Beginning with the title

Tuesday 16 April 2013
Edited Friday 23 August 2013

'The title always comes first, to me and to the reader. I’ve written many stories and articles just by doggedly following the title' – Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Infante strains to devise one of his characteristic, diabolically paronomastic titles.

If there were such things as patron writers like there are saints, Guillermo Cabrera Infante would be the patron of titles. In a single interview in edition 75 of the fantastic 'Art of Fiction' series in The Paris Review, for example, the word comes up some 21 times. In fact, he seems to have been a little obsessed with them, making him a fitting epigraph for this post.

I can't say I'm as devoted as old Saint Guillermo to the art of the title, but I do of course appreciate its importance, and I do admire a good one. At some point I'll post the premise of 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe' here for those who don't know but, before I do, I'm interested in people's opinions of the title. 

To be honest, it's not the kind I would usually go for; my favourites tend to be interesting sentence fragments. In my own work they're usually resurrected little darlings lifted from within the body of the text during the drafting process from a place where I've taken it one step too far, overstated something, as with 'These dying hours'. That, or a fragment from a relevant quote like 'All these, all our meagre losses' from Lina Sagaral Reyes' poem 'The Story I Would Have Told You Had I Met You Yesterday', or 'Some have entertained angels' from Hebrews 13:2, 'Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares'. (And then, of course, there are the times you happen to be writing an article defaming a public figure named Bede, which also happens to be the name of a seventh/eighth-century monk whose title, 'the Venerable Bede' is just begging to be inverted.)

Infante might be the most enthusiastic titler but, when it comes to the fragment title, Hemingway is the undisputed champion. All his titles are amazing, but especially stellar exemplars include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, 'Hills Like White Elephants' and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place'. I love the way these titles suggest belonging to something larger, or contain within them a verb or the suggestion of a verb, or just use any other form than the standard, 'The XYZ'.

        

When Hemingway's titles do follow the more conventional format, they're always redeemed by the interesting words contained therein, often poetic, curious combinations, slightly discordant in their adjacency, fabular in their construction: The Old Man and the Sea; 'The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio'; 'The Faithful Bull' – what do these words have to do with one another? How do they come together? Good titles, I think, provoke such questions, and chime euphonically in the ear and the mind. Other examples include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Merlinda Bobis's The Solemn Lantern Maker, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. There's something magical in all of them.

  

Dull offenders of this kind include Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind (though perhaps this last sounded less clichéd in the original Spanish).

  

And I don't think the curiosity-piquing 'magic' of these titles when they work can be replaced with references to made-up peoples and place names that nobody knows or cares about until they read your books. David Eddings' Malloreon springs to mind, featuring such obscure, repetitive, banal titles as Demon Lord of Karanda, Sorceress of Darshiva, Seeress of Kell or, rather, Magical Person of Bad Made-up City Name 1, 2 and 3.

  

Goodreads has a list of the 100 best book titles as voted by users, and I think they largely get it right (with the notable exception of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, which I cannot abide). The list is topped by Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, also including such favourites as Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at number 49 and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night A Traveler at 84. I was surprised the omission of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, though. And there are also very few or no one-word titles, which suits me. I'm generally not a fan, excepting perhaps JM Coetzee's Disgrace and AS Byatt's Possession. I'm really interested in this at the moment, so I'd love to hear some of your favourite book titles and the rationales behind them.

I recently had the chance to ask two authors about their titles when I attended a panel for the recently published novels The Railwayman's Wife by Ashley Hay and Song in the Dark by my old Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Wollongong, Dr Christine Howe. The Railwayman's Wife is very romantic, and Song in the Dark is equally evocative, so I asked about the significance behind them. I wondered especially why, in a book in which the author professed to have created a strong female character, she chose to situate that character's identity in her husband in the title, half suspecting the answer to be 'publishers'. And it was. Apparently it was originally to be titled after a line from a Triffids song, but the publishers objected and suggested The Railwayman's Wife. Luckily Hay didn't feel this was a betrayal of the heroine's character and accepted the suggestion. The origin of Chrissy's title was more organic. She said she actually woke up in the middle of the night and knew it was the one.

