different PN would
initially
lead to the
opening
of a new file.
If,
how
ever,
we decide the new name is a mere variant or
equivalent
of the one we
already
have,
the files will be
merged.
If we believe the bearer of a
given
PN is no
longer
alive,
then the file will be closed to
any
additional real-time factual information.
Finally,
if it turns out a
given
PN never referred to
any
actual individual and if we
are interested in
maintaining
files on actual individuals
only,
the whole file will have
to be deleted. We are
going
to encounter all of these situations in the stories to be
discussed.
1.3 Most
literary
narratives are concerned not
only
with the contents and func
tioning
of individual
minds,
but also with human actions and interactions in
public
space,
of which communicative
exchange
forms a
key component.
PNs are crucial in
this
context,
because
they
are "the condition for
making knowledge
and communica
tion
possible,
for
getting
the
enterprise
off the
private ground" (Barcan 188).
Seen
from the
pragmatic perspective
of
signs
and their
users,
PNs are there to
begin
with
so that on a
given
occasion one can refer to
(pick
out,
single
out,
uniquely identify)
an individual or
group
in a
way
that is as clear as
possible
to both name user and his
addressee(s).
It is hence the
referring
use of
PNs,
the
referring
acts in which
they
occur,
and the
perlocutionary impact
of these acts that are of
major
interest to liter
110 Uri
Margolin
ary
authors. In
simpler
terms,
what
people
do with PNs as their users and what these
PNs do to their
receivers,
as well as to the individuals
picked
out
by
them,
are
key
is
sues here.
The
"doing" just
mentioned
can,
in its
turn,
be
unpacked
into at least three
major components: communicative,
epistemic/doxastic (issues
of
knowledge
and be
lief),
and behavioral. In the first
instance,
PNs as
linguistic
entities are introduced
into circulation
by
someone and become a constituent of various verbal utterances
by
the introducer as well as
by
others,
so that
eventually they
become a common coin
of verbal
exchange
in a
community.
In standard use a PN is
supposed
to
pick
out an
individual in a common or shared
phenomenal
world and to occur in utterances ex
pressing
some claims about this individual.
Beliefs,
both individual and
collective,
are
consequently
formed over time about the individual
answering
to this PN. The
beliefs entertained
by
different
persons
with
respect
to the same name bearer
may
differ,
and can therefore be contrasted with one
another,
with shared communal be
liefs
(if any),
and,
in fictional
narratives,
with the certain
knowledge
about this indi
vidual
possessed by
the
narrating
voice and
representing
the facts of the matter
(at
least in most
third-person anonymous narration).
Notice that in nonfictional narra
tives, too,
any participant
views
may
be contrasted with those of the
narrator/author,
except
that now the narrator's views cannot constitute
absolute,
unquestionable
knowledge.
In
literary
narratives,
especially,
we can also witness the
process
of the
formation,
change,
and
possible
abandonment of
beliefs,
both
personal
and collec
tive,
with
respect
to a
putative
referent of a
given
PN.
Finally,
PNs are also means
by
which individuals refer to themselves or
identify
themselves in a
generalized
or im
personal public space,
so that the beliefs
they
hold about themselves
(de
se
beliefs)
and their own PN
(or
the one
by
which
they
are
known)
can be confronted with those
held
by specific
or
generalized other(s),
or
by
the narrator. Beliefs are
currently
un
derstood as intentional states
responsible
for
appropriate
behavioral
dispositions
or
as
cognitive maps by
which we steer our actions. Either
way,
beliefs often lead to ac
tion in
interpersonal space,
and the
totality
of
ensuing
acts centered on a
specific
PN
defines the relevant
group dynamics.
One
key
issue in the
pragmatics
of PNs concerns the
authority
of
naming:
who,
under what circumstances and in what kind of discursive
activity,
is
socially
sanc
tioned to introduce a PN
usage practice
into a
community (Evans
ch.
10),
and to have
it
accepted
as an uncontestable fact that an individual
answering
to this name exists
or no
longer
exists?
Differently put,
who can establish or disclaim
"public
facts"
with
respect
to
any
name
bearer,
that
is,
a standard shared network of beliefs about
him with a
quasi-normative
status in a
community?
This issue is
closely
associated
with the
general
mechanisms of
designation
chains
(Devitt
and
Sterelny)
encom
passing
the
origination,
dissemination, establishment,
spread,
maintenance, and,
on
occasion,
termination or abandonment of a PN
usage practice
in a
community.
The best available
philosophical theory
about the
launching
and dissemination
of PNs is
provided by
the so-called historical-causal
theory,
formulated
by Kripke,
Geach,
and
Evans,
and codified
by
Devitt and
Sterelny.
In its barest
outline,
this the
ory
claims that an individual is
given
a PN
by
one or more
persons through
an act of
ostensi?n
("This
is
Jack")
or
through
association
(though
not
equation)
with an iden
Proper
tifying description.
This initial act is termed
grounding
or reference
fixing.
The
name-giving persons
are the
producers
or
originators
of a PN
usage practice
that es
tablishes a correlation between a PN and an individual. This initial
baptism
is fol
lowed
by
a
reference-borrowing process:
the PN is launched into circulation in a
community,
and
competence
in that PN's use
spreads through
it. The
community
members thus become the consumers of this
naming practice.
Note that a
person's
ability
to use a PN results sometimes
exclusively
from the exercise of such an
ability
by
another
person
in the chain of communication or from its
being
an item in a
shared
repertoire,
and not from
any knowledge by acquaintance
or
by description
of
the referent of the PN. A
community practice
of the use of the PN is
eventually
es
tablished and underlies its use as a
referring expression
on numerous occasions. We
thus end
up using
a certain PN to refer to someone because we know that there is a
general practice
in our
community
of
using
this
expression
to refer to this
person,
and the use of this PN
by any
individual can be viewed as an
adoption
of the
group
practice.
Now the later user intends to
agree
in reference with those from whom he
picked up
the
name,
thereby preserving
the reference. This is
so,
as
Kripke
reminds
us
(167),
because the use of a PN has a
predominantly
social character: we use PNs
in order to maintain communication with others via a common
language,
and
specif
ically
in order to maintain a constant correlation between a name and an individual.
But if we
just
borrow the use of a PN from others and
merely repeat it,
we
may
not
understand the
referent,
that
is,
we
may
not know the truth conditions of
any propo
sition of the form
"[PN]
is thus and so."
1.4 A smooth
process
of name
giving,
and that name's
gradual spread
and en
trenchment,
is
largely something
we take for
granted,
in life as well as in literature.
We become aware of the
presuppositions,
conditions of
possibility,
and
enabling
conditions of this
complex
mechanism in cases of
breakdown,
difficulty,
or confu
sion. Because fictional narratives can
provide
full and certain information as to what
went
awry, how, when,
why,
and with what
consequences, they
are an
ideal labora
tory
of the mind for
examining
both
presuppositions
and their nonfulfillment. What
is
more,
traditionally
literature is
largely
based on a
story having
a
point,
of its
pos
sessing strong tellability,
which,
in its
turn,
is associated with the disturbance of the
expected,
the
normal,
and the routine. Fiction can thus tell us the most about the so
cial
working
of
PNs,
their
epistemological
and behavioral
consequences, through
stories concerned with
problematic
referents,
problematic
relations of reference be
tween PN and
person,
and
problematic
or undecided acts of
referring.
And this is in
deed what takes
place
in the stories I discuss below.
PROPER NAMES WITHOUT REFERENTS
2.1 A German craftsman's
apprentice
with no
knowledge
of Dutch comes from
his neck of the woods to the
"big
and rich
city
of Amsterdam." He
stops
in front of a
beautiful house and
inquires
of a
passerby,
"what is the name of the man to whom
this house
belongs?"
His
inquiry
is made in
German,
a
language
the
passerby
does
not
understand,
so the answer he
gets
is
"kannitverstan,"
that
is,
"can't understand"
112 Uri
Margolin
in Dutch. The
apprentice
assumes,
mistakenly,
that the
passerby
had understood him
and that this is indeed the owner's
name,
whereupon
he makes in his mind the
pred
ication "Mr. Kannitverstan is a
very
rich man" and
proceeds
on his
way.
