In the Beginning...
Considering the power of an opening line.
This Monday marks the start of a new academic year (my first as an Assistant Professor), and so it felt like the perfect time to talk about beginnings.
I’ve always preferred beginnings to endings, not just as a writer but as a reader and viewer. I love set up, introduction, exploration (though not exposition), and I always get bummed and find it a little tedious when things have to start bending towards a resolution.
I’ve gone so far as to consider whether we have reached a point where conclusive endings in narrative are actually immoral. Does resolution in fiction inspire complacency in life? Do we need a lack of closure1 in our stories not just for intellectual vigor, but to keep us active and engaged in the world we inhabit, at a point where it becomes easier and easier to check out of it to not only our own detriment but the detriment of those we share it with?
Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that endings are difficult and as such rarely work as effectively as they could. TV has seemed to exacerbate this of late - we spend years engaging with a narrative whose ending more often than not ends up being disappointed and unsatisfying.
I can’t help but think of this all in terms of my own work, either. The more I reflect on my own writing, the more I realize that I am more drawn to set-up and exploration in the films I love, rarely the payoff or the endings. Perhaps the endings have to work for the set-ups to then be resonant, but I’m not so sure that this is as necessary as the opposite.
Maybe it all stems from a fear of death and finality. If the end doesn’t define the whole, then the end loses its power.
It could also just be as simple as the fact that to begin something is easy, whereas to end something necessitates completion. My shelves and hard drives are littered with plenty of beginnings, but precious few endings.
(In fact, I may take one of these and try finishing it over the course of several newsletters if there’s any interest in that kind of thing)
Whatever the reason, I have nonetheless been obsessed with beginnings as both audience and creator. I cannot sit down to actually start work on something until I know exactly how it begins. I could talk about the great opening scenes from films (the opening sequence of Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie remains something I chase constantly, to a perhaps a paralyzing degree), or opening album tracks (there may be none better than Metallica’s Enter Sandman - a basic take perhaps, but sometimes takes become basic for a reason - yet I distantly remember hearing Tom Waits’ Alice for the first time and being struck in my tracks by its combination of beauty and terror). But literary opening lines to me have always been uniquely powerful. There is fluidity to language, and its vagaries can suggest so much with such limited real estate. You can tell a whole story, or evoke an entire world in terms of both time and space, within one line.
Literary openings also feel inextricably tied to my own beginnings as a writer. It’s only recently that I’ve realized that this begins with my maternal grandfather, who was an incredibly well-read and literate raconteur. A former actor, he once told me the story of a lonely night patrolling as a Military Policeman during which he spontaneously recalled and recited for himself every line of Shakespeare he had ever read. In fact his library of miniature Shakespeare volumes and my paternal grandmother’s devouring of mystery novels explains so much about the reading habits that I developed myself as a child.
He also carried a mental file folder of all of his favorite lines. It was from him that I first encountered Kafka, as he would often quote the opening of The Trial - “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” He would also quote what he claimed was the first line of a science fiction story he had once read: “The last man on earth sat alone in his room, when suddenly he heard footsteps on the stairs.”
This one obsessed me for years, so perfect was it in its simplicity and yet so expansive its implications. I always wanted to know where it came from. Grandpa was admittedly a bit of a fabulist - he once recounted a story he had come up with that I realized without calling him on it, was in fact Ray Bradbury’d A Sound of Thunder - and, as I aged I couldn’t remember if he claimed authorship of this snippet. I have searched for the source of this, and it turns out that it’s actually a famous example of a one-sentence story. Much like “For sale - baby shoes. Never worn,” attributed (erroneously) to Hemingway, this line seems to live in the ether (usually he hears a knock on the door rather than footsteps on the stairs - perhaps that’s where Grandpa’s authorial voice came in). Like most such things, the more I discovered the less interesting it became; I sometimes regret that I ever looked it up.
Regardless, it did its job when it needed too, instilling a love of opening lines that was sealed for me when I started to discover the writers who would mean the most to me on a personal level. I have to not only return to Kafka here, but also indulge in cliche by singling out in particular the opening line of The Metamorphosis. Again, sometimes the easy answer is the easy answer for a reason. “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin2.” It so perfectly introduces not only the seamlessness with which Kafka will integrate the surreal within the mundanities of everyday life, but also the understatement that is a hallmark of his style and makes his unique absurdity not only so much more effective but also so darkly funny. Reading this as a high schooler, an entirely new universe of expression was suddenly available to me.
The opening sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is similarly not-unheralded, but it bears including here not only in its own right, but because Gabo is such a consequential figure for me (and in no little part because Solitude may be the one piece of art I can point to to which I believe all else should aspire): “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This line in its own way conveys the combination of the banal with the miraculous (the idea of discovering ice tells us so much about the world we are in and the wonderment we are about to experience), but perhaps more importantly introduces us to the ways in which this sprawling and complex narrative will move back and forth throughout time. The words, their content, and their very tense are all working together to communicate everything we need to know about how this novel will function.
I’ve never read Avery Corman’s Kramer vs. Kramer, though I have of course seen the Academy Award-winning film adaptation. I did, however, once pick it up to flip through in a bookstore many years ago. It’s opening line is simple - “He did not expect to see blood” - but it must have drilled a hole in my brain and planted itself there, because years later when I was in college and writing a story for my creative writing workshop about a file clerk who gives himself a paper cut that refused to heal, I started it with the line “He thought it was strange that there was so much blood.”
Endings are important, but to me sometimes the beginning is everything.
Some more favorites:
“All this happened, more or less.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Stephen King, The Gunslinger
“I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
“124 was spiteful.” Toni Morrison, Beloved3
“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday - I can’t be sure.” Albert Camus, The Stranger.
I’d love to hear some of yours if you’re willing to share.
-cs
I don’t mean irresolute in the Marvel way, where the concern is simply franchise perpetuity. Everything that should happen needs to happen, we just shouldn’t understand it or grasp it fully.
This is the specific translation I remember reading. Most often it is described as a “monstrous insect,” which I think is actually a little too specific and not only dulls some of the efficacy but also dilutes the strain of self-loathing and internalized othering (specifically antisemitism) that is so central to all of Kafka’s work.
The opening line of The Bluest Eye - “Here is the house.” - may not seem like much out of context and on its own, but taken in sum with its entire opening section, which is a repetition of children’s book platitudes that become crushing in their idealization and which, once they collide in repetition until they are one solid block of text, bear the weight of all that society places out of reach of the novel’s central character.