RICHARD SAWYER Fictional Titles: A Classification The title of Henry James's celebrated ghost story The Turn of the Screw was ultimately derived from a figurative expression current in the author's day. (Dickens, it may be noted, had already appropriated the same idiom for a chapter title to Bleak House.) However, since the title phrase also appears within the text of James’s narrative, its meaning is more closely circumscribed by its use therein. The title phrase, in fact, appears within the work in two seemingly unrelated contexts; first, at the beginning, in the narrative prologue to the ghostly tale, and then, near the end of the tale itself. The first usage is the more emphatic of the two and imprints itself firmly on the reader’s mind. You may remember the context: a small group of house guests have gathered by the fire one Christmas Eve to tell ghost stories (Dickens, once again, is brought to mind). The company has just listened breathlessly to a story (purportedly true) of a child’s encounter with a ghost. This rather disquieting twist to the plot of the conventional ghost story, we soon learn, is to be the screw upon which our narrative will turn. Of course, the prologue not only discloses the relevance of the title phrase. It also identifies the generic form of the tale (that is, a ghost story) and even effectively endorses the reliability of the written source (the governess’s manuscript). Yet it has seemed so out of character for James, a staunch opponent of the obtrusive authorial hand, to manipu- late the reader in such a determined way, that many readers and critics have been inclined to interpret the tale as an ingenious revision of the prologue’s original claims. In any event, the recurrence of the title phrase in a context that falls outside the prologue would seem to lend support to such subversive readings. For, in citing the story title within the tale itself, James appears to be implying that its use in the prologue may not be authoritative, but rather should be expanded or even substantially revised to accommodate unforeseen developments in the tale. The only problem in this line of reasoning, in my view, is that when the title phrase does surface again much later in the narrative, its use seems incidental, of no real consequence to the greater meaning of the text. However, in Jamesian fiction one cannot dismiss such unobtrus- ive, seemingly insignificant references too quickly; they may in fact lie UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 60, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1991FICTIONAL TITLES 375 next to (if not at) the heart of the tale. I believe that this is the case with that second explicit allusion to the story title, as I shall attempt to demonstrate later in the essay. Jalso find, curiously, a third allusion to the title in the story, though in this instance the phrase is only implicitly recalled. This occurs just as the story is switching over from prologue to tale. Douglas is preparing to read to the assembled guests from the late governess’s manuscript when he is interrupted with the following inquiry: ‘What's your title?” Douglas replies that he has not got one, at which point the anonymous narrator of the prologue declares that he, on the other hand, has, even though he has not yet listened to the governess’s tale. The anonymous narrator, however, does not reveal the title that then came to mind. But the reader, at this crucial juncture in the text, will surely recall the only title available, namely, The Turn of the Screw. What does that title really mean? There must be more to it than we initially supposed. In fiction, the relationship between the title and the narrative text can be quite intricate and revealing. But it seems to me there are only a limited number of basic forms that the relationship can take. Writers, I find (and here James is no exception), tend to favour one form of intitulation over another - one way, that is, of linking their title to their narratives. This noticeable preference in titling fiction may stem from the writer’s personal taste, as well as a prevailing literary trend. I thought it would be instructive, in any case, to examine the practice of literary intitulation in general in order to give us a better context in which to analyse James's title in particular. I offer, therefore, a simple classifica tion of titles, which shall be followed by a brief consideration of The Turn of the Screw. I shall restrict my survey to prose fiction (mainly English) of the past three centuries, since poetry, and probably non- fiction prose, too, would require, in my opinion, a more extensive taxonomy. In the past, writers have used three, and possibly four, basic modes of intitulation.’ The first of these, and by far the most popular form of titling down to the latter part of the nineteenth century, I would designate the nominal mode. By nominal, I mean those works simply ‘named after’ the key figure(s) in the text or the place(s) where the significant action takes place; for example, David Copperfield, Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina, Wolf Solent, Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, and Mansfield Park. Of the three common modes of intitulation that I have identified, the nominal appears generally the least expressive, the author divulging little of his or her underlying method or thought. There is, indeed, a ‘certain flatness’ in such a literal form of titling, as Henry James himself conceded when he sought to account for the addition of the subtitle ‘A Study’ to the story ‘Daisy Miller.’