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For this is action, this not being sure, this careless

Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

Making ready to forget, and always coming back

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

—JOHN ASHBERY, “SOONEST MENDED”

Its weight the iceberg dares

Upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

—ELIZABETH BISHOP, “THE IMAGINARY ICEBERG”

In “The End of the Poem,” Giorgio Agamben pursues the startling implication of Jean-Claude Milner’s thesis that poetry can be defined by the possibility of enjambment, the possibility of opposing form and meaning, sound and sense, a syntactical limit and a phonological or formal one: the end of a sentence or phrase and the end of the line.¹ If poetry is thus defined by this possibility, of opposing “a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, … a prosodic pause to a semantic pause” (Agamben, “End of the Poem,” 109), it follows, Agamben concludes, “that the last verse of the poem is not a verse” (112). Because the poem becomes formally coherent only at its end—it is a unit, Agamben writes, “that finds its principium individuationis only at the point at which it ends” (111)—and because the last line is the one line in a poem where enjambment is not possible, it further follows that the poem is defined by an element that is not poetry, takes form only when it ceases to be a poem. “Poetry,” he writes, “lives only in the tension and difference (and hence also in the virtual interference) between sound and sense, between the semiotic sphere and the semantic sphere” (109). The end of the poem thus instantiates a crisis in which the poem both comes into being and disappears: “As if the poem as a formal structure would not and could not end, as if the possibility of the end were radically withdrawn from it, since the end would imply a poetic impossibility: the exact coincidence of sound and sense” (113). Agamben’s essay traces the poetic institutions that derive from the poetic confrontation with the end; equally striking are the metrical and linguistic innovations that Daniel Heller-Roazen traces in the multilingual poetry of tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century Andalusia, and the emergence of a “form without precedent and sequel in the history of literature”—a shift, at the end of the poem, into another voice, and another language (even a non- or double-language of one tongue transliterated into another) (Heller-Roazen, “Speaking in Tongues,” 106). The radical experiments of poets a millennium ago body forth poetry’s perpetual confrontation with its conditions of possibility, with the limitations and incitements of its form.

This book starts out from the intuition that there is an analogous crisis of inception. For any material form—any work of art, for example—and perhaps for any form of consciousness, inception marks a discontinuity analogous to what, in music, is called “onset distortion,” which R. Murray Schafer, in The Soundscape, defines as the distortion in any sound that (as is familiar to any string or woodwind musician as a major technical problem) derives from the fact that both the emission of sound and our perception of it depend on physical vibration. Because it must overcome inertia, the beginning of any sound production, as of any perception of sound, entails distortion:

All sounds we hear are imperfect. For a sound to be totally free of onset distortion, it would have to have been initiated before our lifetime. If it were also continued after our death so that we knew no interruption in it, then we would comprehend it as being perfect. But a sound initiated before our birth, continued unabated and unchanging throughout our lifetime and extended beyond our death, would be perceived by us as—silence.²

The imperfection rooted in the physical nature of sound makes it perceptible to us; temporal and formal boundedness entails a distortion that makes apprehension inseparable from a deformation. And not merely beginnings we might empirically isolate: Onset distortion, and what I will call inception, is internal to any sound. When one bows a string instrument, for instance, the hair of the bow repeatedly catches and releases the string, causing a vibration that then resonates inside the instrument; the seemingly continuous sound is, in fact, discontinuous, a series of repeated onset distortions. (The vibration of the reed in a woodwind instrument could be conceptualized in a similar way.) Inception (for sound, to be caused by a physical vibration that must perforce begin) marks every created form with an exteriority it cannot comprise; its origination makes sound deviate from itself even as it constitutes it as sound, makes it perceptible even as it dictates that all origins be impure, that no sound coincide with its beginning. Or, in other terms, to have a form is to see that form ruined from the start.³

Onset distortion or impure beginnings thus make manifest an inherent property of form as such. Such a possibility is all the more legible where the ambition toward monumental form is most marked: In great performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for instance, one feels, viscerally, the ominous threat underlying the monumental ambition—as the last movement invokes themes and motifs from the previous movements to unify and sublate them in its closing Schillerian ode, the ecstasy is hardly to be separated from an anxiety that those gathered threads might, at any moment, and within the triumphal ode itself, unravel, and leave the monumental edifice to shiver into fragments. The high-wire act of the “Grosse Fugue” (op. 133) likewise makes viscerally perceptible this tension between order and chaos. Or, to turn to a more serene and less self-consciously monumental composer, in the first act finale of Don Giovanni, the virtuoso juggling of time signatures (famously, Mozart coordinates the pit orchestra with two on-stage ensembles, all playing in different time signatures)⁴ could fall into chaos—and, in a sense, it does, as desire erupts again, with the shriek of the molested Zerlina and the unrepentant, world-dissolving defiance of Don Giovanni (“Se cadesse ancora il mondo, / Nulla mai temer mi fa” [Confused and caught up in the finale’s “tempest,” he asserts that he will not lose himself or be confounded, even “if the world yet crumbles. Nothing will make me afraid”]).⁵ In his lectures on painting, Deleuze cites a remark from Paul Claudel (from the Introduction to Dutch Painting), suggesting that visual form is less the arrest than the perpetuation of such a process of dissolution: “la composition c’est une organisation en train de se défaire” (a composition is an organized system [structure] in the process of coming undone).⁶ These examples are mere analogies; the topic here is not sound or music—nor is it painting or visual art. Yet the question, in each case, is, explicitly or not, creation, and the emergence of the work of art. These analogies make tangible forms’ confrontation with the contingency that marks the fact of their having a beginning. In inception, and the potential it embodies, for any form, that it might have been otherwise, or not at all, it is possible to see making and unmaking coincide within the mechanism of creation. That mechanism is crucially at stake in the texts I examine in this book.

