More on the behemoth.
Dylan, as ever, says it best. —Meanwhile, Momus is trying to take the piss out of Potter and The Wire at the same time, and for such an intellective jackanapes falls distressingly flat. Announcing to the world that you think the point of a name like Severus Snape is “you don’t have to waste much time working out whether they’re good or evil” is to mistake the set-up for the punchline, and if you require nothing more than a weepy third party’s word to accept that Bubbles must be “the most sympathetic character ever to appear in a TV drama,” well, you’re pretty much doomed to repeat the downfall of Tom Townsend, who never read novels, just good criticism, thus to efficiently garner the thoughts of a critic as well as the novelist.
—Ah, well. Momus is not without his point re: “wholly human,” and at least it’s—wittier? more insightful?—better than Ron Charles’ weary screed about how it’s all not really, you know, reading.
You’ve misrepresented my argument somewhat; all I said about the name Severus Snape was that it was Dickensian, as is the division of characters into easily-identifiable heroes and villains.
The connection between the name and the nature is actually one you make in your linked piece: “Oh, he’s an asshole, all right. (You can hear it in his very name: Ssssseverus Sssssnape.)”
I’m afraid I’m too much of a Saussurian to think that the relationship between signifier and signified is anything but arbitrary!
Actually, I’m more concerned about poor Bubbles; there I am stressing your argument to a breaking point just to get in a Metropolitan dig. The line about Snape’s name was a direct quote, Saussurian or not; I called him a hissing asshole way back when merely as set-up for a punchline: the image of Snape standing up to his author, insisting he is bigger and better than that, despite her Dickensian bent.
But the point is not so much the sign or the signified but the dismissal: Snape, though he marches onto his kid’s lit stage thickly smeared with all the traditional signs of Evil (missing only a Snidely Whiplash mustache, really) turns out to be a much richer and more complex character than your tossed-off bon mot on the way to another point entirely would credit; as noble, in his way, as Bubbles is scheming and self-centered. —The thing to pay attention to isn’t the Dickens but the, um, Will Wright? The world-building, then, and the world-peopling, and how the audience is reading for that. There’s your 21st century.
Why, thank you.
I’ve only seen seasons one and two of the Wire yet. Don’t try to extinguish the flame of my love for Bubbles.