Chapter 3 beginning

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, intelligent, wealthy, of a comfortable home, of a cheerful disposition, who seemed to possess the greatest happiness of life at the same time, had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world without any care. She was the youngest of her father's two dearest daughters, and by virtue of her elder sister's marriage she became the mistress of the house at an early age.Her mother had died prematurely, she remembered only dimly her caresses, and her mother's place had long since been filled by an eminent woman, the governess.Emotionally, this female teacher is no worse than her mother.

Miss Taylor, who had been in Mr. Woodhouse's house sixteen years, was more a friend than a teacher, and was very fond of the two sisters, and especially Emma.They were as close as siblings.Even when she was nominally a teacher, because of her gentle disposition, Miss Taylor had not allowed herself to impose any control over others. Now the shadow of this authority has long since disappeared, and they live together as friends and love each other.Emma did what she liked; she had great respect for Miss Taylor's opinion, but chiefly her own. The real bane of Emma's situation lay, indeed, in her right to do as she pleased, and her self-important disposition, two unfavorable factors which presaged many of her pleasures.However, this danger was not yet seen, so these two defects did not count among her misfortunes.

Sorrow, a less severe kind, came at last, but not in any odious form.Miss Taylor is married. Jane Austen (1816) (translated by Liu Chongde) This is the saddest story I've ever heard.Before that, we had known the Ashburnhams of Norham for nine years, and we knew each other very well—or we should say that our relationship was loose and casual, but also as close as a hand and a glove.My wife and I knew Captain Ashburnham and his wife as well as anyone else; but in another sense we knew nothing of them.This is probably the characteristic of the British.To this day, when I sit and mull over how much I really know about this tragic event, I am still at a loss.Six months ago, I had never been to England, and of course I had no feeling for anything deep in the heart of the British people.All I know is superficial.

Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915) When did the novel begin?This question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does a human embryo become a human?Of course the creation of a novel does not always begin with writing or typing the first few words.Most writers always have to do some preparatory work in advance, even if it is an idea.Many people prepare carefully weeks or even months in advance, such as drawing plot development maps, compiling character biographies, and recording ideas, scenes, situations, and jokes, etc., so that they can be prepared at any time during the writing process. refer to.Different writers work in different ways, and Henry James' notes for "Boynton's Post" were almost as long and as entertaining as the finished novel.Muriel Spark, as far as I know, always rethinks every new novel he writes, and never writes until he comes up with a satisfactory title and opening sentence.

For readers, the beginning of a novel always begins with the first sentence (of course, the first sentence may not be the one originally written by the author), then another sentence, and another sentence... When does the novel begin? finished?This is another difficult question to answer.Is it the first paragraph, the first few pages, or the first chapter?In any case, the beginning of the novel is a threshold, a boundary separating the real world from the fictional world of the novelist.So it should, as the saying goes, "bring us in the door". This task is not easy.We are not yet familiar with the author's tone, diction, and syntactic conventions.At first, we looked slowly and hesitantly.There is a lot of new information to absorb and memorize, such as the names of characters and their relationship, time, place, the ins and outs of plot development, etc. If you don’t remember these, you can’t understand the story.Is it worth the effort?Most readers take good care of writers, hesitating, but at least able to read a few pages before deciding whether to step in the door.However, as far as the above two examples are concerned, the possibility of our hesitation is very small, or even no hesitation at all, because the first sentence "hooked" us.

The beginning of Jane Austen's novel is classical: clear semantics, careful words, objective narrative; like a velvet glove: elegant on the outside, but ironic inside.The first sentence of the novel lifts up the heroine first, in order to make her fall down.This design is really ingenious.This is in contrast to stories like Cinderella, where the heroine is at first unsuccessful and eventually turns around. Jane Oslo has been deeply influenced by such fairy tales from the creation of Mansfield Park.Emma is like a high-ranking princess. Only by suppressing her arrogance and discrediting her prestige can she obtain real happiness. "Handsome" (without traditional vocabulary such as pretty or beautiful - this neutral adjective implies that the heroine has a masculinity with a strong desire for power), clever (clever) (this is an ambiguous word, indicating a developed intelligence ; sometimes used pejoratively, as in "too clever.") "rich" (this last word is old and notorious, conjuring up biblical stories and colloquial tales of the moral decay that comes with wealth.): The clever combination of these three adjectives (involving stress and phonology issues, if you don’t believe me, you can rearrange them), implies that Emma is deceptive under the "satisfied" appearance.After nearly twenty-one years of carefree life in the world, it was time for her to be stimulated and sober.Twenty-year-old is an adult, and Emma has to take responsibility. In the bourgeois society in the early nineteenth century, when women reach this age, it means deciding whether to marry or who to marry.Emma was unusually free in this respect, for she was already the "mistress" of the house.Such a position in the family could easily breed habits of arrogance, especially as she had been brought up by a governess who was fond of her but insufficiently disciplined.

