Authors and After Words

I’m fascinated by the way stories begin. Those first few words establish context and direction, so they tell a lot about what’s likely to follow. For example:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

These words open the book of Genesis. Whatever else the Bible may be, it is a collection of stories with a tradition. Story traditions usually begin with the Creation. All such accounts come down to one issue, and that is not whether, but how we belong to the universe. It doesn’t matter whether you are an ancient priest studying the movement of stars or a Carl Sagan peering out of an imaginary space ship meditating on the star stuff out of which we are all made, the message is the same – this universe is our home, our journey and our purpose. Of course, we can alienate ourselves from it, but in the end, our universe will notice. We cannot escape our destiny and our stories tell us so.

There is a second beginning account which appears in the New Testament Gospel of John. It goes like this:

The lyricism in this passage is clearly ritualistic, and it refers to the earlier creation story and reminds us of the words through which we and the world became. In so doing, it reifies the creative connection between Word and Object. Language (Logos) is the very life’s blood of the universe for those who inhabit it.

All of our big stories throughout the world maintain this spiritual connection through their mythologies. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid all begin with prayers to the divine Muses. This is no small nod, for they are the daughters of Zeus and this direct lineage reminds us, as do the opening words of both Genesis and John, of the divinely creative dimension of all the arts. Their practice leads directly back to the Spirit and, of course, through it to the ultimate meaning of our experience in the universe. In the Greek and Roman epics, the prayer is a petition for inspiration and guidance in the telling of the story. Let the following few lines from the Aeneid, as translated by the late Robert Fagles, stand for all three of these crucial epic poems.

If Virgil’s question, showing so clearly the direction of the story, reminds us a bit of the Biblical account of Job, that is no coincidence. Fate is the direction of all great hero stories and therein lies their message to the rest of us.

Lacking the shorthand of heroic myths and legends, the modern writer must find more clever ways of setting up his story. Here is one of the great efforts of the 19th century.

Is this any way for Dickens to begin A Christmas Carol? It is if you are part of the English tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmastime. No dead man; no ghost!

Here’s another deathly opening but to a quite different effect. It’s the opening paragraph of Camus’ The Stranger.

In these few sparse words, Camus sets his novel on a course that can only lead to absolute absurd alienation – perhaps the alienation I suggested earlier.

Alienation has become a central agony of contemporary story telling. Which is not to say that it does not make for good stories and good writing. Here’s a cutting from the opening of a book called The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. It’s actually three intertwined novellas which come with a rave by Ursula LeGuin. That’ll do for starters:

The agony of boys having to be in bed on a bright summer’s night should create a deep resonance with any grown up kid but with the crippled monkey the appetite is whetted for some delicious oddities to come. I’m already hooked. Of course, this monkey foreshadows serious darkness. I don’t necessarily object to that but, really, doesn’t any one reach out to embrace the universe and it’s mythologies any more? Well, there is such a book by an author that you’ll hear more about in these pages. He’s Neil Gaiman and here are the first words in his novel Anansi Boys:

And they still are.