In my previous post I discussed a figure of speech which, so far as I know, had never up till then been described or named. In this figure the last word of a clause (or nearly the last word) is repeated and then expanded upon to provide some explanation or expansion or specification. I have given this figure the name “explanatory epizeuxis”. Here’s an example from Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady: “It [the house] stood upon a low hill, above the river—the river being the Thames at some forty miles from London.” Here the initial statement is general—the river could be any river—and the explanatory epizeuxis specifies exactly which river and where.
In general, we name a figure if it is fairly common and if it has a distinctive form, a form that stands out from the ordinary run of a sentence. Explanatory epizeuxis is not rare; it’s easy to find examples. I’m not sure why this figure has never been noted or defined or named. The point of naming it is to give it a place in your mental catalogue so you can think about it and perhaps even learn to use it yourself.
In this post I want to describe and name another figure: a figure of narrative rather than a Figure of Speech, because it’s likely to be found in narrative rather than in oratory. I call this an Alarm Clock Beginning. Here are a dozen examples:
From Richard Wright’s Native Son: “Brrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman’s voice sang out impatiently: ‘Bigger, shut that thing off!’” (3)
From Willa Cather’s One of Ours: “Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.” (3)
From Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: “A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.” (1)
From Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov: “In his apartment in Gorokhovaya Street, in one of those large houses with a population the size of an entire town, Ilya Ilych Oblomov was lying in bed one morning.” (21)
An Alarm-Clock Beginning may be less terse than the preceding examples, as we see in Robert Silverberg’s Shadrach in the Furnace: “It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital of the reconstituted world. For some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at a glowing green circlet in the wall that is the face of his data screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day: MONDAY 14 May 2012.” (9)
José Saramago’s Skylight begins as Silvestre wakes up: “Through the swaying veils filling his sleep came the clatter of crockery, and Silvestre could almost swear that light was beginning to filter through the loose weft of those veils. Just as he was starting to feel slightly irritated, he realized suddenly that he was waking up. He blinked several times, yawned, then lay quite still, as he felt sleep slowly moving off.” (1) The description of his waking continues for several paragraphs.
From Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double: “It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning when the titular councillor Yakov Petrovich Goliadkin came to after a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes all the way. For some two minutes, however, he lay motionless on his bed, like a man who is not fully certain whether he is awake or still asleep, whether what is happening around him now is a reality or a continuation of the disordered reveries of his sleep. Soon, though, Mr. Goliadkin’s senses began to receive their usual everyday impressions more clearly and distinctly.”
A One-Day novel may appropriately begin with the beginning of the day. John Barth’s The Floating Opera, a One-Day book, has an initial chapter of introductory comments that aren’t really narrative; the alarm-clock beginning opens the second chapter: “I suppose I must have waked at six o’clock, that morning in 1937 (I’m going to call it June 11). I had spent a poor night—this was the last year of my prostrate trouble. I’d got up more than once to smoke a bit, or walk around my room, or jot some notes for my Inquiry, or stare out the window at the Post Office, across High Street from the hotel. Then I’d managed to fall asleep just before sunrise, but the light, or whatever, popped me awake on the tick of six, as it does every morning.” (9)
Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, another One-Day novel, begins as the protagonist, George, wakes up in the morning: “Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home” (4).
The beginning of Natsume Soseki’s And Then (Translated from the Japanese by Norma Moore Field; Perigee Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York, New York; 1982) is a meditation on time and mortality. The first sentence of the novel I take to be the ending of a dream, as the sound of footsteps are taken over into the dream world: “As hurried footsteps clattered past the gate, a pair of large clogs hung suspended from the sky. When the footsteps grew distant, the clogs slipped quietly away and vanished. Daisuke awoke. ¶ Turning to the head of his bed, he noticed a single camelia blossom that had fallen to the floor. He was certain he had heard it drop during the night; the sound had resounded in his ears like a rubber ball bounced off the ceiling. Although he thought this might be explained by the silence of the night, just to make sure that all was well with him, he had placed his right hand over his heart. Then, feeling the blood pulsating correctly at the edge of his ribs, he had fallen asleep. ¶ For some time, he gazed vacantly at the color of the large blossom, which was nearly as large as a baby’s head. Then, as if he had just thought of it, he put his hand to his heart and once again began to study its beat. [. . .] This was life, he thought. Now, at this very moment, he held in his grasp the current of life as it flowed by. To his palm it felt like the ticking of a clock. But it was more, it was a kind of alarm that summoned him to death. If only it were possible to live without hearing this bell—if only his heart did not measure out time as well as blood—then how carefree he would be! (1)
Soseki here is drawing out the unspoken implications of many Alarm-Clock Beginnings. The ticking of the narrative clock is the beating of the heart.
Edith Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense begins not as the day begins, but as Kate Clephane’s day begins. “Kate Clephane was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed. It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in the third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l’Univers: that the morning sun came in her window, and yet didn’t come too early. ¶ No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too many lost joys. . . .” (3) The final chapter of the novel (Chapter XXX) begins with another morning, to form a ring with the beginning: “Kate Clephane was wakened by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed. ¶ The hotel was different, it was several rungs higher on the ladder than the Minorque et l’Univers, as its name—the Petit Palais—plainly indicated.” (261)
Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine begins on the first day of summer in 1928, as the young boy Douglas Spaulding seems to bring the world to life: “It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness, and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer. ¶ Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early morning stream. Lying in this third story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind, the grandest tower in town.” At the window in this tower room, Douglas performs a kind of ritual magic: “He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath, and exhaled.”
The end of Dandelion Wine is the end of a cycle, as indicated by ring composition: at the beginning of the book Douglas wakes the world, and at the end he puts it back to sleep: “Douglas, spending a last night in the cupola tower above Grandma and Grandpa, wrote in his tablet: “Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films sometimes, where people jump out of water onto diving boards. Come September, you push down the windows you pushed up, take off the sneakers you put on, pull on the hard shoes you threw away last June. ¶ Douglas, in the high cupola above the town, moved his hand. “Everyone, clothes off!” He waited. The wind blew, icing the window pane. ¶ “Brush teeth.” ¶ He waited again. ¶ “Now,” he said at last, “out with the lights!” [. . .] ¶ June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. [. . .]¶ So thinking, he slept. ¶ And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.”
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses, both One-Day novels, begin early in the morning but not with a character waking up, so I would probably not include them in the list. I’m sure there are more instances of this figure, but this collection is enough to justify giving it a name. I don’t imagine that writers learn to use this figure from textbooks. The idea is natural enough to occur to different writers spontaneously, but it’s also possible that one writer could borrow this figure from another, perhaps unconsciously. Although all these count as instances of the figure, they differ, and it is interesting to see how different writers use the figure differently. We would not appreciate the differences if we did not notice the similarities. All these examples come from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the earliest of these is from Dostoevsky’s The Double, published in 1846. (I don’t count Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” formula, since it doesn’t come at the beginning of either epic. It does come at the beginning of some books (Od. 2, for instance, or Od. 8; cf. Od. 5), but the book divisions are probably not original.) If you know of other examples, especially earlier ones, please let me know and I will add them to my collection.
The Art of Reading Slowly 