“In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. .”
Although it was first published before the three preceding essays, I’m placing this meditation on story-openers here so that its “dark and stormy night” will be followed by “The Morning After.”
“HAPPY FAMILIES ARE all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I don’t particularly agree with that famous kick-off proposition of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but I’ll carry it to my grave, along with a clutch of other jim-dandy story-openers.
A first sentence’s job is to draw its reader into the sentences that follow it — while at the same time, in the case of fiction, maybe establishing the tale’s tone and narrative viewpoint, introducing one or more of its characters, and supplying preliminary hints of setting, situation, and impending action. Some do their job so well that they remain in our memory long after we’ve forgotten most of the words that came after, even in a novel that may have changed our lives, or at least deeply engaged our minds and spirits in the way great literature can. A Tale of Two Cities, in this reader’s opinion, is neither the best nor the worst of Dickens’s novels, but it’s the only one whose opening—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. .”—has stayed with me. Likewise the so-casual “Call me Ishmael” that opens Melville’s Moby-Dick (the first time I met the novelist Ishmael Reed, he smiled and said, “Call me Mister Reed”), and García Márquez’s time-straddling fanfare to One Hundred Years of Solitude—“Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—and a dozen more, from the bibliophilic beagle Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night” in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip (a cliché opening by the 19th-century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which the poor mutt never gets beyond) to the slyly soporific first words of Marcel Proust’s multivolume Remembrance of Things Past: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”
“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure,” that last one reads in the original, and the poet/translator Richard Howard thought it sufficiently important to preserve that opening’s word-order, even at some slight cost to its sense, that he amended Scott-Moncrieff’s earlier translation to read “Time was when I went to bed early,” so that Volume One of Proust’s epic about Time begins (as it will end) with that key word — and then, seven volumes later, outflanks its subject by having “Marcel,” at the saga’s close, set about to write the time-intensive tale that we’ve finally finished reading: a story about a storyteller’s preparing himself to tell the story that we’ve just been exhaustively told.
If that sounds too clever by half — too vertiginously “metafictive” or proto-Postmodern — it has some distinguished and comparably dizzying antecedents, none more offhandedly cunning than the opening of “Scheherazade’s” Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah, or The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. English translations from the anonymous compiler’s 13th-century Persian vary considerably, but my two favorites — Sir Richard Burton’s freewheeling and footnote-rich 1888 version, and Mardrus and Mathers’s more rigorous one a half-century later — both begin by declaring (in effect, and much less directly), “Praise be to Allah, who has passed on to us the tales called The Thousand Nights and a Night, among which is. . [the story of Scheherazade’s telling her nightly postcoital tales to wean the cuckolded King from his serial-murderous revenge].” A double-take opener indeed: The book in our hands, whose introduction we’ve embarked upon, is not Scheherazade’s book, but a book about Scheherazade’s book, which will wind up multivolumes later (17 in Burton’s edition, a modest four in M&M’s) with the welcome news that King Shahryar relents, lifts his nearly three-year-old entertain-me-or-die ultimatum, marries Scheherazade (who has by that time delivered him three male heirs as well as a kilonightsworth of stories), and commands her to tell them all over again to the royal scribes — thus accounting not directly for the book we’re finally at the close of, but for the book that that book is about: “And this is all that has come down to us concerning the origins of this book.”1
Allah willing, Amen!
Which terminal imperative may remind us that this kind of ingenious once-upon-a-timery has been a storyteller’s ploy from the beginning, so to speak. Whether or not the God of the Bible ever winked at the devoted audience of His own creation, His chronicler in the Book of Genesis sure did: What subtle, pre-proto-Postmodern chutzpah, to kick off the story of the world’s beginning with the Hebrew word Bereshith, “In the beginning. .”—anticipating Proust’s merely Modernist “Time was” by nearly three millennia!2
But then, the bards of the classical Greek oral tradition, arguably coeval with Genesis if not with the world’s big-bang commencement, traditionally cleared their epic throats by saying, in effect, “Sing, O Muse, the tale that I’m here and now about to repeat: the one about [et cetera].” Which is not necessarily to say, “And while you’re at it, begin at the beginning, okay?” Better to hit the ground running in medias res: advice worth perpending still in Tale-Telling 101.3
A dozen-plus centuries later, at about the same time that the great Persian Anonymous was setting down the story of the story of Scheherezade’s stories, his or her fellow pre-Postmodernist Dante Alighieri, in exile from Florence, ratcheted up his countryman Horace’s advice by beginning his divinely comic epic not only in the middle of its narrator’s story instead of “In the beginning,” but with the very words Nel mezzo. “In the middle of our life’s road, I found myself lost in a Dark Wood”: a quietly bravura overture to a work whose form throughout will figure its three-in-one, unity-of-the-Trinity content, from the traditional division of the Hereafter into Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, through the allotment of (on average) 33 1/3 cantos to each of those departments, to the interlocking three-line stanzas’ terza rima versification. Three cheers, maestro!
Tough acts to follow. But a mere six centuries later, James Joyce completes the movement from Genesis’s “In the beginning” through Dante’s “In the middle” by beginning his dream-epic Finnegans Wake not with “The end” but with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”—which odd, lower-case opener (so we learn 627 dream-dark pages later, unless we’d heard the news already) is the completion of that cyclical opus’s unfinished closing sentence. In short, the author begins his story literally in the middle of its ending: a triple play at which Dante might have nodded approval, unless he’d nodded off. As a graduate student in the 1950s, I proposed in a Joyce seminar that the appropriate print-vehicle for Finnegans Wake would be not a conventionally bound book, but either a very long roller-towel or unnumbered pages fanning out from a central spindle, so that Beginning and Ending would literally conjoin.