Fiction Friction: The Perils of Paleonomism
- cepmurphywrites
- May 9
- 7 min read
By Thomas Anderson.
‘Paleonomism’ is a term I’ve just made up, because I’m an author and I’m allowed. It means ‘ancient name…ism’ and it refers to a situation in which an older work of fiction uses a name which later becomes much more famous in a different context, casting the original work in an unintended light later on.
You may already be familiar with this phenomenon, but typically it comes up in contexts where the original work remains high-profile (or is revived) and then the creative people behind it have to cope with the problem of the name’s connotations changing. In a previous article on the Garibaldi Problem, I discussed how, paradoxically, naming someone or something in honour of a historical character can have the reverse intended effect of covering up the original person being celebrated or reducing them to a comical-sounding punchline. It is a lot harder to talk about the Incan resistance leaders named Tupac since a rapper was named for them.
Even more problematically, a name may even become copyrighted or otherwise unusable. The original Captain Marvel was eventually renamed after his catchphrase, ‘Shazam’, despite the fact that Shazam was already the name of another important character in that comic, because Marvel Comics now used the name Captain Marvel for a different character. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had a series of radio sketches titled Dave Hollins – Space Cadet! which eventually became Red Dwarf. In the transition, protagonist Dave Hollins was renamed Dave Lister due to a footballer named Dave Hollins becoming prominent in the meantime. The brief but gruesome reign of the terrorist organisation ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) led to a series of panicked renamings of everything from the CIA-type organisation in the animated spy parody Archer to a superheroine in Legends of Tomorrow to a town in Dragon Quest. (Fortunately, a proposal to change the name of an Oxford journal named after Oxford’s river, the Isis, didn’t get off the ground.) Ironically enough, ISIS itself ‘rebranded’ in time in the sense it became better known as ‘Islamic State’ and was thankfully driven back, though remnants continue to this day.
But in discussions of paleonomism, I’m mostly not talking about cases high-profile enough where such renaming has to be actively considered. Instead, I’m thinking of examples which remain sufficiently obscure and low-profile that the old names are retained as amusing quirks of our cultural memory. They are also reminders that there are only so many names in the English language (or any other) and a writer may not be the first or only person to have a particular idea, which is meaningful from the point of view of writing alternate history.
Some of us alternate history writers, and I include myself in this, were burned on overly convergent popular alternate histories: “Constantinople doesn’t fall in 1453, how does this affect Barack Obama’s election in 2008?” Because of this, we tend to avoid examples of names being the same as OTL like the plague and resort to alternate terminology as a consequence – which I have many articles about. But paleonomisms are an interesting case of holding a mirror up to life and reminding us that things may sometimes be more superficially ‘convergent’ than we like to think. After all, who would ever write an AH scenario where two completely different and unconnected comic characters, one British and one American, were sent to the press for the first time within hours of each other in 1951 and both given the name Dennis the Menace? But it happened in OTL.
So what are some examples of the kind of paleonomisms I’m talking about? Agatha Christie, unsurprisingly given her vast output of writing, is a prime vein of names that now seem out of place, many of them in her lesser-known works. A borderline case is a character in And Then There Were None, a book whose own title saw repeated renamings due to its original title being reference to a racist nursery rhyme. And Then There Were None is often regarded as the finest mystery story ever written, but the names of its characters are not especially well-known. For this reason, it may be a surprise to some to learn that one of the characters – who are all portrayed as murderers who escaped conviction – is a military man named General MacArthur. The book was adapted for the stage in the 1940s (albeit with a changed ending) by which time the Pacific escapades of the controversial General Douglas MacArthur were in the news, and to avoid negative implications the name was changed to McKenzie. Later film adaptations followed suit, though not always keeping the same name consistently.
Other Christie works are less well known and so there has not been a need to change character names, meaning that they are all the more jarring when they appear to us now. For example, in the short story “The Rajah’s Emerald” (1934), Christie features a protagonist named James Bond! This is a prime example of what I was talking about before about how changing context can radically change one’s perception of the connotations of a name. In the 1930s, when Christie was writing, that combination of names was meant to imply someone who was dull, boring, run-of-the-mill. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons why Ian Fleming chose it almost two decades later– it sounded like a plausible codename. Christie’s Bond is indeed a rather dull young man who feels life has passed him by and isn’t having much luck with women, only for a dramatic situation to fall into his lap. Now, it’s almost impossible to read that short story without one falling into the mindset that surely the choice of name is meant to be ironic!
