Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

13. The Beginning of Beloved

13 The Beginning of Beloved A Rhetorical Approach J A M E S P H E L A N This essay locates narrative beginnings within a rhetorical theory of narrative, develops an approach to beginnings that pays attention to both textual dynamics and readerly dynamics, and then analyzes the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Rhetorical theory defines narrative as somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened. The theory further postulates that narrative is a form in which an implied author draws on or invents the appropriate textual and intertextual resources to convey a multi-leveled communication about the something that happened to an implied audience . In this view, then, narrative is not just a structure of meanings but also an act that engages and seeks to influence its audience’s understanding , emotions, and ethics. Rhetorical theory also notes that individual historical readers can seek to join that implied audience—or, to use Peter J. Rabinowitz’s term, authorial audience—and thus share the experiences offered by narrative. Thus, when I speak of readerly dynamics here I am speaking of the activities of the authorial audience. Narrative progression is the concept that rhetorical theory uses to refer to the double movement of narrative from its inception to its ending, a movement of characters and events (or textual dynamics) and a movement of audience response (or readerly dynamics). Progression , in this sense, is the synthesis of a narrative’s textual dynamics and readerly dynamics. Thus, within a rhetorical theory of narrative, an adequate account of beginnings, middles, and ends must provide a means for giving us access to both kinds of dynamics. I have chosen to use Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the focus for my 196 J A M E S P H E L A N development of the concept of beginnings, because it provides both a welcome invitation and a healthy challenge to the rhetorical approach. It is inviting because it clearly is a narrative act that has designs on its audience, but it is just as clearly a complex act whose designs are not easy to pin down. Among the chief questions it raises are these: Why does Morrison choose a narrator who opens the novel with such a dense and difficult- to-process exposition? In particular, why does Morrison choose to make the temporality of the action and of the telling difficult to track? Does Morrison expect her audience to believe in ghosts? Why does the narrator introduce so many possible threads for the narrative to follow in such a short space? I will attempt to address these questions after setting out my rhetorical approach to beginnings in particular and progressions in general.1 Previous narrative theory, for the most part, has emphasized the textual rather than the readerly side of narrative beginnings. Aristotle tells us in his wonderfully logical way that a beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else and that which has naturally something else after it. Structuralist theorists, following Propp, identify the beginning with the introduction of a lack. Psychoanalytic critics such as Peter Brooks view the beginning as the initiation of narrative desire. In my previous work on narrative progression, Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), I identified the beginning as that part of a narrative which introduces unstable relationships between characters (instabilities) or between the reader and the author or narrator (tensions ). Local instabilities are those whose resolution does not signal the completeness of the progression; global instabilities are those that provide the main track of the progression and must be resolved for a narrative to attain completeness. (Of course, not all narratives seek completeness in this sense.) The first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, for example, uses local instabilities—the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet about whether Mr. Bennet will visit the new tenant of Netherfield Park—even as it communicates the global instability: the arrival of the single man of good fortune into the neighborhood. The one theorist who has emphasized the readerly side of beginnings, Peter Rabinowitz, has been less concerned with identifying beginnings proper than with pointing out that, before reading, we are already The Beginning of Beloved 197 equipped with conventional “rules of notice” that mark the initial features of texts—titles, first sentences, first chapters—as deserving special emphasis. These different perspectives obviously have much...