英语写作略谈（5）：什么是好开头

徐海铭 上海外国语大学

陈婵娟 上海外国语大学贤达经济人文学院

庄甘林 上海外国语大学贤达经济人文学院

如果文章的开头能引人注目，或是新颖别致，那么，它不仅在观感上立刻抓住了读者的眼球，激发起他们的阅读欲望，在认知上也能让读者获得为之一振的感觉，置读者于非读不可、非要把文章开头设置的悬念探究清楚的心智状态。于是，在文章开头的吸引或激发之下，读者便开始了一次增进对世相人情的认识和理解、学习如何应对复杂世界的阅读旅程。人们常说，一篇文章如果有了好的开头就成功了一半。当代著名作家毕飞宇在创作长篇小说《平原》（2005）时，曾对笔者说，就是为了这篇小说的开头，他整整忙活了三个多月，写了，不满，重写，又不满，又重写，还是不满，再重写——反反复复，曲曲折折，真比绣花还难。最后，在反复摸索中，他找到了自己满意的故事开头，也就是找到了自己期待的叙事的自然切口。一旦有了合适自然的切口，作者便文思泉涌，叙事得以顺畅完成。难怪托马斯·福斯特（Thomas C.Forster）在《如何像教授一样读小说》（How to Read Novels Like a Professor）一书中说：“And it wants to tell us what it thinks is important, so much so that I cannot wait to get started.Perhaps more importantly,it wants us to get involved.When it’s over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, but it will have been an affair to remember.The opening of a novel is an invitation to come inside and play.”（Forster, 2008: 21—22）〔“它（指小说开头）想要告诉我们什么是它认为重要的东西，它如此急着要告诉我们，以至于我也等不及要开始阅读。或许更重要的是，它要我们卷入其中。开头结束时，我们或许有被追求过、被爱慕过、被欣赏过的感觉，不过这将会成为刻骨铭心的事。小说的开头就是邀请我们进入故事，去体验其中的乐趣。”〕可见，精妙的、富有魅力的开头对于作家的顺畅叙事和能否吸引读者具有举足轻重的意义。

经典（classical works）或值得品读的作品都非常注重开头的设计。其实，不论是小说、议论文、散文、随笔，还是报纸上事实性的或非虚构的专题报道也都是如此。我们来看几个具体例子，考察例子中开头的特点及其背后的意图。

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be.National narratives, like personal ones,are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness.There is never just one—they compete and constantly change.The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking.They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires.Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost.But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop selfcriticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity.The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.

…

The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake.In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity.They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living.They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries,extending and deepening the lines of fracture.Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence.They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another.None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.

这是美国年逾百年的期刊《大西洋月刊》（The Atlantic）刊登的一篇政治文章的导论部分。美国资深政治社会学者乔治·帕克（George Packer）（2021）采用宏大的叙事方式，回溯性地概括并分析了自二十世纪七十年代以降直到特朗普时代美国社会所经历的主要裂变、裂变规律以及形塑裂变的核心要素。导论的具体写法是这样的：个体通过讲故事来表达自己对社会的理解和认知，更重要的是，通过叙事认识自己，构建自己的各种身份（认同），表达自己想要成为什么样的人。个人如此，民族、国家亦是如此。显然，作者通过比拟的方法界定叙事的内容。这是具体可感、可以触摸的日常描述，一般读者都能理解这个定义。之后，作者从个人叙事过渡到抽象的国家宏大叙事。之所以显得抽象，是因为作者要从国家整体视角（holistic perspective）和全景化视点（panoramic view）审视整个美国的发展：“如同个人叙事一样，国家叙事也容易受感伤、怨恨、自豪、羞愧、自我盲目的影响，而且，国家叙事从来都不止一个版本。它们互相竞争，不断变化。”可见，要把握国家叙事并不容易。作者进而指出国家叙事的一个特征：“最持久的叙事不是因为其最能经得起事实检验，而是因为它回应了我们内心最深切的需要和愿望。”这是理解国家叙事的关键。然后，作者整体勾勒了国家叙事变化的一般情况：

二十世纪七十年代终结了战后的、两党的、中产阶级的美国，随之也终结了两个相对稳定的关于迈步向前和公平竞争的叙事。取而代之的是四个竞争性的叙事，也就是四个关于美国道德身份的讲述出现了。虽然这些叙事根植于历史，但却被新的思维方式和生活方式所塑造，反映出双方（民主党和共和党）的分歧，这些分歧已经使得美国变成了两个国家，延长并加深了裂痕。过去四十年来，这四个叙事轮流产生影响。它们互相重叠、互相转变、互相吸引、互相排斥。脱离了其他三个叙事，任何一个叙事都无从理解，因为它们来自相同的整体。

显而易见，这样的开头充满了高度抽象的表述，它是对美国近四十年历史的高度浓缩和提炼。既然是浓缩提炼，当然会令一般读者产生距离感。没有在美国生活或工作经历的读者，或者不是长期关注美国社会变化的专业读者，通常需要很大的想象力才能理解文本的思想内容。尽管如此，文章开头从具体熟悉的东西入手，再过渡到美国社会，提纲挈领地梳理出几大叙事以及构成叙事的核心内容，使读者有了关于文本主要内容的清晰眉目：四个关于美国的叙事版本，它们彼此关联、互相依赖，不懂其一，便无从理解其余；要理解美国社会，每一个叙事都不可偏废。四个叙事共同构成关于美国近四十年变迁的有机整体。

我们现在换个文体，来看一看法国作家维克多·雨果（Victor Hugo）的小说《巴黎圣母院》（The Hunchback of Notre-Dame）的开头。

Preface

A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the following word,engraved by hand upon the wall: —

AΝÁΓΚΗ.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.

