Narrative Beginnings: Relations between First Full-Fledged Scenes and the Beginning of the Main Action

ABSTRACT: This essay focuses on two important phenomena in the context of narrative “beginnings”: the beginning of the action proper and the first full-fledged scene (FFS), namely, the first time-section in the text that the author finds to be of consequence enough to deserve full scenic treatment. The point of departure for my discussion is Meir Sternberg’s claim that the FFS always signals the beginning of the action proper (and the end of the exposition) in the fabula. To refute this as an absolute claim, I examine several types of openings where the FFS either succeeds or precedes chronologically the beginning of the action proper. I thereby also try to demonstrate it is instructive to consider the FFS more generally as significant on aesthetic and rhetorical grounds within the narrative whole; it can perform various and possibly alternative functions to the one Sternberg attributes to it as necessary and constant. Moreover, regarding the question of establishing the beginning point of the action proper, I suggest as an alternative signpost another full-fledged scene—the first in what I call the “main linear sequence” of the work (the application of both criteria often leads to the same result, but not always). This alternative indicator is not without its limitations either, but these limitations are methodologically useful since they help us identify and explain cases where the demarcation between exposition and action proper is genuinely problematic (when it is difficult to identify a main linear sequence in the work).