After much Facebook-friend consultation and confabulation with her publishers, another of my old lecturers, Dr Shady Cosgrove, has finally announced the title of her latest work: 'What the Ground Can't Hold', which I think sounds like an instant classic, very Hemingwayesque, and vastly superior to the other more pedestrian contenders, 'The Missing' or 'The Disappeared'.

But 'What the Ground Can't Hold' started out under a different name, if I remember correctly: 'The Necessary Tango'. In fact, Shady told us that title was the original kernel from which the rest of the novel grew. And yet I think it's skipped up a step from a great example of the enticing, provocative 'The XYZ' title, to an even better 'fragment' title.

Perhaps the same is in store for me. Like Shady's and Infante's, my novella began with the title, or the notion of a title. I was watching a trailer one day in 2007, unaware of the film's title and trying to guess what it would be, when I came up with 'The [Adjective] Death of Harold Crick'. Its actual name was Stranger than Fiction, but the title I had invented stayed with me. Or rather, the format 'The [Adjective] [Noun] of [Proper Noun]'. This was around the time I was trying to decide on an idea for my English Extension 2 major work, so I spent a little time theorising it before ultimately abandoning it in favour of a (very poor) fictionalisation of the 1989 Tiananmen Square riots. I did so by trying to fill the gaps in the title, then imagining what such a story would be about. First I replaced 'Harold Crick' with a similarly quirky name, 'Norman Crabbe' ('Irving' didn't come until first year when I reimagined and wrote the story for my first Creative Writing assessment), but I always retained the word 'Death'. Then I played around with the adjective, which I found the most stimulating part of the exercise. I knew I wanted an 'in-' or 'un-' word, and tried 'inconsiderate', 'inoffensive', 'unintrusive', 'unconventional', 'unexpected', 'unfortunate' and 'indisputable' before coming to 'innocuous', dreaming up the different stories each adjective connoted.

So the title 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe' has been with me since at least the first half of 2008, with predecessors a year older. It has lived in a couple of radically different incarnations since then, first as a short story for Merlinda in first year, then as a novel outline and first chapter for Shady and Jill Jones in second year, but the name has stuck. Guillermo would be proud. Perhaps now that I am finally working on the novella in earnest, though, it will outgrow it. Maybe there's a better name, and I shouldn't 'doggedly follow the title', I don't know. Would you pick up a book called 'The Innocuous Death of Irving Crabbe'? What do you think of it? Good? Bad? Memorable? Forgettable? Devastatingly bromidic? Inexplicably erotic? What does it put you in mind of? What kind of story does it conjure? I'd really appreciate any feedback.

As an aside, when attempting to think of a title for this post, the utterly obvious 'what's in a name?' reference came to mind. Not that I ended up with something much better. But here's a selection of posts and articles that went down that road, heedless of those millions who had gone before them:

• 'Book Titles: What's in a Name?'
• 'Constructing a Title for a Book: What's in a Name?'
• 'What's in a Name?'
• '"What's in a Name": Did I Screw Up the Title of My Book?'
• and my favourite, another 'What's in a Name?', which is ironically concerned with not wanting to use 'a combination of words that has been used before for a book title'.

Thanks for reading.

LPL

References*

Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Alfred Mac Adam's interview 'Guillermo Cabrera Infante, The Art of Fiction No. 75' in the Spring 1983 issue of The Paris Review, number 87, reproduced on The Paris Review website.

Verse 2, chapter 13 of the Epistle to the Hebrews of the New Testament of the King James 'Authorised Version', Pure Cambridge Edition of the Holy Bible, as reproduced by The Official King James Bible Online website.

*Click on images to be directed to original location.

A repudiation of spelling nazism

Tuesday 27 December 2011

There was a time when I probably would've proudly identified as a spelling nazi. I think I first heard the term some time in high school, when you're eager to define yourself and will seize upon any idiosyncratic characteristic that vaguely applies to you and claim it as your own. But when I got to uni, I started seeing other people who called themselves 'spelling nazis', and it wasn't pretty when viewed from the outside, with matured eyes. It was just so clearly about attention. 'Look at me!' they seemed to be saying. 'Aren't I just so quirky? Aren't I so individual? Aren't I so smart? Aren't I just so ob-sessed with all things literary?'

