“My characters were not even people. They were athletes. I did not even give them names. Maloney, who was paying me to write, effectively named them.” The protagonist, a young and shiftless pornographer, is speaking here. Maloney will not name him. He is called I: only that. Let me. for convenience, dub him P.
The Pornographer executes a kind of literary rack fade, to speak in chic cinematic jargon. That is; camera or narrative will blur foreground action to stare with simplifying bright focus at smaller peripheral figures beyond. In this. John McGahern has made a perceptive comment on the game of fiction. Major characters— P; P’s moribund aunt; his uncle—are too intricate and organic for high-resolution camera technique: too intricate even for the most rudimentary descriptive adjective, a name. They change;’ they self-contradict: they do; they are. Cameo-part actors, however, will be summarized (and limited) by precise designation. Particularly the narrative-within-narrative dramatis personae: Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, who people P’s pornographic writing. It is so with X-rated film, another merely athletic exercise: character and feeling don’t count, a name or a football uniform number would do just fine.
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