FOR MARIE LUISE KASCHNITZ
“‘Nanine?’ asked so-called Kunstrichter, or critics, when the comedy of that name first appeared in the year 1747. What kind of a title is that? What is it supposed to suggest?—No more and no less than a title should. A title should not be a recipe. The less it reveals about the contents, the better it is.”1 So says Lessing, who often discusses questions concerning titles, in the twenty-first piece in the Hamburger Dramaturgy. Lessing’s aversion to titles with a meaning was an aversion to the Baroque; the theorist of German bourgeois drama does not want anything to remind him of allegory, although as the author of Minna von Barnhelm he did not disdain the alternative title Oder das Soldatenglück [Or Soldier’s Luck]. And in fact later, in German classicism, the stupidity of conceptual titles proved him right; the title under which Louise Millerin has been performed since then is not held against Schiller. But these days if one tried to name plays, or novels, after the main characters, as Lessing suggested, one would hardly be better off. Not only is it doubtful that the most incisive products of this era still have main characters; perhaps they had to perish along with heroes. Above and beyond that, the contingent quality of a proper name above a text as title emphasizes to an intolerable degree the fundamental fiction that the text deals with a living person. Titles that are specific names already sound a little like the names in jokes: “The Pachulkes now have a little one.” The hero is demeaned when one gives him a name as though he were still a person of flesh and blood; because he cannot fulfill this claim, the name becomes ridiculous, if it is not already an impudence to bear the name at all, as is the case with pretentious names. And when we are dealing with abstractions from empirical reality, what are we to make of titles that act as though they were derived directly from that reality? Material with the dignity of a name no longer exists. Abstract titles, however, are no better than they were in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Lessing demoted them to the archives of learned poésie. They regularly excuse themselves by appealing to the technique used, latent designations of genre at a time in the history of spirit when no genre is so secure that one should seek refuge in it, while “Construction 22” or “Textures” act as though they possessed the cogency of universalia ante rem as well as hermetic boldness. Technique is a means, not an end. The latter, however, the work’s substance, should on no account, on pain of the work’s immediate demise, be put into words, even if the author were capable of doing so. Titles, like names, have to capture it, not say it. But the mere “thingamajig” manages that no better than the distilled idea. The task of every title is paradoxical; it eludes rational generalization as much as self-contained specificity. This becomes evident in the impossibility of titles nowadays. Actually, the paradox of the work of art is recapitulated and condensed in the title. The title is the microcosm of the work, the scene of the aporia of literature itself. Can literary works that can no longer be called anything still exist? One of Beckett’s titles, L’innommable, The Unnameable, not only fits its subject matter but also embodies the truth about the namelessness of contemporary literature. Not a word in it has any value now if it does not say the unsayable, the fact that it cannot be said.
Assuredly spontaneity is only one moment in works of literature. But it should be demanded of their titles. Either the titles have to be so deeply embedded in the conception that the one cannot be conceived without the other, or they have to simply come into one’s mind. Searching for a title is as hopeless as trying to remember a forgotten word when one thinks one knows that everything depends on remembering it. For every work, if not every fruitful idea, is hidden from itself; it is never transparent to itself. The title that is sought after, however, always wants to drag what is hidden out into the open. The work refuses it for its own protection. Good titles are so close to the work that they respect its hiddenness; the intentional titles violate it. This is why it is so much easier to find titles for the works of others than for one’s own. The unfamiliar reader never knows the author’s intentions as well as the author; in return, what he reads crystallizes into a figure more easily for him, like a picture puzzle, and the title is his response to the question the riddle poses. The work itself, however, no more knows its true title than the zaddik knows his mystical name.
