I just caught up with an interview with the American author Don DeLillo in a recent Saturday edition of the Guardian. Two moments in it caught my eye. (Well, three, actually but I’m only going to quote two):

‘”People always use the word ‘identify’. ‘Do you identify with these individuals?’ And I really don’t. I can’t talk about characters outside the frame of the fiction. I identify with the words on the page. I identify with the paragraphs.”‘

And then

‘I ask DeLillo how he came to write [White Noise], but his recollection is hazy. The rhythms and patterns appear to be all that remain. He says, “I can remember the main character’s name, which is Jack Gladney. And there was something in that name–JA for Jack and GLA for Gladney–which felt important. I’ve done the same thing for other books. I’m always very conscious of the patterns of letters in a name. Ross Lockhart isn’t a great example, but its RO and then LO. So it’s a thing that I do. A character takes shape because of that confluence of letters.’

The comments resonate with a moment in DeLillo’s gruelling 9/11 novel Falling Man, when a (very minor) character learns that his name is his destiny:

‘Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An a for the u. Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the u, the rum, that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. That would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.’

The way that a character–or a type, a way of being in the world–unfurls from a single letter in a name here is rather magical, and it’s interesting that it’s the adman who should be most attuned to the power of names. DeLillo’s writing practices take us back to the root of the word ‘character’, which was being used to indicate brands, stamps, marks and letters for a good century before it was used to signify a person’s identity. (The OED currently gives the first citation in the latter sense to Ben Jonson, and the list of characters that preceded Every Man in his Humour in 1600). Of course, though the Guardian interviewer doesn’t mark it, it must matter that Don DeLillo has himself got the most wonderful little poem of a name, a tongue-twister incorporating a miniature Manhattan skyline, and the best brand that he could have hoped for.