We next
meet him at the
harbor,
where a
ship
laden with
goods
from the East Indies is
being
unloaded. Our friend asks one of the
stevedores,
again
in
German,
"What is the name
of the fortunate man to whom the sea
brings
all these wares?" The answer is "kan
nitverstan." The
apprentice
reasons,
"No wonder that the one to whom the sea
brings
such riches can build such houses." The
putative
Kannitverstan is now twice
quali
fied: as owner of a
big
house and as a rich
importer.
In the
inquirer's
belief world a
cluster of
properties begins
to form around the name
bearer,
and he
expresses
his
wish "if I could
just
once be as fortunate as this Mr. Kannitverstan." As he
goes
strolling
around the
city,
he stumbles
upon
a
big
funeral
procession.
He
approaches
the
very
last
person
in the
procession
and
says
to him in
German,
"this must have
been a
good
friend of
yours,
since
you
are
walking
so
pensive
and
dejected."
The re
sponse
is once
again
"Kannitverstan." The
apprentice
is
really
moved;
he addresses
in his mind the dead
Kannitverstan,
"poor
Kannitverstan,
what have
you got
for all
your riches,"
and watches as the
body
of the
presumed
Mr. Kannitverstan is
being
lowered into his
grave.
The narrator concludes
by telling
us that "whenever later on
the
apprentice
felt
dejected by
the
thought
that there were so
many people
in the
world who were so rich while he was so
poor,
he had
only
to think of Mr. Kannitver
stan in
Amsterdam,
of his
big
house,
rich
ship
and narrow
grave" (Hebel 157-60).
A
good story,
no
doubt,
both
aesthetically
and
philosophically.
But what is re
ally happening
here? I think the
process
could
adequately
be treated in terms of the
communicative/epistemic/actional hierarchy.
The
linguistic
and communicative di
mension is the first to come to the
fore,
as one would
expect
in
any
case of verbal in
teraction. The
speaker's linguistic ignorance
and
inability
to determine that the
interlocutor does not understand him leads the
apprentice
to a
category
mistake: a
phrase
(a complex
of lexical items
standing
in
grammatical
relations to one
another)
is delexicalized or desemanticized and
(mis)interpreted
as a mere label or
tag,
a sin
gular
term,
referring expression,
or PN of an otherwise unknown man.
Asking
"what
is the name of.
..,"
one
expects
to
get
in
response
a
string
of several
phonemes
that
do not
require
lexical
decoding,
and this is
exactly
what the
apprentice
thinks he
gets. By
the time he has heard this
supposed
PN
twice,
a further occurrence of a
token of it in the
speech
of an additional
interlocutor,
even when not
perceived
as an
answer to a
question,
can
only
reinforce this
(mis)understanding
of "Kannitverstan."
The
irony
of the situation
is,
of
course,
that the failure to understand that the other
cannot
understand,
and is in fact
saying
so,
leads to the
inquirer's
own misunder
standing,
and that the failure to
comprehend
a metacommunicative
expression
leads
to the failure of the
underlying
communication,
to the misconstrual of this
very
phrase,
and to the
consequent
formation in the
inquirer's
mind of a false belief about
the common
phenomenal
world. A
linguistic
error thus
gives
rise to the first
epis
temic one,
an erroneous existence claim that there is a Mr.
Kannitverstan,
and to sev
eral claims about him: that he lives in Amsterdam and that he is the owner of a
sumptuous
house. The
reader,
who is
provided by
the narrator with the German
equivalent
of the Dutch
phrase,
knows that the
phrase
is not a PN and that there is
Proper
hence no Mr. Kannitverstan
being
referred to
by any
of the
respondents.
The
very
ex
istence of this individual and
any property
he
may possess
are thus restricted to the
belief world of one individual and are not shared
by any coagent
or
by
the
narrator,
which is
equivalent
to
saying
that there is no Mr. Kannitverstan in the
storyworld.
For the
apprentice,
on the other
hand,
the combination of
presumed
PN and
predica
tions leads to the formation in his belief world of a
person.
This
parallels
the
general
literary
creative
process
as described
by
Barthes when he
says
that a "character"
(personnage)
is formed when a set of
predicates
traverses a
proper
name.
And,
as in
literature,
the
process
is
purely
verbal,
consisting
of an
empty
term and
predications
with no truth
value,
but this time not with
respect
to
actuality
but inside the
story
world. On the other
hand,
while
literary
characters are created
by
their authors from
words used in a
storytelling
mode and as
part
of a
pretend
or make-believe
game,
the
apprentice's
creation is based on
ignorance
and error. His misconstrual of a
signifier
gives
rise in his mind to a nonexistent
signified
in whose existence he
truly
and hon
estly
believes,
so that
any
claims he makes about this individual are
again
erroneous
but sincere.
By
the time we
get
to the funeral and another occurrence of
"Kannitverstan,"
a
further
cognitive
mechanism sets in: that of
constructing
for the
person
in
question
a
life
story,
a coherent narrative with
general
human
significance
out of a
sequence
of
situations and events. The additional
predicates
now
possess
a
dynamic
or
temporal
dimension,
the narrative theme
being
that of sic transit
gloria
mundi.
So,
once there
was a man who for a while was
rich,
blessed with
many possessions.
But
eventually
he
died,
and his riches were of no avail to him
any longer.
At this
point,
the
appren
tice's
disposition
to
action,
anchored in
axiological
and deontic
claims,
becomes rel
evant. The set of beliefs he retains about Kannitverstan the man
guides
him in his
own
conduct,
serving
as an
exemplary
or
cautionary
tale about
greed, envy,
and the
like,
so
that,
as the narrator
says
at the
beginning
of the
story,
"in the
strangest
round
about
way
a German craftsman's
apprentice
arrived in Amsterdam
through
error to
truth"
(157).
This
general
moral
truth,
which is
presented
as valid inside the
story
world, may,
for all we
know,
be
equally
valid in the actual world. If it
is,
then
through
two levels of individual nonreference and nonexistence
(one
inside the
storyworld
and the other relative to
actuality),
we have arrived at a valid universal moral
insight
and an
implied
behavioral
precept.
As far as the
apprentice
is
concerned,
the conclu
sion underscores the fact that he could achieve
general knowledge only through
fail
ure of factual
understanding
and
through
lack of awareness of this
failure,
which is
quite
ironic. The
story
contains one further
irony,
now associated with
naming.
While its main
character,
the
apprentice,
is nameless and
designated only by
this one
definite
description,
the
story
itself is titled "Kannitverstan." In view of what
hap
pens
in the
story,
it would
probably
not be too far-fetched to
suggest
that this
expres
sion could
very appropriately
serve as the name or nickname of the
apprentice.
In
such a
case,
the name is
again
relexicalized and functions as a
speaking
name
(re
dender
Name),
possessing
both
meaning
and reference and in addition
correctly
characterizing
its bearer.
2.2 Juri
Tynjanov's "Podporuchik
Kizhe"
("Second
Lieutenant
Salso")
is a far
more
complex story
than the
previous
one. It is the
story
of Czar Paul I
(1796-1801)
114 Uri
Margolin
and how the life careers of two minor
officers,
Kizhe and
Synukhaev,
are affected
by
his
reading
and
signing
of official documents in which their names occur. To
be,
in
the world of this
story,
is not to be the value of a bound
variable,
as in
logic,
but
rather to be named and certified
by
an official discourse. This social
sanctioning
or
normative official truth is not treated
by philosophers,
who are interested rather in
mind- and
context-independent
truth and existence.
Kizhe,
created
by
clerical error
(a
PN introduced without a
corresponding referent), prospers,
while
Synukhaev,
real
but declared dead
by
a similar error
(PN
withdrawn from
circulation),
wastes
away.
The
story constantly
alternates between these two life
stories,
and contains in addi
tion a
brief
episode
of a
young
soldier who wonders how real the czar is. In this sec
tion we will deal with the officer created
by
scribal
error,
deferring
discussion of the
other two cases to section 3.2 and
4,
respectively.
