O p e n i n g s2 5watching horror movies are fictionally, not genuinely, afraid. This,
too, is another question.)
Since ‘Ishmael’ sounds more like a literary name than a real one,
this may be another signal that we are in the presence of fiction. On
the other hand, the name may sound fictional because it is not the
narrator’s real name but a pseudonym. Perhaps his real name is
Fred Worm, and he has chosen this more exotic title to compensate
for the fact. If he is not really called Ishmael, the reader might
wonder what his real name is. But if we are not given his real name,
then he does not have one. It is not as though Melville is concealing
it. You cannot conceal something that does not exist. All that exists
of Ishmael as a character is a set of black marks on a page. It would
not make sense, for example, to claim that he has a scar on his fore-
head but that the novel fails to mention it. If the novel does not
mention it, then it does not exist. A piece of fiction may tell us that
one of its characters is concealing his or her real name under a
pseudonym; but even if we are actually given the name, it is as
much part of the fiction as the pseudonym itself. Charles Dickens’s
last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, contains a character who is
clearly in disguise, and who may well be someone we have encoun-
tered elsewhere in the book. But since Dickens died before
completing the work, we shall never know what face the disguise is
concealing. It is true that there is someone beneath the disguise,
but not that it is anyone in particular.
* * *Let us turn again for a while to poetry, taking the beginning of six
well- known poems. The first is the opening line of John Keats’s ‘To
Autumn’: ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. What strikes
one about the line is the sheer opulence of its sound- texture. It is as