It didn't help that most of these self-proclaimed spelling nazis weren't actually so great with spelling and grammar. Most of them were studying English Literatures or Creative Writing, not English Language and Linguistics.* (Evidently) they hadn't done any outside reading on language. They didn't have any real understanding of grammatical concepts or language philosophy; they just had that innate, approximate proficiency with spelling and grammar that is pretty much the best result that can be achieved by the implicit system of teaching grammar I mentioned in the last post.

*Obviously not to denigrate the worthy disciplines of English Lit or Creative Writing, in which I myself am undertaking studies. It's just that in those two, it would be quite easy to carry on at the same level of grammatical capability as at high school, without any real understanding (until Editing, perhaps, in Creative Writing). While doing English Lit, Creative Writing and Linguistics constitutes probably the most comprehensive study of the English language available at undergraduate level, it's really Linguistics that I credit with forcing me to think about language enough to move beyond the level of the 'spelling nazi'.

Yeah, this is pretty much how it is.

And then that obligatory, awkward class in first year came around, where your tutor hands back the first assessment of your degree and makes a big speech about how many people in the class didn't reference correctly and how many spelling and grammar issues there were. And there would be the nazi, sucking up to the tutor and declaring how they can't stand when they see spelling mistakes, and they think it's such a shame that no one can spell any more. And they'd always finish with a faux-self-conscious laugh and say, 'But then I'm a total spelling nazi, so maybe that's just me.'

To me, then, spelling and grammar nazis are usually just over-compensating. As perhaps is connoted by the name, they're using their often uninformed proficiency with grammar to try to gain power over others. Very often when any contentious grammatical issue arises in class, often at their own instigation, their formerly self-extolled body of knowledge is shown to be built on false precepts. They frequently have an outdated propensity towards prescriptive, rather than descriptive, grammar. They learn what they think are the 'rules' of grammar, largely propagated by misinformed primary school teachers, and apply them unquestioningly, not knowing that many of these rules are wrong. And so they go on through life, arrogantly insisting, for example, the legitimately anglicised plural octopuses become octopi, decrying the ending of sentences with prepositions, and denouncing the starting of sentences with and. Octopus has Greek roots, not Latin and, as such, if we insist on being pedantic, should technically be realised in its plural form as octopodes. The ridiculously popular notion that sentences should not end in prepositions, as Bill Bryson points out in his thoroughly entertaining and insightful book Mother Tongue (which I highly recommend as a humbling device for any spelling nazi clinging obstinately to prescriptivism*) seems to be founded merely on the fact that the word contains the prefix pre-. And as for not starting sentences with and, what possible justification could there be for the imposition of such a rule other than the self-realising argument that 'it's bad grammar'?

*I have a copy if you know me and want to borrow it.

The long-term popularity of these false (or rather, arbitrary and unnecessary) rules has gone some way to giving them the weight of truth, but even this hiccough in linguistic history has enriched language. We now have the option to adhere to these rules if we want to sound formal in, for example, an academic context, but we can remain unconstrained by them in more casual or expressive discourses like everyday speech or fiction. To insist that sentences not end in prepositions in any other context, as Susan May does, is completely absurd, and I defy any prescriptivist to explain to me why it isn't without saying, 'It's just bad writing.' 

Susan May's post actually defeats its own argument. Not only does she state that '[n]obody says, unless you are English gentry perhaps, 'From where is that noise coming?'', but she also keeps ending sentences in prepositions, sentences that sound perfectly natural, and then having to re-word or rearrange them so as to avoid doing so. But what's wrong with ending a sentence with what I'm talking about? Nothing! May seems to think that any sentence ending in a preposition is automatically invalid and sloppy, and needs to be changed, but that this is okay because the alternative is always less clunky. I have less faith. Take, for example, Churchill's famous debunking of the preposition rule (which I actually think is misattributed to him, but nevertheless): 'This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.' In that case, and in many others, it would be much smoother to end the sentence in a preposition, i.e.: 'This is the type of English I will not put up with.' May might contend that another verb phrase besides 'put up' should have been used, but I believe it's silly to disqualify certain phrasings from writing arbitrarily. Nazi discrimination is what it is.

