小说的开头

J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), 30-32.

Sometimes it is not quite the first sentence that brings the character alive. The opening sentence of the second chapter of Pickwick Papers brings Mr Pickwick to life for me, along with the distinctive ironic parodic voice of Dickens himself, the “Immortal Boz,” as he liked to be called. What is parodied in this case is the circumstantiality of place and date that is expected of “realist” fiction. The sentence opening the second chapter picks up the fiat lux echo in the first sentence of the novel. Here is part of that first first sentence: “The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved…” This opening parodies not only Genesis but also the pomposities found in official biographies of “great men.” It also indicates Dickens’s inaugural power as author, light-bringer. The echo of that in the beginning of the second chapter applies the same figure to Pickwick’s appearance find morning:

That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen, and begun to strike a light on the morning of the thirteenth of May, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, when Mr Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked out upon the world beneath. Goswell Street was at his feet, Goswell Street was on his right hand—as far as the eye could reach, Goswell Street extended on his left; and the opposite side of Goswell Street was over the way.

George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch, to give another example of a deferred beginning, does not come fully alive for me in the opening sentences. The novel opens like this: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters…” This is circumstantial enough, but what really brings Dorothea to life for me is a moment in the opening scene with her sister Celia when, against her principles, Dorothea admires the jewelry they have inherited from their mother: “‘How very beautiful these gems are!’ said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam [that the sun has just reflected from the jewels].”

The attentive reader will note how often these openings, though I have chosen them more or less at random from those that stick in my mind, involve in one way or another either the sun or the opening of a window. Sometimes, as in Pickwick papers, both motifs are present. Mrs Dalloway, to give a final example, a few sentences beyond the opening sentence I have cited, shows Clarissa remembering an experience of her childhood:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.

The beginning of the world, even these imaginary literary ones, seems naturally figured by a rising sun or by a window opening from the inside to the outside.