A while ago I wrote a post (“It’s Time to Wake Up!”) about what I called Alarm Clock Beginnings, when a novel starts first thing in the morning. In this post I look at another way to begin a novel, when a novel begins by specifying, in the first sentence or so, Time, Place, one or more Characters, and an Event that gets the narrative clock ticking. By Time, I don’t mean just clock time or calendar time, but time in its fullness, time which gives a moment its quality; and by Space I don’t mean just geographic space. An Event is anything that starts the narrative clock ticking. Examination of examples will clarify these ideas.
Consider the following passages, each one the first sentence or two of their respective novels (these are selected from novels I happen to own; I have included novels from a range of historical periods and languages and genres):
1. “It was on May 31 of last year, at Geneva’s Cointrin airport, that the man who called himself Charles Latimer disappeared.” (Eric Ambler, The Intercom Conspiracy)
2. “I arrived in St. Gratien from Nice on Tuesday, the 14th of August. I was arrested at 11:45 a.m. on Thursday, the 16th, by an agent de police and an inspector in plain clothes and taken to the Commissariat.” (Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy)
3. “On a cold December morning of the year 1612, a young man whose clothes looked threadbare was walking back and forth in front of a house in the rue des Grandes-Augustines, in Paris.” (Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece)
4. “In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale, California, a man was bracing trees.” (James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce)
5. “One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Daimant gazing down the broad empty river far below him.” (Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock).
6. “Early one evening, during an exceptional heat wave in the beginning of July, a young man walked out into the street from the closetlike room he rented on Stoliarny Place.” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment)
7. “I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she was sitting with three other people and came over to see me.” (Dashiel Hammett, The Thin Man)
8. “On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre”. (Henry James, The American)
9. “An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.” (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain)
10. “Christmas Eve, 1955. Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and a big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.” (Thomas Pynchon, V)
11. “This all started on a Saturday morning in May, one of those warm spring days that smell like clean linen. Delia had gone to the supermarket to shop for the week’s meals.” (Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years)
12. “On a pitch-black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometers of cobblestones running as straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.” (Émile Zola, Germinal)
13. “On the eve of Pentecost, when the companions of the Round Table were all assembled at Camelot, at the hour of none when the office was sung and the tables were being set up, a maiden of great beauty came riding into the hall.” (Anonymous, The Quest of the Holy Grail)
Here’s an example from non-fiction, from a history of the thirteenth century crusade against the heretical Albigensians in southern France:
14. “North of Arles, where the rive Rhône divides, a papal legate was assassinated on a January morning in 1208.” (Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade)
And one more; this one is the first couplet of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:
15. “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe”.
These passages are all different and also all the same: each one specifies a time, a place, one or more characters, and an event. The order of these elements varies, and they may be more or less specific, but all are present in each passage. Thus in the first passage, from Eric Ambler’s thriller The Intercom Conspiracy, the time is May 31 of last year, whenever last year was, the place is Geneva’s Cointrin airport, the person is a man who called himself Charles Latimore, and the occurrence is his disappearance. In passage 15, “Jabberwocky”, the time is “brillig”, the place is “in the wabe”, the characters are the “slithy toves”, and the action is “gyre and gimble”. In passage 13, from the anonymous Arthurian tale The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Time is the eve of Pentecost, the Place is Camelot, the Character is a maiden of great beauty, and the Event is her unexpected entrance. In the last passage, from Sumption’s history of the Albigensian Crusade, the Time is a January morning in 1208, the Place is North of Arles, where the rive Rhône divides, the Character is a papal legate, and the Event is his assassination. These texts come from different periods and from different literary genres, but they all begin with Time, Place, Character, and Event.
These four features are fundamental and essential elements of narrative: a story must occur at some time and over some time, it must occur in some place or in some places, it must involve one or more characters, and something has to happen. The time and place of a story may be specific, as in some realistic fiction, while a fairy tale or a fantasy or a science-fiction story may occur “once upon a time, once upon a place”. Even in a realistic story the time and place may be left only approximate.
