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First Sentences or Paragraphs #2: Big Novel Edition
[series note: This post is the second of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph — I’ll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn’t exist in the contextless manner in which I’ve presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we’ve been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller’s Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
“Our God surpasses the Gypsy god; He is more avuncular and noble, though some of us begrudgingly admit their god is more assertive than our God, whom we haven’t seen or heard from since He rose from His own corpse and promised to rescue us from peril, and He has, though in secret, and if you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He, our Savior, who speaks in a voice that is no voice, not the song of any bird, not the snap of burning logs or crunch of shoes on sand.”
– The Avian Gospels, Adam Novy
“This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”
– The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”
– The Secret History, Donna Tartt
“I am the recording angel, doomed to watch.”
– The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian
“So. You don’t believe in a future life.
“Then do we have the place for you!”
– The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.”
– Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”
– Underworld, Don DeLillo
“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the signs of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.”
– The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
“Christmas again in Yucatan.”
– Gringos, Charles Portis
“–Money . . . ? in a voice that rustled.”
– JR, William Gaddis
“When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.”
– The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
“A screaming comes across the sky.”
– Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
– Beloved, Toni Morrison
“Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.”
– The World According to Garp, John Irving
Tags: big novels, first sentences
i always forget how good of a book garp is
[Tolkien-nerd alert]
Kyle, if that’s to be the “first sentence” of The Fellowship of the Ring, and not a preliminary footnote – as it were – to Lord of the Rings, then I think you’d have to call the epigraphs preliminary to the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow and to Blood Meridian “the first sentence(s) of the book”.
This is the correct “first sentence” proper of The Fellowship of the Ring:
Doesn’t that whimsical note really begin the story? – as opposed to the ‘encyclopaedia!’ warning-label you quote?
That’s a fair way to see it, deadgod.
i always forget how good of a book garp is
Flannery O’Connor is just the shit. Always has been, forever will be.
If we want to get technical, the first paragraph Kyle has posted of “The Quick and the Dead” isn’t the actual first paragraph, but simply the first paragraph that enacts the present story. When people reference and discuss “The Quick and the Dead,” those intermediary/introductory sales pitch-type chapters seem to be totally overlooked. They seem out of place, or at least underdeveloped. I wonder what other people, especially Kyle, think about those segments.
You know, it’s funny — your complaint and deadgod’s are both about the same thing — where is the first sentence? Novels, especially novels with different varieties of apparatus, can make it difficult to judge where the first sentence is. And I also note someone else’s comment about Mary Miller’s stories — that the title comes before the first sentence and influences how the first sentence gets read.
I agree with you on this one — you’ve made your case for the sales pitch containing the first sentence, and I think you’re right. I’ll change it, in the space above, as you’ve recommended.
MG, I’m trying to hold off on talking about the sentences until the end, so as to not hijack the conversation I’m hoping will take hold. (Some good conversation on the Mary Miller post, but less here — surprising to me, but maybe I haven’t given it enough time.) So let me turn the question back to you: You said you thought those sales pitch chapters seem overlooked and that they seem underdeveloped to you. Why? What kind of work do you think they’re doing? What do you think is the strategy that informs putting them first? Do they reflect a different speaker than the other kinds of chapters are using? What do you think of that?
I’m also hoping to hear from other Joy Williams fans on these matters. (And anyone else, too.)
[…] sets we've been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller's Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton […]
It’s interesting how direct and leading those openings are, when you consider how Gaddis is so often considered impenetrable. I don’t think he really is. I just think it takes stamina to read so many densely-packed pages. But it’s not “hard” reading, like Finnegans Wake or Absalom, Absalom!
I like how the Gravity’s Rainbow 1st sentence gives us an image (actually a sound—v. nice) to fasten onto that becomes an anchor for the incredible density that follows. It reminds of me of “Call me Ishmael” in that way. Almost nothing afterwards is as succinct, but it positions us, and five hundred pages later it’s still resonates. And it’s just a really pleasing sentence.
Seems odd that in a discussion about physically large novels and first sentences Mr. Gaddis’s goddamned books have been omitted. Too easy or what?
