Opening Signals in Narrative

Abstract

L -OUIS ARAGON, having agreed to improvise on the subject of his own creative processes, proposed an impertinent title: Never Learned to Write.' This title, which also provides the last sentence of the essay (Je n'ai jamais appris ecrire) becomes less scabrous if one remembers to quote it in full, with its coordinating particle and its final Latin word pointing to the problem of poetic or fictional beginnings: Je n'ai jamais appris ecrire ou 'les incipit.' For what Aragon claims never to have known in advance is the unfolding of his stories, the deroulement of his textual landscape, which he discovered, as he says, as though he were his own reader. At paradoxical extreme, it would seem that all text needs to be constituted and propelled forward is first word. The writer as reader. Aragon, as child, discovered that hearing and lying, reading and playing, interpreting and inventing, are the same. An initial word meant the necessity of the game as well as the game of necessity. Hence the assertion: I never wrote my novels, read them. What is involved is the threshold of the text: not merely the generative, matricial virtue of the initial (and perhaps arbitrary) attack, but that point both in time and space where text, separating itself from what it was and is not, comes into being. On pense partir de ce qu'on ecrit: the key expression partir de, referring to supposedly dynamic point of origin, occurs again some ten pages later, as Aragon speculates on the mechanism of writing a partir d'une phrase, d'une image. The Surrealists were fond of invoking the phrase de reveil, that galvanizing opening and revelatory sentence. Revelatory, because the incipit meant the initial incantation as well as the first signal of the initiation. It is not surprising that mythical notions press themselves forward. Every opening of novel or poem, says Aragon, revives the image of Hercules at the crossroads. Image of destiny? It would seem