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is to be art, wrote Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, if there
is to be any aesthetic doing and observing, one physiological
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On
Literature
pre-condition is indispensable: rapture. Rapture : the word
means being drawn forcibly out of oneself into another
realm. That other realm is by no means peaceful. It is
associated in one way or another with those excessive things
I have named: death, sexuality, and the irrational side of
language. Literature seizes me and carries me to a place where
pleasure and pain join. When I say I am enchanted by the
virtual realities to which literary works transport me, that is
a milder way of saying I am enraptured by reading those
works. Literary works are in one way or another wild. That
is what gives them their power to enrapture.
OPENINGS AS THE RAISING OF GHOSTS
Shakespeare s plays might almost be taken as a counterproof
of what I have been saying. They typically open not with a
speech by one of the main characters but by dialogue among
subsidiary folk. A Shakespeare play often begins with minor
characters who establish the social milieu within which the
main drama will be enacted. Hamlet, for example, starts not
with the appearance of the ghost but with a conversation
between two sentinels, Bernardo and Francisco (unlikely
names for Danes), on the battlements of Elsinore Castle. Othello
begins not with Othello himself, but with a speech by
Roderigo, a gulled gentleman, victim of Iago s villainy.
Shakespeare s beginnings, nevertheless, obey my law of an
irruptive start in the middle of things. They instantly establish
a new social space, the space within which Hamlet or Othello
will work out his tragic destiny.
The opening of Hardy s The Return of the Native sets a scene,
Egdon Heath. The heath is, the chapter title says, A Face on
which Time makes but Little Impression : A Saturday after-
noon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and
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Literature as Virtual Reality
the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath
embrowned itself moment by moment.
The openings of Mrs Dalloway, Lord Jim, Crime and Punishment,
Herbert s The Collar, Faulkner s Light in August and many
other works, however, establish in a single sentence a
character, often a chief protagonist. For me the character
springs to life with this sentence. The personage remains alive
ever afterward somewhere in my imagination, as a kind of
ghost that may not be exorcized, neither alive nor dead.
Such ghosts are neither material nor immaterial. They are
embodied in the words on the pages in all those books on the
shelves waiting to be invoked again when the book is taken
down and read.
Sometimes it is not quite the first sentence that brings the
character alive. The opening sentence of the second chapter of
Pickwick Papers brings Mr Pickwick to life for me, along with
the distinctive ironic parodic voice of Dickens himself, the
Immortal Boz, as he liked to be called. What is parodied in
this case is the circumstantiality of place and date that is
expected of realist fiction. The sentence opening the second
chapter picks up the fiat lux echo in the first sentence of the
novel. Here is part of that first first sentence: The first ray of
light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling
brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the
immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved . . . This
opening parodies not only Genesis but also the pomposities
found in official biographies of great men. It also indicates
Dickens s own inaugural power as author, light-bringer. The
echo of that in the beginning of the second chapter applies
the same figure to Pickwick s appearance on a fine morning:
That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen, and
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On
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begun to strike a light on the morning of the thirteenth of
May, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, when Mr
Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers,
threw open his chamber window, and looked out upon the
world beneath. Goswell Street was at his feet, Goswell Street
was on his right hand as far as the eye could reach, Goswell
Street extended on his left; and the opposite side of Goswell
Street was over the way.
George Eliot s Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch, to give
another example of a deferred beginning, does not come
fully alive for me in the opening sentences. The novel
opens like this: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which
seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and
wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not
less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin
appeared to Italian painters . . . This is circumstantial
enough, but what really brings Dorothea to life for me is a
moment in the opening scene with her sister Celia when,
against her principles, Dorothea admires the jewelry they have
inherited from their mother: How very beautiful these
gems are! said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling,
as sudden as the gleam [that the sun has just reflected from
the jewels].
The attentive reader will note how often these openings,
though I have chosen them more or less at random from
those that stick in my mind, involve in one way or another
either the sun or the opening of a window. Sometimes, as in
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