In the old days, grammar and linguistics weren't about observing how language works, but about making up rules for how it should work, about glorifying Latin as an ancient, 'pure' language, and about ensuring any words inherited or imported from other languages continued to be used in the way their original languages used them so that, for example, they retained their original plural forms instead of gaining English ones. They were about Proper Sentences and prer NUN sea ayshun, to borrow from Arundhati Roy. In other words, they were prescriptive. Luckily for us, we've moved away from all that and accepted that language is a fluid entity, and this fluidity is to be celebrated, not castigated. It's what has led English and, indeed, language on the whole to flourish.

'Of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist, lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pull from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a spluttering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy. The hulk of a charred Panzer. The underside of a granite boulder. The first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterrenean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.'

With their limited understanding of language, though, spelling and grammar nazis tend to default to prescriptivism – the result of caring about language, but not knowing much about it. Nazis and prescriptivists alike, then, refuse to accept or are ignorant of the fluidity of language and seek to pin it down. They regard any change or evolution within language with hostility, as an 'attack', or as 'erosion' or 'perversion'. If their attempts to censor new developments and neologisms in language were always successful, we would be deprived of some of our richest and most useful expressions. Fortunately, they rarely succeed, and the people behind them tend to become history's fools when the grammatical concepts they denounce take hold and become fundamental parts of common vernacular.

Sometimes, of course, language is 'under assault'. Sometimes it's used in a way that will not aid its development, a way that is redundant or banal or that obfuscates meaning. Pontification on language should be reserved for these instances, not organic occurrences which may sound different or silly, but which ultimately enrich language and expression. Those who rail against developments and changes in language should be regarded with automatic suspicion, and their arguments need to be examined. Is the change actually occurring and, if so, is it actually a bad thing, or just a different thing?  Sometimes, however, even changes for the worse end up becoming standardised, and we just need to accept this.

Are you picking up on any resemblances here? Outdated doctrines? Unquestioning belief in unfounded rules? Unreasonable opposition to change? Yep, that's right. Prescriptivist spelling nazis are the linguistic equivalent of sociopolitical conservatives, except with much, much less ground to stand on. Is it any wonder I'm scrambling to dissociate myself from them? 

The prescriptivist–conservative parallel is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the dynamic between French literary legend Marcel Proust and his contemporary Louis Ganderax, as explored by philosopher Alain de Botton. 'For Ganderax', says de Botton, 

     the priority of good writing was to follow precedent, to follow

     examples of the most distinguished authors in history, while

     bad writing began with the arrogant belief that one could avoid

     paying homage to great minds and write to one's own fancy. It

     was fitting that Ganderax had elsewhere awarded himself the 

     title of "defender of the French Language." The language needed

     to be defended against the assaults of decadents who refused to

     follow the rules of expression dictated by tradition, leading 

     Ganderax to complain publicly if he spotted a past participle in

     the wrong place or a word falsely applied in a published text. (93)

Sound familiar? Ganderax is a grammar nazi! What's scary is that you could easily replace a couple of words there and he would sound just like an American Republican politician.

Conversely, Proust had a much more sensible view of language:

     The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame

     Straus! ... This man who is so sceptical has grammatical

     certainties. Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even

     grammatical ones ... [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our

     choice, our taste, our certainty, our desire and our weakness can

     be beautiful. (94)

It's troubling that France's attitude to its beautiful language seems currently to be rather more Ganderaxian (?) than Proustian, with the notorious Académie française constantly making its restrictions on the way the language can be used. Perhaps that's only what's needed to protect against the culturally imperialistic incursions of the anglosphere, but isn't the very idea of 'protecting' a language from influences pointless and counter-productive? An interplay of languages can be beneficial. Something like 30% of English words, in fact, came from French, remnants of a time when England was ruled by francophones. Imagining where English would be now, without that influence, is impossible; it has benefited immeasurably. Now the tables have turned and English is the dominant tongue seeking, if you will, to pay off its loan, but French doesn't want it. It's isolating itself from an exchange that could well promote growth. Who knows what effect this stifling will have on French? If French became as beautiful as it is via a process of change, what will ossification do to it? Won't it only make English a more attractive option, and French increasingly out-of-touch and incapable of keeping up with demand?