He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient church.

Afterward, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down,I know not which, and the inscription disappeared.For it is thus that people have been in the habit of proceeding with the marvelous churches of the Middle Ages for the last two hundred years.Mutilations come to them from every quarter,from within as well as from without.The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them.

Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this book here consecrates to it, there remains today nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved with the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame—nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up.The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn,has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.

It is upon this word that this book is founded.

March, 1831 （Hugo, 2010: 1）

雨果创作这篇序言来充当小说的开头。读完这篇序言，读者的思绪立刻被序言中的关键词“命运”拽入巴黎的历史情境中，并在心中思忖：留下了耻辱印记“命运”、饱受折磨、不甘心离开人世的灵魂（soul in torment）会是谁呢？人间代际更替，历史朝代变换，写下“命运”一词的那只血肉之手早已化作尘土，消失得了无痕迹，而巴黎圣母院这个坚固的物理实体却依然矗立。这里曾经发生过什么故事？故事的人物曾经历过怎样的沧桑，才非要写下“命运”？也就是说，小说一开头就打下的“命运”这个楔子，诱惑或迫使读者跟着作者的思路去追寻故事发生的轨迹。换言之，作家的抱负就是要记载这里的历史，刻录这个冤屈灵魂不断挣扎的命运。冤屈命运的书写者究竟是谁？这座教堂的主教是谁？他与这个冤屈灵魂有何关系？骚乱迭起的巴黎在教堂这里上演过何种惊心动魄的故事？可以想象，这应该是一部气势磅礴的史诗级别小说。

与雨果这篇背景气势宏阔、人物命运悲惨的序言开头不同，英国十九世纪女小说家简·奥斯丁（Jane Austen）的小说《傲慢与偏见》（Pride and Prejudice）开头是这样写的：“It is a truth universally acknowledged,that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”（Austen，2008：1）这句话采用了it作形式主语结构，把需要强调的、由that引导的从句（真正主语）置于句末，凸显了一位有钱的单身汉需要娶个太太，点明了小说是关于男女爱情纠葛的戏剧性家常故事。作者使用了一本正经的大词truth（真理，真相）以及universally（普遍地、放之四海而皆准地）、acknowledged（承认、认同、同意）这样的表述，给整个小说的基调缀上了一丝诙谐和幽默的色彩，彰显了小说的风格：轻松，幽默，自然。同时，这个开头简明扼要，直抵小说核心内容。究竟谁傲慢？为何傲慢？谁持有偏见？为何产生偏见？偏见和傲慢能否消除？如何消除？这一系列疑问的答案都会随着爱情故事的展开渐次向读者敞开。

再如美国著名黑人作家、诺贝尔文学奖获得者托妮·莫里森（Toni Morrison）的代表作《宠儿》（Beloved），小说一开始就悬念重重、先声夺人，激发读者顺着小说的开头探究到底，揭开作者悬置的谜题。

I24 was spiteful.Full of a baby’s venom.The women in the house knew it and so did the children.For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.The grandmother,Baby Suggs was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard).Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill.Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods:the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed.No.Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time.Within two months, in the dead of winter,leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother;and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road.It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati did not stretch that far.In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.（Morrison，2004：3）

首先是I24里满是恶意，充满了婴儿的怨恨。这屋里的女人们知道这一点，孩子们也知道。需要读者注意的是，作者为了营造阅读的惊奇效果，打破一般的写作规则，不对I24这个地点做具体描述，而是故意让读者从字里行间去寻找关于I24这个编号是什么的答案。细心的读者能够从后面的回指短语in the house推测出这是房子的门牌号码。作者还引出了women、children、Sethe、Sethe的女儿Denver、奶奶Baby Suggs以及两个儿子Howard和Buglar。

这两个儿子13岁时离家出走，照镜子把镜子打碎了时（那是给伯格拉的信号）；蛋糕上出现两只小小手印时（那是给霍华德的信号）。他们谁也不想等待多看点什么。满满一壶的鹰嘴豆在地板上的一堆东西里冒烟。苏打薄脆饼干被捻成粉末，靠近门槛撒成一条线。他们谁也不想等待其中的某个轻松时刻：甚至在无事惊扰的几周，几个月。不等了。他们每个人都立刻逃离——在这屋子做了他们无法忍受或再次目睹的侮辱的那一刻。两个月内，在隆冬时刻，他们离开了奶奶Baby Suggs、母亲Sethe、小妹妹Denver，把她们丢在蓝石路上的那栋灰白屋子里。那时候，这屋子还没门牌号码，因为辛辛那提市还没延伸到那么远。事实上，俄亥俄自称是个州，不过也才70年。那时候，先是一个兄弟，接着是另一个兄弟，把被卷儿塞进帽子里，提着鞋，悄然离开了让他们感到浓浓恶意的屋子。

可以推断，这样的开头暗示着整部小说的叙事都是围绕这房子里的人物展开。作家的语言风格和叙事格调在开头已经露出端倪。

现在总结一下全文。本文列举了政论和不同风格的小说的开头样例，旨在说明不论是写政论还是写创意小说，我们都要在开头下足功夫：如何开头？是制造悬念，还是从熟悉的话题开始，逐渐过渡到所要言说的议题？这些都得悉心推敲。有了新颖别致的开头之后，我们再去演绎精彩的故事或展开对议题的深刻论述。