* Clearly, many writers besides James have fretted about the stinginess of the purely nominal376 RICHARD SAWYER title and thus have resorted, as we shall see, to alternative titles in order to reveal something of their underlying purposes. Nonetheless, it must be emphasized that no title is utterly valueless, or ‘nominal’ in the popular sense of that word. For instance, in naming a fictional work after a place, an author locates the action on one of various planes - realistic, comical, figurative. The world you are going to read about, the title may assert, is ‘Utopia’ or ‘Wonderland’ or ‘Middlemarch,’ the latter obviously a place much closer to home. Similarly, in the act of naming a character, an author may disclose a whole range of features, including a person’s national and sexual identity, or, possibly, generic or symbolic function. And finally, in simply choosing, between a person and a place for the title of a literary work, an author makes a significant statement about the narrative point of view. For example, consider the difference between Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre and Villette; the former named after a person, the latter after a place. Though both are first-person narratives, only in Jane Eyre is the story focused overtly on the narrator herself. Hence, Jane Eyre is truly ‘autobiographical,’ as the subtitle further specifies. In Villette, on the other hand (and one has only to glance at the opening chapter to confirm this), the narrator allows herself to be upstaged by other characters and even her environment; thus she seems to function more as an observer than the observed. Villette is in fact autobiographical, just like Jane Eyre; however, the elusive narrator, Lucy Snowe, only reveals herself obliquely, through implicit comparison/contrast with other women in the text, and, most notably, with the provincial Catholic environment of Villette, where she eventually goes to work and reside. A similar contrast might be drawn between two of Jane Austen's novels, Emma and Mansfield Park. Both employ third-person narrators; yet, as the titles indicate, the focus shifts from person to place. Titles that do not simply name a character but rather include an epithet or identify an individual in terms of a professional or personal relationship tend to depart from the strictly nominal mode of titling. For instance, though The Warden, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, Stephen Hero, The Great Gatsby, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Burger's Daughter refer obliquely to their central characters, these titles actually serve to underline themes and conflicts (for example, between public persona and private self) crucial to the characters’ lives. Such titles are often ironic and direct our interpretation of the fictional work in a more conspicuous fashion than the purely nominal mode would allow. Madame Bovary and Mrs Dalloway, novels in which the title character is identified in terms of her marital status, are two good examples of titles that do more than name. Both works deal with marital conflict and infidelity (either real or imaginary), themes that make the titles certainly ironic.FICTIONAL TITLES 377 Of course, fictional women (like their real counterparts) have traditionally been harassed by the naming process. In the past, society made women anxious to acquire respectable married names. Early novels named after mainly heroines, such as Pamela, Clarissa, Eveline, Cecilia, and Emma, seem to accentuate what each of these young ladies lacks: a husband who will complete her identity. Becoming a ‘woman,’ as the etymology of the word implies, meant becoming a ‘wife.’ Jane Eyre thus strikes one, in this context, as being a rather bold departure from the conventional denomination of womans fiction. It is not so easy to predict from the title of that work how the plot will unfold. Indeed, Bronté gives us a heroine whose name and identity are entirely her own. Aside from a lost uncle, Jane shares the name ‘Eyre’ with no man; she has no husband of that name, no father, and, as far as we know, no brother, either. And even though she does marry Mr Rochester in the closing chapter of the novel, as in a conventional romance, Jane’s personal identity (like her financial independence) remains uncom- promised by the event. When a writer uses a title to do more than identify a central character or place, preferring instead to hint at the underlying meaning of the story or its subject matter, another mode of intitulation is operative — the thematic? As I have indicated, most authors seem to chafe at the limitations imposed upon them by nominal titling and have consequently made use of subtitles to disclose more fully their intent. Such alternative titles may reveal the sociological or historical preten- sions of the work (for example, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life; Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life; Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets) or its allegorical purport (for example, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Women; Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus; Sybil; or, The Two Nations; Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman; Livia; or, Buried Alive). Disraeli’s Sybil, as the full title intimates, has a prophetic purpose — to warn of the potentially explosive conflict between the ‘two nations’ of rich and poor. In fact, ‘Sybil’ is the name of one of the characters in the book, but Disraeli’s decision not to render her name in full allows the mythical or thematic overtones of the word to reverberate. Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles has, as the subtitle plainly states, a tendentious argument behind it, one that the author discussed in the preface to the fifth edition. However, the first part of the title is, like Sybil, not strictly nominal. Tess‘s true patronym is ‘Durbeyfield’; her relationship with the ‘D'Urbervilles’ of antiquity, in contrast, dooms her to an unhappy fate. The heroine's titular name, then, adumbrates the author's ironic approach to his subject matter. While nominal intitulation may have flourished during the early history of the novel, the thematic appears to have since replaced it as378 RICHARD SAWYER the dominant mode. This shift in titling habits may reflect a change in literary or publishing practice, with no profound implications. It is possible to view the current preference for the thematic title, however, as a direct response to the diminution of the authorial voice in the text of the modern narrative. As Wayne Booth has observed, in the past an author would conventionally direct the reader from within the narrative itself.4 The vehicle chosen to accomplish this aim was the ‘authorial’ narrator, a reassuring figure who presumably spoke for the author and who could be trusted to guide the reader safely over the necessary social, moral, and psychological ground covered in the text. The modern writer, by contrast, tends to be less co-operative, throwing up narrators whose limited and even untrustworthy points of view usually impede our immediate understanding of the text. Hence the modern author has had to rely upon rhetorical devices that lie outside the narrative proper, such as the title or epigraph, to communicate an ‘authoritative’ intent. Of course, this switch to a more revealing mode of intitulation accentu- ates the title’s importance, at least in the interpretation of modern fiction, and thus justifies the added attention that I think should be given to this part of the text. Of the various literary devices employed to generate thematic titles, two seem to have been given considerable play, namely, allegory and allusion. As I indicated, a number of early fictional works had allegorical subtitles, and Jane Austen even used allegory in the primary titles of major works, for example, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion. However, there are obvious drawbacks to allegorical intitulation, not the least of which is that it tends to narrow the thematic range in a novel to one or two abstract ideas. Allusion has therefore provided the writer with a less restrictive means of authorial expression. In the intitulation of fiction, allusion can be either extratextual or intratextual. In the former, the title refers to some figure, event, or literary passage ‘outside’ the text. There are many titles in modern literature, for instance, taken from other literary works, and certain writers, like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner, use this device repeatedly. The practice seems to have arisen in the latter part of the nineteenth century with such authors as Thackeray, Butler, and Hardy (for instance, Vanity Fair, Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh, Under the Greenwood Tree, and Far From the Madding Crowd). Since the twentieth century, the number of fictional titles belonging to this category of allusion has expanded considerably. It is easy to cite examples ~ The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, Look Homeward Angel, Brave New World, Tender Is the Night, All the King’s Men, and Waiting for the Barbarians. The second form of titular allusion is intratextual, so called becauseFICTIONAL TITLES 379 the title refers to an object, event, word, or phrase ‘within’ the narrative itself. The allusion is always explicit and can be singular or multiple. It almost always functions thematically, isolating a detail in the text that encapsulates, as it were, the meaning of the entire narrative. Harry Levin suggests that we define this form of allusive titling as ‘synecdo- chic’ because the author selects a part to stand for the whole. In any event, this is the form of intitulation that James favoured, particularly in the middle and late years of his literary career. The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, ‘Figure in the Carpet,’ ‘The Great Good Place,’ ‘The Beast in the Jungle,’ ‘The Jolly Corner,’ ‘The Bench of Desolation’ — these are just some of the titles James derived from the texts of the stories themselves. And, of course, The Turn of the Screw must be placed in this category too, though the figure of speech used in the title, in so far as it belonged to the common parlance of the day, also conveys a certain extratextual allusive force. The Golden Bowl, the title of James's last complete novel, alludes in a similar way both inwardly, to the symbolic object featured in the story, and outwardly, to a passage from Ecclesiastes and, possibly, to The Book of Thel. Both the nominal and the thematic titles focus attention on the content of the literary work. They isolate an important theme, or identify a central character or location in the story. The third mode of