Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

7. A Theory of Narrative Beginnings and the Beginnings of “The Dead” and Molloy

7 A Theory of Narrative Beginnings and the Beginnings of “The Dead” and Molloy B R I A N R I C H A R D S O N The central theoretical question surrounding this topic is precisely what constitutes the beginning of a narrative. I argue in this essay that there are three distinct kinds of beginnings: one in the narrative text (syuzhet), one in the story as reconstructed from the text (fabula), and one in the prefatory and framing material provided by the author that circumscribes the narrative proper (authorial antetext). There is also what may be called an “institutional antetext” that frames (or attempts to frame) the book before it is read. In nearly all cases, there is no ambiguity concerning the beginning of the syuzhet: it is the first page of the narrative proper. It is perhaps the very fixity of the syuzhet that is the ground for play with beginnings in the other two areas. It should be noted, however, that recently several new kinds of narrative have appeared that dislodge this stability. There is the “novel in the box” by Marc Saporta (Composition #1, 1962), a series of unnumbered autonomous pages which the reader is invited to shuffle before reading. Ana Castillo’s epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters extends the compositional technique of Cortàzar’s Hopscotch and offers different points of entry for different readers: cynics are advised to begin with the second letter, while the quixotic are told to begin with the third. Many hypertext novels have several possible points of entry, as Jessica Laccetti demonstrates later in this volume. The question of exactly where the fabula begins is, by contrast, a 114 B R I A N R I C H A R D S O N difficult one to determine with precision. Is it the chronologically first dramatized scene, narrated incident, mentioned act, or inferable event? Each possible answer is problematic. Meir Sternberg states that the beginning of the fabula of The Ambassadors is the first narrated event in the history of Lambert Strether. He does not indicate the criterion he uses for this determination, nor does he consider other possibilities of establishing the origin of the fabula, such as the earliest disclosed event in the history of Strether’s family, or those surrounding the other families involved in this story. Neither does he mention the difficulties that would be posed by more ambiguous, recessive, or unretrievable beginnings of the fabula in more elusive texts. Even a seemingly straightforward example can reveal how hard it is to come up with a definitive beginning that does not require several interpretive decisions that are unlikely to be agreed on by most readers. Let us start with a text that contains several references to the past, Joyce’s “The Dead,” and ask where its story begins. If our definition is that of dramatized scenes, as Romagnolo claims in her essay in this volume, then it begins as the guests are arriving at the party at the Morkans’: with one partial exception at the beginning of the text, there are no analepses; the entire narrative is told in a completely linear manner, as any reference to the past comes from memory or a conversation in the “narrative present tense.” But this response is clearly inadequate, since the point of the story is the revelation of a significant past event, the death of Michael Furey, and its powerful transformation of the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. This centerpiece of the story, narrated by Gretta, would have to be part of the fabula, I believe. Otherwise, to take another example, all the past events of Oedipus’s life would not be part of the fabula of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; this is clearly an unsatisfactory conclusion, since the story has to stretch at least as far back as the prophecy which stated that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. Mieke Bal is one of the few theorists to discuss this possibility; she calls it an “embedded fabula that explains and determines the primary fabula” (144). However, I suspect this ingenious delineation will seem inadequate to most theorists: to refer to the cause of the central story as an embedded fabula would seem to imply that it might not be the same story simply because it is disclosed A Theory of Narrative Beginnings 115 by a character’s speech...