Beginnings—and the questions of inception that they raise—thus bring one into contact with the text’s own conditions of possibility. This is a question, in the first place, of foundation; the self-reflexivity of any textual beginning bears witness to the self-grounding quality of literary fiction—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority, an aspect of creation that the book will return to in terms such as posit and fiat. (Bishop’s imaginary iceberg bodies forth this groundless positing—and is, to that degree, an emblem of inception; her poem’s dire terms of death and shipwreck point to the uncanny consequences of such moorings of our startings out.) Reading can perhaps only mirror this fundamental groundlessness. The non-trivial self-reflexivity of the work of art I try to specify in theoretical readings of various theorists or philosophers (especially Giorgio Agamben) and in detailed readings of particular texts. Beginnings and endings alike make visible a coming-together, even a becoming-indistinct, of a formal coherence and its undoing; beginnings in literary texts are often self-conscious about the pressure this coincidence puts on foundation, perpetually raising the possibility that the work might disintegrate in the very fiat that gives it birth. The tenuousness registered by every starting out therefore links the question of beginning to the potentiality of literary creation: the capacity to not be sheltered, according to the Agambenian gloss of Aristotle, within every actualization—understood, therefore, as a kind of suspension, a capacity to not not-be. Thus, while beginnings raise any number of questions—practical or generic questions, for instance, that might be answered by careful formalist analysis of a representative corpus; or historico-epistemic questions, in which a given period might be shown to confront the conditions governing the emergence of its particular forms of thought; or philosophical questions about the relation of origins to what comes after them, or about the possibility of recovering or deducing origins from supervening conditions; and so on—and while the specificity of various writers or thinkers or even works could be brought into view through a detailed examination of their particular relation to beginning or the particular mode their beginnings take, this book explores a more limited, if also a more general, topic: ways that inception makes manifest the potentiality structural to literary creation.

Thus, the book charts the productive gap between inception and related but not synonymous terms: beginning, birth, and origin. Perhaps idiosyncratically, I use inception to mark an asynchronicity within beginnings, textual and existential—where foundation diverges from mere starting out. “The action of entering upon some undertaking, process, or stage of existence: origination, beginning, commencement,” reads the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary Online—nearly synonyms, the latter three terms perhaps beg the question.⁷ The more technical sense of “incepting,” which (at one time) marked “the master’s formal entrance upon, and commencement of, the function of a duly licensed teacher and his recognition” by others in the profession, registers the multiple temporal layers of inception. The lag even within pedagogico-bureaucratic structures of licensing mirrors more fundamental kinds of asynchronicity. Inception is privileged here for this sense of establishing a form, institution, or consciousness; beginning, in contrast, can have the more neutral sense of merely locating a first moment in time. In birth (at least its mammalian varieties) one perceives the ways that separation is crucial to beginning (indicatively, in this case, separation from a maternal body); leaving the shelter of another’s body, the newborn comes into existence—one synchronous with neither its biological “viability” as a separate organism nor with its independent consciousness. (Whatever else one might say about it, the fraught question in abortion debates about the boundaries of human life underlines the stakes of this temporal indeterminacy.) Unlike inception, birth retains a reference to biological reproduction, however much the latter might be obscured by the term’s figural acceptations. Origin covers still different terrain, linking a beginning to a source or a cause—my humble origins, or the origins of the French Revolution—and which can be either absolute (the origin of the universe) or relative (the origin of that year’s fiscal crisis—an origin that could itself have an origin, or that could share the field with other, equally salient origins). If certain chapters take origin as a central term it is insofar as origin in particular uses and instances (and in the particular vocabularies of writers I discuss) draws closer to inception. In the movement among these various terms one can chart the consequences, for the texts examined here, of inception: confrontations with staggered or asynchronous beginnings, with the onset distortion of any starting out and the ways that founding distortion brings into view the grounds of possibility of literary creation.