A
young,
nervous,
and
inexperienced regimental
clerk needs to
copy by
6
p.m.
a
regimental
list. He is
supposed
to write
"podporuchiki
zhe
Stiven,
Rybin" (328),
that
is,
"second lieutenants also
Stiven,
Rybin
etc." He
gets
distracted and writes
by
mistake
"podporuchik
Kizhe, Stiven,
Rybin,"
that
is,
"second lieutenant
Salso,
Stiven,
Rybin."
Kizhe is thus
literally
Salso in
English,
and this is how we shall refer
to him from now on.
Making
more errors as he
goes along
and
running
out of
time,
the clerk cannot correct the errors he has made and
of
which he is
fully
aware.
By
6
p.m.
the list is
picked up by
an officer and submitted to the
czar,
who is
obviously
not
personally acquainted
with the name of
every petty
officer. The czar reads the docu
ment and inserts in his own hand the order "Second Lieutenant Salso to
guard duty."
The omniscient narrator tells us that
"only
one clerk in the whole world understood
[what
was
going on],
but
nobody
asked him and he did not tell
anybody"
(332).
The
regimental commanding
officer does not know who Salso
is,
cannot find him on
any
list, and,
not
knowing
what to
do,
turns to a
high-ranking
relative for advice. The lat
ter
tersely
instructs him: "Czar not to be informed. Second Lieutenant Salso to be
counted
among
the
living. Assign
to
guard duty" (333).
"And thus
began
the life of
second Lieutenant Salso"
(338).
What started as a clerical error is
given
"tenuous
life"
through
the czar's
hand,
quite literally,
and "the
slip
of the
pen
became a second
lieutenant without a
face,
but with a surname"
(338).
The
poor
clerk had no intention of
deceiving anybody.
For him
any PN,
like all
other
words,
is a mere
graphic
unit,
a set of letters to be
faithfully copied,
and
ques
tions of existence of
anybody answering
to
any
PN are irrelevant. He is well aware
that he has created an additional PN on the
list, but,
fearing
trouble,
he
prefers
to
keep
silent. The
czar,
in an official context of
reporting, naturally
believes that this
unusual PN
(it
is as
strange
in Russian as it is in
English)
does
designate
a minor of
ficer?whom he knows not
by perceptual acquaintance
but
merely
as a name associ
ated with an
important predicate
(second lieutenant)
and
occurring
on an official
list?and
proceeds
to
assign
him a role.
By construing
and
using
"Salso" as a
singu
lar
referring
term,
the
czar,
through
his
writing, acknowledges
the existence of an of
ficer
answering
to this name,
thereby launching
a PN
usage practice
backed
by
his
absolute
authority.
For the czar's beliefs have a normative
force,
as
they
establish the
one and
only
correct belief
system
to be
adopted
and adhered to
by
all his
subjects.
His order
(the deontic)
establishes the
epistemic
and doxestic
(what
is
officially
Proper
known or believed as
fact).
His
writing
on the
regimental
list is in fact a
performative
utterance
establishing by
fiat the existence of
Salso,
tantamount to
saying
"I
hereby
declare that Second Lieutenant Salso exists in
my regiment."
Of
course,
no act of
speech
can
change
the
ontological map,
but it can determine the official social
repre
sentation of
reality.
In this
sense,
the czar's word can create an individual
ex
nihilo,
turning
an individual scribal error into a
public
fact.
The existence errors in the
previous story
were restricted to an individual. But
once the czar is involved it is not that
simple any
more. The
high-ranking
official
who advised the
regimental
commander to
go
on with the unfounded
naming prac
tice initiates a
long-term
collective
pretence
or
collusion,
a
conniving
or deceitful
group practice
of PN
usage
that should override the commander's
knowledge
that
there is no
corresponding person, and,
as we shall see
later,
the
simple
soldiers'
per
ceptual knowledge
that when Salso's name is called out
nobody
can be seen or
heard. Over
time,
the court is
split
into two
groups:
those in the know and the
rest,
in
cluding
the czar. Members of the first
group
know that "Salso" dees not refer to
any
one,
but
go
on with the
pretence
for their own
purposes, endowing
Salso over time
with more and more attributes and actions. Their use of the name is a deceitful or sto
rytelling
one that
they try
to
pass
to outsiders as a
reality-invoking
one. Members of
the second
group sincerely
believe that an officer
answering
to this name
exists, yet
for obvious reasons most of the "information" about him must come from the first
group.
We
see,
especially
in the second
group,
the extension over time of
designa
tional chains
involving
"Salso"
through
reference
borrowing,
where the next
person
using
the name feels warranted in
doing
so because he relies on the
public
shared
knowledge
that "Salso" has been used
by
other members of the
community
to refer
to an officer in this
particular regiment.
The
newly
created officer comes in
handy
in
solving
current
problems.
When
someone shouts
"help!"
under the czar's window
(ironically,
the Russian word used
for
"help"
is
"karaul,"
which also has the
meaning
of
"guard duty")
and the
culprit
cannot be
found,
the blame is
conveniently pinned
on Salso. "What has been
up
to
now the clerk's
distress,
the commander's
perplexity
and the
adjutant's quick
wit"
(338) begins
to assume a face and a
character,
that
is,
predicates
related to
disposi
tions for action. He is "a mischief maker" sentenced
by
the czar to be lashed in front
of the
regiment
and then be banished to Siberia. An
ongoing,
real-time life
story
as
an
open-ended
narrative now
begins
to be created and attached to the PN "Salso."
His name is called out in front of the assembled
regiment,
and a mare is then
flogged
by
two soldiers. "The
mare,
however did not seem
completely
bare,"
and when the
straps
were
untied,
"it was as if someone's shoulders were freed.... Even
though
no
one was
there, yet
it was as if someone was"
(339).
I believe these
phrases represent
a focalization
through
the collective
eyes
of the assembled
regiment:
direct
percep
tual evidence and official
truth,
as manifested in the institution of
flogging,
collide,
and the result is a state of hesitation and
indeterminacy
in the belief worlds of the
soldiers. Truth and official truth seem to be out of
joint,
but since official truth has the
power
of life and
death,
the soldiers better
play along.
Two
guards
next
accompany
Salso to Siberia. It is
strange
indeed that there is neither
sight
nor sound of
him,
but
they
have an official letter
saying
that "this is a secret
prisoner
who has no
figure"
116 Uri
Margolin
(344),
so whenever
they
become confused
by
the looks of the toll
keepers, they pro
duce the letter and
everything
is fine.
"They
soon
began
to understand that
they
were
accompanying
an
important
criminal.
They got
used to it and
significantly spoke
be
tween themselves
[of
him
as]
he or it"
(344),
that
is, person
or official fiction. Court
complicity
in the hoax
goes
on,
and Salso is next ordered back from Siberia
by
the
czar and commanded to
marry
a
lady-in-waiting
in the court who has become
preg
nant due to a
one-night
stand with an officer whose name she never knew and whose
face she did not
clearly
see in the dark.
When Salso comes back from
Siberia, many people already
know about him.
Fake reference and attached
deceiving predications keep spreading, yielding
an ever
expanding
network of false beliefs about him. There are
by
now
"fully
definite fea
tures of his life"
(350), namely,
the facts
we have seen so far. Life
goes
on
equally
whether
we
really
are or are
just supposed
to be. Over
time,
the
regimental
comman
der takes Salso for
granted
in
assigning
duties,
and the
czar,
poring
every
now and
then over
regimental
lists, promotes
him first to
captain
and then to colonel. He has a
room in the barracks and a
study
at
home,
and "after some
time,
a son was born to
lieutenant Salso
who,
they say,
was similar to him"
(350).
Notice the
impersonal
form of
"they say"
or "it is said" or
"according
to
hearsay" ("po slukham"),
which
does not anchor the claim in
any
individual source but treats it as a communal
phe
nomenon. Like most
hearsay,
it cannot be traced back to a
source,
and
people repeat
it as a
supposed
fact because
they
have heard it from
others,
not unlike
designation
chains in
general.