intitula- tion, the formalistic, does not indicate who the story is about, or where it is set, or even what it means, but rather how it means, to use a familiar New-Critical distinction. Nevertheless, though this third mode does underline the formal properties of the fictional work, it does not thereby exclude comment on the content. As I have stressed, none of these modes is quite as clear cut in its function as its name might suggest. The most common type of formalistic title is undoubtedly the generic, one that explicitly identifies the work with a specific form of writing, such as history, romance, autobiography, comedy, picaresque adventure, and so on. This manner of titling was popular during the early stages of the novel’s development and reflected in part a neoclassical preoccupa- tion with genres. Moreover, the trend may have arisen from the novel’s not having been then clearly established as a distinct genre in its own tight. Once again, writers have often seized upon the subtitle in order to identify the narrative format of their works. Bumney’s Cecilia, Bronté’s Jane Eyre, and, much later, Woolf's Orlando, for example, were thus classified with their non-fictional counterparts - the memoir, the autobiography, and the biography, respectively. Middlemarch was subtitled a ‘study,’ a word that appears to betray the serious intellectual pretensions of the form. James's use of the same term to define ‘Daisy Miller,’ however, draws upon an artistic convention and hints at the sketchy or preliminary character of his narrative form. Thackeray, in a380 RICHARD SAWYER similar vein, first compared his treatment of the subject matter of Vanity Fair to a series of ‘Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society.’ Later, however, he revised the subtitle to the more provocative generic classification ‘A Novel without a Hero.’ A title that draws upon an analogous musical format would be the Alexandria Quartet, which in turn comprises a quartet of nominally titled books - Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Cleo. (‘Alexandria,’ too, of course, constitutes a nominal component.) Though occasionally suggestive, the formalistic subtitle frequently seems unimaginative, merely stating the obvious. It is hard to believe, for instance, that a reader who could appreciate Meredith’s elegant, mannered wit really needed to be told that The Egoist was ‘A Comedy in Narrative’ (or is that a joke, too?). Dickens, to be sure, did aim his fiction at a wider audience and thus apparently thought it prudent to indicate that A Christmas Carol was ‘A Ghost Story.’ But then, conscience (still mindful, perhaps, of that rash, impecunious choirmaster) impelled Dickens to emphasize that his ‘carol’ was not to be sung; it was, in fact, ‘in prose.’ Buyers of modern fiction, in contrast, had better beware of generic labels, which are apt to be misleading or ironic, as in the case of The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion or The Last Tycoon: A Western. The generic subtitle of Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle also raises expectations that it does not honestly fulfil. Yet here is a novel whose title seems to bend over backwards for its readers; it incorporates all three modes of intitulation - the nominal, the allegorico-thematic, and the formalistic! Early novelists were, on the whole, anxious to dissociate the new form from the romance. They hoped that the novel would be used to represent characters and events more true to life, thus bringing fiction closer to history or autobiography. Both Richardson and Fielding called some of their novels ‘histories,’ and Fielding, who viewed himself as ‘the Founder of a new Province of Writing’ (Tom Jones ii, i), even sought to explain what he meant by this fictional/historical genre in various prefaces and narrative discourses. Defoe went even further by pretend- ing not to be devising fiction at all; his literary journals and memoirs were, he claimed, authentic. The tension between story and history, fiction and fact, in the novel has been longstanding, and perhaps nowhere more bluntly posed than in Elsa Morante’s generically entitled La storia: romanzo (‘History: A Novel’). There is a novelistic tradition, represented by such notable figures as Hawthorne and John Cooper Powys, that has sought to legitimize the ancient kinship between the novel and romance. Literary works written in this slenderer antithetical tradition often contain the generic indicator in the title, for example, The Blithedale Romance; Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages; or A Glastonbury Romance. As the foregoing reveal, almost noFICTIONAL TITLES 381 title is purely generic, one that serves merely to identify the form of the work. Most generic titles do, in fact, contain a nominal or thematic component. Indeed, ‘Glastonbury,’ the name that figures in the title of Powys’s great work, has both nominal and thematic force, in that it identifies the actual setting of the story and alludes to the Arthurian subject matter transformed in the work. [remarked earlier that a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels possess allegorical titles and subtitles, of which Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is a familiar example. Allegory is a literary genre with a long history, yet I have classified the allegorical title with the thematic rather than the formalistic mode of intitulation. This requires some