39 Books: 1986

In my second year of reading, I read four novels by DM Thomas, beginning with his most famous, The White Hotel, in the edition below with its very 1980s cover design. I look at the single-word titles of the others and can remember absolutely nothing about them.

Both the title and the three forgotten novels continue the theme of 1985, with the title following Martin Amis' guideline, adding a metafictional element for good measure: the novel as a temporary residence, a holiday in which one can escape, its whiteness offering a clean slate onto which one can watch the projection of another life, another world, but it was also throwing good money after bad as I sought something else these novels could never contain. Perhaps a book's title is the perfection we are seeking in novels, which the content can only spoil.

Fuss over titles is nothing new, nor is Amis' guideline. Early commentators on Dante's Commedia were either troubled by or ignored the comedy of the title when tragedy was considered the highest of styles, and by Dante in particular. Boccaccio came up with the answer:

On the grounds that the author was a most prudent man, I believe that he would have had in mind not the parts contained in comedy but its entirety, and that he named his book on the basis of this entirety, so to speak. And from what one can infer from Plautus and Terence, who were comic poets, the entirety of comedy is this: comedy has a turbulent principle, is full of noise and discord, and ends finally in peace and tranquillity. The present book altogether conforms to this model. Thus the author begins with woes and infernal troubles and ends it in the peace and glory enjoyed by the blessed in their eternal life. And this certainly suffices to explain how the said title suits this book.

This quotation is taken from Giorgio Agamben's The End of the Poem, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, in which Agamben assesses what he calls "an event" that led Dante "to abandon his own 'tragic' poetic project for a 'comic' poem".