The coercive
power
of such collective doxa over individual knowl
edge
is so
strong
that one
night
even Salso's
"wife,"
when she hears the floor creak
ing
in the other
room,
believes for a moment that it is her husband
coming
back
home and takes a
fright,
since she is with a lover at that moment. Some time
later,
the
paranoid
czar feels the need for a modest man who will be
absolutely duty
bound to
him
(354),
and Salso fits the bill since he had never been either
abject
flatterer or
malcontent,
but carried out his duties "without
complaint
or murmur"
(354).
Salso is
thus
promoted
to the rank of
general,
and
somebody
hears the czar
speak
about him
to the
military governor
of St.
Petersburg.
But
again
the main
point
is the communal
PN
usage practice.
On the eve of his
promotion day,
"his name came to the fore and
they [the
court
people] spoke
about him"
(354): incompatible
fake
memory
claims
(or
are
they
rather
just
false
memories,
induced
by
confusion and the felt
pressure
to
show
one is well
informed?)
about his
past
life and
origins
are uttered
by
different
unidentified voices.
But the moment of truth can no
longer
be
put
off. General Salso is summoned
to the czar. "On the same
day
the Czar was informed that General Salso
was
danger
ously
ill"
(355). (Notice again
the
anonymous impersonal quality
of the
source.)
On
the third
day
he
passes away
and is
given
a state funeral in which his hearse is fol
lowed
by
a
crying
wife and son. The
czar,
believing
to the end that "Salso" refers to
an actual
person, gravely
remarks,
"My
best
people
die"
(355),
and the
narrator,
act
ing
as vox
communis,
casts a
retrospective glance
over Salso's career,
which obvi
ously
has no childhood
period,
and notices that he was "the
envy
of courtiers"
(356).
Such is the force of collective PN
usage practice
that the name and
properties
asso
ciated with it
acquire
real
agency
in a
group
and end
up influencing
the actions and
Proper
attitudes of actual
persons.
It is
only
natural, therefore,
that Salso's name is
posthu
mously
entered into the official historical chronicles.
2.3 Anatole France's
"Putois,"
the last
story
to be discussed in this
section,
is
somewhat different in form from the rest. The
impersonal
narrative voice is mini
mized,
and the
story
consists almost
entirely
of the oral reminiscences of a middle
aged
man and his
sister,
made to the man's
daughter
and to a
couple
of
friends,
and
of
generalizing
comments made
by
all of them. The
object
of the reminiscences is an
extended series of childhood
experiences involving
"Putois,"
a
gardener
whom their
mother invented on the
spur
of the moment to
get
an
annoying great
aunt off her
back. It is
thus,
within the
storyworld,
a true account of a fictitious
story
that
sought
to
pass
for a true
one,
and of its
impact.
The
point
of
departure
is no
longer
an error
in the
interpretation
of a
signifier
that turns it into a
presumed
PN,
but rather a delib
erate
deceit,
an intentional
conniving
or
pretending practice
of
introducing
into the
discourse a PN as if it were
referring
to an individual known to the
speaker.
The
communicative
sincerity
condition is thus violated. In standard
communication,
when a token of a PN is introduced
by
a
speaker
in the context of
reality-invoking
discourse,
it is understood
(default clause)
that the
speaker
is
using
it as a
referring
expression,
that the
speaker
knows or believes that the name does
pick
out an indi
vidual in the actual
world,
and that the
speaker
could
identify
this individual
by
means of ostensi?n and/or definite
description
if asked to do so. The mother's deceit
consists in
pretending
to be
using
the name as a
referring expression
while
knowing
it does not have
any
actual
referent,
and in
supplying, upon
the
great
aunt's
demand,
further
identifying descriptions
of the form "Putois is thus and
so,"
which cannot be
true with
respect
to
actuality
since Putois does not exist in the
public
world.
The
baptism
or reference
fixing
or
grounding
of "Putois"
having
taken
place,
the PN
usage practice
is initiated in the course of a
private
act of communication. But
once it is taken
up by
the initial addressee
(the great aunt),
it
spreads
like wildfire in
the small
provincial
French town and becomes
very shortly
a shared
usage
of the
town as a whole. The
presumed
name
bearer,
not unlike
Salso,
gradually acquires
more and more attributes
(physical,
mental,
and
agential);
a whole
physical
and
psy
chological portrait;
and a
past
life
story
and an
ongoing present
one,
which consists
of all kinds of dubious
activities,
from mischief to theft to
seducing
maidservants.
What started as a
private,
occasional deceit turns on short notice into an article of
public
faith,
into a certified
abiding
existent in the shared belief world of the towns
people,
and hence into a factor that
greatly
influences their
behavior,
judgments,
and
expectations.
Putois becomes the
object
of collective
concern,
if not fear.
People
seem to have false memories of
having
heard the name
before,
or of
having
encoun
tered him in the
past.
At
present,
he seems to be
sighted
in different
places
at the
same time. He is an
object
of a
police
and
journalistic
search,
yet nobody
can
agree
what
exactly
he looks like.
Things
reach their absurd climax when the new maid of
the woman
who invented Putois comes to her one
day
and tells her that a man called
"Putois" is in the kitchen and wants to
speak
to her. "This encounter between the
maid and Putois has never been
explained," says
the
speaker (759).
When the name
"Putois" was
initially
uttered,
it had no intended referent and its utterer had no one in
mind.
By
now,
many
individuals claim to have in mind a
specific perceived
referent
118 Uri
Margolin
of this name. But in fact Putois is defined
by
an
ever-increasing
collective rumor mill
that defines the semantic referent of this name. "Putois" is also a beautiful
example
of the
designation
chain or
reference-borrowing process,
where
my
use of a PN is
based on its
having
been used
by
others before and on some of the features
they
have
associated with the name bearer. The
longer
and wider a PN is
used,
the more en
trenched the name and its
presumed
referent become in the
public
mind.
Another
interesting aspect
of France's
story
is the
description
and
juxtaposition
of the varied and
quite
different
knowledge
and belief worlds associated with the
name "Putois" for its inventor
(the mother),
her
husband,
the
children,
the
great
aunt,
and the
populace
at
large (opinio communis).
The mother
obviously
knows that there
is no one
answering
to this
name,
but as the
originator
of the PN
usage practice
she
is
supposed
to be the one with the authoritative
knowledge
about his
looks,
where
abouts, manner,
and
skills,
being
the
only
one
possessing
knowledge by acquaintance
or
perception
of him
(after all,
he is her
gardener).
She is thus forced into evasive an
swers or
vague
lies when
requested again
and
again by
the obnoxious
great
aunt to
provide specific
information that will
help
her locate him. But the
supposed appear
ance of Putois in her own kitchen
gives
her
pause.
The brother
says,
"I believe that
since that
day my
mother
began
to believe that Putois could well
exist,
and she
might
well not have lied."
("Je
crois
qu'a partir
de ce
jour,
ma m?re commen?a a croire
que
Putois
pouvait
bien
exister,
et
qu'elle pouvait
bien n'avoir
pas
menti"
[759].)
Notice
the modalities: she does not now know that Putois
exists,
but instead of
knowing
that
he does not
exist,
she now retreats one
step
to the
twilight
area of beliefs about
pos
sible existence.
Quite significantly,
this is the
concluding phrase
of the
story.
The fa
ther is a
skeptic
and rationalist.
Besides,
he knows how the whole
thing
started;
he
demanded of his wife to invent an excuse not to visit the aunt on the
following
Sun
day,
and the excuse she came
up
with and
gave
the
great
aunt was
precisely
that
they
were
awaiting
Putois,
the
gardener,
on that
day.
Yet,
he
plays along
with the
children,
and whenever he cannot find his
pen
or ink he would
say
"I
suspect
Putois has
passed
by" (748).
This
humoring,
make-believe,
or
pretend
attitude towards the children is
paralleled by
his
feigned
belief whenever adults are concerned. He is aware of
human error and
gullibility,
and
speaks
of Putois as of a real human
being.
He occa
sionally speaks
so
emphatically
and in such detail that his wife
says
"one would
say
that
you speak seriously,
but
you
know well"
(758).