comment. In my view, the allegorical title of the classical novel generally refers to the thought or theme of the work rather than its form (obviously, The Pilgrim's Progress would be an exception here), A literary text may indeed be read ina variety of ways, as medieval exegetes, for instance, customar- ily maintained (they counted four levels of meaning, including the allegorical), However, although any given text may be read in a variety of ways, its form does not really alter with each reading. For example, if a novel is composed according to realistic criteria, it cannot then be expected to behave with equal consistency according to the principles of allegory or romance. Readers of Jane Austen who try to view the characters in Sense and Sensibility or Prideand Prejudice exclusively in terms of one or the other of the abstractions named would soon acknowledge the truth of this assertion. Though these novels may be interpreted on one level as comedies of conflicting humours, their form encourages the reader to give the central characters a wider dimension of life. In most instances the allegorical title is supplementary and reveals an authorial intention absent from the usually nominal title that precedes it. This titular strategy, which to some extent subordinates the moral to the representational aims of the work, perhaps arose during the early neoclassical history of the novel when convention dictated that the literary work have some redeeming moral or instructional value. Richardson, for example, expressed such a Horatian commonplace on the title-page of Pamela. Though he hoped that his book would ‘agreeably entertain,’ the author contended that he had primarily written Pamela ‘to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES.’ His words here simply echo a theme implicit- ly expressed in the allegorical subtitle. Fielding’s Shamela [full title: An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews] was of course intended as a parody of Richardson’s supposedly edifying tale. Fielding’s title suggests both the form (burlesque) and the content (an exposé of Pamela’s true hypocrisy) of his work. There are a few other formalistic titles that, like Shamela, only implicitly identify the form of the works they name, and usually this is done through allusion.382 RICHARD SAWYER James Joyce’s fictional output provides us with some good examples of the strategy. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance, as the title implies, must be read as a self-portrait; its form is therefore autobiographical. Yet the novel, with its third-person narrator, appears on the surface merely biographical. How can this be? Recent studies of Joyce's extensive use of ‘free indirect speech’ (a form of discourse that borrows many elements from direct speech) have in part demonstrated how a third-person report can indeed sound autobiographical. In any event, the title here is crucial for an understanding of the work because it forces one to read the novel from a consistently autobiographical narrative point of view. The title of Joyce’s next novel, Ulysses, serves a dual purpose much like Shamela. On the one hand, the title is thematic, encouraging the reader to view the work as an ironic retelling of an ancient heroic myth. On the other hand, the title is formalistic, pointing to the possible structural and stylistic parallels between this work and the Odyssey. In other words, the title Ulysses alludes to both the content and the form of the novel. Finnegans Wake, the title of Joyce’s last work, is also partly formalistic, the pun in the title underlining the brisk phonological and semantic ambiguities that structure the entire text. When I began this survey of fiction titles, I indicated that there may be a fourth mode of intitulation. Though I can define the form, however, Ican think of no titles that would actually fulfil its requirements (no titles, that is, in the art of prose fiction). Nevertheless, I shall describe the mode even though it may have only a theoretical existence. This fourth species of intitulation, as I see it, would generate a kind of anti-title, one that bore no integral relation to the form or the content of the narrative text it identified. Such titles would tend to be either nonsensical or arbitrary, not unlike the ISBN assigned to each publica- tion. Hence I would call such titles incidental. Examples can be found among the musical and visual arts, especially of this century. Western instrumental music has traditionally been entitled generically. Such titles tend to be redundant, merely rendering in verbal form what is evident from the musical score. Symphony in D Minor, for instance, is a formalistic title designating both the musical genre and the key in which the piece is composed. But the words are superfluous; the music itself declares the form. With the abandonment of traditional genres and tonal structures in modern music, however, even the purely generic title has had to be discarded. In its place the incidental title has assumed some prominence. A number of modern composers, for example, do not really title their works at all, but simply number them for easy reference. Hence while Composition 8, 5 Pieces for Orchestra, or 3 Inventions could arguably be defined as generic titles, each, in my view, identifies a genre that is just too broad or vague to be of any real formal significance; instead, such titles appear ‘incidental’ to the works they label.FICTIONAL