Fear of the First Line

Abstract

FICTION Fear of the First Line Bernard Quiriny In the following metafiction?with nods to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino?Belgian author Bernard Quiriny tackles the tyranny of the first sentence. "For a phrase to be the last one, another one is needed to declare it, and it is then not the last one." ?Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Diff?rend: Phrases in Dispute The first line: now there was the enemy. Or so Gould thought the day he decided to write the book he'd been contemplating for several years. He spent hours before the blank page, looking for the perfect first line. Time and again he set the tip of his pen to paper and tried to free his wrist to make the first loop of the first letter; every time he stopped with the exasperating certainty that there was a better way of beginning his novel. Everything he'd write would follow from the first line; a bad one could contaminate an entire book. It had to be a rock, a granite cornerstone to build on in utter safety; it had to be worked over to perfection. Most of his future readers would start with it; it was like the hand you held forth when you first met people. If your nails were dirty or you crushed their fingers while wringing their hand like a dead sparrow, there was no chance of your making a good impression. The same went for the first line of a book. Gould tracked it all day long as though it were a cunning, crafty creature, with the troubling impression of being caught up in a merciless struggle. It was this fear of beginning, no doubt, that had led to the invention of the epigraph. The epigraph was a way of cheating on the first line by borrowing one from a famous writer. Gould was opposed to this practice, which he found a kind of cowardice. It seemed anyone could pull, from a masterpiece, a sentence whose genius would reflect unduly on the text it introduced; this method of fleeing responsibility by hiding behind a great man was unacceptable to him. It was hardly better than swiping the hood ornament from a luxury sedan and sticking it on your own lemon. Gould, not the sort to yield to ease, rejected the epigraph option and continued to seek the per fect first line. He recalled Flaubert, who said he'd found the opening to Bouvard and P?cuchet only after "an entire afternoon of torture." How had great writers gotten through this ordeal? Gould decided to meditate on the openings to a few of his favorite novels, hoping to glean lessons from the masters that might help him take the plunge. The two most famous first lines in the nation al literature are no doubt "Mother died today " and "For a long time, I went to bed early." Gould read them each several times out loud. They don' : look like much, but one must admit their simplicity shows real genius. As soon as one goes for a closer look, one sees they seem to have been conceived expressly for the masterpieces they inaugurate. It is as though the French language had been set up from the start to permit these perfect combina tions of words, combinations it was up to people like Proust or Camus to discover. Gould thought perhaps there was, scattered in the air around him, something like a flock of perfect first lines that only great writers could see and capture. And as a great writer writes, by definition, great books, great books always have perfect first lines. Gould took his favorite books from his library and read only their first words. Not without sur prise, he noticed that several geniuses themselves 32 I World Literature Today had devised adroit stratagems so as to avoid hassle with their beginnings. Some resorted to epigraphs. Gould, as we have seen, did not support this practice, but the use to which great writers put it was, he felt, not reprehensible. A hack who refuses to confront his fear of the first line by quoting a classic has nothing in common with a...