He
answers,
"the whole town be
lieves in his existence. Would I be a
good
citizen if I denied it? One
ought
to think
twice before
denying
an article of common faith." And
further,
"in order to be
a
good
citizen he
professed
his faith in the existence of
Putois; yet
he
dispensed
with him in
order to
explain
the events in town"
(758-59).
This is an
interesting
mixture of a be
lief in
principle together
with a refusal to attribute to "him"
any specific
actions an
chored in
space
and time. The brother calls him "a follower of
Gassendi,"
a
seventeenth-century
French
philosopher
who advocated a via media between the
skeptics
who doubt we can have
knowledge
about
anything
and
dogmatic
claims for
possession
of certain
knowledge.
Like his
wife,
he
juggles private knowledge
that
Putois does not exist and a
publicly
declared
(feigned)
belief in his existence. But he
would not commit himself to
any
assertions about this existent.
Furthermore,
the
pri
vate
(versus public)
behavior of husband and wife
cannot,
of
course,
be affected
by
Proper
any public
beliefs about Putois. For
example, they
cannot entertain
any
fears or wor
ries about him.
The
populace
at
large
(the impersonal "on")
and the
great
aunt are the true
dupes
of the
piece.
All the aunt's
fears, biases,
and
prejudices
seem to have found a
focal
point
in
Putois,
whom she turns into a
living
embodiment of
everything
vile
and
menacing.
Because of him she
changes
her locks and
yet
cannot
sleep
at
night.
The
townspeople, communicating
with one
another,
find in Putois a convenient
scapegoat
for all crimes and misdemeanors that cannot be
solved,
and start a
process
of
ever-increasing
demonization,
which ends
up attributing
to him
supernatural pow
ers. Notice that the
townspeople
feed
upon
each other in this
process
of invention
and
exaggeration,
and that their unfounded beliefs tend to be therefore
mutually
en
forcing
in their incessant
upward spiral.
In
fact,
in the absence of
any independent
supporting
evidence for
any claim,
the
only possible support
for each claim is the
other claims. The false beliefs of
many
thus turn into a common article of faith. To
the
children,
brother and
sister,
Putois is
present
and familiar. His face is never
seen,
but there are indications of him
everywhere.
Over time his
memory
becomes "less
real and more
poetic" (758).
His
memory
is associated with all the
objects
that sur
round the children
(dolls,
exercise
books,
the
street, trees, benches)
and
they
com
pare
him in their minds with
figures
of tales and stories. For
children,
who cannot
always distinguish
between natural and
supernatural,
actual
figures
and
figures
of
fiction,
who tend to endow
objects
and events with
magical powers,
and who
popu
late the life world with creatures of their
imagination
on
par
with observable ones,
Putois is one more
figure
known to
all, yet especially
attached to their own home. He
is,
in
fact,
the most familiar
figure
of their childhood.
This
brings
me to the last issue of the
story:
the
explicit philosophical
com
ments made
by
the adult brother
(the teller)
and his listeners
concerning
modes of in
dividual existence and the status and
impact
of invented
beings, including
the
relation between
objects
of fiction and lies. The
story begins
with the brother
saying
that Putois remains the clearest in his
memory
of all the
figures
that
passed
before his
eyes
as a
child,
and that features of Putois's looks and character are still
present
in
his
memory. Whereupon
brother and sister
begin
to recite these features "like a
memorised
piece
of
prose,"
"a sacred
liturgical
text used
by
the
Bergert family"
and
compared by
the father with anatomical
descriptions
in Rabelais
(757).
Putois was
named,
and from then he
began
to exist. The
great
aunt said he was such and such
and from then he had a character. The mother said "I am
waiting
for
my gardener,"
and
immediately
he was and acted
(750).
But how could he act in the sense of im
pacting
the lives of actual
people
if he did not
exist,
asks the interlocutor. In re
sponse,
the brother
speaks
about different modes of existence and kinds of
entities,
including imaginary
ones.
They
are all ens
rationis,
or
objects
of mere
thought,
but,
according
to
him,
such entities
possess
attributes too. He is
advocating
a
philosophi
cal view that is crucial to all theories of
literary
fictions and of fictional worlds se
mantics,
namely Meinongism,
after the Austrian
philosopher
Alexis
Meinong
(1853-1920). According
to this
view,
nonexistent individual
objects
(that is,
not ex
isting
in
space
and
time)
can be
objects
of our
thoughts,
and can
truly
and
objectively
possess
the constitutive
properties
(So-sein),
such as
being
a
gardener, predicated
of
120 Uri
Margolin
them in our
thought.
If
so,
these nonexistent
objects
can also be the
objects
of
thought
of whole
populations
and influence their beliefs and actions. The brother
goes
on to cite all the
mythological
characters of our tradition as
proof positive
of his
claim,
and dubs Putois "a low
grade mythological figure" (751).
While the mother
told a lie?in the sense of
knowing
that what she was
saying
was not true and
yet
wanting
others to believe
it?everybody
else,
starting
with the
great
aunt,
used their
experiences,
both life
worldly
and
literary,
to enrich Putois's
portrait
and life
story
in
a
way
not different from that of writers of fiction.
Fiction,
creative
imagination, pre
tence,
feigning, making
a
mistake,
or
lying,
it all boils
down,
it
seems,
not to differ
ences in
objects' ontological
status or truth-functional
properties,
but rather to the
attitudes and intentions of their inventors or
users,
to the
pragmatics
of both individ
ual and collective contexts. But
pragmatics
is a matter of
gradation,
of one situation
shading
into
another,
unlike the strict true/false
dichotomy
of
logic.
PROPER NAMES WITH UNCLEAR REFERENTS
3.1 "What's in a name?" the Bard asked
long ago. Well,
it seems that on occa
sion one's
very destiny hangs
on one's choice of a PN. The main character of An
dreas Schroeder's "The
Connection,"
Mr.
Derringer (his legal
name as
given by
the
narrator)
is sent on a business
trip by
his new
employer,
a northwestern U.S. oil com
pany.
He is
given
various documents and told that "car reservations have been made
for
you
at
your
destination"
(53). Upon landing
in New
York,
a
way
station on his
journey,
he
expects
to meet the
company
PR man who is
supposed
to
provide
him
with further information. As he
picks
his
way
down the
ramp,
a stewardess "calls out
his name: 'Mr.
Derringe
of
Chicago'
"
(53).
But
according
to whom is this his
name,
equating Derringer
with
Derringe?
The stewardess has been
given just
this
name,
without
individuating
or
identifying descriptions
of
any
sort,
by
some
anonymous
in
stitutional source,
which functions like the
dispatcher
in classical
narratology.
She
has no first-hand
knowledge
of
Derringe(r),
never
having
set
eyes
on him. Nor does
she know the semantic reference of
"Derringe(r),"
or its standard reference in
any
speech community,
since she is not
part
of
any
communal PN
usage practice
involv
ing
this name. As the
messenger,
she has no means of
fixing
the reference or
picking
out the name
bearer,
and so she does not have
anybody
in
particular
in mind as she
uses the token of
"Derringe."
She has a
message
for a Mr.
Derringe,
whoever that
may
be. In technical
terms,
this is a wide
scope
use of the name. In this
particular
case,
"Derringe" may
indeed be intended
by
its
originator
to refer to
Derringer,
and
may
succeed in
picking
him out in
spite
of the
slight spelling
error,
a common oc
currence when PNs without lexical
meaning
are transmitted in an
impersonal
bu
reaucratic chain of communication. Or it
may
refer to someone else whose name is
indeed
Derringe.
After
all,
Derringer
is not the
only passenger
on this
flight.
Or
"Derringe" may
not
pick
out
anyone
on this occasion.
The decision about who is the intended referent of
"Derringe"
on this occasion
is left therefore to
Derringer.
Should he
or shouldn't he
self-identify
as the referent
of the PN called out
by
the stewardess?
Derringer apparently
entertains at least a
Proper
probabilistic
belief of a
pragmatic
nature that he is the intended referent of "Der
ringe,"
so he walks
up
to the
stewardess,
but corrects her
"Derringer,
with an r"
(53).
The stewardess
glances
at a
piece
of
paper
in her hand and
says
"a
message
for
you
Mr.
