Nameless Characters

Answering some reader questions about naming and abstraction of identity in my first novel

Recently, a grad student named Ethan sent me some questions over email about my decision to write nameless characters (the father, the mother, the son, etc) in my first novel, There is No Year (2011, Harper Perennial). I enjoyed thinking aloud about the subject, especially given how much my writing style has changed since. Q/A below.

Looking back, can you remember why you chose to make the characters nameless in There is No Year? How about removing the characters geographically from any specific location?

The novel began from a single image, of two people sitting side by side on a sofa close together but not touching, looking straight ahead like hypnotized. I didn’t know anything else about them but I knew there was a whole novel that surrounded them. They felt like chess pieces or stage props more than people in that way, and so I suppose when I started typing I didn’t feel the urge to humanize them more than that. Then I just thought it was appropriate to keep doing that through the whole book, so I did.

As for locations, I thought it was funny in a sort of sad way that brands and corporations had identities but the people didn’t. That feels more realistic to me than pretending a character named Charlie should mimic a person who lives in America where individuals tend to have less and less actual freedom compared to machinic entities.

Were the choices above decisions you made in the first draft or were these decision that came later?

First draft definitely. It couldn’t have been written the same way if they had names.

Have you used nameless characters, unnamed narrators, or undefined places in other works of yours? If so, which works were these and can you recall why you chose to make these decisions?

I wrote another novel titled Sky Saw right after I finished There is No Year that I saw as a sort of diptych, and I used a similar approach with having no names to the characters besides their handles, though when I finished that one it felt different than the first novel so I changed all the characters to have names like Person 1180. That provided a very different texture than using “the father,” more sci-fi than existential, and I liked the way that made the books fit together differently. I’m sure I’ve used namelessness a bunch and other weird names of identifying characters as tags. I’m not really a big fan of ‘creating characters’ as if they’re real; I like the fact that fiction allows you to play with reality and expectations of reality.

What does refusing to put a name to a thing allow you to do within writing?  

I think it becomes more theoretical and abstract in a way, which allows you to explore the terrain of the writing and the ideas in the writing as forces of affect instead of simply trying to create drama or realistic narrative. It also allows the reader some space to attach themselves to the constructs, or to envision their own illustrations of the applications, rather than being forced to befriend or identify with simulations of people. I guess for me it makes the potential space of a novel larger, like a maze or a dream world, that isn’t bound to normalcy and the often cookie cutter ways we force art to be enslaved to reality.

What, if anything, does namelessness do for you as a reader (whether it's nameless character/narrators or undefined places)?

I don’t think I think about it too much as a reader; I just accept it as an element of the way the writing was constructed, like part of a mystery I’m being immersed in. I don’t tend to try to unpack those kinds of forces when I’m consuming something; I prefer to let it wash over me and dig into me in ways that I wouldn’t expect.

I was thrilled to see in your 2019 reading log that you had read Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome. After I read this novel only back in 2022, I felt someone had read my mind (or perhaps I had indirectly read hers). This is the sort of stuff I’ve been trying to write for the last several years. Her short story collection, New & Selected Stories, further solidified this feeling. Her stories are quite stripped down and she often implements namelessness into her stories. Both your novel, There is No Year, and her novel, Taiga Syndrome, are quite strange and yet interrogate/meditate on a number of important issues. The issue of identity, is perhaps a common theme among them.

Keeping some of this in mind, are there other writers/stories you could point to that utilize nameless characters, unnamed narrators, and/or undefined settings in similar capacities?

I was really big into Beckett during the time I wrote There is No Year, and though many of his characters have names, I’ve always thought of them as silly names, like handles more than something a mother gives you. The way he writes, too, as a kind of rhizome or refracting body, feels both very personal and very alien, which allows his storylines to meander and involve experiences I share little to no experience with while still filling the spirit with an energy that feels like living more than being told a story. David Lynch was also a big influence on the book, and I think he is incredible at building effective characters that define themselves by ways they speak or move or act instead of anything articulately definitive. Both Beckett and Lynch attach to imagination in a way that create opportunity, I think, rather than enclosing the viewer in a trap. I like freedom.

Are there other writers or individuals you might know who'd be interested in this topic about the utility of namelessness in writing?

Off the top of my head, Robert Lopez has a great book called Kamby Bolongo Mean River that does some weird work with naming and identity.