TITLES 383 In the past, generically entitled compositions sometimes acquired popular thematic titles; for example, ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, ‘Emperor’ Concerto, ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. Unfortunately, because such titles were usually not sanctioned by the composer, they seem inadequate. As the formal conventions of Western music began to disintegrate towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the thematic or interpretative title alone came to be established as a legitimate means of identifying a musical composition. The Planets is an early example of this kind of programmatic titling; Suntreader, Under Stress, and Shaker Loops are later titles that illustrate the form. A composer like Eric Satie may have found this new trend pretentious. At any rate, he parodied such titles in his own inimitable way. Some of Satie’s titles are truly bewildering and at times clearly spurious; for example, Chose vues a droite et a gauche (sans lunette). The foregoing title, to be sure, is not completely irrelevant, at least characterizing the flippant tone of the composition. Furthermore, Satie’s nonsensical title may be said to have an implicitly tendentious purpose, even if that is only to insist ironically on the work's decidedly non-representational nature — that is, on its not obviously being about ‘Things seen to the right and the left (without spectacles).’ Yet since the title does not say what the work is about, I would contend that its function is really incidental to the musical composition. A third and more obvious type of incidental musical title is illustrated by, say, the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, or the ‘Linz’ and ‘Paris’ Symphonies of Mozart. In such titles, a generic designation is routinely coupled with the name of the person who commissions the piece, or the name of the person to whom it is dedicated, or the name of the place where it is composed. This form of titling would, I suppose, be comparable to the literary practice of naming anonymous manuscript collections after the city or library where they were preserved; for example, the Exeter Book, the Towneley or Chester Plays, the Harleian or Cotton manuscripts. In the visual arts, the generic subtitle is also prominent. Sometimes compositions are explicitly identified in terms of their format; for example, still-life or portrait. Sometimes the title, though ostensibly nominal or thematic, has become virtually generic through its association with a succession of works depicting the same subject in roughly the same format. Religious and mythological subjects, such as the Birth of Venus, the Three Graces, the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, or the Last Judgment, thus establish themselves as individual genres, each with its own recognizable, formal requirements. Similarly, the proliferation of harems, odalisques, and bathers in the last century eventually created a whole series of generic subgroupings within the larger category of erotic nude. However, the nominal title has been at least as important as the384 RICHARD SAWYER formalistic in Western art because of the emphasis on representation. The nominal title in this instance traditionally identifies the person, place, or thing depicted in the composition. As Western art moves away from the conventions of realism towards more abstract and impressionis- tic modes of representation, however, such titles begin to sound whimsical, if not absurd. For example, a title asserting that a few vibrant splashes of colour indeed configure ‘Pierrot dancing with Fifi’ is likely to be as spurious as Satie’s Choses vue, and the gullible viewer who insists on discovering the representation named had better beware of himself being mistaken for the fool. In addition to such nonsensical titles that only pretend to say something relevant about the content of the work, there are those that make only specious identifications of the form. Like their musical counterparts, such titles appear simply convenient, a means of catalogu- ing an artistic output; for example, Painting 1, Tableau 2, or Composition in Red 152. It is understandable for artists working in non-verbal media to rebel against a convention that would force them to use words to interpret purely visual images or musical sounds. If the viewer or listener really does want to appreciate painting, sculpture, or music, one hears the artist saying, let him or her learn the language of colour and form, texture and space, rhythm and harmonics. The medium for literature, on the other hand, is the written word, and however much words may aspire to music or a visual form, they are essentially devised to communicate meaningful sounds and verbal images. There are, to be sure, literary works that lie on the perimeter: Dadaist echolalia, for instance, or the typographical configurations of a concrete poem. But even these stray texts, for the most part, represent experiments in the art of verbal signification. In short poetic compositions, the title can perhaps be dispensed with, or, if present, maybe even disallowed (readers, for instance, still question the relevance of the title ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to the poem). In longer fictional works, which require a more sustained commitment to the conventions of normal linguistic discourse, however, a spurious title in particular seems unwise. For if the title makes no