Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

Part Two: Beginnings in Narrative Literature

*P A R T T W O Beginnings in Narrative Literature In the modern era, theorists of beginnings have generally gravitated toward one of three positions: first, the attempt to establish a fixed point where the sequence of events commences; second, the identification of two opposed trajectories that writers must navigate between; and third, the hypothesis that all beginnings are somehow arbitrary, fabricated, or illusory. In the first category, Vladimir Propp imagined folktales as discrete entities with unambiguous starting points (“The king sends Ivan after the princess”). The subsequent structuralist tradition would continue to articulate story beginnings in a similar fashion. Todorov would formalize Propp’s analysis into the general claim that an initial state of equilibrium is disturbed by the introduction of a serious disequilibrium ; the narrative then attempts to reestablish a new equilibrium that is similar to but not identical with the original state (50–52). Other structuralists (Bremond, Prince) would employ comparable formulations, as would Peter Brooks in his study of plot. This general stance would also inform cognitive approaches as well as work in the social sciences, for example, the positions of J. M. Mandler and Nancy Stein, both of whom stress the establishment of the setting and the initiating event (see Stein and Policastro 113–27 for an overview of these and related positions). Meir Sternberg, in his seminal account of narrative exposition, gives signal importance to the first scene represented in a narrative: this establishes the work’s “fictive present”; all temporally prior material belongs to the exposition, regardless of where it appears in the text. “The exposition always constitutes the 80 P A R T T W O beginning of the fabula, the first part of the chronologically ordered sequence of motifs as reconstructed by the reader,” he writes, “but it is not necessarily located at the beginning of the sujet” (13–14). Using the example of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Sternberg states that “the beginning of the fabula is the earliest event in Strether’s history that we learn about in the course of the novel (namely, his marriage); while the beginning of the sujet coincides, of course, with the beginning of the first chapter” (9–10). The most comprehensive work that delineates a number of distinct starting points is that of Phelan, who, as will be seen in the final section of this volume, outlines four different starting points in narrative: the exposition or setting; the launch or opening instability that sets the plot in motion; the initiation or commencement of engagement between author or narrator and audience; and the entrance, which initiates the reader’s entrance into the narrative proper. In her essay in this section, Catherine Romagnolo offers an equally thorough modeling of the various types of beginnings and also includes a category for thematic beginnings, since works that foreground formal beginning strategies regularly interweave thematic discussions of origins into their texts. This daring move helps push narrative theory toward a constructivist perspective that refuses to separate strategies of narrative composition from the larger conceptual issues that inspire those techniques. In the second category, Edward Said distinguishes between the more active individual establishment of a beginning with the more passive acceptance of a communal or official origin. He points to the seemingly contradictory nature of beginnings, which seem to be always already predetermined and yet, at the same time, to effect a break from that which precedes them. In this section, Gaura Shankar Narayan traces the struggle within Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to contest originary narratives while establishing an ironic starting point for his stories of the birth and growth of an individual and a nation. In a similar vein, Carlos Riobo’s essay, “Heartbreak Tango: Manuel Puig’s Counter-Archive,” identifies the common desire among many Latin American “boom” novelists to establish an origin in a Spanish colonial archive with which to ground their fictions and shows how Puig’s work disrupts this project. Beginnings in Narrative Literature 81 Stephen Kellman, in his study of opening lines of a work, has posited a different opposition, noting that opening lines generally do one of two things: either “thrust us immediately into the text or . . . retard our encounter until we are prepared for it” (146). In Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel, A. D. Nuttall outlines a comparable though rather more cosmic dichotomy, the “artificial” versus the “natural...