Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

14. Connecting Links

14 Connecting Links Beginnings and Endings A R M I N E K O T I N M O R T I M E R In a coherent system, beginnings lead to endings, and endings determine how we understand beginnings. Our concept of the novel as the locus of a fictive world includes a strong expectation of coherence. As Peter Rabinowitz writes, “by the general rule of conclusive endings, readers are invited to revise their understanding of the beginning of the text so that the ending, which at first seems a surprise, turns out to be in fact prefigured” (305). Rabinowitz also posits an innate need for closure: “there is a general tendency in most reading to apply rules of coherence in such a way that disjunctures are smoothed over so that texts are turned into unified wholes—that is, in a way that allows us to read so that we get the satisfaction of closure. This interpretive technique is taught explicitly in school; and it may be connected to an innate psychological drive for closure” (310–11). In her inaugural work, Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith always understood that the reader’s perception of closure was a function of the whole of the poem (4). With these unifying premises in mind, I will confront beginnings and endings in examples of French novels, to describe a combined construct of “beginning-and-ending.” We are no longer in the dark about narrative closure, because a large number of books and colloquia have brought considerable illumination to the topic, but the relations of beginnings to endings is less well understood. The French novelist and critic Julien Gracq (1910–2007) posed the problem of beginnings in acute terms by alluding to Archimedes’ fulcrum, the ultimate starting point: 214 A R M I N E K O T I N M O R T I M E R The truth is that the sum of unredeemable decisions, whether abrupt or subtle, implied by any first page is enough to set one’s head spinning. . . . The beginning of a work of fiction may well have no other real objective than to create something irremediable , a fixed anchor point, a fact of resistance that the mind cannot budge. For in the problematic of fiction, there is a problem that arises before all others, which is left unexamined; it is none other than Archimedes’ fulcrum: from what basis can we push off to get outside the enclosure of the evasive, the substitutable, the fluctuating? (109–10) To achieve a definite starting point by creating a fiction, the novelist can only ignore the mystery of how one can create, at the beginning of beginnings, something which can then become opaque to one’s own mind—and this with nothing more than the hands, according to Gracq. Beginnings are therefore difficult to study on their own terms, because nothing comes before. Given that the beginning is the thing that makes the ending possible at all, the initiator of the ending can be called the connecting link (the “and” of my title). Rabinowitz has identified as “the second metarule of configuration” a convention that “leads us to expect balance in a text, to expect that the ending will somehow be prefigured in the beginning” (304–5). Beginnings and endings of novels bespeak the period in which the novels were written; for instance, we can speak of “romantic closures” defining a certain style of novels of the nineteenth century or the “open endings” so characteristic of the narratives of the 1960s. An eighteenth-century novelist begins with a “genealogy” and a twentieth-century novelist plunges in in medias res, leaving it up to the reader to sort out who is speaking or what the situation is. Given that all works of fiction start and end, what is interesting is the fact that there are many different ways to start and end and to join the beginning to the ending. In an approach to addressing this relationship, I will skim some theoretical ground and discuss three different moments of French literature. But instead of examples that defy conventions, my examples will confirm them, showing how the ending is prefigured in the beginning, whatever their forms. Connecting Links 215 In Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, the link between beginnings and endings is typically very solid. To best illustrate this, I...