Thus the beginning of the poem, no matter what its theme, makes manifest a crisis of inception inherent in creation; one could also say that the crises of inception I trace in various chapters make manifest the non-coincidence of beginning and inception, or of either of them and birth—as in forms, for instance, that are founded or instituted only after their beginning. (When a beginning escapes our cognition [as do the beginnings of our lives], the subsequent form lacks a certain boundedness and troubles a clear moment of inception.) This formal question of inception is visible—to choose one example among many possible others—in Ovid’s play with meter: The first poem of the Amores begins with the same word as the Aeneid (“Arma”) and feigns dactylic hexameter until Cupid “steals a foot” from every second line, creating the elegiac couplet that Ovid adapts from early Greek verse and that will come to be associated with love poetry. In the Tristia, he will knowingly link this “limping” line to the deprived, displaced state of exile, as if his earlier meter were an anticipation of future privation—adding another retrospective layer of significance to his meter, and thus rhyming, as it were, formal considerations within the particular poems with a movement legible only from a meta-level reflection on shifts in metrical form across an entire corpus. Between these, in The Metamorphoses, it is only at the end of the second line that the meter (dactylic hexameter) becomes apparent, as the poem, by thwarting our expectations of finding the elegiac couplets of the Amores, returns to the meter of the epic.⁸

In general, prosodists know the difficulty of establishing a meter with only one line—a second line (at least) is required to confirm the meter. As Joseph Brodsky remarks, “Remember: it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem is to go metrically” (further remarking that “the second line is the line that introduces the rhyme scheme”).⁹ This is the retrospective structure that Ovid exploits; metrically, that is to say, the poem comes into being a line after its beginning. Even if one accurately foretells the meter from the first line, there can be no hypothesis at all until the first line is complete. The first line hovers in a metrical no-man’s land until a pattern can be confirmed (or posited) after two full lines. If, as Brodsky notes, the rhyme scheme likewise begins with the second line, it, too, is a retrospective structure, requiring the completion of a larger formal unit (a couplet, a stanza, or the entire poem) before it can be conferred, in hindsight, on the lines we have read. In the non-coincidence of beginning and inception, we find that forms are founded in and through this fundamental contingency.

Thus, Hannah Arendt’s claim that beginning, “before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom,”¹⁰ ought perhaps to be read in relation to this contingency. As she addresses the question of beginning in The Human Condition, action is linked to speech because, in speech, human beings realize their uniqueness and take the risk of appearing to one another—which, not to be confused with self-expression, is rather an avowing of the contingency of one’s actions in a world where there are others, each unique yet equal and capable of action. Beginning corresponds to what Arendt calls “natality” and is the mode through which man’s status as equal and unique appears:

The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.¹¹

Action thus also confronts a fundamental contingency: The uniqueness of each human being, and his or her capacity to act, means that the outcome of every action is unpredictable and potentially infinite. What she calls forgiveness (as a form of action itself that does not simply repeat the received action) responds to that contingency and prevents the paralysis that would attend it. Likewise, promises attempt to contain that contingency by binding people together, and to their words. In a very different context, then (which we will find echoed, however, in James’s account of revision, and Foucault’s account of parrhēsia), Arendt suggests some of the ethical stakes of the potentiality of inception. In the beginning, all could have been otherwise. Inceptions describes ways this founding contingency remains within the completed form the beginning foretells.

Origin is perhaps more problematic than beginning (or even birth), precisely because it has been an explicit term of reference for many disparate writers, including those who subject it to critique—from Nietzsche to Foucault to Derrida to Edward Said (who chose beginning over origin).¹² I do not propose to offer a history of the term, to speculate why, in certain eras and for certain thinkers, it became problematic, or to attempt to clarify its different uses (its different meaning for Rousseau, for example, than for Darwin, or, for that matter, for Heidegger). Eschewing origin for inception, the attempt here is to delimit a narrower topic, turning, again, to questions of literary creation and literary form in the vicinity of textual beginnings. Once again, it is the friction between terms that matters; arguably, for James’s New York Edition prefaces, as for Welty’s “First Love,” the conceptual movement of each text could be charted by tracing, in detail, the non-coincidence of origin and inception. (Such would be one way to summarize the structure of these chapters.) The foundation of text or psyche—emerging, originated—as it departs in significant ways from its origin is registered in both cases by the multiple, and in many ways irreconcilable, narratives of origination they offer: The boy’s “first love” in Welty is both his dawning love for a man (Aaron Burr, in the story’s startling and delightful premise) and for the parents he has lost; these paired losses bring the boy’s consciousness into being. In James, origins are both conceptual movements and anecdotal occasions (occasions that bear no clear relation to the ideas they inspire) structuring the narratives, in the prefaces, of the genesis of the novels and tales. That James knowingly assimilates differing registers without rationalizing their relation, just as Welty mingles a linguistic structure of inception with origin stories (of subjectivity, of desire—these, in turn, not assimilated to one another) marks much of the interest of beginnings for these texts. This book often invokes origin when the formal abysses of inception appear in relation to epistemological or existential difficulties of beginnings, which are forced to presuppose an inception with which they cannot coincide: This is perhaps the rhythm of literary creation in Maurice Blanchot, the pursuit of what he repeatedly terms origin, which, perpetually to be sought, perpetually escapes one, a creation that has, at any given moment, always already begun. This hiatus marks any inception; the coming into being of any text, no matter what its theme, leads one to confront the difficulty that Augustine perceived in Genesis: What is before the beginning?¹³ Whatever one might decide about the cosmos, human thought seems structurally to follow from something that precedes it; in Wordsworth’s lines from the Prelude: “Not only general habits and desires, / But each most obvious and particular thought, / Not in a mystical and idle sense, / But in the words of reason deeply weigh’d, / Hath no beginning.”¹⁴

