Triad 7 of 32 · 2026-09-30 · Difficulty 3 · Shared form or method, Conflict, Oblique/structural
The thread
Three books made of beginnings and nothing else. Calvino’s Flannery states the wish (‘I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit’, ch. 8) and If on a winter’s night a traveler half-grants it with ten broken-off first chapters. Kuppner’s Arioflotga carries it out for verse: 4,108 first lines of a lost ‘Great Anthology’, alphabetized, with no poems behind them (the title is the initials of ‘A Revised Index Of First Lines Of The Great Anthology’). Jullien’s The Book of Beginnings does it for philosophy, a whole book on three first sentences (Genesis, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Yijing), built on the claim ‘We never exit a first sentence.’ Conflict: for Calvino the incipit’s charge is narrative, ‘the promise of a time of reading’; Jullien’s Chinese opening ‘opens no account’, because ‘No negative means no “story.”’ Kuppner sits between: promises with nothing promised, alphabet in place of plot, and two stock first lines (‘O Muse, begin’; ‘At first, in the beginning, there was no such thing as Time’) that parody Jullien’s two Western openings.
The three books
- Arioflotga, Frank Kuppner; 2008. The incipit as the whole book: 4,108 first lines of a lost anthology, alphabetized, no poems behind them.
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino, William Weaver (translator); 1979 (Eng. 1981). The theory of the incipit as narrative promise; ten broken-off first chapters; Flannery’s wish for a book that is only a beginning.
- The Book of Beginnings, François Jullien, Jody Gladding (translator); 2012 (Entrer dans une pensée); Eng. 2015. The first sentence as fate: Genesis (creation), Hesiod (generation), Yijing (process); a beginning that ‘opens no account’.
Notebook
- An index for a book that doesn’t exist: write twenty first lines for unwritten poems or essays and alphabetize them (Kuppner’s compiler: ‘re-ordered accordingly’; Flannery: ‘a book that is only an incipit’, ch. 8). Does alphabetical order give you a plot anyway, as Oblivia does? Which line refuses its place?
- Two readings of one first sentence: take the opening of one of your essays; with Jullien (‘it folds the thinkable … We never exit a first sentence’, ch. 4) write what it commits the rest to; with Calvino (‘the first line … refers to something that has already happened outside the book’, ch. 7) write what it presupposes. Then recast it as a Yijing-style parataxis of four terms, no subject (‘does not construct’, ch. 5).
- The copyist’s hand: Flannery copies the start of Crime and Punishment to see ‘if the charge of energy contained in that start is communicated to my hand’ (ch. 8). Copy ten first sentences by hand from your Gestext shelf (Benjamin, Jabès, Borges); note where the hand wants to go on. Is the incipit’s charge a gesture?
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Tze-Ki Hon, ‘Chinese Philosophy of Change (Yijing)’, SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-change/
- Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/beginningsintent0000said
- Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Evelyn-White, Theoi https://theoi.com/Text/HesiodTheogony.html (also Project Gutenberg #348 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/348)
- ‘Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130’, The Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino
- Arioflotga, Books from Scotland https://booksfromscotland.com/book/arioflotga-2/
- Frank Kuppner, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kuppner
To carry
“We never exit a first sentence.” — François Jullien, The Book of Beginnings, ch. 4, trans. Jody Gladding
Themes
alphabetical order · beginnings · commonplace · copyist · creation vs generation vs process · first lines · first sentence · Genesis · Hesiod · incipit · index · narrative promise · Oblivia · second person · Yijing
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