"Bégayer la langue"—Stammering Language

"Bégayer la langue"—Stammering Language Jean-Jacques Lecercle 1. Incipit L ET ME BEGIN with an unashamed value judgement, which is also a confession. The best incipit I know is the first sentence of Beckett's Murphy: (1) The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. This is indeed a gem: a king in incipitdom, a paragon of incipithood, the climax in a long progression in incipitity. How easily it outshines the trivial opening of "longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure." Who wants to bother about going to bed early when the sun is shining so bright, when the revelation of me poetic event leaves the reader dazzled. Yet, this incipit, which is clearly the best, is also me worst: the monument is a ruin. Trivial as it appears at first sight, the humble going to bed does an excellent job. It contains, as a word within a word, the crucial word "temps," thus announcing a "recherche," and of some length too, since that time is "long." In other words, it initiates a narrative programme, which it will take many tomes to fulfill; it is redolent with presupposition (the tense of the verb indicates that the process is no longer current—but why?) and duly provokes questions and expectations. Not so with Beckett's incipit. Because it is a gem; it is entirely self-sufficient , cut off from any context (it could be the incipit to a parody of the adventures of Tarzan). It has all me qualities of a self-quotation: it is not the first link in a narrative chain, but a fragment, an aphorism, what the French call "une sentence," that is, a maxim. It stands alone at the threshold of die text, but not actually as a threshold, not even as an outpost, rather as a statue, independent of the rest of the edifice. Or again, to change the metaphor, it does not engage the maculate conception of a fictional world; it is not, as a good incipit always is, the annunciation to an expectant reader of the imminent birth of a narrative universe. It does indeed seem to start with the optimism of the narrative incipit, through a confident tÃ-ietic statement, "the sun shone," that is, not with etymological adumbration, but with the promise of a bright new world (this is not the beginning of the creation scene in Frankenstein: "It was on a dreary night of November..."). But it immediately takes it back, tÃ-irough Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4 109 L'Esprit Créateur the immemorial trick of negation. Yet, this negation is not used to create atmosphere, as in the famous incipit to Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day," but it has semiotic value, an abyme commentary on the incipit by itself: "no alternative" implies no choice, therefore no Saussurean value, therefore no meaning. This is far worse than Jane Eyre: this meta-narrative negation scuttles the ship of words that has just been launched—a self-destroying incipit that immediately ruins the expectations it evokes. Yet, I have not changed my mind, and I would like to maintain that this is the best incipit ever. In order to grasp both aspects of this paradoxical reaction , let me explicate the three paradoxes implicated in the incipit. First, an incipit is supposed to introduce the theme of the narrative by answering as many as possible of the following rhetorical questions: quis, quid, ubi, quando, cur, quomodo. This our incipit signally fails to do. It only answers one, quando, and in terms so vague and trivial ("the sun shone") as to be totally uninformative. Even the incipit to Tess of the d'Urbervilles, "On an evening in the latter part of May...," does better than that. Yet, paradoxically , the very triviality of this quando becomes an asset when through the work of figurality it becomes a quis, a personification, an allegory; this sun which has no alternative may be as sulky as it is sultry—it is the hero that one expects in the first sentence of a novel. By "figurality" I mean what Laurent Jenny calls "le figurai,'" the linguistic twist that...