Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

2. Before the Beginning

2 Before the Beginning Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface M A R I L Y N E D E L S T E I N The few narrative theorists who analyze beginnings typically assume that a narrative’s beginning is to be found in its opening line, first paragraph, or first chapter. But what do we make of a work whose ostensible beginning (the beginning of the plot, of the primary narrative ) is itself preceded by something else—specifically, a preface or foreword? Is a preface part of the text? It is, for instance, part of the physical book when it is included within the book’s covers. It is part of the reader’s experience of the text as a whole, and when the reader reads the preface first it serves as the point of entry into the narrative. What do we make of such a liminal text, a text that precedes, initiates, and influences the reader’s experience of the subsequent narrative?1 Examining the few works in narrative theory that address prefaces and analyzing some of Vladimir Nabokov’s prefatory texts, especially in Lolita, can illuminate the difficulty of deciding when, where, and how a narrative actually “begins” and reveal much about authors’ relations to their texts and their readers. Prefaces to novels, while no longer oral, are like the exordia or proemia (introductions to speeches) in classical rhetoric—from which they derive—in that they allow manipulation of both the speaker/ author’s ethos or persona as well as of the audience’s reception of the text. Classical rhetorical treatises advise orators how to use the exordium or proem to make the audience attentive and receptive, to bring “the mind of the auditor into a proper condition to receive the rest of the speech” (Cicero 41; bk. 1, ch. 15). Prefaces to novels fulfill similar rhetorical functions,2 serving as a site for the author to 30 M A R I L Y N E D E L S T E I N “make his own character look right and put his hearers . . . into the right frame of mind” (Aristotle 90; Rhetoric, bk. 2, ch. 1, lines 22–24, emphasis added). Few authors have been as skillful as Nabokov in cleverly crafting an ethos designed to shape readings of not only their literary texts but of “the author himself.” Prefaces to novels exist on the threshold of the fictional world and on the borders between literature and literary theory or criticism. Novel prefaces are part of what Susan Sniader Lanser calls the “extra fictional structure” and what Gérard Genette calls the “paratext.” Lanser’s 1981 book The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction provided the first detailed analysis of the extrafictional and extratextual elements that shape reading of fictional narratives. In Lanser’s schema, an author’s preface would usually be extrafictional—outside the fictional world—but still intratextual—because a part of the total published text of the novel. Lanser distinguishes between the extra- fictional author a reader “builds” from such information as titles or prefaces and any extratextual information a reader may discover about the real historical author (122–24). In his 1987 book Seuils (translated into English in 1997 as Paratexts : Thresholds of Interpretation), which does not discuss Lanser’s pioneering work in the United States, Gérard Genette coined the term “paratext” to designate all those “auxiliary” discourses that surround, serve, and present a text.3 For Genette, the paratext includes both “epitext” and “peritext.” “Epitext” refers to auxiliary elements that are not physically part of the text but nonetheless “frame” it, such as an interview with the author, which Lanser would call “extratextual.”4 “Peritext” refers to elements that are physically part of the text, such as titles or epigraphs, as well as prefaces (4–5), which Lanser would call “extrafictional.”5 Many paratextual elements can influence readers’ expectations of and responses to works of fiction, starting with the author’s name on the book’s cover—especially when readers are already familiar with the author’s other works or even reputation. For instance, if the name on the cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were a woman’s instead, say “Margaret Atwood,” many readers might read Lolita as a scathing feminist critique of male objectification or consumption Before the Beginning 31 of Woman (or...