Derringe [no r]
in
passenger
information." Once he has
accepted
as
applying
to
him a name
appearing
in some official
context,
this is henceforth his name for
others,
his social identification
tag,
so to
speak.
He
proceeds
to
information,
but does not
find the PR man.
Instead,
the
girl
at the information desk addresses him as Mr. Der
ring,
and informs him that there is a
message
for him to
fly
on to Florida.
But,
once
again,
who is the intended addressee of this
message? Derringer protests
that his
name is
"Derringer," whereupon
the
girl proceeds
to
produce
a ticket for
Torre?n,
Mexico,
for a Mr.
Dorrengor,
which is the name she now addresses him
by.
She
urges
him to "decide which refers to
you
Mr.
Dorrengor"
(54).
For the stewardess
and the information clerk
alike,
the decisive consideration is to
preserve
intact the
name as it
appears
on the official
paper.
It is no concern of theirs who
picks
it
up
as
"his"
name,
as
long
as he owns
up
to the name as written and
signs accordingly.
For
them,
the name is a
constant,
while its bearer is variable
(whoever).
For
Derringer,
the situation is the
very opposite.
He for himself is
constant,
one and the same
throughout,
as assured
by
both
bodily continuity
and
memory.
Various labels
are at
tached to him
temporarily by
others,
who
may
know him
by
different "incorrect"
names,
but he
constantly
self-identifies from the inside in one and the same
way:
he
is the individual with the birth name
"Derringer."
But once
again
he must make a bi
nary
choice: Shall I
accept "Derringe"
or
"Dorrengor"
as the name
intended to refer
to me?
Naturally,
it
may
well be that neither name
picks
him out at
all,
that the whole
thing
is a colossal mistake or blunder on his
part. Nevertheless,
he is a man on the
move,
being
sent to a
destination,
so he cannot not choose.
Failing
to choose will
ground
him and will constitute a failure in his mission. It is
Sunday,
the office is
closed,
and he chooses
"Dorrengor,"
this time without
any
reason
being given.
He
signs
the ticket
(as
Dorrengor?)
and
proceeds
to the
plane.
Notice that another
unique identifying
feature of an
individual,
namely signature,
is
being
bandied about
here. On
documents,
the
authenticity
of a
signature
is
recognized by
receivers if
they
can match the current token with a certified
sample signature
of the individual in
question.
The stewardess and information clerk do not have a
sample signature
of
Derringe/Dorrengor,
so
they
must
accept Derringer's signature
as
is; he,
in his
turn,
must however
sign
the name he has
just accepted,
not his
baptismal
one.
Arriving
in
Torreon,
Dorrengor,
which is his current
public identifying tag,
is
met
by
a stewardess who addresses him: "Mr.
Farronga?
Your car is
waiting
for
you
on level 5"
(54). Dorrengor protests
that
they
have
got
his name
(which one?) wrong
again.
The stewardess
apologizes, goes away,
and looks for
Farronga among
the
pas
sengers. Nobody
comes
forward,
and after a while he is left alone with her. He de
cides "I
suppose
that
massage
is for me."
Why?
Two local
pragmatic
reasons come to
mind.
First,
in the office he was told about a
prearranged
car
rental,
and
second,
he
uses a
process
of elimination: "if it is for
nobody
else,
then it must be for me." So he
now assumes the label of
Farronga
to
keep moving.
But the car rental
agent
has doc
uments for a Mr. Fatronca. Neither name bears much
similarity
to
Derringer any
more,
but
by
now he is well down the
slippery slope anyway
so he does not
protest
122 Uri
Margolin
and
signs.
"The
signature
[which:
Derringer?
Fartonca?]
does not match the
name,"
the rental
agent points
out
(55). Again,
our hero has a choice:
bog
down and start ex
plaining,
or
plough
on. He decides to
plough
on and
explains
that his name is
spelled
differently
in different countries and that he will
spell
it the clerk's
way
if it is so im
portant
for him. But what is this one name that is
spelled differently
in different
countries,
and is there one such name to
begin
with? These
questions
are left unan
swered.
Farronga/Fatronca
drives off to the Sao Santos
airport,
a
relatively
small
one. Mr.
Farronga
checks with all ticket
counters,
but no one
recognizes
"his" name.
By
now he has
got
used to
identifying
himself to others
by
the last name he has ac
cepted
as "his"
name,
so
Farronga
is
probably
the name he uses.
Suddenly
the PA
system pages
a Mr. Garroncton
flying
to Peru. "Fatronca" considers it a
possibility
and walks to the counter. The
agent agrees
that "the name is
certainly
not the same"
(56)
and
produces
a
photo
he has been
given
to
identify
the
expected passenger.
Hav
ing
failed the tests of
knowledge by acquaintance, identifying description,
and famil
iarity
with a social
practice
of
naming (semantic reference)
and of
signature,
the
correspondence
between PN and
person
is now
put
to the test of iconic means of
unique
identification. This means does not
presuppose any previous knowledge
or
information, any
beliefs or different
degrees
of information held
by
different indi
viduals,
and it is indifferent to
any naming practice, relying
on
physical similarity
alone. But the result is
again
inconclusive.
"Though
the
similarity
with Fatronca is
doubtful,
there is
enough
resemblance for the
agent
to
ignore
the dissimilarities"
(56).
So Garroncton is
by
now on his
way
to
Sicuani,
Peru
(the
place actually exists).
Upon arriving
at the
tiny neglected airport,
Garroncton is at a loss how to
proceed.
A
check of the
only
two ticket offices
provides nothing:
no one
appears
to be
expecting
anyone by
a name even
resembling
his own
("his
own" is
again ambiguous,
between
Derringer
and
Garroncton).
After a
frustrating, lonely
wait,
he is
approached by
a
wild-looking
bush
pilot
who asks him:
"your
name Garotta
by any
chance?"
Again
Garroncton hesitates: the name is not that far off
(from
Garroncton
presumably)
and,
besides,
if he "admits the
discrepancy,"
he
may
end
up
"stuck in this
crumbling
hole
for
days" (57).
So he
says "Yeah,
that's me I
guess,"
and off
they fly
in a
rickety
two
seater to Cocane.
They
land in a
clearing
in the
jungle
with a small
airstrip
and a few
abandoned
buildings.
Garroncton learns to his
dismay
that no
company
man is com
ing,
and the
pilot
takes off. After two
days
of
hungry
wait,
a native in a
donkey
cart
shows
up
and asks whether he is Se?or Tarotina. Tarotina does not even
speak any
more. He
just
nods and climbs into the cart. The native
explains
"we are
going,"
and
off
they go,
God knows where.
At each of his
way stations,
Derringer
is
given
a
binary
choice,
either between
two names or between a
yes-or-no
answer to a
suggested
name. Did he choose
wrong,
and if
so,
where and how often? We will never know. And when does one
cross over from what is
probably
a mere
(erroneous)
variant of the
original
"correct"
PN to an
entirely
different
expression
or
PN,
one
picking
out a different
individual,
if at all? The
question
is
obviously implied,
but never answered. What we do
know,
though,
is that the
adoption pro tempore by
the main character of
any
offered name
as
referring
to him is the
only
factor that decides the next
stage
of his life.
Derringer
is known
by any
of his
adopted
names at
only
one
stage
of his
journey
and
by
one of
Proper
ficial
only.
These officials are in different
countries,
have no contact with one an
other,
and none of them is aware of his
baptismal
name or of his other
adopted
names. For
Derringer
alone are all these names
coreferential,
each
picking
him on a
different
leg
of his
journey
to nowhere. It is
interesting
that all the characters in the
story,
with the
exception
of
Derringer,
are
referred to not
by
name but
by
an
impor
tant
predicate defining
their social role:
stewardess,
airline
agent,
and so on. One rea
son is that
they
are focalized
through Derringer,
who knows them as role bearers
only.
More
importantly, though,
their PNs and
individuality
do not
really
matter.
They
are
solely
there as
agents performing general
social roles that can
be
performed
by many.
The
only person
whose individual
identity
matters,
who needs to be
uniquely
identified and who cannot be
replaced,
is the
passenger.
And his name is
crucial because of the
implicit assumption
of all the
agents
that a name is a
unique
singular
term,
a
unique
identifier with a
single
referent.
