Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (review)

In theories of narrative construction, endings have historically been accorded primary significance. From Aristotle to Peter Brooks, they have been seen as organizing principles that give shape and meaning to everything that comes before them. As a result of this attention, beginnings, at both the general and discrete level, have been largely overlooked. It is this deficiency in the critical literature that Brian Richardson’s edited collection, Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, attempts to redress.

The first of the collection’s three sections deals with beginning at the theoretical level, offering ways of conceptualizing the problematic notions of origin and commencement. The middle section provides readings of individual texts (from Tristram Shandy to the hypertext novel These Waves of Girls) that represent interesting case studies in the history of beginning. The final section of the study, which mediates between theory and practice, reinscribes familiar notions about the relationship between beginning and ending that often emerge in discussions of narrative unity and closure. Editorially, the selection of essays carefully insures that the focus on beginnings and origins apprehends a wide range of cultural, ideological, and historical areas. In this way, beginning is shown to bear equally on the areas of philosophy, politics, history, gender, and race.

Although it receives a good deal of attention, the theory of beginning does not advance particularly far in the course of these essays. Very often, the attempts to describe or analyze it at the largest level, at the level of the purely theoretical, settle eventually into a single formulation: beginnings are both arbitrary and elusive. While Richardson’s introduction admirably sketches the development of narrative beginnings from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first and while it describes the modernist moment as a turning point in the history of narrative openings, only Niels Busch Leander’s contribution accounts for this notion of beginning’s elusiveness as a particularly modern phenomenon, as something endemic to a modern sensibility. As Leander notes, successive ages understand the concepts of beginnings and origins separately. The poststructuralist assault on meaning, at least as it emerges from Derrida, has at its core a rejection of the originary logos. But even here, one would need some theory as to why this should be the case, some theoretical suggestion about why our age no longer has faith in beginnings and sees them as endlessly regressive. Although he is not invoked in the collection, George Steiner provides one possible answer. According to him, the modern world, particularly after 1945, loses faith in the efficacy of ending. The return to origins that this apostasy precipitates carries with it the concomitant suspicion that beginnings are no longer resolute or steadfast, that they no longer extend into moments of revelation. If this logic is to be followed, then the sense of beginning that this study addresses is actually inextricable from the alternate sense of ending that has historically come to dominate it.

Throughout Narrative Beginnings, a slight complication emerges at the level of nomenclature. Owing in part to the fact that the discourse of narrative beginnings is still relatively nascent, there is as of yet no shared vocabulary for parceling out the differences between various aspects of beginning—for distinguishing, for instance, the functional beginning of a story from the originary instant that sets it in motion. In the course of the essays, we are therefore introduced to a series of terms (“start,” “origin,” “launch,” “initiation,” “causal beginning”) that attempt to apprehend these nuanced distinctions. Navigating from one essay to the next often requires a process of translation that can allow the various ideas about beginning, especially when they overlap, to come into alignment.

Drawing on both reader-response criticism (which often considers the cultural understanding that a reader brings to text) and advances in narrative theory, the opening section of the book focuses on the material that surrounds the act of beginning proper. In “Before the Beginning: Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface,” Marilyn Edelstein investigates the relationship between...