Free Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Page A

or Bom.
    I was brought up within the linguistic orthodoxy that the signifier is arbitrary, though for mysterious reasons the signifiers of one language won’t work as signifiers in another language ( Help me, I am dying of thirst! will get you nowhere in Mongolia). This is supposed to be doubly true of proper names: whether a street is named Marigold Street or Mandragora Street or indeed Fifty-fifth Street is supposed to make no difference (no practical difference).
    In the realm of poetry (in the widest sense) the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the signifier has never won much credence. In poetry the connotations of words—the accumulations of cultural significance around them—matter. “Mandragora,” via Keats, calls up bliss and death. “Fifty-fifth Street,” which at first sight seems anonymous, turns out to connote anonymity.
    Through a supreme act of poetic power, Franz Kafka has given a letter of the alphabet allusive (connotative) force. Roberto Calasso’s recent book is called simply K. We look at the jacket and we know what it will be about.
    I once called a character K (Michael K) as a stroke to reclaim the letter of the alphabet that Kafka had annexed, but didn’t have much success.
    Few of us write novels, but most of us, one way or another, end up producing offspring, and are then compelled by law to give our offspring names. There are parents who accept this duty with joy, and parents who accept it with misgiving. There are parents who feel free to make up a name as they choose, and parents constrained (by law, by custom, by anxiety) to choose a name from a list.
    Parents with misgivings try to give the child a neutral name, a name without connotations, a name that will not embarrass it in later life. Thus: Enid.
    But there is a catch. Name too many daughters Enid, and the name Enid comes to signify the kind of child whose parents reacted with misgiving to the duty of naming a child and thus gave their girl-child as anonymous a name as they could. So “Enid” becomes a kind of fatality awaiting the child as she grows up: diffidence, caution, reserve.
    Or someone far away, someone you have never heard of, disgraces your name. You grow up in the Midwest of the United States, and everything is fine until one day someone asks you, “Are you by any chance related to Adolf Hitler?” and you have to change your name by deed poll to Hilter or Hiller or Smith.
    Your name is your destiny. Oidipous, Swollen-foot. The only trouble is, your name speaks your destiny only in the way the Delphic Sibyl does: in the form of a riddle. Only as you lie on your deathbed do you realize what it meant to be “Tamerlane” or “John Smith” or “K.” A Borgesian revelation.
All the best,
John

August 29, 2009
    Dear John,
    First, allow me to pounce on Fifty-fifth Street—which “turns out to connote anonymity.” For the sake of argument, let us assume that the Fifty-fifth Street in question happens to be located in New York, the borough of Manhattan to be precise, east side or west side not indicated, but Midtown Manhattan for all that, and then anyone who lives in this city will be able to conjure up vivid mental pictures and a flood of personal memories about that street whose name is not a word but an anonymous number. You write “Fifty-fifth Street,” and I immediately think about the St. Regis Hotel and an erotic encounter I had there when I was young, about taking the French writer Edmond Jabès and his wife there for tea one afternoon and seeing Arthur Ashe enter the room in his tennis whites, about lunching there with Vanessa Redgrave and discussing the role she was about to play in my film, Lulu on the Bridge . The numbers tell stories, and behind the blank wall of their anonymity they are just as alive and evocative as the Elysian Fields of Paris. Mention to a New Yorker the following streets, and his mind will swarm with images: 4th Street (Greenwich Village), 14th Street (the cheapest stores in the