The art of the incipit has been commented on many times. Title art, less. “For a long time I have…”; “It started like that…”; “Today, mom died…”, everyone knows that, but managing to slip the word incipit into the incipit of a column where the title word appears in the title, admit that it’s subtle.
The idea was suggested to me by a friend who, a young retiree, wonders what he could do with this new life that is opening up before him. He has ideas, he’s had them all his life, he was paid for forty years by a boss to have ideas, and now he realizes that outside the company, without the production apparatus he disposed, his ideas are useless. A creator is not someone who has ideas, he is someone who realizes them. Ideas belonging to no one, only their applications, if only in the form of texts, confer on their authors fame, fortune and sometimes both.
We had lunch at Mazenay, rue de Montmorency, frequented by contemporary artists and their gallery owners. I don’t know how, in the midst of this brouhaha, we had come to discuss the question of book titles, wondering about the sometimes exaggerated importance given to them. I confided to him that I had been obsessed with the title of my latest novel, throughout its writing, which lasted several years.
To what extent does a title influence the content of the novel being developed? Appearing prematurely from the pen of the writer, can an original, sensational title exhaust its comic potential by dint of being rehashed by the boastful writer? Should the latter then replace this darling with an avatar, which would risk diverting the work from its original intentions? After this introduction, the main course: can one write a book only to give substance to a title, the text being no more than the support of a find? Is this a literary scam?
Could it be, conversely, that the book which made Dany Laferrière famous in 1985 was spoiled by its title, How To Make Love With A Negro Without Getting Tired ? Wasn’t the reading of the text itself thwarted, corrupted by the author’s malice, the reader swallowing the sentences without trying to grasp their meaning, depth, finesse, jubilant over pages of this easy provocation, lifting the book high so that the other passengers on the train can benefit from it, as if he were really learning to make love with a Negro, or directly with the author , without getting tired of reading it. In short, wouldn’t this be the typical example of a book crushed by its title? And if so, is it serious? No, because eight years later, Laferrière wrote Is this pomegranate in the young Negro’s hand a weapon or a fruit, a book that recounts the misfortunes of an author persecuted by the success of a book with a resounding title, a book that takes reflection on the question of the title a little further, a little higher.
At the end of the bottle of Condrieu, we decided to create a titrology institute, determined not to stay at the idea stage. No question either of playing it small arm like some authors who offer their consulting services at 50 euros an hour, to poor pigeons who still imagine it possible to learn to write. Considering it unreasonable to order another bottle of Condrieu, we settled for a glass of red Saint-Joseph, to accompany the millefeuille.
A second round of espressos carrying our neuronal plasticity to its synaptic ends, we came to the question that would naturally arise for researchers at the Institute of Titrology: how does the writer manage to convince himself that his title is great?
