First Line
Through the Brownian motion of the web, I bounced into a page devoted to great opening sentences from science fiction. Lists like this are terribly subjective, but this particular list honorably, and uncharacteristically, provides its criteria: a good first sentence hooks you, “But a great first sentence…establishes a tone, it sticks in your mind, and it’s like a little otherworldly koan, confounding your expectations. And maybe freaking your shit a little.”
So I was saddened not to see my favorite opening line from any book—science fiction or otherwise—make the list, although I confess 1984’s credentials as science fiction are debatable. Someone offers it for consideration in the comments, but he doesn’t explain why Orwell’s immortal words belong on the list, so I’ll do so here.
1984 opens with the words, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Let’s deconstruct that sentence.
Bright, cold day in April. Clear weather, conducive to and metaphorical of a clear mind. Sunlight makes things visible, subject to observation and analysis; cool air keeps one alert. (Contrast the frame of mind you experience in hazy summer doldrums, or fog, or storms, or the wee hours of the night.) Calm. Attentive. This frame of mind is reinforced by the use of simple, short, common words that are part of everyone’s working vocabulary. Nothing elaborate, just simple facts, told with simple words. There’s the establishment of tone.
So when we learn the clocks are striking thirteen—something clocks manifestly should not do—we are made to feel that it isn’t some kind of accident, or misperception or illusion. Wrong things are happening, and they are doing so in the calm, rational light of day. There’s the confounding of expectations.
There is an explanation, of course: the clocks are on military time, as in “1900 hours” for 7 pm. A clever reader, or one used to living on an army base, might pick up on that immediately, in which case the sentence does double duty in establishing tone: the setting is one of civilian life—clock towers don’t survive very well on the modern battlefield—but a civilian life which has been militarized, to fight the Eurasians and/or Eastasians in the service of Big Brother, we soon learn. Yet such an explanation must come after the moment of confusion; a military rationale does its work without preventing the initial moment of surrealism from doing its work. There’s the koan.
For readers who anticipate this explanation, however, the sentence performs yet a fourth function, although its significance will not be clear until later, by which time the first-time reader has forgotten the opening line. If the reader is sufficiently on the ball to explain away the thirteen-striking clocks, he has already engaged in the rationalization of the absurd, which for Orwell includes the state of war, especially of perpetual war extending to encompass civilian life. Rationalization of the absurd in the service of the state, especially the willful denial of reality known as doublethink, is the crux of 1984’s message. Orwell seduces his brightest readers into participating in the very intellectual self-sabotage he wants to warn us against, as a way of illustrating how insidious the trap is. Insidious enough that you won’t know it until you read the book a second time. And that should freak your shit a little.
All in fourteen words, not one of which would trouble a six-year-old. That is a master wordsmith at work.