This is also the belatedness that structures human consciousness and might be named, simply, birth. Finitude entails that our knowledge will be fractured—and constituted—by the impurity of having begun. As Adam says in Book VIII of Paradise Lost, “For Man to tell how human Life began / Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?”¹⁵ (In that poem, Adam’s narrative of emergence retells the creation that the Archangel has just narrated—and is itself subsequently doubled by Eve’s narrative. In each case, one tells to someone who might have witnessed it the story of a beginning one’s consciousness cannot comprise.) This is among the questions confronted in the deceptively simple play on words at the beginning of David Copperfield: “I am born,” the text announces, drawing on the placard-style chapter titles of eighteenth-century fiction, but thereby introducing, from the outset, in a first-person, quasi-autobiographical text, a fracture between its voice and its autobiographical “subject.” The opening’s pun—“To begin my life with the beginning of my life,” Dickens writes in the novel’s second sentence—further draws out the gap between the life lived and the life written, and locates that gap at the origin of the text (the origin toward which the text, written, moves, at which it hopes to arrive): “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”¹⁶

Discussing the correlation of verb tenses in French, Émile Benveniste takes issue with a common account of the relation between the passé simple and the passé composé—an account in which the two forms are largely redundant, the latter having begun, around the twelfth century, to displace the former, which, never spoken, remains, vestigial, in literary and historical writing. The two forms, on the contrary, cover different fields, he suggests, and their opposition corresponds to that between “history” and “discourse”; “discourse” assumes the speaker and hearer that “history,” on the contrary, excludes (208).¹⁷ The historical, he writes, “excludes every ‘autobiographical’ linguistic form”; historical language excludes the personal pronouns (je and tu) in favor of the non-person (il).¹⁸ It is unsurprising, given this account, that the passé simple conventionally lacks a first-person form; in this historical form, Benveniste writes, “no one speaks” (208). It is striking therefore that a notable exception is je naquis: I was born. Je naquis, the logic suggests, likewise excludes a first-person perspective; the formulation in the first person enacts the belated structure of consciousness in the very choreographies of speech—for one can speak a perspective that one cannot perforce comprise.¹⁹ Who himself beginning knew? “I am born,” David Copperfield can write, but only in a chapter heading, and in a narrative present tense that is divided from the first-person voice (Dickens, 1). “The blank of my infancy,” he says, otherwise (13), recalling Prospero’s “dark backward and abyss of time.”²⁰ Speaking of one’s own birth, no one speaks; the ostensible anomaly recalls, within speech, the contingencies of inception.

Birth, we noted, names the non-coincidence of an organism’s emergence into the world, its achievement of organic coherence, and the dawn of its organizing consciousness. It thus brings into focus another central tension in conceptions of beginning, which recur to the beginning or origin of the text, and to the beginning or origin of a life. (This structure is particularly explicit in James’s considerations of autobiography and revision.) The ways that texts and forms of consciousness arrive belatedly to themselves are analogous but not identical; the analogy is a powerful one for each to take cognizance of its particular belatedness. For autobiographical and quasi-autobiographical texts (David Copperfield, for example, The Prelude, À la recherche du temps perdu, or even James’s New York Edition Prefaces), the difference between these is a productive force for the work, and in question is the text’s power to bring into being an explicitly textual self. (If Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets might be said to mark one of the beginnings of literary criticism in English, criticism, like the novel, is marked from its beginning by the blurred boundary between the textual and as it were biological or historical status of the poet’s “life.” Similar oscillations are visible in the history of the term character.) This book’s exploration of inception repeatedly returns to this relation—privileging in its account of novelistic beginnings, for example, the question of character and, more generally, the ways that lives are taken up and transformed by texts.

This emphasis in the book emerges from its exploration of inception in relation to potentiality. At various moments, Agamben’s linking of potentiality to dimensions that he marks as ethical takes the form of considering the work’s relation to the life of its creator. The ethical dimensions of potentiality preoccupy The Use of Bodies, for example;²¹ schematically, one might say that, at many moments in his writing, the ethical life is one that gives form to potentiality—which is also to say suspends itself within potentiality. If what that entails often remains elusive, it is clear that it is linked to his understanding of authorship; in essays such as “The Author as Gesture” in Profanations or “Opus Alchymicum” in The Fire and the Tale, this ethical preoccupation emerges in his characterization of authorship as an enigmatic suspension of life within the potentiality of the work. Thus framed, beginnings bring into view a further set of questions: the relation between registers that are often called “psychological”—character, identification, personhood—and those that are termed “formal”—the literary work read as a structure, as, at the limit, an impersonal form. The author as a psychologically determined person whose influence over the work might be illuminated by biographical criticism and the author as a function, as if created by the work, or destined to disappear there in the fading vitality that makes for literary immortality; character as psychological verisimilitude or locus of identification or character as one among other formal attributes of fiction; “voice” as the speech of a person, however distant or attenuated in immediacy and as the all-but-inhuman locus of the person’s disappearance: a series of hinges, these, in which one traces the vicissitudes of the relation of life to art. In Henry James’s consideration of the authorial life in the shadow of revision; in Eudora Welty’s account of emerging desire and consciousness as they coalesce in relation to language turned to gesture; in Robinson Crusoe’s imagining of the inception of speech and sociality; in George Eliot’s and Charles Dickens’s exploration of character, as it emerges as if from an indeterminate ground and then continues to exert its influence on their novels; in the ways that retrospection leads Wallace Stevens to an arid, abstract, and profoundly moving consideration of embodied experience; in the various ways that solitude leads writers to think about an originary human relation to language or speech; in the question of how a work might confront the not-yet-formed, the potential identity of the proto-queer child: The central concerns of each chapter of the book could be rendered in the particular terms of potentiality and literary creation—and the encounter thus charted between life and literary form—that emerge from the consideration of inception.

