Joseph Mitchell and Names: A Postscript

Abstract

Recent installments of Joseph Mitchell’s uncompleted memoir, published in The New Yorker, strongly support and extend claims made by Michael Adams in “‘The Course of a Particular’: Names and Narrative in the Works of Joseph Mitchell,” published in Names 63 (2015). Mitchell explicitly describes lists of names as possessing a lyrical quality, so that such lists — lyrical inserts — would exhibit prosodic features out of tempo with the surrounding narrative. And the fragment of memoir titled “Days in the Branch” suggests — in the dissonance between topographical and genealogical views of experience and personal history — why names had the epistemological, ontological, and finally affective significance Adams claimed they had for Mitchell.