Another example from Agatha Christie is slightly more prominent, in that the title character is also the lead character of a short story anthology, The Mysterious Mr Quin. In these short stories, the protagonist is a man named Satterthwaite (a double dissonance for me as I was at school with someone with that fairly rare name) who tells the stories, and also briefly appears in the Hercule Poirot novel “Three-Act Tragedy”, albeit unceremoniously removed from every adaptation of it. Satterthwaite periodically teams up with the titular mysterious Mr Quin, whose goal in life seems to be to untangle matters of tragedy in love that have arisen through mutual misunderstandings.
The reference Christie was going for may not be immediately apparent to most modern English-speaking consumers of culture, but at the time she was writing, the Italian Comedy (Commedia dell’arte) was better known. The Commedia (which also ultimately inspired English pantomime) uses a set of stock characters, portrayed by actors wearing masks and costumes, who can be plugged into any story. These include Pierrot the sad clown, Scaramouche the braggart (whose name is now perhaps best known for appearing in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), Pulcinella (who was adapted into Mr Punch in England, with his long-nosed mask becoming his face), and Columbine, who is the wife of Pierrot but also the mistress of Harlequin. Who is Harlequin? Derived from depictions of devilish characters in mediaeval plays, Harlequin is a trickster, often a servant who thwarts the aims of his master and purses a love affair with Columbine. He always wears a chequered costume, sometimes referred to as his motley.
In Christie’s stories, Mr Harley Quin is a maybe-mundane, maybe-supernatural figure who appears right when it seems love will be thwarted through misunderstanding and then sets things right with the assistance of Satterthwaite. In each story, there is a hint to his real identity when he is superimposed with something which hints at the chequered motley garb of the Harlequin character, such as light from a lamp with a chequered shade falling on him, or him being visible through stained glass in a similar form.
But, of course, today the name Harley Quinn (with two Ns) is best known for a character conceived by Bruce Timm, creator of Batman the Animated Series in the 1990s, to act as a female foil and sidekick to the Joker. (Incidentally, I recently came across one of the lesser-known inspirations for the Joker in some 1930s pulp fiction, but I’ll save that for another article….) Considering Harley Quinn was created basically for the Joker to have someone to monologue to when Batman wasn’t there, it’s remarkable that the character became enormously popular, being traded back into the comics, starring in TV, film and video games even sometimes without the Joker, and developing a vast (and often very, very problematic) fandom. At this point, not only would it be very difficult to adapt Christie’s stories, it’s probably quite hard to even use the word ‘harlequin’ in any context without a lot of people first thinking of the DC character.
While there are plenty more examples of paleonomisms out there – feel free to suggest some in the discussion link below! – I’ll leave you with one more recent example I was amused by. John Haslette Vahey (1881-1938) was a Northern Irish accountant and First World War veteran who became a successful detective story author in the same era as Christie, ‘the Golden Age’. Like Edgar Wallace he was a very fast writer, and he used a bewildering nine pseudonyms for different sets of detective novels and other fiction. Among these were Vernon Loder, Walter Proudfoot and Anthony Lang. It is under the latter name that he published a book in 1930 entitled simply “Evidence”. A drunken, vengeful poacher seems to have shot the tyrannical magistrate who imprisoned him. An open and shut case for the police? But the private detective Edward Wimperis isn’t so sure…
This is a well-written Golden Age murder mystery and I’d suggest seeking it out; it’s available on Amazon (albeit in an imperfect transcription) for almost nothing. Vahey’s works have been rediscovered, like those of other writers such as Freeman Wills Crofts and John Bude, since Martin Edwards’ British Library Crime Collections started coming out, and I’m glad that a new generation has the chance to experience them.
However, when they do, they may raise their eyebrows at one point in this book in particular. Wimperis has a number of assistants who help him out, who travel to the village being investigated but carefully avoid contact and use simple pseudonyms like Porter and Brown. What a coincidence, we learn, for one of the potential suspects in the case also had dealings with a car dealer and fellow poacher of the same name. He later gets referred to in conversation as ‘Charlie’. Wait…
Yes, indeed, later in the book Wimperis goes to confront the man in question: a thuggish but rather weak-willed poacher who suspiciously lent a gun to a suspect but is willing to turn evidence to save himself. And in that chapter, he is finally given his full name: Charlie Brown. I’m sure Charles M. Schulz would have considered suing, if he hadn’t been 8 years old at the time.
What other examples of paleonomisms have you spotted in old fiction? Let us know in the discussion forum!
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
The Twilight's Last Gleaminghttps://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/the-death-of-zeitgeist-and-the-reflective-superheroes-of-the-mid-2000s.7314/
among others.
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