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AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 2.2An introduction to literature, criticism and theoryThis extraordinary opening sentence is all about beginnings. Thematically, itestablishes the poem to be about the first disobedience of Adam and Evewhich ‘Brought death into the world, and all our woe’. But it is also about itselfas a beginning: it assures us that this is the first time that such a project hasbeen attempted (‘Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’). It is as if theopening to a poem could be the equivalent of a moon-landing – one small stepfor John Milton . . . Rather differently, the opening sentence is about itselfas a beginning in the sense that it is asking the ‘Heav’nly Muse’ for inspiration. It is about the way that poems are conventionally thought to begin – ininspiration. This produces a strange paradox of beginnings: the origin of thepoem, inspiration, comes after the beginning of the poem. In other ways, too,Milton’s opening unsettles any simple notion of opening or beginning. Notonly does the poem talk about a beginning, the eating of the fruit of knowledge, but it also refers to a return to a time before that beginning (‘regain theblissful seat’), a restoration which will be both the beginning of a new age anda repetition of a previous state.There is another way in which this beginning is not a beginning: it repeatedly refers us back to other texts. Milton refers to Moses (‘That shepherd’)in the belief that he ‘taught’ the children of Israel the creation story – in otherwords, that he wrote the opening books of the Old Testament. In this respect,the muse that Milton’s poem addresses and invokes is a second-hand muse.Contrary to its claims to originality, this opening echoes and alludes to various other openings. ‘Of man’s first disobedience . . . Sing Heav’nly Muse’repeats the conventional apostrophe of such classical openings as Homer’sIliad and Virgil’s Aeneid; ‘In the beginning’ repeats the opening to the Gospelaccording to St John (‘In the beginning was the Word’), and so on. Finally,the very syntax of Milton’s sentence displaces the beginning of the poem,in particular by holding back the main verb of the sentence – ‘Sing’ – untilline six.Despite the complications of Milton’s opening, however, at least it tries (orpretends to try) to begin at the beginning, rather than in the middle. Beginningin the middle – in medias res – is the other way to begin. One of the mostfamous beginnings-in-the-middle is Dante’s opening to The Divine Comedy(c.1307–20):Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscura,che la diritta via era smarrita.(Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a darkwood, for the straight way was lost.)

AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 3.The beginningThere are at least three different middles here: the middle of ‘our life’, the middle of a dark wood, the middle of a narrative. Dante conflates life, journey andnarrative, and suggests the uncanny terror of beginning at such a moment ofmiddling. In particular, the uncanniness of ‘mi ritrovai’ suggests the hallucinatory terror of (re-)finding, of retrieving oneself. But Dante’s opening mightalso suggest that there are no absolute beginnings – only strange originarymiddles. No journey, no life, no narrative ever really begins: all have in somesense already begun before they begin. But this is not to say that we can dowithout the concept of the beginning. Where would we be without a beginning? Where would a text be?The paradox of the beginning having already begun is wittily presented byLaurence Sterne in the opening of his novel The Life and Opinions of TristramShandy, Gentleman (1759) in terms of both the beginning of a narrative andthe beginning of a life:I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they werein duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about whenthey begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon whatthey were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being wasconcern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature ofhis body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aughtthey knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might taketheir turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceededaccordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite differentfigure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. (5)This opening is a comic version of Philip Larkin’s equivocal opening line tohis poem ‘This Be The Verse’ (1974): ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.Tristram Shandy complains because his parents were thinking of somethingelse at the moment of his conception and he is afraid that in consequence hiswhole life has been fucked up. As his uncle Toby remarks a few pages later,‘My Tristram’s misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into theworld’ (7). Tristram Shandy famously confronts the intractable problem ofhow to end an autobiography: such a text can never catch up with itselfbecause it takes longer to write about life than it takes to live it. In this sense,no autobiography can ever end. But Tristram Shandy is also about how tobegin – how to begin at the beginning – and how we begin.If beginnings always have a context and are therefore determined by whatcomes before, the opening to Tristram Shandy also makes it clear that, in turn,beginnings determine what comes after. This is true of literary as of other3

AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 4.4An introduction to literature, criticism and theorybeginnings: beginnings augur, acting like promises for what is to come. Suchis the force of many well-known literary beginnings. The opening to JaneAusten’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is apparently unequivocal: ‘It is a truthuniversally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,must be in want of a wife’ (1). This sets the stage for the whole novel. The topicis marriage, the tone is ironic. Austen proclaims the values of universalism(‘a truth universally acknowledged’), while satirizing them: what is acknowledged as a truth for upper middle-class men in early nineteenth-centuryEngland is not necessarily acknowledged universally. Before going on to provide an ‘Explanatory’ note on its dialect, Mark Twain’s The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (1885) begins with a ‘notice’:NOTICEPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORPER G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCEAt once witty and baffling, the sentence is both an entrance and a barrier tothe novel. It reads something like the sentence ‘Do not read this sentence’,in that it both acknowledges that readers do try to find motives and morals innarratives, and comically prohibits such a reading. Herman Melville’s MobyDick; or, The Whale (1851) is also framed by a number of what GérardGenette calls ‘peritexts’ (Genette 1987) – by a contents page, a dedication, an‘Etymology’ (of the word ‘Whale’) and ‘Extracts’ (several pages of quotationsabout whales) – before it begins with the famous words ‘Call me Ishmael’.Satirical prevarication and pedantry, combined with blustering assertiveness,characterize the whole novel. Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928) opens (after adedication, preface, contents page and list of illustrations) with a sentence thatequivocates by appearing not to do so: ‘He – for there could be no doubt ofhis sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in theact of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters’ (13). Thesentence begins a book about a person of uncertain or variable gender in atone of strange uncertainty, with a suggestive mixture of decapitation and castration. By appearing not to, this opening sentence, like the novel as a whole,subtly undermines conventional ideas about gender identity. The first sentence of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is sheer heart-tuggingseduction: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ (7). It is the sort ofsentence from which a novel might never recover. And Proust’s famous understated opening to Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27) implies that there is

AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 5.The beginningno single beginning: ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ (‘For along time I used to go to bed early’, 13). A studied reflection on the past,a sense of intimacy, the power of habit and repetition are what characterizeProust’s 3,000-page novel. As these examples suggest, one of the peculiaritiesof literary openings is that they are never single. The openings to HuckleberryFinn, Moby Dick and Orlando produce multiple beginnings through their‘peritexts’, but the other examples also present more than one beginning: TheGood Soldier suggests both a story and its retelling (as well as other stories thatare not as sad), while Proust’s opening gives a sense that narrative begins inrepetition, that no single event can be said to be a beginning.As we have begun to see, one of the ways in which a literary text multiplies its beginning is through the deployment of peritexts – titles, subtitles,dedications, epigraphs, introductions, ‘notices’ and so on. A classic examplewould be the opening of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Before we arriveat the first words of Eliot’s poem we encounter a series of multilingual hurdles.To start with, there is the title. The title, like all titles, is uncertainly poisedbetween inside and outside. It both names the poem, as if from outside, andforms part of that poem. ‘The Waste Land’ both refers to a place or predicament – post-1918 Europe, for example – and names the strange ‘land’ thatEliot’s poem creates (like a waste land, the poem is full of debris from the past,fragmentary memories and quotations). Next we encounter the Latin andGreek of Petronius: ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidiin ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σiβυλλα τi Θελεις; respondebat illa: aποθαυειυ Θeλω’ (‘For once I myself saw with my own eyes theSibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her “Sibyl, whatdo you want?” she replied, “I want to die”’). As an epigraph, this quotationtoo may be said to be both inside and outside the poem, both a commentaryon and a part of the text. The next hurdle is a tribute in Italian to Ezra Pound:‘il miglior fabbro’ (‘the better craftsman’). Pound, as editor, was responsiblefor much of the final shape of Eliot’s poem and therefore is in part the craftsman of what follows. Even this tribute is a quotation: it comes from Dante’sPurgatorio and is in this sense too both part of Eliot’s poem and not part ofit. Finally, there is a subtitle: ‘1. The Burial of the Dead’. This is a quotationfrom the Anglican burial service. Then we have what appear to be the firstwords of the poem:April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain. (ll.1–4)5

AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 6.6An introduction to literature, criticism and theoryBut in fact these lines are a pastiche or reworking of the opening to anotherpoem, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c.1387–1400):Whan that April with his shoures soteThe droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,And bathed every veyne in swich licour,Of which vertu engendred is the flour. (ll.1–4)In these and other ways, Eliot’s poem displaces its own beginning. The beginning of the poem is no longer the first stroke of the pen or keyboard. Throughemphatic effects of intertextuality (including quotation, allusion, referenceand echo), Eliot’s poem suggests that originality, the notion of beginning assingular, definable, stable is severely problematic. To ask where or whenEliot’s poem begins is to meet with a series of questions concerning theidentity of the author, the text and reader, and finally of the Western literarytradition generally.The Waste Land may seem to be unusually concerned with questions oforigins and their displacement. But the kinds of effects of intertextuality thatthis opening explores are in fact fundamental to literary texts more generally.Literary texts, that is to say, are always constructed by and within a contextor tradition. In his well-known essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’(1919), Eliot himself argues that ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his [sic]complete meaning alone’: rather, what is important is the poet’s ‘relationto the dead poets and artists’ (Eliot 1975, 38). A poem, novel or play thatdoes not in some sense relate to previous texts is, in fact, literally unimaginable. The author of such a text would have to invent everything. It would belike inventing a new language from scratch, without any reliance on alreadyexisting languages. In this sense, intertextuality (the displacement of originsto other texts, which are in turn displacements of other texts and so on – inother words an undoing of the very idea of pure or straightforward origins)is fundamental to the institution of literature. No text makes sense withoutother texts. Every text is what Roland Barthes calls ‘a new tissue of pastcitations’ (Barthes 1981, 39).Two of the most compelling and most persistent myths of literary textsconcern their origins. The first is the idea that the most important aspect ofany reading is an imagined meeting of the reader’s mind with that of the author– an idea that exemplifies what has been known for the past fifty years as the‘intentional fallacy’ (the mistaken belief that what the author intended is the‘real’, ‘final’ meaning of the work and that we can or should know what this is).But if we cannot know the beginnings of a text in terms of what is available to

AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 7.The beginningus on the page, how much more difficult it would be to discover the origins ofthe thought which impels the text. Does an author know where these thoughtscome from? Are they in fact thoughts (conscious, coherent, consistent)?Whose ‘thoughts’ do we read when we read the beginning of The Waste Land?Eliot’s, Chaucer’s, Pound’s, Petronius’, Dante’s? Are they still the poet’sthoughts if the poet is said to be ‘inspired’? The second common mythinvolves the priority given to an individual reader’s first reading of a text.According to this myth, all literary criticism involves a corruption of theoriginal ‘experience’ of reading. Once upon a time (so this myth goes) we wereable to read a novel (by Charlotte Brontë, say, or J.K. Rowling) and have acompletely unadulterated reading experience, unsullied by any critical thinking or complexity. But although we often talk about literary texts as thoughthey have been subjected to only one reading, we all know that this is in manyrespects simply a convenient fiction. Roland Barthes, in his book S/Z (1970),makes a point about the act of rereading as ‘an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society’ and suggests that it is ‘toleratedonly in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people and professors)’ (Barthes 1990b, 15–16). Professors – who are usually old people,very seldom children, though not infrequently an undecidable mixture of thetwo – include Roland Barthes, of course, and it is part of his aim to questionthe very idea of a single or first reading. Rereading, he argues,contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is aprimary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, haveto ‘explicate’, to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, asif everything were not already read: there is no first reading . . . ). (Barthes1990b, 16)Once again, Eliot’s The Waste Land suggests some of the complexitiesinvolved in a first reading. If the opening to Eliot’s poem refers to Chaucer’s,then when can we properly be said to read ‘April is the cruellest month’?Surely we must reread it, once we have read it, with Chaucer’s words in mind.In which case the first reading is inadequate. Less dramatically, perhaps, thesame may be said of any other literary text: every reading (even a so-called‘first reading’) is at least in part a learned or programmed response, conditioned by other and others’ readings. In this respect, reading critically is, inT.S. Eliot’s words, ‘as inevitable as breathing’ (Eliot 1975, 37).The present book is, fundamentally, about questions of origins, aboutbeginning. It is concerned with how we might begin to read, to think aboutand write about literary texts. In particular, the book is about those uncertain7

AIT C01.qxd 13/05/2004 14:46 Page 8.8An introduction to literature, criticism and theoryorigins – the author, the reader and the text – none of which can ever be takenfor granted. Neither author nor reader nor text finally or properly constitutesa beginning. As with ‘beginning literary studies’ (which we have begun now,haven’t we?), the idea that everything begins with the author or with the readeror with one particular text is both deeply compelling and deeply false.Further readingThe now classic exploration of literary beginnings is Edward Said’sBeginnings (1975), an exuberant and theoretically astute exploration ofopenings, originality and origins in literature and theory. A more recent andperhaps more accessible book on beginnings is A.D. Nuttall’s Openings(1992), which eschews theoretical discussion in favour of a concentratedfocus on a small number of classic literary openings. On intertextuality, seeGraham Allen’s Intertextuality (2000) and Mary Orr’s Intertextuality (2003).For a different perspective on these questions, see Françoise Meltzer’s study ofthe idea of literary originality, Hot Property (1994), and for a more ‘traditional’and sometimes polemically anti-theoretical approach see Christopher Ricks,Allusion to the Poets (2002). On inspiration and the origins of creativity, seeTimothy Clark’s inspirational book, The Theory of Inspiration (1997).

AIT C02.qxd 13/05/2004 14:45 Page 9.2.Readers and readingW hat do you do when you come across a poem like

literature and film war monsters, mutants and the inhuman Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theoryavoids what is so frequently tiresome or intimidating about ‘theory’, offering instead an introduction that is con