For me, queer has long been a useful category for thinking about related questions. In Innocence and Rapture, Henry James and the Queerness of Style, and Dead Letters Sent, queer was a central term for my literary analyses, and for my explorations of innocence, style, and transmission (respectively), in part because it marked a hinge between ostensibly personal or psychological questions of sexuality, on the one hand, and impersonal, formal, aesthetic ones on the other.²² The central analytic category of each book was defined in relation to queerness, and for each book non-normative forms of sexuality illuminated and were illuminated by ostensibly non-sexual literary questions. The relation here is different because the central argument is not focused on sexuality. Queer serves rather to index a particular structure of inception, a paradoxical recursivity of foundation whose relation to potentiality is charted throughout the book. The turn to “queer origins” at the end of the book is, in the first place, a further instance of the vexed relation, brought to the fore by the question of inception, between so-called psychological and formal or impersonal registers. Phrased this way, however, the identity category could have been anything else—and my reading of Baldwin, for instance, might have focused on the ways the story of growing up in the text encounters ideologies of race and class, or the geographical fractures in the American history of both. These important questions are not, nevertheless, the focus of the chapter. My particular interests and training and preoccupations lead me to privilege questions of sexuality, but my particular intellectual formation is, to my mind, beside the point, for it isn’t the turn to this particular identity (and not some other) that is the signal question. Rather, queer names not a particular identity but a powerful way of conceptualizing the relation between the abstract formal properties of the work of art and the ostensibly psychological categories of identification, psychology, and experience—between “art” and “life.”

Forms founded after they have begun; the non-coincidence of temporal and conceptual beginnings; the tension and interference among inception, beginning, birth, and origin: Read in relation to writing and literary creation, these have different meanings and pose different questions for different writers and texts. The structure of the book—along with its reliance on close reading and on theoretical models immanent to those readings—attempts to do justice to that particularity. Repeatedly, nevertheless, in the return to the conditions of possibility of the work, one encounters a common thread that I attempt, in various ways, to link to potentiality—in otherwise disparate writers from Ovid to Dickens to Stevens to Welty. What remains of language thus returned to potentiality is given striking and highly condensed form by Augustine’s Confessions. In the account of time that follows upon his consideration of Creation (in Book XI), Augustine’s effort to make time perceptible appears to turn on a curious operation: Moving first to an analogy between time and sound (we are asked to imagine a noise), his phenomenalization of time seems to depend on the voiding of semantic content in the recitation of a hymn by St. Ambrose—the very hymn, one recalls, that consoled him after the death of his mother.²³ Excerpted first, to a line, the hymn is then reduced to a sequence of long and short syllables—which can be measured (not absolutely, but in relation to each other: the long syllables are twice as long as the short) and therefore supply the “tick” and “tock” of phenomenal time.²⁴ For the North African Church father, this procedure makes silence measurable, and one might suggest that this small moment also enacts the larger movement of the Confessions itself: from the specifics of personal loss and desire to abstraction, the consideration of time and faith toward which the text moves. A becoming-impersonal of loss is made analogous to a voiding of semantics in favor of sound with a (relative) duration. In the phenomenalization of time, the meaning of the hymn is at once sustained and voided, reduced to the smallest, unmeaning units of meaningful language, just as the subject’s losses and consolations alike vanish into the materiality of the language through which he knows his losses and their remediation in faith. (Augustine’s writing, presenting as it does a patchwork of quotations from the Gospels, and especially from Psalms, arguably has a similar effect: at once embodying his voice’s saturation in the words of faith and abstracting those words so that they become the building materials of other sentences, become almost [though never quite] sequences of mere sound.) Thus perceptible here is a form of inception that one might counterpoise against the Biblical Creation with which he begins.

Repeatedly, in the course of Inceptions, we will encounter language abstracted or purified of any specific content other than itself—in, for example, the persistence of stone in Ovid’s rendering of the songs of Orpheus as they encrypt the poem’s structure of metamorphosis as creation; in “gesture” in Agamben and Eudora Welty as it bodies forth language that is as if prior to content; in Adam’s invocation of natural forms in his address to God in Paradise Lost as it is echoed in Wordsworth and in later instances of poetic positing; in the shifting figurations of embodiment in Wallace Stevens; or in the blank positing of character in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: Origin and inception in these cases return, in different registers, and with different emphases, to the capacities and potentialities of literature and literary creation.