This implication is further strengthened in the third paragraph; but interestingly, we begin to hear Emma's own voice in the narrator's impartial, objective words. "They were as close as sisters." "They lived together as friends..." From these expressions we seem to hear Emma herself complacently describing her relationship with the governess, who allowed her to "do as she pleases." ".The structure at the end of this paragraph is full of irony: "Although I respect Miss Taylor's opinion, but mainly act according to her own opinion", the two sentences are symmetrical in structure, but logically contradictory, which implies the difference in Emma's character. flaw, which is stated very clearly in the fourth paragraph.With the marriage of Miss Taylor, the story itself begins: Emma loses Miss Taylor as a companion and mature counselor, and takes in a protege, Harriet, who further inflates Emma's vanity, Emma set out to match her, with disastrous results, of course.

The opening of Ford Maddox Ford's novel is exaggerated, designed to grab the reader's attention, and actually drags us by the collar to the threshold.But almost at the same time, the obscurity, ambiguity and anxiety that characterize the modern novel make this narrative extremely infectious.Who is this man speaking to us?He speaks English, but he is not English.The English couple, who seemed to be the subject of this tragic story, had known them for at least nine years and said he had "knowledge-nothing" about England before that.The word "heard" in the first sentence implies that he is going to tell someone else's story, but almost at the same time it implies that the narrator himself, or his wife, is also a person in the story.The narrator is intimate—and not intimate—with the Ashburnhams.These contradictions characterize the British character and reflect the disparity between appearance and reality in the behavior of the English middle class.Therefore, this opening and Emma's opening embody the same thematic tone respectively, although the tone of the former indicates tragedy rather than comedy. The word "miserable" reappears at the end of the paragraph, and another key word, "heart," appears in the second-to-last sentence (both characters have heart problems, and their love lives are not normal).

I use the glove as a metaphor for Jane Austen's narrative style, which is more authoritative in part because it avoids metaphors (figures are a common rhetorical device in poetry, as opposed to reason and common sense).This glove metaphor actually appears in the opening paragraph of The Good Soldier, but with a different meaning.Here it refers to the polite, easy-going, yet measured, discriminatory social behavior typical of middle-class people (the "elegant" glove is a concrete embodiment), but also suggests deceitful concealment or "cover".Several mysteries in the first paragraph are quickly resolved as more information is provided, such as the clarification that the narrator is an American living in Europe, etc.But the veracity of his account, and why the other characters took so long to show up, remain key questions in this harrowing story.

Of course, there are many ways to start a novel, not limited to the two mentioned above.The reader will have the opportunity to see some examples as he skims through the book, for I always cite the opening passages of a novel as illustrations when explaining every aspect of the art of the novel (so that I do not have to outline the action).Here, however, it may be useful to point out some areas of possible beginnings for a novel: a novel may begin by describing the landscape in which the story takes place, what film critics call a "set."Thomas Hardy, for example, begins with a somber description of Egerton Heath in The Return of the Native. E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India - begins with a guided tour of Chandrapur, which is beautifully and elegantly written.Novels may also start in the middle of character dialogue, typical examples are Evelyn Waugh's "Handful of Dust" and some characteristic works of Ivy Compton-Burnet.The novel could also begin with the narrator's remarkable self-introduction: "Call me Ishmir" (Herman Melville's); or with a crude imitation of traditional autobiography: "...you wonder Probably the first thing on my mind was where I was born, and how I had a bad childhood, and what my parents did before they had me, and all the David Copperfield crap, but I don't Will Say” (J.D. Salinger).A novelist can begin a novel with a philosophical remark: "The past was a foreign country: people there had strange ways of doing things" (L. P. Hartley); Situation: "Hale hadn't been in Brighton for three hours before he knew they were going to murder him" (Graham Green, "Brighton Nock").Many novels begin with a "frame story," explaining the origin of the main story, or explaining that the main story is told by a fictional bystander.An unnamed narrator in Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" reveals that on the deck of a cruiser in the Thames Estuary, Marlowe was telling a group of friends about his experiences in the Congo. "There," Marlowe began, "is the darkest place on earth." Henry James's The Turn of the Screw begins with the memoir of a dead woman, which is read aloud. The audience, read out, were guests at a ball, gathering at a country house to tell ghost stories for fun, and what might happen to them in the end was unexpected.Kingsley Amis's ghost novel The Green Man begins with a playful parody of The Fine Foods Guide: "A real coach shop can be found within forty miles of London—eight miles from Kilometer I. Hotel, you will be amazed; before this astonishment has passed, you will be amazed at the quality of the food, which is also very British..." Italo Calvino's "The Winter Night Traveler" It begins like this: "You are about to read The Winter Night Traveler by Italo Calvino." James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake begins in the middle of the sentence: "The river The torrent, past Eve's and Adam's, from the bay to the bay, brought us back to House Castle and Envilens. "Finally, the incomplete words above are used as the end of the book: "A road, a lonely one, a last lover, a long-lasting one"-this brings us back to the beginning of the novel, just like the cycle of water in nature, formed by the river From the sea to the cloud to the rain to the river, it goes round and round, endless; it is also like the generation of meaning in the process of reading a novel: it emerges endlessly and is infinite.