Finally, why
"The Connec
tion"? To
begin
with,
the term
designates change
of means of
transportation,
but it
also
problematizes
the relation
among
the different
way
stations of the
journey:
is
there
one,
or are
they
connected
solely
via the PN
Derringer
assumes at each
stop?
But his choice at each
juncture
is made under conditions of
uncertainty, lacking
suf
ficient information for a reasoned
decision,
so that the whole
thing may
be a random
journey
into chaos. Then there is also the connection between the various names as
sumed
by Derringer, predicated solely
on
various
degrees
of
similarity
of sound and
spelling,
that
is,
solely
on the level of the
signifier.
And,
finally,
the
great paradox:
while the connection between
Derringer
the individual and
any specific
name he
chooses for himself is tenuous and could well have been
otherwise,
the connection
between each name
adopted
and the next
stage
of its bearer's
destiny
is
causal,
deci
sive,
and irrevocable: nomen est omen.
Absurd as this
story may
be
by
realistic stan
dards,
it does
put
on
display
all the available means of
connecting
a PN with a
person,
and the destabilization of social
identity
(I
for
others) resulting
from their
failure. Once
again, philosophers
are
mostly
worried about the
difficulty people
have
in
finding
out whether two or more PNs
pick
out the same
person
or
object,
but sel
dom wonder about the
impact
of such a situation on the individual in
question.
3.2 We could well know who someone is
by knowing
a PN and an associated
important predicate, yet
not know her in the sense of
perceptual acquaintance,
of
recognition
and
ability
to
put
a face to a name. In
Tynjanov's
"Second Lieutenant
Salso,"
a
young
soldier asks an old one "who is our
Emperor?"
and the old one an
swers "Pavel
Petrovich,"
something
the
young
man knows
very
well. The
young
man
then asks the old one whether he has seen the
emperor,
to which the old one
replies,
"I
have,
and so will
you."
But the
young
man is not satisfied: "I don't know.
They
talk and talk
'Emperor.'
But who he is is unknown.
Maybe
it's
only
talk"
(339).
In
other
words,
there is a shared belief in the
community
that there is an
emperor,
but no
one can anchor the reference of this
expression
in his own direct
sensory experience,
so that no one can
personally
vouch for his existence
apart
from common belief. As
a
referent,
the
emperor stays
on a
purely
abstract
level,
being
whoever bears this title
and whatever he
may
be like
physically.
Then,
all of a
sudden,
the old soldier whis
pers
in the
young
one's ear: "He
exists,
only
he has been substituted"
("on est',
tolko
on
podmenenny" [340]),
a
Gogolian absurdity
if there ever was one. The old soldier
124 Uri
Margolin
has seen the
emperor, only
it is not the
emperor
but a substitute. How does he know
this if he has never seen the
original,
and how does he know that the
legitimate
name
and title bearer
(still)
exists at all? Identification
by
definite
description
and
by
ac
quaintance
turn out to be
equally
unable to anchor the name in a
referent,
and both
soldiers will have to
go
on
taking
the existence of Pavel Petrovich on
faith,
by
au
thority
of a universal PN
usage practice
that
may
well be unfounded.
PROPER NAME WITHDRAWN
4. We have seen before that a PN could
give
rise to a whole network of beliefs
about a
person,
even
though
the name is
empty
and does not
pick
out
any
actual in
dividual. But what of the reverse
case, when
an actual
living person
has someone in
an official
capacity
decide that his name no
longer picks
out
any living
individual
or,
in other
words,
that this
person
is dead? We have all heard
apocryphal
stories of
computer
errors
by government agencies
where "deceased" is
printed
beside a
per
son's name on some official
list,
with the immediate result that all
ongoing
files
about him are closed. The first
consequence
of official death is that the individual is
henceforth
deprived
of all
agential properties
in
public opinion.
The name bearer is
no
longer part
of
anyone
else's
ongoing
life
world,
his life
story
is terminated for all
others,
and his PN can occur in their discourses in
past-tense
action statements
only.
Another
consequence
of the
official,
but not
actual,
death of an individual is that his
PN can no
longer
occur in second-
or
third-person
deictic
propositions,
but can
go
on
occurring
in first
person
ones. No one can
any longer point
at a
living
individual and
say
"He is Joe" or "You are
Joe,"
but the individual himself can still
point
to himself
and
say
"I am Joe." But
beyond
mere
logic,
what does it feel like to have
your
PN of
ficially
withdrawn from the
register
of the
living
while in fact
you
are
very
much
alive? What
happens
to
your
sense of self and
ability
to interact with others? It is
only
fictional narrative that allows us direct access to the minds of such unfortunate
persons, and,
in the case of
Tynjanov's
"Second Lieutenant Salso" it is the mind of
Lieutenant
Synukhaev.
The same
hapless regimental
clerk whose
graphic
error
gave
rise to Salso is the
cause of
Synukhaev's
demise,
by writing
"deceased" next to his name instead of next
to Sokolov's
on the
previous
line.
Again,
the clerk is
dealing
with letters
only,
with
signifier
s. He has no one in mind while
copying
the
list,
and hence does not entertain
any
beliefs nor make
any
claims about
any
individual who
may
be
picked
out
by any
of these names. His sole intention is to
copy
a list as fast as
possible.
The
list,
having
been submitted to and
approved by
the
czar,
thereby turning
it into an official
order,
is read out the next
day by
the commander to the assembled
regiment.
Lieutenant
Synukhaev, standing
in his usual
place
and
"thinking
of
nothing,"
all of a sudden
hears "Lieutenant
Synukhaev, being
dead of
fever,
is to be considered
separated
from
the service"
(333).
The
commander,
noticing
the "dead man"
standing
in his usual
place, very
much
alive, stops momentarily
and then
goes
on
reading
aloud.
Direct,
immediate,
and incontrovertible
sense
evidence,
based on
personal acquaintance,
Proper
clashes with a document that defines and establishes the ultimate official truth for the
realm. So the lieutenant must be dead after all. And what about the name bearer him
self?
Nobody
in a realistic
storyworld
can
truthfully
assert "I am
dead,"
since
death,
as
Wittgenstein
has said
long ago,
is not an event in one's life but its
boundary.
Con
sequently,
the de re
(about
a
thing)
claim
"Synukhaev
is dead" cannot
imply
the de
se
(about oneself)
one "I am
dead,"
even
though
the officer
accepts
that his own
name is indeed
Synukhaev.
If
up
to now "I am so and so" and
"Synukheav
is so and
so,"
identifying
him once for himself from the inside and once for others from the
outside,
were
synonymous
for
Synukhaev,
from now on
they
are
decoupled.
Synukhaev begins
to suffer from an acute case of
cognitive
dissonance,
where he is
holding conflicting
beliefs
simultaneously.
He
may
be dead for others as a
person,
but the
very
fact that he is aware of this
provides
the best
proof
that he is not dead for
himself as a self or a mind. His
public identity,
manifested in the PN "Lieutenant
Synukhaev,"
is
gone
as soon as the name is struck off the official
list,
but the essen
tial indexical "I" is still with
him,
since it
precedes
and is
independent
of
any
social
attribute,
including
PN. This semantic
quandary
is
compounded by
a well-en
trenched and
long-held pragmatic
belief he still holds
unquestioningly, according
to
which words of an
(imperial)
order are
"special
words
having
not sense and
signifi
cance,
but life and
power
of their own.
...
An order could
change regiments,
streets
and
people,
even if not carried out"
(333-34).
This sounds
very
much like a
pure
performative,
where what is said determines what is.
Yet,
even
though
he is neither
physically
nor
mentally
dead,
his status has been
changed radically
and
irrevocably
by
the
very promulgation
of the order. After the initial shock and
disbelief, "[h]e
began
to doubt whether or not he was alive"
(334).
From the sensation in his hand he
seemed to be
alive,
but at the same time
"[h]e
knew that
something
was
irreparably
spoiled.
He never
thought
there could be an error in the order. On the
contrary,
it
ap
peared
to him he was alive
by
mistake,
due to a blunder. He failed to notice some
thing
and did not
report
it to
anyone" (334).