Critics have considered textual beginnings in various ways; the most extensive literature is in narratology, which, however, often considers the question in largely pragmatic or descriptive terms.²⁵ Rather than focusing on such pragmatic or descriptive questions, I attempt to bring to the fore quandaries of a different order—the ways that, in their inception, texts confront their own conditions of possibility. Because, understood in relation to writing and literary creation, it has different meanings and poses different questions for different writers and texts, the book’s structure privileges this specificity. It does not, therefore, proceed chronologically; it does not seek to make a historical argument, or to offer a genealogy of its central terms—both of which might have dictated a chronological progression. Instead, it is hoped that its groupings and juxtapositions will illuminate its central concepts. I have also felt emboldened to be careless of chronology in part because inception precedes all chronology. History is one after-effect of the constitutive fracture of the beginning. Each grouping into which the chapters are divided builds on what comes before even as it circles back to the central question of inception—while the book’s argument elaborates theoretical strands that are spelled out in the introduction and in the chapters on Welty and James, true to the logic of inception, each part, and each chapter, must found itself anew, repeatedly returning us to the potentiality of literary form.

Thus, each chapter of the book in a sense lays out its own theoretical framework—in the place of a global theory an introduction might have offered. The book’s theoretical frameworks emerge out of the detailed readings of particular texts: in Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality in relation to what James calls “revision”—and the relation it charts between the text’s perpetual return to its conditions of possibility and a “life” subjected to the work of art; in Eudora Welty’s “First Love,” a theory of gesture, also drawn from Agamben, among others, that attempts to confront language in its bare capacity to signify, prior (as it were) to its signifying anything in particular, and the way that theory abuts the emergence of consciousness and desire in Welty’s text; in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, its narrative of language acquisition in relation to some of the formal peculiarities of the text; in George Eliot and Charles Dickens, and their self-conscious consideration of how novels begin and how they create characters, questions that bring into view difficulties (specific to the fictional project of each writer) of foundation; in Ovid and Wallace Stevens, more or (often) less explicit theories of origin, immanent in the texts themselves, that allow one to pose the question of how the rendering of origin inflects the consideration of embodiment and literary form; in poetic invocations (in Milton, Wordsworth, Oppen, Shakespeare, and others) of a poem’s power to posit, and the ways that it runs up against the limits of human mortality; in James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Su Friedrich, the narration of queer incipience, which brings to the fore quandaries of sexual etiology in queer theory—and the latter’s vexed relation to questions of sexual identity and sexual politics. Out of the detailed readings of these texts in relation to these theoretical frameworks, the book brings into view key aspects of literature’s confrontation with inception.

Because each chapter provides its own framework, I do not attempt here to offer a systematic account of theories of beginning, inception or origin—but turn, instead, to a few texts where beginning raises the question of the conditions of possibility of the text, often in realms removed from the explicit concerns of the chapters that follow. Thus, for example, in “The Discourse of History,” Roland Barthes responds to Benveniste’s opposition between “discourse” and “history,” pointing to the ways that historical writing is ruptured from within by its moment of enunciation—by, in other terms, its inception. Barthes turns at one point to the “organizing shifters”—the shifters through which the historian “organizes his own discourse, taking up the thread or modifying his approach in some way in the course of narration” (points of reference to his own discourse [as enunciation, or what the translator renders as “uttering”] as it structures the historical material, to, in other terms, the fact that the discourse was composed).²⁶ These shifters, Barthes asserts, have a “destructive effect … as far as the chronological time of the history is concerned. This is a question of the way historical discourse is inaugurated, of the place where we find in conjunction the beginning of the matter of the utterance and the exordium of the uttering” (9). Not dissimilar to the convergence marking the crisis of the end of the poem, that conjunction is a problem, Barthes suggests, because it marks the coalescence of two disjunctive times—of the utterance or the writing and of the historical time it would comprise or represent,²⁷ between the time of “discourse” and the time of “history.” The two forms of inauguration he notes (the invocation that recalls the opening of the epic and the prefatory commentary that locates the written history itself as an object of prospective or retrospective commentary) thus signal a crisis of inception. Barthes does not dwell on it in this essay, but inception marks an irreparable internal fracture in the discourse of history that is indistinguishable from its conditions of possibility.

In his study of “narrative beginnings,” A. D. Nuttall elaborates on the logic and consequences of a pair of claims by Ernst Robert Curtius about the Muses: that they disappear in modern poetry, and that they come (in a displacement he first sees in Prudentius) to be replaced in the traditional invocatio by the “poet’s soul.”²⁸ (Ovid, as we will see, has it both ways in the Metamorphoses, appearing to invoke his own spirit or consciousness before ceding that place to unnamed gods.) For Nuttall, then, the question of beginning is a question of inspiration and authority: the question, enacted in the proem or invocatio, of what allows the poet to begin speaking, of whose voice this is, and whether it can ground or institute itself. Although Nuttall (like Curtius) does not draw out this particular implication, the individual poetic voice would seem to emerge from the internalization of a foreign, impersonal voice—of a deity or deities that speak through one; the shift from oral to written poetry and the adaptation of classical models for Christian poetry—both of which he does dwell on—could be read as moments in that history of inspiration.²⁹ In Nuttall’s argument, this question of grounding emerges in the tension between “natural” and “artificial” openings; rephrasing Horace’s distinction between a beginning ab ovo and one in medias res, this is an opposition between an absolute or a relative beginning, one might say, or, in other terms, the beginning of the world as opposed to the self-consciously “formal” or limited (or therefore “artificial”) beginning of a text.³⁰ These are among the tensions I hope to name with the term inception.

