Wilson and pistachios

Staying out of the midday heat for awhile, I’m not surprised that Edmund Wilson is the perfect author to go with those Sicilian pistachios. I’ve compared his writing to pistachios before: you open a volume to read one of his essays, and you find that you can’t stop snacking on them.

I’ve recently made the case that every author has one specific genre in which they thrive, and have also said that Wilson isn’t really a writer of books. Some of his books are explicitly nothing but collections of miscellaneous essays, and even the ones that are supposed to be books really aren’t.

It occurs to me now that one symptom of this is that Wilson chooses surprisingly bad titles for his books.

Axel’s Castle, for instance, is a fairly stupid title that tells us very little about the topic of the book. It sounds like the title of a novel, for one thing, and that’s what I assumed it was until I was about 25. But in fact it is a collection of literary criticism of various modernist figures. Only in the final chapter does he explain the meaning of the title— it’s a reference to Axel by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, to whose hero Wilson retroactively compares all the symbolist figures discussed in his book. But he doesn’t bother to make the case clearly, nor does the reader end up feeling especially convinced. Wilson was meant to write 2,000-word reviews, not books. He’s incredibly brilliant at the former genre, but doesn’t have much of a clue how to pull off the latter.

Here are some of his other book titles:

The Shores of Light
The Triple Thinkers
The Wound and the Bow
Classics and Commercials

I don’t think any of these are effective book titles. The first seems like random poetic advertisement. The second is never convincingly explained. The third is a reference to its final piece, on Sophocles’s Philoctetes, but again there is no convincing link made between the Philoctetes and all the earlier pieces in that book. The final title is satisfactory in explaining its content, but not very vivid.

Who has the best book titles in the history of philosophy? I think it has to be Neitzsche. Almost every one of his titles is brilliant.