When we looked at de Botton's essay in WRIT316: Advanced Editing for Practising Writers, my lecturer Dr Chrissy Howe, knowing how zealous an editor I was, expected me to come down on the side of Ganderax, to take issue with Proust's wishy-washy approach to language. When she said so, I launched off on a massive tirade basically comprised of everything I've said so far. Just because you love language doesn't mean you have to be a grammar nazi.

The fight with prescriptivism takes place on a million battlefields every day. The latest instance I've come across was in the debate between YouTube atheist Cristina Rad, or 'ZOMGitsCriss' (who appeared in the episode of Q&A Til and I went to see) and another atheist named Kate Fahr going by the name of 'BionicDance'.

I think this is really at the heart of what I find so frustrating about spelling nazi prescriptivism. There's nothing more irritating (and cringe-inducing) than watching someone belittle someone else for a reason that you know is totally unjustified. Fahr's video response to Rad, declaratively titled 'You ARE TOO an Agnostic Atheist' was smug and patronising, delivered in an indescribably (but nevertheless infuriatingly) condescending tone. It opened with a melodramatic sigh and the statement, 'Folks, when someone's wrong, they're wrong, and they should be called out on it.' Too right. She then went on to use the phrase you see and kiddo to top and tail every other sentence, and kept on saying, 'I don't know what else to say to you', like an eccentric, longwinded aunt lecturing her niece or something. On top of all of that, she kept making these weird faces at the end of every point, as if to say, 'Oops, you were wrong – how awkward for you.'

Can't you just hear your mum saying this to you?: 'If you want to actually discuss these issues rationally and reasonably, like an adult, well, you're going to have to accept the fact that some of the things you don't like apply to you.'

The issue of agnosticism vs atheism is a different one which I hope to treat in the future, but for now, Fahr's criticisms of Rad were totally wrong, founded as they were in prescriptivism. Rad asserted that she is not an agnostic, but an atheist. Fahr responded, 'But you see the truth is, that is what you are. You just don't realise it because your definitions are wrong.' I almost can't even imagine a more typically prescriptivist argument. Fahr makes an appeal to what she calls the 'correct, etymological definitions' of the words to prove her point, interrogating what those words' morphemes (a- gnos -tic and a- the -ist) mean in their root language. Her claim is that the former means 'without knowledge' and the latter means 'without belief'. As Rad rightly retorts, though, these etymological definitions actually have little to do with the words' actual meanings today, as is the case with most words due to the process I call semantic decay. Fahr keeps on talking about words being 'etymologically incorrect' and 'technical, etymologically correct definitions'; she wants to prescribe how words should be used according to their etymology, but Rad knows that 'the value of words is given by how people use them'.

At the end of the day, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as Dr Shady Cosgrove taught me, are all about clarity. It only takes a little extrapolation to get from clarity to expression, expression to communication, communication to connection, and connection to empathy. Prescriptivists and spelling nazis, conversely, are about stasis and homogeneity: expressing yourself in a rigid, unchanging, 'correct' manner which then stymies diversity of communication, and thereby affects connection and empathy – just one more reason I feel the need to discredit it. Although it can be difficult, we need to learn not to regard change with automatic revulsion, but to interrogate each new development based on its own merits, not only in language, but in life.

That's all for now, but check the comments below for my model of a spelling nazi's response to this post.

References 

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television episode, 'A Philosophical Q and A' from its television program Q&A, Season 4, Episode 34.

Alain de Botton's book chapter, 'How to Express Your Emotions' (85–103), in his book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, published by Vintage International in 1998.

Bill Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, published by Penguin in 1991.

Kate Fahr (BionicDance)'s video 'You ARE TOO an Agnostic Atheist' from her YouTube Channel 'Rabid Lesbian Atheist of DOOM!'.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's sketch, 'Tricky Linguistics', in their television series, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Season 1, Episode 3.

Susan May's post 'How do you solve a problem like prepositions?' on her blog, An Adventure in Words: Ideas, Information and Inspiration, from Friday 7 October 2011.

Cristina Rad (ZOMGitsCriss)'s video 'I am not an Agnostic Atheist. Seriously' from her YouTube Channel 'k-rina'.

Cristina Rad (ZOMGitsCriss)'s video 'Belief. Knowledge. Agnosticism' from her YouTube Channel 'k-rina'.

Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, published by Harper Perennial in 2004.