If the question of beginning leads, in various ways, to the question of voice—and to the relation of “life” to text, or how to conceptualize the shaping power of authorship—it also raises more general questions of form. In Nuttall’s worrying of the distinction between the “literal” and the “figural” in Dante (among other places), one perceives that what is in question is the relation between the inside and the outside of the text.³¹ The artificial beginning strives to touch the natural beginning; form seeks to reach its outside. The Aeneid circles back to the creation song of Iopas, the Carthaginian minstrel (Aeneid, Book I, ll.740ff; see Nuttall, 29); in Dante’s Commedia, an “in medias res narrative opening is followed by a classical proemium” (the invocation of the Muses in Canto II of Inferno) (Nuttall, 57). Dante, circling back to the invocation in the second canto, then repeats the gesture nine times in the course of the Commedia.³² Milton, beginning with the fall of the rebellious angels, circling back to the Creation and moving forward to the Fall of man, aims, it might be said, to make epic the place for “natural” beginnings; for Gordon Teskey, Milton, alone in the epic tradition, chooses to dwell within the origin.³³ Nuttall’s account of the relation of texts to their “outsides” is not always clear; although he does not use these terms (and, from what I can gather from the book’s now antiquated polemics, would demur from this characterization), his reconsideration of poetic originality links it to a potentiality inherent in language.³⁴

This potentiality emerges from the dynamic relation between forms and “reality” that Nuttall takes from Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. There, potentiality is the consequence of the formal, or what Nuttall calls the “artificial,” dimension of texts; a pure merger with reality would be illegible chaos, while to forget that reality fundamentally escapes capture in a form is to risk an error that Kermode repeatedly links to fascism.³⁵ Kermode’s thematic concern with “ending” as apocalypse—and the desire to install an image of eternity in time (or its predicted achievement, repeatedly falsified by life in the “middest”)—links literary form to an oscillation between artifice and nature, a sustained “as if” in which the literary artifact maintains an illusion of merger with a reality that, nevertheless, it never achieves. In like terms, then, beginnings make manifest a gap between boundedness or form and the external “form” or reality that they ostensibly represent (make clear that literary form is not a mimetic category).³⁶

This fact is “known” by the opening of John Shade’s poem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the difficulties of tracking the relations (temporal, spatial, and logical) between representation and its “object” (to say nothing of those between the “I” and itself) come to the fore in the emergence of the poetic voice, constituted in an encounter of scarcely sublimated violence: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.”³⁷ The text’s abyssal metafictional play is condensed in those opening lines, where the lyric voice stakes its claims in a posthumous utterance that figures the imponderable inception of poetic speech; reflection of shadow and “Shade,” its metafictional pyrotechnics appear there as questions of reference and textual grounding. The “hidden” story of Zembla ostensibly revealed by the commentary, like the more humdrum experience of alienation revealed “behind” it, in turn allegorizes large-scale displacements of history (the Russian Revolution and a century of exile) as a small-bore drama of literary criticism; the relation of the inside and the outside of a text, of language to history, is rendered in the nice terms of poem and “responsible” commentary, the limits of identification. The dire terms of criticism of the text certainly miss its pleasures by overstating the consequences of the fictional narrator’s infractions of standards of academic criticism; Kinbote’s own misreadings are perhaps to be deplored less than those of the novel’s critics, for, in misreading, Kinbote grasps the stakes of reading, and more lucidly than those who animadvert on the consequences of his mistakes. The slain waxwing joins the jewelry from a grave that cuts its facets from within in Bishop’s “Imaginary Iceberg.”

That “form” is not mimetic would seem to follow from the fundamentally metaphorical acceptation of the term as it is applied to literary objects whose bounds cannot in any literal sense be comprised by a gaze. Although argued in a different register, the potentiality highlighted by Kermode (as the gap between form and formalization) is perhaps also what D. A. Miller calls the “narratable”: “the instances of disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise. The term is meant to cover the various incitements to narrative, as well as the dynamic ensuing from such incitements, and it is thus opposed to the ‘nonnarratable’ state of quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end.”³⁸ The “perverse” way that novels by Austen, Eliot, and Stendhal are shown to be at odds with themselves points to this central dimension of literary form as it emerges in studies of closure and opening alike: The curious self-suspension of a foundation that simultaneously puts in question the form it institutes.³⁹

Examining beginnings, J. Hillis Miller points to a similar aporia of foundation:

The paradox of beginning is that one must have something solidly present and preexistent, some generative source or authority, on which the development of a new story may be based. That antecedent foundation needs in its turn some prior foundation, in an infinite regress. The novelist may be forced to go further and further back down the narrative line in an ever unsuccessful attempt to find something outside the line to which it may be firmly tied.⁴⁰