Since he is
officially
dead,
he does not
move from his
place
when the
regiment
next starts the institutional
practice
of exer
cising.
The commander at first flies at him in
rage,
but
realizing Synukhaev
is
(offi
cially)
dead,
recoils in silence "not
knowing
how to
speak
to such a
person" (336).
What follows next is a
process
of
estrangement
from the shared
phenomenal
world of the
military.
The
parade ground
looks unfamiliar to
him,
and the whole
city
of St.
Petersburg
is now "an
altogether
unfamiliar
city." Having
been excluded first
from the
military
social
sphere
and now
estranged
from its
physical setting,
"he un
derstood that he had died"
(327).
He has
died, however,
as a social
entity,
as "I" for
others,
but not as a sentient
being.
He next
goes
to his room in the barracks and looks
at the
things "belonging
to Lieutenant
Synukhaev."
Once
again,
he
regards
all insti
tutional manifestations of his former official or
public
self as
belonging
to someone
else,
to be referred to in the third
person.
Later that
evening,
a
young
officer enters
Synukhaev's
room
and,
in his
presence,
takes over his bed and
belongings.
When our
hero
feebly protests
that this is
against regulations,
the newcomer
calmly explains
that "on the
contrary, everything
was
according
to
regulations,
that he was
acting
ac
cording
to section
2,
like the late
Synukhaev,
the one who died"
(341).
At the behest
126 Uri
Margolin
of the
newcomer,
the former
Synukhaev changes
into a uniform no
longer
fit to
wear,
leaves the barracks and walks around the
city
all
night long.
"He never returned to
the barracks"
(341).
But where is he to
go?
It turns out that he walks to the house of his
father,
a
doc
tor in
Gatchina,
a suburb of St.
Petersburg.
He looks
dejected,
and
finally says
to his
father "I am not alive."
Upon hearing
the full
story,
the father becomes
uneasy
about
keeping
his son at
home,
places
him in a
hospital,
and writes on the board above his
bed "Accidental
Death,"
with
only
insiders and the reader
knowing
what kind of an
accident it was: the accident of a scribe's errant
pen.
A
petition
to the
czar,
composed
by
the father and
signed by
the
son,
is next handed
by
the doctor to his
neighbor,
a
baron with close connections to the
czar,
with a
request
that he deliver it to the czar
personally.
The baron
dryly
informs the
emperor
that the deceased lieutenant
Synukhaev
has shown
up
in
Gatchina,
where he was
put
in
hospital.
The lieutenant
declared himself alive and submitted a
petition
for reinstatement in the rosters. The
story
reaches its absurd climax with the czar's decision: "The
request
of the late lieu
tenant
Synukhaev,
withdrawn from the rosters
by
reason of
death,
is denied for this
very
same reason"
(349). True,
a dead man cannot
request
to be reinstated into ser
vice. But an even
greater paradox
is
lurking
in the
background.
As far as the PN is
concerned,
if the lieutenant is considered
dead,
no one can
legitimately sign
a
peti
tion with the PN
"Synukhaev."
Yet how else could the
poor
man
self-identify (sign)
in a
petition
addressed to others in which he claims that
he,
Synukhaev,
is not dead?
A catch-22 if there ever was one.
The
upset
baron rushes to the
hospital,
orders the
immediate
discharge
of the deceased
lieutenant,
issues him
underwear,
but
keeps
his
official clothes.
Synukhaev
is
quite literally stripped
of the last
vestige
of his social
identity, becoming
a
no-person.
From now on he
begins
a life of incessant
wandering
in circles in and around St.
Petersburg,
not
looking people
in the
eye, smelling
them
like a
stray dog, sleeping
outdoors,
and
living
on
gifts
of bread and milk from
ped
dlers.
Shopkeepers
treat him as an outcast and an inversion of
nature,
shouting
after
him: "come
yesterday," "play
backwards." While the
officially
existent but unreal
Salso had a state funeral and his name was noted in the
annals,
the
officially
nonex
istent
yet quite
real
Synukhaev
is not mentioned in
any
annals. "He vanished without
a
trace,
as if he had never existed"
(356).
Nomen and its
vagaries
is omen indeed.
To conclude: the
map
of
disruptions
as it
emerges
from the stories is as follows:
Hebel's
"Kannitverstan,"
Tynjanov's
"Second Lieutenant
Salso,"
and Anatole
France's "Putois" all
deal,
quite humorously,
with
empty singular
terms or PNs with
out
corresponding
referents inside the
storyworld,
hence with
referring
acts made
and claims formulated without a
corresponding object.
A PN
usage
is introduced
by
some individual and in two cases
(Salso
and
Putois)
followed
by many
others for a
fairly long
time,
but no individual
answering
to the name exists. We are thus wit
nessing
the
spread
of an unfounded
referring practice
and its
consequences.
Schroeder's "The Connection" is a humorous
yet disquieting story
of an
individual
who is faced with a whole succession of PNs which
may
or
may
not be intended to
pick
him
out,
and who must decide for each PN whether it does
pick
him out or not.
Differently put,
this individual must decide at each
stage
whether the PN
by
which
he is addressed is a mere distortion or variation on his "correct"
name,
or whether it
Proper
is a different
name,
associated with an
entirely
different individual. But no criteria
for
making
this decision are
provided.
The
unique
relation between name and refer
ent is
put
into
question,
and the individual is turned into a referent with numerous
problematic namings. Eventually,
this
begins
to unsettle his inner sense of individual
identity
as well. A minor character in
Tynjanov's story
faces a similar
quandary:
he
wonders "who is the Czar." Of course he knows the
name,
but he is unable to associ
ate the name with
any experiential
details,
so identification and connection between
name and individual referent remain
ambiguous
and undecided for him. Another
major
strand in
Tynjanov's story exemplifies
the reverse of the first case mentioned
above. A PN is withdrawn from circulation and a
referring practice
terminated or
blocked
by
fiat,
although
the name bearer is alive and
doing
well. A referent thus ex
ists,
but his PN is said not to refer
any longer
to
anyone
alive. If in the first case a
PN,
once
launched,
created a
person
as a social
fact,
here a PN withdrawn uncreates a
person by denying
the name henceforth
any corresponding
referent in the social
sphere.
We end
up
with
an individual denied both PN and official
existence,
who all
the same
goes
on
existing
on the
biological
and
private
levels.
WORKS CITED
Barcan,
Ruth Marcus. Modalities. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press,
1993.
Devitt,
Michael and Kim
Sterelny. Language
and
Reality.
Oxford:
Blackwell,
1999.
Evans,
Gareth. The Varieties
of Reference.
Oxford: Clarendon
Press,
1982.
-.
"The Causal
Theory
of Names." In Collected
Papers,
1-24. Oxford: Clarendon
Press,
1995.
France,
Anatole. "Putois." In
Oeuvres,
vol.
3,
edited
by
Marie-Claire
Bancquart,
746-59. Paris: Editions
Gallimard,
1991.
Geach,
Peter. "The Perils of Pauline." In
Logic Matters,
153-56. Oxford:
Blackwell,
1972.
Hebel, Johann
Peter. "Kannitverstan." In
Werke,
vol.
2,
edited
by
Otto
Kleiber,
157-60. Basel:
Birkhaeuser
Verlag,
1959.
Kripke,
Saul.
Naming
and
Necessity. Cambridge:
Harvard Univ.
Press,
1980.
Ryan,
Marie-Laure. Possible
Worlds,
Artificial Intelligence,
and Narrative
Theory. Bloomington:
Indi
ana Univ.
Press,
1991.
Schroeder,
Andreas. "The Connection." In The Late
Man,
53-59.
Victoria,
Canada: The Sono Nis
Press,
1972.
lynjanov,
Juri.
"Podporuchik
Kizhe." In
Sochinenia,
vol.
1,
327-56. Moscow:
Terra,
1994.
Werth,
Paul. Text Worlds.
Longman:
Harlow, Essex,
1999.

Naming and Believing Practices of The Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Naming and Believing Practices of The Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Naming and Believing: Practices of the Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Author(s): Uri Margolin

You might also like