There's something in a name

"I love the story, but why don't you add some colour to the title?" said a longtime friend with literary interests when, a couple of days ago, I asked her to read a short story I had just finished writing and give her opinion. "Doesn't the title fit?" I asked her. "Oh, it does," she said. "There's no doubt about it. But, well, isn't it rather simple?"

It was. Not just simple but banal. And far from being evocative. After a good deal of futile discussion, the title I chose was 'The Smoky World of Aravamuthan.' It was clever and descriptive, but loud and lengthy. If I settled for it, it was because I had grown weary of the title discussion, and I wanted the story to be taken off my hands as soon as possible.

Now that the story has left me and become part of the editor's headache, I can look at the issue of naming with some detachment -- without being distracted by my own story, I mean. A good number of literary masterpieces have very simple titles. Tolstoy's tour de force, which is recognized as one of the greatest novels in world literature, has a plain title: War and Peace. Pasternak's Nobel-Prize-winning novel, Dr Zhivago, is plainer than that. Animal Farm and 1984, the titles of Orwell's famous novels, are matter-of-fact. Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are some of the most fascinating books in world literature, but their titles are colourless.

It is difficult to find a title that is fitting as well as evocative. The Grapes of Wrath, the title of John Steinbeck's famous novel, is at once both. The title, taken from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, is richly evocative of the Apocalypse of John in the Bible. Similarly, If It Die, the title of André Gide's memoir, is reminiscent of St John's Gospel: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The title of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory brings to mind the doxology chanted at the end of the Lord's Prayer. Here are a few other titles that are evocative: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sound and the Fury, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The God of Small Things. And, of course, 'The Smoky World of Aravamuthan'!

“What's in a name?” asked Juliet. While we never tire of quoting her, we believe that there is something in a name. Many of us even believe that there is so much in a name.