Peter Suhrkamp had an inimitable gift for titles. It was perhaps the mark of his gift as a publisher. A good publisher might be defined as one who can lure the title from a text. One of Suhrkamp’s idiosyncrasies was directed against titles with the word “and.” That kind of title no doubt sealed the fate of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe [Cabal and Love]. As in allegorical interpretation, the “and” permits everything to be connected with everything else and is thus incapable of hitting the mark. But like all aesthetic precepts, the taboo on “and” is only a stage in its own dialectical process. In some titles, and ultimately in the best ones, the colorless word “and” sucks the meaning up into itself aconceptually, when the meaning would have turned to dust if it had been conceptualized. In Romeo and Juliet the “and” is the whole of which it is an aspect. In Karl Kraus’ Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität [Morals and Criminality], the “and” has the effect of a point made with one’s hand over one’s mouth. The two antithetical words are coupled with cunning banality, as though it were simply a matter of the difference between them. Through its reference to the content of the book, however, each turns into its opposite. But the title Tristan and Isolde, printed in Gothic letters, is like a black flag flying from the bow of a sailing ship.
My book Prisms was originally called Cultural Critique and Society. Suhrkamp objected to that because of the “and,” and it was relegated to the subtitle. Since the original title had been settled on at the beginning, along with the structure of the work as a whole, it was extremely difficult to find another. Lessing was certainly wrong about one thing, the rhetorical question “What is easier to alter than a title?” (417). Prisms was a compromise. In its favor it must be said that at least the word correctly characterized, in a straightforward way, what the parts had in common. Aside from the quasi-introductory one, most of the essays deal with preformed intellectual phenomena. Nowhere, however, is it an issue of deciphering those phenomena, as would usually be appropriate to the essay form. Instead, through every text and every author something of society is to be understood more clearly; the works dealt with are prisms through which one examines something real. I am dissatisfied with the title nonetheless. For what it stands for conceptually cannot be separated from something nonconceptual, namely the historical status of the word “prisms” and its relationship to contemporary usage. The word is all too willing to be carried along by the currents of contemporary language, like periodicals with modernistic layouts designed to attract attention in the marketplace. The word is conformist through a distinctiveness that costs it nothing; one hears immediately how quickly it will age. Tags like that are used by people who think of jazz as modern music. The title is a memorial to a defeat in the permanent contest between the work and the author. I express this, hoping thereby to add to the title a little poison that will preserve it, mummy-fashion, so that it will not damage the book all too much.
Nor was it ordained at birth that the Noten zur Literatur [Notes to Literature] would be called that. I had christened them Words without Songs, after the title of a series of aphorisms I had published in the Frankfurter Zeitung before the Hitler era. I liked that, and I was attached to it; Suhrkamp found it too feuilletonistic and too cheap. He mulled it over and put together a list, no item on which I was willing to accept, until he slyly announced Notes to Literature as his final suggestion. That was incomparably better than my somewhat stupid bon mot. But what delighted me about it was that Suhrkamp had retained my idea while criticizing it. The constellation of words and music is preserved, as is the slightly old-fashioned quality of a form whose heyday was the Jugendstil. My title cited Mendelssohn, while Suhrkamp’s, several levels higher, cited Goethe’s notes to the Divan. From the controversy I learned that decent titles are the ones into which ideas immigrate and then disappear, having become unrecognizable. It was not much different with Klangfiguren [Tone Figures]. Suhrkamp objected to my Thought with the Ears, an allusion to the first sentence of Prisms. The association to that, he said, would be “wagged with the tail.” I arrived at Tone Figures through a process of developing variation, to use Schönberg’s term. If Thought with the Ears was intended to define the sensory perception of art as mental at the same time, then tone figures are traces left by the sensory element, the sound waves, in another medium, that of the reflecting consciousness. Once a title has come into one’s head, it can be improved; what is improved in it is a piece of history that has been absorbed.
