Why NOT "A screaming comes across the sky"?

[Dave Monroe]

Why Ishmael?

>From Proust's madeleines to Du Maurier's Manderley,
first lines set the reader on track - but not always
the right one. John Sutherland ponders the enigma of
beginnings

John Sutherland
Saturday August 26, 2006

Guardian
Like much of the peripheral apparatus that the book
trade has shrewdly devised and perfected over the
years, the publicity photo has a palpable effect on
the reading experience. More so as the photograph is
typically "framed" by readers' perceptions of what it
is, at this point in time, to be an author. Such
perceptions change over time. Novelists first began to
use publicity photographs in the great carte de visite
mania of the 1860s, when photography for the masses
became a viable proposition. It also, as literary
historians have recorded, changed the canons of
narrative realism; as did the arrival of film, 40
years later. In the middle of the 20th century, studio
photos of the author embellished novels (by Yousuf
Karsh, or Cecil Beaton, if the novelist warranted it).
Publicity photographs, as with everything else, have
loosened up in the past 50 years. It would be possible
to write a history of the novel in terms of the poses
that novelists have struck for the lens over the past
century and a half, and the changing iconography of
authorship those poses project. The Victorian sage;
the cigarette-smoking, tweed-wearing bookman; the
beautiful fighter for human rights. The "semiotics"
(what am I signalling to you by my appearance?) are
historically different and - for those with a curious
eye - register the changing image of what this
novelist is, beyond a neutral tale-teller.

One of the more useful pieces of advice given to
examination students is to visualise, in as much
detail as you can, the examiner you are writing for:
as a person you are conversing with, that is, not a
veiled, Delphic figure who holds your destiny in
her/his hand. So, too, with novels. Without making the
crass error of confusing narrator and author (Holden
Caulfield is not JD Salinger), the novelist is always
there in the novel - if only as the ghost in the text.
It is a plus to be able to put a face to the name.
Sometimes, however, it is not possible to lodge an
image of the author in the mind, as you read. The
Walter Scott of our day is Thomas Pynchon, of whom no
authenticated photograph exists. Even the class
mugshot of him at his alma mater, Cornell, has
apparently been removed from the record. He is the
Great Unphotographable. The unusualness adds to the
zest of reading, say, Gravity's Rainbow

The prospective reader has, then, a number of initial
"encounters" with the novel before reading it. Reviews
and word of mouth may form a distant introduction. The
first sight of the cover and the title, a quick-read
scan of the blurb and shoutlines on the jacket form
another. But the first "close" encounter will be the
first line of the text. This is the moment of
coupling. The following are two of the more famous
first lines, or sentences, in fiction: they are much
quoted and will be found in all self-respecting
anthologies of quotation as stand-alone statements
about the human condition.

"All happy families are alike. All unhappy families
are unhappy in their own way."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single
man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of
a wife."

The first is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the second
from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice....

[...]

Consider next another famous first sentence: "Call me
Ishmael." ...

[..]

This is an edited extract from How to Read a Novel,
published by Profile. 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1858449,00.html


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com