How Did Homer Simpson Get His Name?

Back in that patch when my personal reading was still dominated by purveyors of action-adventure like Clive Cussler Nathanael West was one of the first Literary writers I read on my own time, without recommendation by an instructor or anyone else I knew personally. I ended up reading three of his books--the reimagining of Voltaire's Candide to a Depression-era America on the verge of going fascist, A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, and probably the most highly regarded of them, The Day of the Locust (the canonical stature of which is, of course, confirmed by its having the #73 spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels published in English during the twentieth century).

To be honest I enjoyed A Cool Million more than the others--precisely because of their touches of Modernist storytelling. Still, if Day of the Locust was often frustrating, it was intriguing enough that bits of it remain with me.

One of the sillier ways in which this was the case was the fact of a major character in the novel being named Homer Simpson, which has ever since had me (and apparently, a great many others) wondering if there was not some intriguing connection between the character and the Homer Simpson everybody knows.

Of course, try hard enough and you can probably find points of comparison in any two objects. Comparing the Homer of the book to the Homer of the show there was, for instance, his comical lapse into extreme verbal incoherence while under very severe stress. (As the narrator explains when the words are pouring out of Homer "A great deal of it was gibberish," and what wasn't gibberish "wasn't jumbled so much as it was timeless. The words . . . behind each other instead of after," while "several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph.") There was also the way Homer lost his temper in the scene that produces the riot that caps the tale.

Still, character, situation, story--they are all very, very different, and that was as far as I got. However, a few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine in which he explained that in high school he had read the book and, while writing "a novel about a character named Bart Simpson," the choice of name had appealed to him as appropriate to his own story because "Simpson" had "simp," a shortening of "simpleton," in it, and his father's name was Homer.

As it happens Matt Groening's mother is Margaret Wiggum, while Matt also has two sisters who go by Lisa and Maggie.

I imagine that many accustomed to thinking of works of fiction as mosaics of abstruse allusions of the kind professors of literature make careers out of explaining (or at least, pretending to explain) expected something more profound, or at least more obscure, than that. Alas, whatever literary critics may imagine, or pretend to imagine, in real life artists' choices are often just that simple--as indeed they have to be, if artists are ever to get anything done. Not everything needs to be a "symbol"--or can be.