a mistress may presumably have an unlimited number

When I saw that the woman in Eliza Haywood’s 1726 novella The City Jilt; or, the Alderman Turn’d Beau was named Glicera I thought back to the article I had seen earlier that day in the online version of the New York Times about a five-hour theatrical adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2066, 2004. The author of the article had said that Bolaño’s book was “wildly digressive,” meaning praiseishly that the dead Chilean had done a startling, impressive, and difficult job, but I could not recall a single digression in 2066 that attracted my attention more than the one that had been created for me by Haywood when she wrote the word, “Glicera.” It was a mysterious black hole for me in the story; I could not grasp it as a name. Why Glicera -- had anybody ever been called actually Glicera? -- then what relevance did it have to the motto of the story, since Haywood is also the creator of personages with pointed names like Betsy Thoughtless (in A History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1751) and Bellacour (a lover in The Double Marriage; or, the Fatal Release, 1726, a book that ends like Hamlet with everyone dead except one latecomer surveying the corpses), and then what about the fact that the word “Glicera” wants me to think that the character is wearing the same green grey dress all the time, and I can’t picture her in another dress: she always has to wear that one? And she is always in the same room with a bare wall behind her, textured like stone but without the joins between blocks: it looks as if stone has been slabbed somehow on the walls, like thick liquid concrete, and yet it is brown, not grey. There are shadows. Such a wall has not been described in the Jilt anywhere but I have made it. Potentially Glicera is a name which will not answer itself or be answered by the story, and it is a suspended infinite digression that I could kill off, I said to myself, if I thought about it for more than two seconds – then I won’t do it I said – I do not want to answer by thinking of explanations for it, or words in other languages that might resemble it, or by thinking of figures in antiquity who were named Glicera, and if I have ever known any then I will blank them out of my memory so that I can retain my own endless, bottomless Glicera, and not replace her with the one who wrote about love to the dramatist Menander in the years BC, and “Tibullus’ Glycera has long occasioned needless confusion and speculation [… The word] has no apparent symbolic force (although having some poems might help us decide that), and is in all likelihood a pet-name, of which a mistress may presumably have an unlimited number),” said David F. Bright in Haec Mihi Fingebam: Tibullus in His World, 1997. Glycera, Glicera, was a nickname for courtesans, meaning Sweetness, or something like that --