These features—Time, Place, Character, and Event—are fundamental features of narrative, so it’s not surprising to find them indicated at the beginning of a novel. But many narratives don’t begin by specifying these four features, so there is no necessity here. A writer may decide to begin with these four features or to begin in a different way. A beginning which immediately indicates all four of these functions I will call a Four Features Beginning.
Any one of these by itself probably doesn’t seem so remarkable. If you happen to be reading, say, Ambler’s Intercom Conspiracy, you will probably take in the information provided by the first sentence without noting that it has the same form as the first sentence of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece or Zola’s Germinal. But a list of all of these suggests that they are all examples of a particular way of getting a story going. In other words, they are all instances of a figure. So far as I know this figure has never been identified or discussed. I don’t know if this figure counts as a rhetorical figure, to be listed in the rhetorical handbooks, or if it should count as what might be called a narrative figure, perhaps along with Alarm-Clock Beginnings, in a different kind of handbook, A Handbook of Narrative Figures.
The study of a figure, rhetorical or narrative, begins when you notice it, and you notice it probably because it occurs several times—how many occurrences I suppose is a matter of judgement—or because it has a particularly noticeable form, or both. The second stage is the collection of examples. The third stage—though these stages can, of course, overlap—is noticing variations within the form. The fourth stage is placing each example in context. For instance, whenever you’re looking at a Four Functions Beginning, it’s always a good idea to ask “What comes next?” The fifth stage is interpretation. There are at least two kinds of interpretation—a figure may have a function, or it may have a meaning, or both; and the function and the meaning may be related. My own practice is to collect a lot of examples before I start to interpret; I think it’s unwise to jump into interpretation before you have enough examples for useful comparison.
I don’t know just when I started to notice this particular figure, which I’m calling a Four Features Beginning, but I know that I started to make a list only in the last couple of years. Probably I happened read two or three novels beginning with this figure one after the other, remarked on the similarity, and decided to make a list. Once I had three or four examples, I went through my library to see if there were more. Now I’m primed to notice this figure, just as I’m primed to notice Alarm-Clock beginnings.
Once I had a decent collection, I could look for variations and start to think about interpretations. Here’s a variation. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop begins twice, and each beginning has its own Four Features beginning. The first beginning comes before the main story begins, in a section titled “Prologue: At Rome”: “One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine Hills, overlooking Rome.” (3)
The Four Features are clear: the Time is a summer evening in 1849; the Place is a villa in the Sabine Hills near Rome; the Characters are three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop; and the Event is diner. The story continues with a detailed description of the location: “The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging a steep declivity planed with vineyards.” And so on for several more sentences until “the eye reached Rome itself”.
The second paragraph places the four characters in this setting but then continues with a description of the weather at that hour of the evening: “It was early when the Spanish Cardinal and his guests sat down to dinner. The sun was still good for an hour of supreme splendour [. . .]. The Cardinal had an eccentric preference for beginning his dinner at this time in the late afternoon, when the vehemence of the sun suggested motion. The light was full of action and had a peculiar quality of climax—of splendid finish” (4). This description continues for two long sentences until it returns to the characters sitting in the evening sun: “The churchmen kept their rectangular clerical caps on their heads to protect them from the sun”. In the third paragraph we learn the topic of their discussion: the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico and the appointment of an Apostolic Vicar, a priest named Jean Marie Latour.
After the Prologue, the story begins again, in Chapter I of Book One: “One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, [we will find out that this is Jean Marie Latour] followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico.” (17) Again in this sentence we find Time (an afternoon in the autumn of 1851), Place (an arid stretch of country somewhere in Central New Mexico), Character (a solitary horseman) and Event (pushing through an arid stretch of country). A detailed topographical description follows: “He had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless—or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much in the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still.” (17–18)
This description continues for another half page. The first beginning, in the Prologue, tells us why Latour finds himself in New Mexico; the second beginning puts him there. The detailed description of the villa in the Prologue serves as a contrast to the harsh landscape where Latour finds himself in Chapter I. This doubled Four Features Beginning is not simply functional; Cather has used it to make a thematic point.
My next post will continue this discussion of Four Features Beginnings with more examples and variations.
The Art of Reading Slowly 