Early on in reference 1, a book I have had for a while but which I am only now getting around to, I find the observation that sometimes titles are important, that without the title, the work of art in question is not comprehensible. Cooke gives as an example the short poem illustrated here, without the title. I completely failed the test, having no inkling that the writer of the poem was talking about an eagle until I popped the first line into Bing. So the question now is, to what extent is a title an important part, an integral part of a work of art? To what extent should a work of art need a title?
With my opening answer, that of much younger person, rather too sure of himself, or perhaps that of a member of the Britart crew, being that a work of art should be sufficient unto itself and should not need to be propped up by either title or commentary.
But being now not so young and more inclined to the ways of the civil service, we might consider this matter of titles under various headings:
- Subject: what sort of a work is being titled? Does medium or genre bear on whether or how a work should be titled?
- Form: some titles are just one or two words. Some are something more complicated. Sometimes one has both title and subtitle. Or even a title followed by a paragraph of explanation. Sometimes one has a first title then an alternative title. Sometimes titles are not words at all, rather bits of tune, as they are in some editions of Beethoven’s piano sonatas
- Function: what is the title for? What does it do for us, the consumers?
- History: how did the work come by its title. Was the title successful? Who used it? Did it change from time to time?
- Identification: the title is used in communication, so that we have can have a conversation about the work. As might be used as a label or a name on a file cover or on a computer record
- Description: the title tells the consumer something about the work
- Direction: the title tells the consumer something about how he or she should approach the work, consume the work
- Discrimination: the title helps the consumer discriminate one similar work, perhaps one of the many stories about Maigret, Biggles or Poirot, from another.
- Commemorative: the titles celebrates something, perhaps the person who paid for the work or the person who owned the work
- Advertisement: the title is intended to sell the work in question. Thinking again of Maigret, we might have ‘L’Amie de Madame Maigret’, a title which tells us that the book in question is one of the Maigret stories which we like and that, unusually, is something to do with Maigret’s wife, so we have not read it already.
In what follows I mostly use ‘title’ rather than ‘name’, two words which one might at first think were more or less synonyms. Then I thought that title might be derived in some way from the French ‘titre’, perhaps with links to ‘en-tête’, at the top of, at the head of. A thought not supported by inspection of the dictionaries which all talk of the Latin ‘titulus’, nothing to do with heads, a quite different word in Latin. But there is talk of at the top of, a sense which is not present with ‘name’. I leave aside titles like 'Marquis' and 'Earl'. I leave aside titles to property.
I then ask whether the title is part of the work so titled, or is it something aside? In the lingo of IT people, is it meta-data rather than data? Is it something on the catalogue card, or part of the thing itself? Is it in the properties of a file (right click in Windows) or is it in the file itself? A subject about which Wikipedia gets quite carried away (at reference 5) and a distinction which is clear enough in the case of computer systems, but like many apparently clean, binary distinctions, rather breaks down in the real world.
And then I wondered about consciousness. To what extent is one conscious of the title of a work when one is consuming it. To which the fairly clear-cut answer seems to be that one is not. The name is something that one uses for purposes other than consumption.
Case law
Starting with music, my understanding is that lots of pieces of music by famous composers, people like Haydn or Beethoven, acquired their titles from their publisher, the publisher who wanted to catch the eye of the paying public, this being the way that many composers made most of their money. While lots of songs are titled, in a straightforward way, by their first lines. Others are titled by their subject, for example Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’.
Lots of novels acquire their titles by negotiation between the author and his or her publisher, titles which usually point up something important in the novel in question. Or are intended, along with a suitable jacket design, to draw in the paying public, to draw the paying public into the bookshop where the novel is displayed. Publishers, no doubt, sometimes take a lot of trouble with such matters. Authors, no doubt, sometimes care and are sometimes in a position to argue with their publisher about it.
The titles of many novels tell us very little. For example, the title of the well known novel ‘Middlemarch’, while accurate enough once one has read it, gives little enough away in advance, even if we include the subtitle ‘a study of provincial life’, a subtitle which is dropped, as it happens, from my own copy, and the title of the first book, ‘Miss. Brooke’, does not give much more away. We buy such a novel on the strength of its advertisement or on the reputation of the author, rather than on its title.
Some novels have more informative titles, titles which might, inter alia, serve to avoid error. So if the novel is called ‘The Bounder’, I know to look out for a bounder, I know how to read the leading man. Or perhaps we have Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’, a novel published, as it happens, in serial form at almost the same time as Middlemarch was published in the same way. With a title of this sort not being used in the case that part of the point of the novel was that it is not always easy to sort the wheat from the chaff, that it is not always obvious from the outset that this or that character is a bounder, in which case one would not want to give the game away in the title, or to offer the reader ready-made judgements, any more than one want to give away the crucial twist in a thriller.