The titles of two of Kafka’s novels, The Trial and The Castle, did not, to my knowledge, originate with him; to give a name to something that was essentially fragmentary would not have been his way. Yet I consider these titles, like all of Kafka’s, good. According to Max Brod, these were the words with which he referred to the works in conversation. Titles of this kind fuse with the works themselves; one’s hesitancy to title the work becomes part of the ferment of its name. What currently circulates in the culture market as “working titles” is an exhausted version of this genuine form. I have an admiration for the title of Kafka’s best-known prose work. It is derived not from the word the story centers on, Odradek, but from a motif that is at least ostensibly peripheral. That Lessing praises Plautus for having “his whole characteristic style in the way he named his plays” and “for the most part [taking] the names from the most insignificant circumstances” (380) is not out of keeping with the affinity between Lessing and Kafka. “The Cares of a Family Man” corresponds precisely to the oblique perspective from which the story is written. Only that perspective allowed the writer to deal with a monstrousness that would have struck his prose dumb or driven it mad if he had looked it straight in the eye. We know that Klee held christenings for his pictures from time to time. Kafka’s title might owe its existence to something of the sort. When modern art creates things whose mystery emanates from the fact that they have lost their names, the invention of a name becomes an act of state.
For Kafka’s America novel, the title he used in his diary, The One Who Was Never Heard of Again [Der Verschollene], would have been better than the title under which the book went down in history. That too is a fine title; for the work has as much to do with America as the prehistoric photograph “In New York Harbor” that is included in my edition of the Stoker fragment of 1913. The novel takes place in an America that moved while the picture was being taken, the same and yet not the same America on which the emigrant seeks to rest his eye after a long, barren crossing.—But nothing would fit that better than The One Who Was Never Heard of Again, a blank space for a name that cannot be found. The perfect passive participle verschollen, “never heard of again,” has lost its verb the way the family’s memory loses the emigrant who goes to ruin and dies. Far beyond its actual meaning, the expression of the word verschollen is the expression of the novel itself.
Karl Kraus’ demand that the polemicist must be able to annihilate a work in one sentence should be extended to the title. I know titles that not only spare one the reading of what they try to talk the reader into without even leaving him time to experience the thing, but in which the bad is condensed the way the good is condensed in good titles. For this one does not need to descend into the nether regions in which the Wiscotts, or the rural schoolmaster Uwe Karsten, stew. Opfergang [Ordeal] is already good enough for me. The word appears without any further specification, like “Being” at the beginning of Hegel’s Logic—beyond all syntax, as though it were outside the world. But the process of defining it does not take place as it does in Hegel; the word remains absolute. This is why it exhales the atmosphere that Benjamin disenchanted, identifying it as a degenerate form of the aura. Beyond that, the word Opfergang [literally “victim walk”] suggests, through the linkage of its two components, the idea of a noble free choice on the part of the victim. The compulsion under which every victim stands is glossed over by the victim, who in any case has no other choice, identifying himself with his fate and sacrificing himself. The omission of the article makes this ritual seem to be more than a disaster befalling the particular—it seems, vaguely, something higher, something belonging to the order of Being, something existential, or God knows what else. The unadorned title affirms sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. The chalice with the flame, which the title imitates, a book decoration from the Jugendstil period, seeks to convince us that sacrifice itself is its meaning, even if it has no other meaning, as Binding’s Nazi-minded friends never tired of asserting. The title’s lie is that of the whole sphere: it makes one forget that Humanität, or humanness, would be the state of a humankind that had freed itself from the constellation of fate and sacrifice. That title was itself already the myth of the twentieth century that their culture prevented the cultivated from mouthing—the culture that led them to sympathize with the same myth. Anyone who notices the slithery quality in a title like this knows what happened when George—who wrote about the revered air of our great cities as long as his dream of modernity still resembled the Babylon for which one station of the Paris Métro is named—stooped to a title like Der Stern des Bundes [The Star of the Bund].
