Pretentious, Superfluous Subtitles
A Humor Essay
It used to be that the latest specimen of pretentious fiction would have a title like Dry Water. But nowadays, publishers have decided that a title like Dry Water, though perfectly insipid, is nevertheless not quite complete. So instead, we are presented with books named things like
DRY WATER
A Novel
Now I suppose the publisher feels that this cute phrase adds an arresting touch of sophistication and endearingly self-conscious self-importance to the otherwise uninspired labels which -- I suspect appropriately -- adorn their new releases. The tactic is one I call "reverse-humble grandiosity", and the general message could be paraphrased as "Yes, it's just a novel, but what emotional power this precious little book has . . . " This tends to make me gag, but I always try to remember that no matter how irritating a title a philistine publishing executive has slapped on a book, the actual author's actual novel is likely to be far worse.
Anyway, this subtitle gimmick probably had the desired effect on the reading public the first two thousand times it was used. But to me, it seems that if they have to tell you that it's a novel, then it can't be a very successful one (I'm talking literary quality here, not sales):
WOMAN IN BOOKSTORE [TO HUSBAND]:
You're right, honey. I'm up to page 23 and it is a novel after all, not a tax-prep guide!
I note that these superfluous subtitles stand in sharp contrast to another -- perhaps equally unfortunate -- trend. I allude here to the off-kilter assignment of lucid, substantive content to the subtitles of scholarly books, which "frees up" the title proper for the light duty of conveying mere sexiness or catchiness. (E.g. Hot Babes: A Cultural History of Comparative Body Temperature Among Newborn Infants in Western Hemisphere Societies.) An excellent study of this phenomenon has been made in Hugo Barneezles' monograph Beyond the Colon: The Subtle Hegemony of the Subtitle in Modern Scholarship, recently published by Dilettante University Press.
But let us return to the "A Novel" problem. Unfortunately, this type of gratuitous subtitling has already spread to a more vital area of Western intellectual culture -- the restaurant industry (e.g. "Captain Joe's: A Shellfish Eatery," or "Dizzy Glenda's: An Overpriced Bar with Bad Food"). Before long, we'll be seeing things like
HERSHEY'S WITH ALMONDS
A Chocolate Bar
and
SLAZENGER
A Tennis Ball
and
STANLEY 1/8" PHILLIPS HEAD SCREWDRIVER #3064Z
A Household Tool
and
WIND-UP ROTATING "FIDDLER ON THE ROOF" MUSIC BOX
A Useless Knick-Knack Purchased as a Last-Minute Gift by Desperate Shoppers
Come to think of it, maybe this is just the kind of "truth in advertising" we need.
POSTSCRIPT
I originally wrote this piece in 1995 or so, at which time I made up the title Dry Water(: A Novel). As I amend and upload it in 2004, a web search reveals that in 1998 a science-fiction author actually published a novel by the name of Dry Water (sans subtitle).
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© 1995, 2004 Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.
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