Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

Introduction Narrative Beginnings

The beginning is a foundational element of any narrative, fictional or nonfictional, public or private, official or subversive. The full importance of beginnings, however, has long been neglected or misunderstood and is only recently becoming known. Currently, only a handful of studies address this surprisingly rich and elusive subject. Others, many of them represented in this volume, are now starting to give beginnings the historical, theoretical, and ideological analysis they require. This critical and theoretical neglect is particularly surprising given the power beginnings possess for the act of reading. There is no doubt that even casual readers remember for decades salient beginning sentences , as the following memorable openings confirm: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”; “Call me Ishmael”; “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heur”; “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”; “I am an invisible man”; “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” Such a list (which could be extended considerably) attests to the conceptual and emotional power concentrated in resonant opening lines of works that move us. Or even that no longer move us: although Camus is rapidly falling out of the canon, the first words of The Stranger continue to reverberate: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Two key moments in the history of literature continue to resonate among narrative beginnings: one is Tristram Shandy’s unfortunate conception, birth, and christening, which dooms him to be out of order for the rest of his life. This is accompanied by the nonchronological I N T R O D U C T I O N Narrative Beginnings 2 I N T R O D U C T I O N presentation of the rest of the story, including an array of temporally anterior episodes that threaten to undermine the possibility of establishing a fixed beginning point in the story, or fabula. This regressive narration is in turn paralleled by the unconventional placement of normally prefatory paratextual material throughout the text (most notoriously, the author’s preface appears in the middle of the third volume). Sterne’s practice would rapidly become an irresistible model for subsequent authors who played with chronology and beginnings, from Lord Byron and Alexander Pushkin to Salman Rushdie and Alasdair Gray. The second key moment is the famous pause before the first stroke of Lily Briscoe’s paintbrush in To the Lighthouse: She took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin? that was the question; at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; . . . Still the risk must be run; the mark made. With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. (Woolf 157–58) Woolf here articulates key psychological and compositional implications of beginning an artwork; intriguingly, they do not match up at all with her own inspired beginning of To the Lighthouse (she wrote the first twenty-two pages “straight off in less than a fortnight” [Lee 471]) but correspond better with the difficult beginning of Mrs Dalloway , which required several drafts. A brief glance at the variety of beginnings that have been deployed in the history of literature will help frame the essays that follow. Examples from drama can offer a helpful vantage point to view the range of possible beginnings: a Chekhov play will begin in the most ordinary, even undramatic manner; alternatively, an audience may be plunged deeply in medias res, as in the opening lines of Webster’s The Duchess Narrative Beginnings 3 of Malfi, where the protagonist, Bosola, walks onstage and shouts, incredulously, “Banished?!” A more or less creaky scene to provide the necessary exposition may be produced, as in the beginning of Sheridan’s The Rivals, where one character asks the other to explain what he is doing in the town of Bath. Such artificial expositions may be parodied, as in the overly elaborate and needlessly confusing opening of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Frame...