Herman Melville opens Moby Dick with an abrupt, direct appeal to his readers: ‘Call me Ishmael.’ A splendid beginning, justifiably famous. We already know what the book will be: a narration of events experienced by a man like us, who speaks to us; a man with a story, who takes a borrowed name, as if to say one name is no better or worse than any other. Or perhaps – if we consider him more closely – a man inclined to take a moniker freighted with biblical resonances, because in the story he has to tell us, the core of moral symbolism matters more than the outer crust of events; he asks us to call him Ishmael because with this name, we come closer to the vital nucleus of the tale.
Could you ask for an opening greyer, more conventional, more neutral – at first glance – than Stendhal’s in The Red and the Black? Stendhal writes: ‘The little town of Verrières may be considered among the comeliest in all Franche-Comté.’ Is this not the banality of a tour guide? It is plain to see that Monsieur Beyle, who signed his name Stendhal, used to read a half-hour of the good dry prose of the Napoleonic Code before settling down to write from one day to the next. The beginning of The Red and the Black, which seems so anodyne, is a rigorous artifice of genius: it announces an implacable, impeccable neutrality, a refined and deliberate – but inwardly taut – capacity for exposition that will reveal, as in the quote from Danton we read in the novel’s frontispiece, ‘the truth, the bitter truth’.
And Proust? In a novel built of long phrases, ample periods – volutes, arabesques, calligraphy of mind and senses – the first brief sentence has something almost Stendhalian in its precision: ‘When I was young, I used to go to bed early.’ Another masterly example of apparent triviality, because what Proust does with this first phrase – which, as we know, he didn’t settle on before sketching out and revising many drafts – is immobilise the attention, fix it in a zone of experience – the bedtime hour, the moment of struggle against insomnia and the specters of memory – that presents, in miniature, the entire process he will lay out through the three thousand long pages of his work: that of a man faced with a moral spectacle set before him by memory.
Beyond simple neutrality, we have the beginning of Kafka’s The Castle: ‘It was late evening when K. arrived.’ The maximum of information in the least number of words: an individual, known only by the initial K., has made a journey, has left, has arrived at some place not clear to us; when he gets there, it is already almost dark; all this, moreover, happens in a not very concrete past, which may be the conventional past of the majority of novels, but may also – bare and abstract as it is – points toward something else. Where did K. come from? Where did he arrive to? When did all of this occur? Might it be now, when we are reading? We will finish The Castle without answers to these questions this first line provokes. Perhaps the response is inside us. K. doesn’t reach the castle, and the novel remains unfinished, because the world is circular, and the past tense of K.’s arrival is the present tense of our arrival at the book. K. is us.
25 March 1980