Inceptions

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that non-coincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the non-trivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way does the fact that they must render our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity. From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Most explicitly for James, for whom revision, a striving to keep the work perpetually at the border of its emergence, was a fundamentally ethical practice, attention to inception is a commitment to human freedom; a similar commitment is legible in all the writers examined here. To experience this vibrancy, the sense that the work might have been, might still yet be, otherwise, it suffices, James reminds us, to reread it. Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, that follows from perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.