L'Incipit romanesque (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: L'Incipit romanesque Alain Toumayan Del Lungo, Andrea. L'Incipit romanesque. Paris: Editions du Seuil, Collection “Poétique,”2003. Pp. 377. ISBN 2020571803 "It was a dark and stormy night. . . ." Few subjects lend themselves to such scrutiny in criticism – aesthetic and philosophical, thematic and formal, stylistic and rhetorical – as literary opening words or lines (or "signals" in Victor Brombert's felicitous phrase). And few subjects lend themselves in literary praxis to such extremes of formal conventionality and experimentation, rhetorical codification and inventiveness, analytic reflection, self-reflexivity and meta-commentary, thematic drama, and literary play, parody, irony, and iconoclasm as the opening lines of literary works. In any discursive practice, aesthetic or other, the strategies and stratagems of capturing attention, of stimulating curiosity, of creating anticipation, expectation, and suspense, of establishing story and orienting plot, of seducing, manipulating, baiting, and entrapping a reader, are as multifarious, varied, and diverse as literature itself and, ultimately, as the critical practices and approaches intending to elucidate these procedures. The purpose of Andrea Del Lungo's L'Incipit romanesque is nothing less than to categorize, describe, and analyze these practices. This study is divided into three parts, each of which could stand on its own: an initial theoretical, somewhat philosophically oriented and essentially formalist, analysis of the practices of opening words (principally, though not exclusively – the title notwithstanding – involving narrative beginning lines); a second section involving some detailed textual analyses primarily inspired by and devoted to the philosophical and aesthetic playfulness of Italo Calvino and considering also other major works in various traditions, and a third section dedicated to a classification and commentary of the practices of literary openings in Balzac's La Comédie humaine. As is apparent, the net cast by this author is wide and this comprehensive treatment of the subject is one of the very useful and impressive features of this study. In broaching a subject of such vast proportions and multiple dimensions, one might expect that the unity of the work derive from its grounding in a certain concept or method. Del Lungo, however, eschews a single methodology; instead, he tries out and adapts a broad spectrum of critical methods and insights, and evokes, as the work progresses, many critical schools and practices. Ultimately, however, the lines of intellectual [End Page 411] influence seem to lead to Genette, Rousset, and Barthes (particularly the Barthes of S/Z, Mythologies, and Eléments de sémiologie). Indeed, in both its strengths and shortcomings, this study suggests Barthes to me; it presents: on the one hand, a rather extraordinary range, an impressive erudition, an irrepressible enthusiasm for the subject, an exuberance, energy, and flair in writing (which comes through nicely in this French translation of the original Italian), flashes of genuine analytic brilliance and penetrating insight; on the other hand, there is a pronounced tendency to get bogged down in attempts to explicate, theorize, and systematize the approaches that have yielded such results. In other words, the principal strength of this work lies not in the conceptual or theoretical assumptions that guide it, which are simply too unsteady, but resides instead in the breadth of the author's range, the creativity of the insights, and the richness of the observations on discrete works. There are some speculations made in the direction of literary or intellectual history but these recede, however, before the much more assertive gestures of classification, categorization, and "functional" analysis. In general, it will be more straightforward to give an empirical rather than conceptual or synthetic description of this work's development and insights though such an approach is of necessity partial and selective. As noted, this author's horizon is vast; the works considered range from Ariosto to OuLiPo, theoretical perspectives extend from Aristotle to Derrida, comparisons are drawn with the visual arts from Van Eyck to Mapplethorpe, musical analogies are proposed that are provocative and promising, though perhaps not exploited to their full analogical or analytic potential. Various extended metaphors are tried out: reading as a sexual or culinary act, opening lines as a seduction or transgression. Some analyses involve the enumeration of thematic scenarios, topoi, and leitmotiv of beginnings: arrivals and departures, or, more generally, the...