best first lines

For several days I’ve also been meaning to post on great opening lines of literature. But I’m pressed for time tonight and can only handle the theme briefly.

One of the candidates often mentioned for greatness in an opening is one with which I unfortunately cannot agree. That would be the first sentence from J.G. Ballard’s 1975 High-Rise (though I generally like Ballard):

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

I don’t like it, because it’s more than a bit forced. Everything depends on the ex nihilo shock value of referring to the eating of a dog as though it were a plausible activity not needing further comment. The author’s pen outruns the reader’s mind. Anyone can say strange things at any time, but good writing requires that we prepare our reader really to believe those strange things.

Imagine, by way of example, that the closing lines of “The Pit and the Pendulum” were the opening lines instead, and you will see the problem. Those lines are utterly preposterous, yet in my opinion Poe succeeds, by means of the whole of the foregoing story, in paving the way for the reader to accept their preposterousness. Place them at the opening instead, and you would simply die laughing, and not in an admiring way.

Poe also comes up with a gem of an opening line in another story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” and I think this opening is instructive. Here it is:

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

I don’t know of a better first line in any work of literature. Why do I say this?

*Nothing is more believable than a cliché. Clichés are so believable that they are actually boring. And “adding insult to injury” is such a familiar concept that no one could deny it as a motive force for a possible crime.

But the fact that clichés are boring also usually makes them poor candidates for use in good literature. Yet Poe finds several ways to avoid this danger.

First, he changes the usual formulation. The “adding insult to injury” construction is not explicitly stated, but used as a sort of background syllogism to give likelihood to the narrator’s motives.

Second, he makes it “thousand injuries,” adding a bit of sparkle to the usual construction while also lending the narrator a mildly ironic mastery. We know that he knows that the insult/injury distinction is in linguistic terms a stupid old saw, and he signals that by varying it, while still letting us know that it was in fact the root of his criminal motive. And the addition of “thousand” lets us know that there were so many such injuries that we ourselves might have been driven to the same extremes once the crowning insult arrived (namely: tricking our adversary into a cellar, fettering him to the wall, and bricking him up to starve to death in silence).

Third, the name “Fortunato” is sufficiently exotic, and sufficiently laced with symbolic etymological resonance, that it also minimizes the cliché effect of the opening. That name also makes it plausible to give the story an exotic setting (the Carnival in Venice, with its attendant costumes and its references to Masonic conspiracies). In fact, Poe is fairly rare among American writers in being able to present a plausibly European feel to much of his writing, and the ravenous way in which the French have adopted him is excellent testimony on that point. (No more Jerry Lewis jokes, please.) [ADDENDUM: No, it can’t be Venice. SEE HERE.]

Fourth, “I vowed revenge” is already the motor for the entire story. Poe certainly has the reader’s attention. No one is going to put the story down after that first sentence.

To see what I mean, imagine the following way of ruining the opening sentence:

“When Bill added insult to injury, I vowed revenge.”

That’s an obviously stupid opening sentence. The cliché is there in such customary form that we’re not even sure the narrator recognizes it as such. The mainstream proper name only adds to the cliché effect.

Instead, Poe gets the best of both worlds: he gets the supreme believability of the platitude (valuable for inducing the reader’s credulity) without also getting its nauseating boredom (and this allows him to induce the reader’s interest).

If you are both credible and interesting to your reader from the first sentence, then you have already succeeded as a writer. The table is set.