One of my favorite Biblical stories seldom gets ranked among others’ top ten lists. Maybe only someone who aspires to use words professionally could so like Genesis 2, verses 19-20 (Revised Standard Version):
So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field…
I’ve always been charmed by this moment in the creation story, which feels almost like the birth of language. (If you can’t name something, you can’t really talk about it.) And I’ve always been a little jealous of Adam for his having that opportunity, always liked to picture myself in his shoes, or in his feet I guess. It would go something like this, I imagine:
God: Okay, for starters let’s try these little things.
JES: Hmm… Wow. You know what they remind me of? You know how when You’re way up in an airplane—
God: I haven’t created airplanes yet.
JES: Okay, fine, just bear with me. Say You’re sitting up there on a cloud and You look down and You see all the people—
God: Nonono, you don’t understand, you’re the first—
JES: Jeez, give it a rest wouldja? And I don’t mean on the seventh day either. I know how this goes, all right? SO anyway You’re on a cloud and You look down and there are all these opposable-thumbed, tool-wielding bipeds swarming around down there. You know what they look like?
God: They look like a—
JES: Stop! I’m doing this, all right? But You’re absolutely correct. They look like ants. So that’s what I’m gonna call these little six-legged critters eating my damn cheese and crackers here on the picnic blanket with us.
God: I guess that makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that Myself?
Etc.
The point is, writers like to invent new ways of referring to things: persons, places, objects. Except, er, well, when it comes to their own works.
Of course no one on the outside, once the thing is published, ever quite grasps the misery which likely lies beneath the title’s surface and (in its creator’s eyes) probably still dogs its passage into literary history.
Some titles are pretty obvious, unadorned — like a one or two-word conclusion to a sentence beginning, This is a story about… Think Treasure Island, or Slaughterhouse-Five, or any of the Harry Potter titles.
But I don’t care how obvious they are in retrospect: I bet their authors turned the titles over and over in their heads, lost sleep over them, explored Wikiquote and Shakespeare and, yes, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita (and possibly “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” to boot). And eventually they just threw up their hands and said the hell with it, “what it’s about” is good enough. (I especially imagine something like that going on in Stephen King’s mind when he came up with It.)
For other titles, the authors sail off into (sometimes high-flown) metaphor, often quoting their own words (even if their own words are borrowed). Catcher in the Rye isn’t really about a catcher, and it isn’t really about a field of rye. Likewise Water for Elephants. As for Gravity’s Rainbow: huh?
The point is that authors know how important titles are, not just for marketing purposes but for the effect(s) the work will eventually have on readers. The title’s the first thing a reader knows about a book or story or poem, after all; it sets up expectations — and possibly disappointments, ultimately — which will stay with the reader long after the rest of the work’s exact words have evaporated. If I blow the title, the author thinks, I may as well not even present the rest of it for publication. (S/He is probably right.)
I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in your head. Those somethings may or may not in fact apply to my story, a fact which doesn’t especially bother me one way or another.
But you, o Running After My Hat reader, are not in the same class as later readers. And it does bother me that those people might come to the tale with all sorts of extraneous baggage in their heads, before they read the first word beyond the title. It bothers me a lot. That word grail, after all, has acquired tons of associations over the centuries. It’s unmistakable. It means, really, only one thing. And I don’t want the reader to come to my book pre-clobbered, so to speak, by all that history. I want them to leave the book, post-clobbered as it were, by the association (perhaps unconscious) with every other story attached to that word.
So no, it’s not going to be Grail in the long run. I don’t know what it’s going to be.
In the meantime, I’ve written one story whose title I love unabashedly, for a whole host of reasons. I’m not going to post the whole thing here at the site, and I don’t expect you to like (let alone love) the title, and Lord knows I’m not going to detail those reasons. But I’ll give you a taste of it — just enough to show where the title comes from, and to show the story’s… well, its direction I guess.
froog says
There’s a fascinating novel called The Very Model Of A Man by the British academic, Howard Jacobson, which deals with that part of the Genesis story. It’s an autobiography of Cain, which alternates chapters from his early life immediately post-Eden with his old age in Babel. I found the latter much less interesting, and the thing, for me, rather runs out of steam after a while. But the first few chapters about Cain’s childhood are stunning – and there’s a lot about that calling-the-world-into-being through naming things (much of this gets devolved on to young Cain, because Adam isn’t very good at it).
Opening sentences can be as much of a trial as titles. Of course, you know Gary Larson’s image of Melville trying to get started on Moby Dick: the wastepaper basket under the writing desk overflowing with scrunched-up sheets of paper; the author tries once again – “Call me…. Bob.”; darn it, scrunch.
Kate Lord Brown says
the Waffle Hut of Loveless? Have to go there. You know how I feel about titles John … have a feeling it is still going to be changed again.
froog says
The ReCaptcha has been eloquent even if I have not.
John says
froog: Had never heard of Jacobson’s book but I often like novels which play around with familiar storylines like that. Your review of it was echoed by the critics cited on Amazon, e.g. Publisher’s Weekly, which said:
Yikes.
(To be sure, the “non-professional critics” — one at Amazon.com, one at Amazon.co.uk — are much kinder, giving it 5 and 4.5 stars out of 5, respectively.)
I’d forgotten that Far Side cartoon. It was the only occasion, I think, on which I felt anything like empathy with Herman Melville.
Kate: With all the advances in technology these days, you’d think someone would come up with a sort of Rubik’s Cube to be inserted at the top of a published book, on each face of each sub-cube a different “significant” word — letting the reader pick his own damned title and sparing us poor writers. :)