What Hillis Miller puts in terms of authority could also be rephrased in terms of reference: The beginning makes clear that the novel cannot touch its outside. Noting that “the beginning is both inside and outside the narrative at once,” he suggests that the need to explain the conditions underlying any opening “involves an infinite regress forbidding a writer ever to establish, except virtually and by a fictive ‘as it were,’ the firm antecedent foundation necessary to get the story going.” “Inside” the story, the beginning looks “arbitrary” and can supply no origin, a bridge started “midspan” with no connection to the shore; “outside” the story, it is foreign to it, and cannot supply the needed littoral anchor. For Hillis Miller, narratives “cover over” the impossibility at the origin; they “cunningly [cover] a gap,” “the impossibility of getting started.” Hillis Miller emphasizes the sleight of hand, but such a structure is often explicit (if perhaps not always perceived), not waiting to be unveiled by the intrepid literary explicator (58–9). The founding gesture that he addresses is evoked by the term posit, which, like the word fiat, I have invoked but not yet explicitly thematized. “How does a speech act become a trope,” writes Paul de Man, “a catachresis which then engenders in its turn the narrative sequence of an allegory? It can only be because we impose, in our turn, on the senseless power of positional language the authority of sense and of meaning. But this is radically inconsistent: language posits and language means (since it articulates) but language cannot posit meaning; it can only reiterate (or reflect) it in its reconfirmed falsehood.”⁴¹ My account invokes the deconstructive use of the term posit (and with it, the deconstructive account of the performative dimension of language) within the context of literary inception. A central term for the book, posit indexes some of the paradoxes of inception. The formal contingency of the work of art entails an inception that might appear, in multiple ways, arbitrary. The asynchronicity of its startings-out—forms that begin after they begin—and the way that that beginning appears as a formal decree that stops the recursive movement back toward origin and forward toward formal constitution also has consequences, as Hillis Miller notes, for textual authority. Positing is a linguistic act, and one that invokes a text’s power to found itself and to reach its outside, that therefore likewise returns us to the shaping power of authorship and, again, the relation of art to life.

The most sustained consideration of positing occurs in Chapters 4, 5, and 8. But many readings in the book will recur to such moments of self-conscious fiat where texts as if call themselves into being. It is often explicit that there can be no proceeding other than on the text’s own knowingly arbitrary or contingent decree; the question, perhaps, is where one goes from there. Hence, perhaps, the self-reflexivity that Niels Buch Leander notes of beginnings: “The beginning of a story, whether cosmological or literary, will then also have to be the story of a beginning, a phenomenon that John Barth deliberately plays on in the opening of his Lost in the Funhouse (1969): ‘Once upon a time there was a story that began’ ” (Leander, 26). The self-reflexivity of any textual beginning bears witness to the self-grounding quality of literary fiction—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. This impotence (if it isn’t rather fiction’s greatest power) the book names by the term posit.

How is one to understand this self-reflexivity—a concept that has, perhaps, been trivialized by its ritualized invocation in recent years? Inception, I have suggested, brings one into contact with the text’s own conditions of possibility. In my opening account of “The End of the Poem,” I simplified its exposition in order to frame the striking logic that moves from the definition of poetic language as the at least virtual possibility of enjambment to the formal definition of poetry by an element that is not poetry. Between the opening account of enjambment and this conclusion, Agamben dwells on the “unrelated rhyme” in Provençal and Stilnovist poetry: a word that, not rhyming with end words in its own stanza, “nevertheless refers to a rhyme-fellow in the successive strophe and, therefore, does nothing more than bring metrical structure to the metastrophic level” (111). For Arnaut, Agamben notes, the unrelated rhyme “evolves almost naturally into word-rhyme, making possible the stupendous mechanism of the sestina”; this mechanism is compelling to Agamben because “word-rhyme is above all a point of undecidability between an essentially asemantic element (homophony) and an essentially semantic element (the word). The sestina is the poetic form that elevates the unrelated rhyme to the status of supreme compositional canon and seeks, so to speak, to incorporate the element of sound into the very lap of sense” (112).⁴²

The unrelated rhyme returns then at the end of the essay when Agamben addresses Dante’s suggestion that the last verses of the poem should “fall into silence” together with these rhymes (113–14). The alternatives for the end of the poem, it would seem, are equally catastrophes for poetic language as Agamben has defined it: a “mystical marriage of sound and sense,” on the one hand, or their perpetual separation “without any possible contact, each eternally on its own side, like the two sexes in Vigny’s poem”—an alternative that would “leave behind it only an empty space in which, according to Mallarmé’s phrase, truly rien n’aura lieu que le lieu” (114). Noting that sound and sense are not “two series or lines in parallel flight,” not “two substances but two intensities, two tonoi of the same linguistic substance” (114), Agamben turns to a specific instance—to the envoi of Dante’s “Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro.” The couplets that end the poem rhyme with this unrelated rhyme (the word donna [lady], the word “that names the supreme poetic intention”) (115):

This would mean that the poem falls by once again marking the opposition between the semiotic and the semantic, just as sound seems forever consigned to sense and sense returned forever to sound. The double intensity animating language does not die away in a final comprehension; instead it collapses into silence, so to speak, in an endless falling. The poem thus reveals the goal of its proud strategy: to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said. (115)

For language thus to speak itself is to return itself to its potentiality—the silence of the end of the poem meets here the onset distortion I term inception. Such is one formulation of the non-trivial self-reflexivity of the work of art that will emerge in the chapters that follow.