Titles as Beginnings before Beginnings
2022; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534645.2023.2198746
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Joseph Conrad and Literature
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsIan BalfourIan Balfour is Professor Emeritus of English, York University. Author of The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002) and Northrop Frye (1988), he has edited collections of essays on Benjamin, Derrida, human rights, and Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (2004). He is completing a manuscript on The Moment of the Sublime. Email: ibalfour@yorku.caNotes1 This title, often reduced to Moby-Dick, is that of the New York edition of November 1851. It followed the publication in London of the first three books under the title The Whale. The final title is an example of the important subgenre of the ‘double-title’, where two items are separated by ‘or’, a tricky word, since it can articulate the identity of or the difference between the two sides of the ‘equation’.2 The distinction is made by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgement, Paragraph 14. The concept and actuality of parerga is probed by Jacques Derrida in “Parergon,” 15–148, especially 53f. John Ashbery titles a poem “Parergon,” such that the title could be precisely an example of what it names.3 Adorno, “Titles,” 4.4 Among the possible functions of the title are designation, enigma, teaser, spoiler, reduction to essence, announcement of genre, signal of affiliation (often by quotation), and beginning.5 The phase ‘or, Virtue Rewarded’ guides interpretation of the novel far more than a proper name could.6 The first words of the novel are Emma’s full, not-yet-married name: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich […]’, Austen, Emma, 3.7 The verse reads: ‘As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved’ (KJV).8 One learns a few pages into the novel the story of the violent act – enforced sex in exchange for an inscription on a tombstone – at the origin of the violent, belated, improper naming of the character with the first word on her tombstone.9 See the “Préface” to Athalie.10 Another possibility was Les Intermittences du Passé, which is not far from the title ultimately settled on.11 On Proust’s title and its relation to Apollinaire, see: https://mescouleursdutemps.blogspot.com/2011/06/la-colombe-poignardee-et-le-jet-deau.html, accessed January 27, 2023.12 In many editions of novels, the title appears on every second page or even every page, a constant reminder of the title.13 In this work – not a novel, as Tolstoy insisted – it is often clear what sections are devoted to war and what to peace. But sometimes the two interpenetrate. That is, the ‘and’ of the title has a different sense depending on where in the text one is. Both war and peace function in the two different registers of the grandly historical and the intimate-interpersonal.14 See Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 23.15 Césaire, The Collected Poetry, 288, 299.16 In the modern era, it’s hard to imagine a long poem without a title. Something like Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ could hardly have circulated the way it did without a title. Famously, the different working title for that poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a phrase from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.17 It’s one thing to give a Dickinson poem a title such as ‘Nature’ when the poem is partly ‘about’ nature or some natural things. It’s quite another to give away the answer to a riddle poem (a characteristic genre) in the title. Helen Vendler shows how perverse it is to do that for the poem her earliest editors gave the poem beginning ‘An alerted look about the hills –’ the title “April.” Vendler argues that one could only discern the poem to be specifically about April well into the 16-line poem. See Dickinson, 32; see also Mulvihill.18 “Todesfugue” is only 36 lines but long by Celan’s standards.19 Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, 689–690.20 Szondi, Celan Studies, 35.21 The poem appeared in the September 1995 number of Harper’s Magazine.22 Eliot’s unprepossessing title is perhaps outdone by Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks, though turning on a different sense of ‘clerical’.23 Ashbery, Collected Poems: 1956–1987, 676.24 For O’Hara’s reading of the poem, see https://allenginsberg.org/2018/02/sat-feb-3/, accessed July 23, 2022.25 See https://allenginsberg.org/2018/02/sat-feb-3/, accessed July 23, 2022.26 Moore, Complete Poems, 32.27 See Ferry, The Title to the Poem, 265.28 Pound, “Contemporania,” 6.29 No other title in this sequence of Pound’s poems displays such spacing between words.30 Ferry, The Title to the Poem. For ‘grammatical run-ons’ see 263ff.31 On the facts and intricacies of the title, see Collected Poems, 264ff.32 Internal to the journal, in the note preceding the poem, we read ‘Le titre était typographiquement composé ainsi : Un Coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard.’See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_coup_de_d%C3%A9s_jamais_n%27abolira_le_hasard#cite_note-1, accessed January 24, 2023.33 Hayes, American Sonnets, 11.
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