sense, why should the reader suppose that the narrative does? The one ought to illuminate the other, for they share a common language and purpose. And what of The Turn of the Screw, to return briefly to that title? The figure of speech that forms the title derives ultimately from the torture chambers, where the reference is indeed literal. The ‘screws’ were the grim instruments that jailers (who also came to be known as ‘screws’) applied to their captives in order to extract the appropriate confession. A ‘turn of the screw’ thus came to signify, metaphorically, coercion or a distressing development.FICTIONAL TITLES 385 The title idiom figures prominently, as I have noted, in the opening paragraphs of James’s narrative. Douglas, the keeper (we soon learn) of the late governess’s manuscript, introduces the expression. He and several others have just listened to a story in which a small child comes face to face with a ghost. After considering its disquieting impact on the listeners, Douglas concludes that the presence of the child in the tale “gives the effect another turn of the screw.’ (Obviously, the fact that the story is about a ghost induces the first turn, or turns, of the screw.) Douglas then proposes to relate a similar type of ghost story involving, not just one, but two children of ‘so tender an age.’ The context in which the title phrase first appears implies that it is the listeners whose thumbs are figuratively squeezed in the vice; the screws turn on them. The storyteller is of course their tormentor, who would have his audience squirm apprehensively with each development in the plot. Hence the title idiom, since it alludes implicitly to the affective or thetorical aims of the ghost story, can be said to function formalistically in this instance. Yet this is not the only allusion to the story title in the narrative, and, in fact, the two subsequent references (and especially the last) develop the thematic implications in the title idiom. As I observed, the mature James habitually drew his titles (usually thematic) from the narrative texts of his stories. Explicit intratextual allusion of this kind in the title derives, I would venture to suggest, from the short story tradition. (Poe, for instance, practised it, and so did James's contemporaries Maupassant and Chekhov.) The novelist tended in the past to work with a larger canvas than the short-story writer, and also with a different focus. As the prevalence of the nominal title in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to testify, the novel's primary concerns were with character and environment. The short story, on the other hand, tended to approach life from a more oblique angle. People and places were usually just sketched in, the story coalescing, instead, around a significant object, a revealing incident or even a sentiment expressed in some turn of phrase or chance remark. In any event, it was, as often as not, by this thematic detail that the short story was ident- ified, was entitled. The detail may have been embedded in the text in one or more contexts; but once promoted to the title, its significance became applicable to the story as a whole. Now, in the case of The Turn of the Screw, the title initially refers to a disturbing aspect in Douglas’s ghostly tale - the involvement of two small children. While this may be true, such a detail (if interpreted thematically) is not in itself likely to have any far-reaching significance, because it is simply a fact. The reader, then, will surely be anticipating a ‘turn’ more profound and disturbing than that initially proposed. Douglas’s conception of the ‘turn’ to the ‘narrative screw,’ while super- ficially correct, thus seems to be introduced to prepare the reader for a386 RICHARD SAWYER more significant turn (or series of turns) later on. Moreover, the implicit allusion to the story title just before the prologue gives way to the goveress’s narrative voice seems to nudge us once again to be prepared for other developments in the use of the phrase ‘the turn of the screw.’ And when we analyse the governess’s testimony in the light of that suggestive phrase, we may perceive that she consistently represents herself in an ambiguous role. She becomes convinced of her duty to ‘save,’ as she repeatedly expresses it, the children from their possession by the evil spectres of Jessel and Quint. The governess casts herself in the role of a confessor who believes that only through an admission of guilt - of collusion - can the children free themselves from the influence of the infernal ghosts. She is virtually certain that the children are guilty, and thus, rather than questioning them sincerely in a calm, open-minded manner, she bullies them (and the housekeeper, Mrs Grose) with accusations, emotional pleas, and sarcastic innuendoes. Her tactics and assumptions, in other words, begin to recall those of the religious Inquisitor whose legacy of coercion is evoked in the phrase ‘a turn of the screw.’ Our governess, furthermore, is not averse to using brutal means. As she prepares for a final cross-examination of little Miles, she fancies that “to reach his mind’ she may have to ‘risk the stretch of a stiff arm across his character’ (ch 22). Figurative language, to be sure, but, in the context of the title phrase, ominous indeed. We have on several occasions prior to this witnessed the governess’s administering such figurative ‘blows’ to Mrs Grose (see chs 6, 7, 11) and, therefore, know her capable of such harsh conduct. Moreover, the suggestion that she is now prepared to use such extreme measures with Miles follows the third and final allusion in the narrative to the title phrase. The governess, in the passage in question, acknowledges that her upcoming session with the little boy will demand from her a ‘rigid will,’ ‘a push in a direction unusual,’ ‘another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.’ Yet when it is subsequently revealed that she intends to employ such sternness to break down Miles, the irony in her use of the title phrase is surely apparent. The possibility that Miles is innocent and that she may be tormenting him needlessly does occur to the governess at a critical point near the end of their last confrontation. She quickly dismisses this notion, however, and pursues her interrogation to its ‘successful’ conclusion. Miles has the misfortune to die, of course, apparently ‘dispossessed.’ But before dying, he does name the ‘devil,’ as he sees it, that torments him. The governess ignores the damning implication in the boy's last, ambiguous utterance and considers herself, instead, thoroughly vindicated. The foregoing interpretation of the thematic significance of the title phrase paints the governess as the misguided villain in the piece. This SeesFICTIONAL TITLES 387 conception of her obviously runs counter to that fostered in the prologue. Douglas claims therein not only that the governess was ‘charming’ and ‘agreeable,’ ‘awfully clever and nice,’ but that she was a woman who would ‘have been worthy of any [position] whatever.’ Douglas may indeed be partial in his estimation of the governess’s strength and intelligence (he seems to have been infatuated with her), and he only became acquainted with the woman some ten years after her services at Bly were no doubt abruptly terminated. Still, there is no evidence to suggest that Douglas, shyly enamoured though he may have been, would deliberately mislead us. To him, the governess was simply a brave young woman who sought to rid the children under her care of a malignant possession. That is what the prologue advances, and yet, in my view, it is also what the title and the ambiguities in the governess’s own report implicitly undermine. I do not find this interpretive inconsistency in James's story at all troublesome, or even unusual. James, as I have indicated, was certainly not an author who favoured the kind of overt authorial manipulation that we seem to get in the narrative prologue to the tale. I find it difficult to imagine James saying, as he appears to in that prologue, ‘My dear reader, this is - don’t you know? — just a ghost story,’ without detecting a touch of irony in that reductionist just, that confidential don’t you know? Surely one of the last things James would stoop to in a fictional work would be to tell us, in no uncertain terms, what we should know. Moreover, if we are determined to dust for imprints of authorial intent, would it not be better to search the title for these rather than the narrative text? The title of a fictional work is an integral part of the rhetoric of the whole text. Yet it also seems to be distinct from the narrative proper, as Franz Stanzel has observed. Like the chapter heading, the marginal rubric, and the epigraph, according to Stanzel, the title is not mediated by a narrative voice.’ It may in fact be as close as we shall come to a direct authorial voice (in this case, James's), if there is such a ghost. NOTES 1 The literature on this subject is not extensive. Of the few articles that I have read, the most fruitful was by Harry Levin, ‘The Title as a Literary Genre,’ Modern Language Review 72 (1977), »xiii-xxxvi. See also John Hollander, “‘Haddocks’ Eyes’: A Note on the Theory of Titles,’ Visions and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press 1975), 212-61; and Laurence Lerner, ‘Titles and Timelessness,’ Reconstructing Literature, ed Laurence Lerner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1983), 179-204. ‘Preface to “Daisy Miller,”” The Art of the Novel, intro R.P. Blackmur (New York: Scribners 1934), 268. x388 RICHARD SAWYER 3 I have borrowed the term from Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957], 53), who mentions, in passing, that some novels are named after their plots, others after their themes. The difference between nominal and thematic titling can be illustrated by contrasting David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Both are first-person narratives by the same author. However, the earlier work, as the full title testifies, is essentially a ‘personal history’ of one individual, David Copper- field. Great Expectations, on the other hand, is organized around a specific theme, and is about Pip (or Philip Pirrip) only in so far as his life illustrates the theme of ‘great expectations.’ Thematically titled fiction, then, is likely to be more discursive in its narrative format than the nominal. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1961). What follows in the text of my essay is a brief summary of Booth’s discussion of the narrator in fiction. His remark on titles and epigraphs in modem fiction (see 198n25), however, is especially pertinent to my discussion. “The Title as a Literary Genre,’ xxiv. Franz K, Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1984), ch 2. + auCopyright of University of Toronto Quarterly is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.