Now that you’ve changed it, Kyle, it seems very out of place with the rest of the selections except for (ironically) the selection from “Fellowship,” in that it’s not so much plot-oriented as it is thematically oriented. “The Quick and the Dead” is probably my favorite novel, and maybe one of those most understatedly complicated I’ve ever read. I’m going to egocentrically post a selection from a paper I just wrote on the novel, as I never really thought I understood the novel until I read it again for this paper:
“Thematically, ‘The Quick and the Dead’ is about the thin barrier between life and death, death’s massive incomprehensibility in the minds of the living and yet how the living are at all times obsessed with death instead of the perpetuation of life.”
The “sales pitch” sections (I don’t know what else to call them), reading them again recently, seem to give away so much of the theme, but at the same time complicating the narrative structure of novel because, as you’ve mentioned, I don’t think they are in the same “narrative voice” as the present story. Williams presents them almost as after-thoughts, extraneous, fun material, but actually they plainly state the purposes of the novel– how death is viewed wrongly, how it has been commercialized and idealized, etc. The irony in this voice is reflective of the irony in the world (but not the voice, not really) that Williams gives us throughout the rest of the novel, and this irony is what complicates the “sales pitch’s” intentions, I think.
Of course, this brings up other questions about narrative, such as: What constitutes the “present story”? How do disparate elements in novels work together to make a novel a novel? What does consistency mean when it comes to voice and structure (as the “sales pitches” begin each of the three sections of “The Quick and the Dead”)?
Gravity’s Rainbow indeed begins with a ‘line’ of iambic tetrameter:
A screaming comes across the sky.
– ballads, hymns, much sing-song in English has this rhythm.
–
I’d say, rather than “nuclear” – that’s Parrokeezza’s angle of portent – , supersonic. That’s the point, right?: if you hear the rocket, cool – it’s already passed and hit something/one else. That we enter Slothrop’s slowly-oriented meander under a ‘supersonic’ undeflected-parabolic arc is interesting — what is there to aim at?
Throw your favorite here in the comments, and I’ll add it. There’s no attempt to make a canon here. I just grabbed some books, figuring we’d get a range of opening gambits if I picked a wide enough swath of writers.
These are questions & observations I’ll spend some time thinking about today, MG. Thank you for posting about The Quick & the Dead.
JR
–Money…? in a voice that rustled.
Frolic of His Own
–Justice? –You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
It’s interesting how direct and leading those openings are, when you consider how Gaddis is so often considered impenetrable. I don’t think he really is. I just think it takes stamina to read so many densely-packed pages. But it’s not “hard” reading, like Finnegans Wake or Absalom, Absalom!
I like how the Gravity’s Rainbow 1st sentence gives us an image (actually a sound—v. nice) to fasten onto that becomes an anchor for the incredible density that follows. It reminds of me of “Call me Ishmael” in that way. Almost nothing afterwards is as succinct, but it positions us, and five hundred pages later it’s still resonates. And it’s just a really pleasing sentence.
It’s also a thematic introduction — we’re in the nuclear age, right?
I noticed that Mason & Dixon started in a way that seemed to be in conversation with the opening to Gravity’s Rainbow: “Snowballs have flown their arcs.” The Cold War is over.
I added the JR opening above.
Ooh, nice. GR is set 1944-45, if I remember? But 1972 (?) readers would have had all kinds of connotations for that image.
Am I reading it right that GR’s first sentence is iambs and M&D’s is trochees?
The time of the setting & the time of the telling & the nature of time all get conflated in weird ways in Pynchon. M&D makes big play of this. The title characters, remember, are Mason and Dixon of old.
Gravity’s Rainbow indeed begins with a ‘line’ of iambic tetrameter:
A screaming comes across the sky.
– ballads, hymns, much sing-song in English has this rhythm.
–
I’d say, rather than “nuclear” – that’s Parrokeezza’s angle of portent – , supersonic. That’s the point, right?: if you hear the rocket, cool – it’s already passed and hit something/one else. That we enter Slothrop’s slowly-oriented meander under a ‘supersonic’ undeflected-parabolic arc is interesting — what is there to aim at?
Good choice; it’s the better of the two, if only for that “rustled.”
Most of the Gaddis is difficult talk seems to stem from the first hundred pages of The Recognitions.
[…] sets we've been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller's Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton […]
no discussion, just small additions:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously.”
well, i’ll discuss that last one: i like it because i can hear the chairs.
[…] This Basque is Badass First Sentences or Paragraphs Series: #1 Mary Miller Big World Edition #2 Big Novel Edition #3 Philip Roth Edition #4 Norton Anthology of Short Fiction Edition (A-G) #5 Best European Fiction […]