Contemporary American literature, especially drama, which is almost obsessed with concrete titles, shows us how deadly the situation of such titles is today. In that literature they are no longer what they ought to be, the blind spots in the subject matter. They have adapted to the primacy of communication, which is beginning to replace subject matter in intellectual works as it has in the study of those works. By virtue of their incommensurability, concrete titles become a means of making an impression on the consumer; they thereby become commensurable, exchangeable by virtue of their inexchangeability. They turn back into something abstract, copyrighted trademarks: the cat on the hot tin roof, the voice of the turtle. The prototype on the lower level of this kind of practice in high-toned literature is the category of hits called “novelty” or “nonsense” songs. Their titles and first lines elude conceptual generality; each one is something unique, an advertisement for the object that has received the stamp of approval. By the same logic, in Hollywood one can patent marketable film titles. This practice, however, has a frightening retroactive power. It provokes the belated suspicion that aesthetic concretion in traditional literature has been swallowed up by ideology, even where it has seen better days. What leers at us from those titles is something that has secretly overtaken everything naively revered as substantive fullness and the core of contemplation, everything those in the know do not want to lose. It is now good enough only to make one forget that the phenomenal world itself is in the process of becoming as abstract as the principle holding it together internally has long been. That should help to explain why today art in all its genres must be something the philistines respond to with the cry of “abstract”: to escape the curse that, under the domination of abstract exchange value, has fallen on the concrete, which shelters it.
In the Hamburger Dramaturgy Lessing says, in a statement as specific in tone as a title ought to be, “I would prefer a good comedy with a bad title” (437). He had, then, already run into the problem that is evident today. But the reason he gives reads as follows: “If one inquires what kind of characters have already been used, one will be able to think of hardly a one for whom the French in particular have not already named a play. We’ve had that one for a long time, people say. That one too. That one was borrowed from Molière, that one from Destouches! Borrowed? That’s the result of good titles. What kind of property rights to a character does an author acquire by taking his title from it?” (437). It is the repetition compulsion, then, that keeps people from thinking up good titles that are not pure names. Lessing, child of his century, concluded this from the fact that “while there are infinite varieties in human temperament, language does not have infinite designations for them” (437). But what Lessing discovered is in fact determined by the production process in literary commodities. Just as the whole ontology of the culture industry dates back to the early eighteenth century, so too does the practice of repeating titles; the tendency to cling parasitically to something that is already in existence and suck it dry, a tendency that ultimately spreads over all meaning like a disease. Just as nowadays every film that makes a lot of money brings a flock of others behind it hoping to continue to profit from it, so it is with titles; how many have exploited associations to Streetcar Named Desire, and how many philosophers have hooked themselves up to Being and Time. This tendency reflects in the intellectual sphere the compulsion in material production for innovations that get introduced to spread over the whole in some way or other insofar as they permit the commodity to be produced more cheaply. But when this compulsion extends to names it irresistibly annihilates them. Repetition reveals the lazy magic of concreteness.
In a city in the extreme south of Germany, I wanted to buy a copy of Proust’s A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [in English, Within a Budding Grove; literally “in the shadow of young girls blossoming”]. In the new German translation it is called Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte [literally, “in the shadow of young maidenblossoms”]. “I’m sorry, we don’t have that in stock,” said the young clerk, “but if Mädchen im Mai [Girls in May] will serve your needs….”
Superstitiously, I hold back from putting the title on a work until it is completed, at least in draft, even if the title has been settled from the outset. I do not deny the relationship of this superstition to the trivial notion according to which one should not invoke anything, should not, out of fear of an envious Fate, represent anything as completed until it is really finished. But my caution extends beyond that. A title written too early gets in the way of the conclusion, as though it had absorbed the power to conclude; kept secret, the title becomes a motive force for the completion of what it promises. The author’s reward is the moment when he may write the title. Titles for unwritten works are of the same ilk as the expression “complete works,” for which the author’s vanity might have lusted a hundred and fifty years ago, while today everyone is afraid of it, as though it would turn them into Theodor Körner—with the exception, of course, of Brecht, who had a perverse taste for talk of “the classic” as well. Or does the hand hesitate to write the title because it is forbidden altogether; because only history could write it, like the title under which Dante’s poem was canonized? The ancients, who feared the envy of the gods, considered the titles they gave their dramas “completely insignificant,” in accordance with Lessing’s remark. The title is the work’s fame; the fact that works have to grant it to themselves is their impotent and presumptuous revolt against something that from time immemorial has overtaken all fame and distorted it. This is what infuses Lessing’s sentence with its secret and melancholy pathos: “The title is truly a trifling matter” (416).