The Namework of Ursula K. Le Guin

Abstract

With its focus on sound and form in language, Sigmund Freud’s concept of jokework provides a useful analogy for studying invented names in fiction. This is especially true of a writer like Ursula K. Le Guin, who describes the onomastic creation in her stories and novels as a largely subconscious process. The namework in her fiction recalls the kind of wordplay and verbal experimentation in which children like to indulge, an activity that both Freud and Le Guin claim is inhibited in the course of growing up. It moreover privileges names in and of themselves as objects of aesthetic delight for the ears, eyes and minds of both the author and her readers. Finally, the concept of namework helps to explain how and why Le Guin recreates names that look and sound alike in her fantasy and science fiction.

Keywords:

• Ursula K. Le Guin
• literary onomastics
• names in science fiction and fantasy
• Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

Notes

1. I have taken the term sound-shape from the title of Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh’s The Sound-Shape of Language (1979). Where they use the term to refer to the sounds of individual words, utterances, and languages as a whole, I use it solely to refer to the phonic sequences that make up individual names.

2. I originally formulated some of the ideas in this section in a study that speculates on how Le Guin’s childhood readings may have provided sources for some of the names in her Earthsea novels (Robinson 2010, 92–99). While partially inspired by Freud, this earlier paper did not draw an explicit analogy between jokework and the psychogenesis of names in fiction.

3. Freud makes a distinction between playing with words in verbal jokes and playing with thoughts in conceptual jokes (2001a, 138).

4. Cited in Lindow (2012, 5). Black and Wilcox provide examples of other writers who create names in their fiction based on childhood memories and friends (2011, 159–160).

5. I cannot identify the source of Pasfal with confidence, though I suspect it is Germanic, possibly a corrupted form of Parsifal.

6. Representation by the opposite happens to be a common technique of jokework that Freud discusses at length (2001a, 70–74).

7. For Brian Attebery the otak is similar to a lemur (1980, 171), though I fail to see any resemblance between the creature described in Le Guin’s novel and this particular animal, which belongs to the primate order.

8. The term monism, which Taoist thought employs in combination with duality, should not be confused with Unism, the name of a fundamentalist religion in The Telling that is virulently opposed to all forms of alterity and dissent. Insightful studies of Taoism in Le Guin’s fiction include those by Bain (1980), Wytenbroek (1990), and Lindow (2012).

9. The traditional model of onomastic interpretation I have in mind is that given by François Rigolot, who imagines, as in a Venn diagram, one circle that represents the totality of associations that a name evokes in and of itself, and another that represents the totality of signifieds generated by the text where the name appears. The intersection of these two circles will give “the exact extent of the literary signification of the name” (1977, 22). In other words, any features of the names or textual associations outside this zone of overlap must be considered as insignificant, from a critical point of view.

10. Freud’s anecdote and analysis of his forgetting the name of Signorelli appears in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. This is the first and most widely discussed example of parapraxis, a mental error due to unconscious interference or obstruction, such as forgetting a word or name, misplacing an object, or what would later come to be known as a Freudian slip (2001b, 1–7).