That Funny Thing Up Front
WHAT’S ALL THIS BUSINESS that happens before a book begins? I mean, forewords, prefaces, introductions, and prologues—who needs ’em? And why are there so many? To the first question, you do, fellow reader. And so do I. And to the second, they are multiple because of different functions. First, the easy one: “introduction” doesn’t mean anything except “up front.” It can be part of an article or book, labeled or not, written by the author or someone else, be part of the text of the book proper (that is, it will appear in every edition ever) or an appendage specific only to the edition at hand. If you’re like me, you may have spent much of your early academic career skipping intros by outsiders to get to the meaty part. That would be a mistake, but it rarely proves fatal.
From here, things get more specific, if not clearer to the civilian. Here’s the interesting thing: forewords, prefaces, and prologues are all the same thing etymologically, the “first word.” A foreword, whose origins are likely the German translation of the Latin “preface,” is front matter written by someone other than the author. Often, these forewords are appended to later editions of works, as when Famous Critic A writes a new foreword to Famous Novel B for a classroom edition of the novel. Forewords of this sort are fairly short; if they turn into fifty-page behemoths, they usually also turn into “introductions.” These instances differ from prologues and prefaces by not actually being part of the narrative or argument that is the author’s text. They are explainers, offering context or salient points to help readers on their way. A preface, from Latin and meaning something like “spoken before,” is front matter by the author to a book of nonfiction or fiction, narrative or otherwise. A prologue, from the Greek for—you guessed it—“the before word,” is most commonly prefatory material (see how hard this is?) for a fiction or nonfiction narrative. The differences between these last two are in the angels-dancing-on-pinheads category, so fine that mere mortals can’t distinguish. How, then, do you know if something written by the author is a preface or prologue? Easy: they tell you. The item will almost always bear a title, so just go with it.
So what does a prologue do? It gets you ready for what comes next. The original of the type was in the plays of Euripides, where the playwright’s representative (originally, likely the playwright himself) would come onstage and explain the backstory and setup. How to work in the contextual exposition—easy in fiction—has always bedeviled drama. Let’s face it, explaining stuff is boring. Euripides, one of the first playwrights, tried the obvious thing: just stand there and talk so you don’t have a lame first act. Starting with his near-contemporary Sophocles, writers tried to have a crisis in the first act so that our interest would be piqued enough that we would put up with the boring bits, as in the ghost business at the outset of Hamlet.
Swell. Plays. But nonfiction books are all exposition, so what’s the point of a piece of exposition up front? Do we really have to explain the explaining?
Actually, the prologue in a piece of nonfiction is sometimes narrative, not expository. And the purpose of that anecdote is a lot like the purpose of the prologue in a Euripides play: to set the stage, offer background, tell the audience how we got to this point. It may tell us who’s who in the story to come, or why this story matters, or why we will find reading it rewarding. Most of all, it will suggest why we should read on.
Consider The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown’s unlikely bestseller. In his prologue, Brown tells us how the book came to be, how a visit to an elderly neighbor he had never met, a man dying of congestive heart failure who in his youth had been one of nine young men—eight rowers and a coxswain—who pulled their way to glory in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, turned into a series of interviews and subsequent research that sought to place their achievement in its historical, sociological, and personal context. The quick story Brown tells focuses on the rowing, of course, with its camaraderie and suffering and sacrifice, but also on the remarkable physical feats of the old man, Joe Rantz, who among other things turned standing cedar trees up on a mountain into nearly half a mile of split rail fence around a pasture down in the valley below. By himself. In his mid-seventies. In something under two and a half pages of text, Brown hints at the dimensions of the story, the incredible hardships that Joe had to overcome in childhood and adolescence, the capacity for hard work that he displayed throughout his life, the huge emotional investment in “the boat” that, even after all these years, could bring him to tears, and the race against time the author faced to get all the information he could before it disappeared forever.
Read on? How could we refuse?
Not every prologue works this way. And despite Brown’s example, they may not all be called “prologue.” I incline toward “preface” myself, for no particular reason except habit, although it may also be because I intuited vaguely that “prologue” was more suited to narratives, which my books manifestly are not. Here are some ways that different authors handle the issue:
Is that the entire list of options? I’m sure not. But what all of these (aside from the last two, which are opt-outs) have in common is that they are brief, somewhere between a squib and a chapter, and that they try to provide a glimpse into some aspect of what’s to come. That may mean any combination of who, what, why, and how, with maybe a touch of when and where. But mostly, it’s a come-on, a letter of seduction to prospective readers.
The writer of a prologue is under twin obligations, first to write something that will entice and tantalize, and second to make sure the rest of the book lives up to the promissory note that draws us in. In exchange, readers are under an obligation to give that prologue the attention it deserves. We do well to remember that the prologue—or preface or personal note or whatever the author chooses to call it—is not an afterthought tacked onto the front of the book; it is a planned part of the book itself, acting as a springboard on which readers can dive into the rest of the text.