Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

4. September 1939

4 September 1939 Beginnings, Historical Narrative, and the Outbreak of World War II P H I L I P P E C A R R A R D As James Phelan has observed in his overview of the scholarship bearing on how novels open and close, “beginnings have received less attention from theorists than endings” (97). Phelan restricts his presentation to works that deal with fiction, but his remark is even more relevant to the type of narrative that Gérard Genette calls “factual” (67): texts such as histories, biographies, and newspaper reports, that is, texts that recount real events and claim to recount them as they actually occurred. Indeed, with a few exceptions (to which I will return later), theorists have not investigated beginnings in factual narratives. Like Hayden White, they have examined how those narratives are organized , but mostly they have scrutinized endings, arguing that even when a story is made of real events and situations, the way it closes is especially significant; for it is the last stage in the plot that confers meaning upon that story, making it—to use White’s categories—into a tragedy, a comedy, a romance, or a satire. My purpose is to fill part of this void by looking at the way factual narratives get started. Limiting my inquiry to historical studies, I will review three of the questions that such studies are raising, namely: On what strategies do historians rely in order to launch their accounts? Are beginnings especially arbitrary in historical writing? And do historians reflect on that arbitrariness, as novelists occasionally do? I take my examples from histories of World War II, more precisely, in histories of that war that are structured as narratives. For not all historical studies tell stories. In this instance, some works about World War II 64 P H I L I P P E C A R R A R D follow specific themes (e.g., Marc Ferro’s Questions sur la IIe Guerre mondiale) or develop an argument (e.g., Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won). They, as a result, do not unfold along temporal lines, posing problems that are different from the ones I plan to take up here. Literary theorists disagree as to what constitutes a novel’s actual “beginning.” Some (e.g., Verrier) locate this unit in the paratext; others (e.g., Gollut and Zufferey), in the first sentence of the text; others still (e.g., Sternberg), in an “exposition” that can be delayed or distributed throughout the work. By “beginning” I mean here the first lines or paragraphs of the text itself. However, because historical studies often include a paratext that cannot be ignored, I will mention the presence of such entities as the preface, the foreword, and the introduction when they play a role in the narrative the historian is conducting. The Modalities of Historical Beginnings The distinction story-discourse, under this form or another (e.g., fabula-syuzhet), has been standard in narratology. Theorists have recently challenged its value, arguing that the dichotomy between the chronological order of the events and the actual disposition of those events in the narrative does not account for the specificity of many modern and postmodern texts, which are characterized by their “fuzzy temporality” (Herman 212). My assumption is that the opposition story-discourse is still useful to describe historical narratives but that it must be supplemented with a third component, which Dorrit Cohn calls “reference” (112): the documentary apparatus that constitutes the base for such narratives, warranting their claim to represent a real past. From the standpoint of narrative theory, “reference” differs from “story” in that it lies outside the text. The Treaty of Versailles and the people who signed it, for example, are constituents in studies of World War I; but they also exist in the archives, where the treaty can be consulted and the identity of the politicians who were involved in the negotiations can also be verified. The love letters sent by Emma Bovary, on the other hand, figure only in the narrative devised by Flaubert ; they are not reproductions of documents, and Emma herself has a textual, rather than a referential, existence. (While Flaubert supposedly September 1939 65 based his narrative on an actual case, he never made the historian’s claim to recount that case “as it actually occurred.”) As far as time is concerned, the documentary...