In some old paperback edition of Bleak House or maybe another Dickens, following the novel was an essay by ... oh, now I've forgotten his name. It reminds me of Angus Wilson.

Anyway, it was a wonderful piece -- all about the power of names. Or rather, the power of naming something. The writer was very critical of Dickens' love of assigning characters comical and goofy names, even his main characters. He said that it was a form of belittling his own creations, and mocking people in general.

Naming a thing, he said, is an act of exerting ownership over it. It limits the thing, sets a boundary around it -- or at least it is like announcing a boundary exists around it. Names are artificial, after all: If my parents name me Duck, it doesn't mean I am one. To give something or someone a silly or foolish name is inviting the world to see that the person is silly. It short-changes the person. It is rather arrogant.

He (the essayist) didn't like the lordly way Dickens went about flinging these names on his fictional people, reducing them to comic figures at times, restricting them from becoming anything serious and large, keeping them firmly within his joking grasp, in his big grand writer's hand, telling them exactly what they were and what they would never be.

To have more than one name is to be less limited, apparently; and all the best deities have lots and lots of names. Marduk had over 100, I think.
Jews -- or perhaps it's orthodox Jews -- will not presume to completely name God, or rather, G-d.
And there was that wonderful short story, acting out almost the opposite idea, called "The Nine Billion Names of God," in which some Himalayan monks believed the only reason man was created was to discover all the names of God. As if finding all those names was to fully appreciate and fully apprehend him. But when done in certain ways, naming someone is an aggressive act.

While I would hate to see a single word of Dickens' changed, I wonder what his novels would have been like had he avoided the tendency to make jokes out of so many names. They definitely leave a tang, when you read them. But maybe his work can't exist without that.

Anyway, I feel quite content with being Undefined, for now. It is like being Unnamed.