Opening Lines: A Congeries of Reflections

Opening Lines: A Congeries of Reflections Michael Bérubé on Gravity's Rainbow (#3) A screaming comes across the sky: what screams? who screams? We do not know, the sentence will not tell us: for that matter, we must wait another eight paragraphs to learn that the sentence occurs in a dream, and much longer to learn that the dream is all too real. All we know now is that the screaming precedes the subject: a screaming comes across the sky, the screaming of the new V-2 rocket as it hits London. But the sentence—and the entire opening sequence of the novel—never names the V-2; the screaming is the subject. The rocket has, of course, struckby the time you hear its approach. And then the terrifying second sentence: "It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now": we still do not know what "it" is—the screaming is only its trace—and now we find that it cannot be likened to anything. We are in uncharted territory, without a referent and without the capacity to tell ourselves what the referent might be like. Something similar, if we can even use the term, is going on at the outset of Paradise Lost, where everything is unstable, and every utterance, every allusion, every analogy might go awry amidstthechaos. Forthis isHell: "you didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. ..." And yet the unnamed object is unlike anything else: cities were bombarded in the Great War, and the "strategic" murder of civilians had become part of modern warfare from the Gotha bombing attack on London in 1917 to the massacre in Guernica twenty years later. But von Braun's V-2 inaugurates a wholly new era—an era of advanced weapons systems developed under the rubric of Mutually Assured Destruction, an era of truly global war. No, there is nothing to compare it to now. Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University and the editor, most recently, ofThe Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell). Stephen Burn on Robinson Crusoe (#56) Anyone with a taste for lists (especially lists filled with errors) will appreciate one of the earliest list-obsessed novels: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, in which Crusoe's love of the catalogue overwhelms his ability to accurately regulate the contents of his lists. Defoe made it into my top ten because the principles of the list—objectivity, concision, maximum information—so thoroughly inform the first line of the novel. Defoe empties his opening of psychological or emotional intrigue to concentrate on amassing data. His words are like building blocks, slowly piecing together his narrator: the first six words pin the chronology; the next five, geography; four more assign Crusoe's class status; the next seventeen fill out genealogical details. It's a masterpiece ofconcision—afterjust thirty-two words the reader could already answer the question "who is Robinson Crusoe?" But Defoe isn't finished yet: sixteen more words refine his class status; the next six tell us that in the Crusoe family love is pursued after business (later, Crusoe's hasty marriage will remind us of this); then, having assured us about the worthiness of his other ancestors (twelve more words), the closing thirty-eight words provide an etymology of his name. The data embedded in this list-like line seems to promise that the book will achieve an encyclopedic account of everything that could possibly be known about Crusoe, but while that is a promise that Defoe is never able to fulfill, this is still an apt introduction because the sentence is so much like Crusoe himself. Most of Crusoe's history is a history of accumulation , eagerly grabbing as much as he can, regardless of actual need, and the opening line, with its many embedded clauses, is equally greedy: the line's fourteen commas are like Crusoe's eager hands, always enclosing more information, reminding the reader that what one has is never enough. Stephen Burn is the author o/David FosterWallace's Infinite Jest...