Famous old master paintings in art galleries usually have titles on their tickets, titles which usually say something about the subject matter, perhaps ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, subject matter which may or may not have much bearing on why we value the work. While lots of new master paintings have titles which do not say anything much at all, perhaps ‘Abstract No.17 – August 1963’, perhaps, a cynic might say, properly reflecting the lack of content in the work concerned. Then there are the small number of galleries remove the tickets on the grounds that the presence of the ticket pollutes the pure consumption of the painting.
Titles also function as labels, an aid to communication. So people in the know can talk knowingly about the Emperor or the Serioso without having to bother with opus numbers or any other kind of number. Or talk about paintings without having to bother with even more tiresome catalogue or accession numbers. I associate to Proust and Simenon writing about the nicknames that top people give to each other, names which are only known to those in, or at least near, the magic circle. So in Proust, the super-snob, M. de Charlus, is known to some as ‘Mémé’. Agatha does it a bit too, with, for example, ‘Bundle’ being the nickname of Lady Brent in ‘The Secret of Chimneys’.
Another angle, in the case that the work of art is about something in particular, is the identification of that something, the subject of the work. So if I see a picture that I like of a building, I know which building it is. I can look the building up in Pevsner and perhaps go and take a look at it for real. One might want to write an essay on the relation of the picture to the real thing. Or, if I were Henry VIII, I might like the picture that I had seen of an eligible young lady and send my ambassador off to check her out.
Associating once again to IT, to computer systems, there used to be a principle which said that the identifiers attached to the records in files or databases, things like telephone numbers, email addresses, VAT numbers and tax reference numbers, should not contain information, they should just identify. Something which it is well to bear in mind when building an IT system but to which one often fails to adhere in detail. So car registration marks often contain information about date and place of registration. National insurance numbers contain a limited amount of information about the date and place of issue. While the first names of people often contain a limited amount of information about their date of birth.
Proper names are used to identify particular things, often but not always people, animals, jewels or places. Leaving aside the topographical or occupational roots of many family names, proper names do not usually include any descriptive information, although the name of a famous or infamous person may associate to some quality of that person, such as avarice, beauty or cruelty, which association might qualify our consumption of a portrait. And then, in some cultures, the names given to new-borns might express hopes as to the nature of the person to come, perhaps Prudence or Charity. Proper names may also have a commemorative function: buildings and parts of buildings are often given the name of the person who provided the money to build them, for example the Blavatnik Extension at the Tate or the Jerwood Hall at St. Luke’s. And in the past, buildings were often given the name of the person who owned them. For example, the foreign mercenary Falkes, a fixer for King John, who once owned a hall in what is now Vauxhall. Or Buckingham Palace, once the London home of the Dukes of Buckingham. Ditto Somerset House, one of the once many grand houses built along the river between Westminster and the City. Or less often the person who built them, for example the Wren Library at Cambridge.
One might digress even further into the related field of the titles of shops, goods and brands. Here however, my interest is in descriptive titles of works of art, in titles the purpose of which is to inform, to facilitate the consumption of the work in question.
Conclusions
I started out with the idea that there ought to be a principle, with a strong candidate being the principle that a good work of art should not need a title, that it should be sufficient unto itself. A principle which is probably related to my belief when young that one should go to the work itself, not to some commentary or criticism; that one should stick to the primary sources.
But having wandered around the topic today, I now come to the view that there is no principle. If someone gives a work of art a title, be that someone the originator, the publisher, the advertiser, the owner or some other consumer, and that title sticks, so be it. If the title serves some honest purpose, fine. It does not matter what that honest purpose is and there is no need for principles. Where by ‘honest’ I mean a title which is not intended to misinform, mislead or deceive – not that, in the case of a work of art, I can see much point in such deception, apart from jokes at the expense of the consumer. Jokes, perhaps, of the emperor’s new clothes variety, a gentleman last mentioned at the beginning of the month, at reference 4.
Plus there is a suspicion that the honest purpose is often discrimination rather than description. The title is mainly there to help us discriminate between the various works of some particular artist. It is usually enough to know the name of the artist, usually just the surname rather than the full name, and the title of the work.
And as far as meta-data is concerned, there is a suspicion that titles are usually meta-data rather than data, something stuck on to the work, rather than something integral to the work, with the eagle poem being something of an exception, an exception from which I associate to riddles. You read the poem and your job is to guess the title. Is it like cross-word puzzles, the knack for which some people have, or have acquired, and some people do not? Which is perhaps a good place to stop.
References
Reference 1: The Language of Music - Deryck Cooke - 1959 – OUP.
Reference 2: http://www.englishverse.com/poems/the_eagle.
Reference 3: Middlemarch - George Eliot - 1971/2.
Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/bricks.html.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata.
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