'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'
- from Through The Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
When does a film really, truly begin? Or a novel, or a website? When does the reader's role kick in? There are numerous journals and conferences on how "hypertext" offers endless varieties of routes, endings and "open-ended narratives". But should we be talking, too, about how narratives are "open beginninged"?
The narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien's 1939 novel, wasn't unduly troubled by conventional literary style. "One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with . . . A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author."
Since the modernists began to chop up the stable Aristotelian trajectory - a beginning, a middle and an end, in that order - postmodern culture has twisted and fragmented it even further.
In today's sophisticated marketing landscape, we've already started reading many a book well before we get to its once-upon-a-time line. Think of how much advance knowledge and experience of a film, television series or video game you have before encountering the real thing. You've already made a connection through the promotional trailers and posters, as well as the media previews and reviews that feed off and meld into each other, in what the literary theorist Gerard Genette referred to as paratextuality.
Already a classic case is The Blair Witch Project. Did it begin with the website, the newsgroup rumours on the Net or the spoof documentary about the "missing film-makers", or when people finally watched the film? Astute promotion meant audiences were already involved in the film's universe long before they bought their tickets.
Or take the role of a dust jacket. We do judge books by their covers - and by their blurbs and their ability to fight and jostle on news-stands and book-shop shelves. They are not pure information but images and typefaces and words; like orchid flowers, they are designed to assist pollination and spread.
In his recent book, Front Cover: Great Book Jacket And Cover Design, Alan Powers goes so far as to assert that good book covers are charged with a form of hidden eroticism, "in order to say: 'Take me, I am yours' ". Before they buy a book, readers may have already explored the cover image and the blurb, already read a review and perhaps even an extract in a magazine or newspaper. They have already entered the world of the book.
Tie-ins offer additional beginnings. Compare an original book cover with that of the edition published to coincide with the release of a film or television adaptation. The reissue of Enigma, Robert Harris's 1995 novel about code-breakers, inevitably relies on images of the film's stars, who include Kate Winslet and Saffron Burrows.
Another example is where a fictional or virtual universe is already in process, predating the film. Lara Croft, the heroine of the Tomb Raider video game, was embedded in popular culture before Angelina Jolie played her on screen. She is not only a character but also a brand, a trademark, a logo - copied on millions of dolls, comics, confectionery and soft-drink cans. Where does her story begin? In the game? In the film? In the commercial for Lucozade?
As the film and publishing industries turn in on themselves, they gamble on the apparently safer bets of sequels and prequels, in an effort to capitalise on already successful stories. As they reopen and mine these "older" narratives, narrative closure becomes increasingly difficult.
Take Rebecca's Tale, Sally Beauman's sequel to Rebecca, or Mrs de Winter, Susan Hill's earlier sequel to the Daphne du Maurier book, from 1993. For many of their readers, their "real" beginnings lie in du Maurier's gothic 1938 original. Or perhaps in Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film adaptation.
Yes, open beginnings are a complicated business. The "making of" subgenre and "director's cut" versions of films involve audiences in a further web of beginnings and entry points, in their makers' attempts to influence the way the products are received and consumed. The convergence and mergers of previously discrete media industries provides a further impetus in this direction.
In his essay The Death Of The Author, Roland Barthes defines intertextuality as how media texts relate to each other, how "the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture". Many narrative theorists would argue that, at the end of the day, we have only a limited number of plots, which are retold and inflected for different media and different cultures.
So A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg's latest film, is a reworking of Pinocchio; Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge is a retelling of the Faustian pact and Superman draws on the Bible. Their beginnings lie elsewhere, in previous texts and narratives.
Notions of intertextuality get away from the idea of the blank slate, the empty mind, the singular beginning. They suggest that we shuttle back and forth between narratives and memories and storytellers in far more subtle and diffuse ways, with several beginnings and links. In a curious reversal, we can begin to agree with the Queen in Through The Looking Glass when she remarks: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
