I’m trying to think of where my book began, and realizing very swiftly the obvious truth that no book has a single point of origin. Better then to talk about a book’s beginnings, and this short post will discuss two of them, and from two very different points in time.
The earlist beginning I can think of goes back to an exam I took as an undergraduate. I had to answer three questions on the exam paper, and had three hours in which to do it. I managed two of the questions pretty well, as I was able to use material that I’d memorized for them: this was a closed-book exam, and I’d spent the last few weeks arming myself with quotations and embryonic bits of argument. With an hour left on the clock, I then turned to the last essay, which was a response to the kind of grab-bag question that I myself now produce for my students: ‘Write about one of the following in relation to literature of the period 1660-1830…’. I chose the last option: ‘theatre of mind’.
At the time and flying high on adrenaline, I only had a vague idea of what ‘theatre of mind’ actually was. But the joy and flaw of an hour-long exam is that one can compensate for the lack of any specific knowldge with flair and persuasion. So I produced an essay on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, arguing for how its dashes, and the transitions they helped operate, produced not just a representation of the workings of Tristram’s mind, but a specifically theatrical one. I brought up the dashes that adorned eighteenth-century playscripts to make my point (I’d just read The Rivals), and made use of some half-remembered lines in Sterne’s novel comparing his readers to theatregoers.
It worked. I remember it working as I wrote, and, although I can’t be sure, I kind of suspect that it was this essay, of the three I produced that summer day, that got me a first-class mark. That helped me get a first overall, which got me a scholarship, and another, and then, as a frustrated PhD student nearing the end of my first year, I started writing once again about transition as a representational strategy.
Another beginning might be the latest one I can think of. After a lot of sweat and tears and walks by the North Sea, I had finally produced an introduction to my book that I was happy with and which just about responded to the concerns of my peer reviewers. So I decided to show it to some colleagues, and got some fantastic advice on how to improve it even more. One colleague (Jennifer Richards) gave me some of the bluntest feedback: she said that the start of the introduction was no good and needed to tell the reader what was going on immediately. She was right.
I got into work early in the spring of 2020 and created a new document. I called it ‘WHAT IS TRANSITION’. I then stared at the blank page for a good while, before finally writing, deleting, rewriting, and writing some more until I produced a new first paragraph for the book, a distillation of all my thinking to that point and a beginning that was in some ways a kind of ending too:
What is transition? Transition names a process of change between objects whose properties define that transition: emotions, chords, gradients, colours, genders. It also names the moment, long or brief, in which such transformation occurs. To identify a transition is thus to acknowledge both the dynamic quality of a process of change and the iconic quality of a rich and recognisable moment. Further, the identification of transition appears to grant meaning: this came from that or that must lead to this; here was the moment when everything was possible or there was the point of no return. As a tool for the making of meaning, criticism has relied upon transition’s simultaneous invocation of the iconic and the dynamic. This reliance is particularly visible in eighteenth-century writing about the theatre but is by no means limited to it.
Just as I was finishing this new beginning, the late Richard Terry walked down the corridor. I called out to him and asked him to read it. As generous, kind, and astute as ever, he stopped and did so. He told me he liked the paragraph, and this reassured me no end. With help from Fionnghuala Sweeney (whose office is opposite mine), and from Ella Dzelzainis (whose office is almost directly below mine) I sharpened the prose a little further, and finally had a beginning I could be proud of.
These two beginnings were almost a decade apart. I’m also aware as I write this that they aren’t necessarily just beginnings for this book. I don’t really talk about Tristram Shandy in Criticism, Performance, and the Passions, so there is certainly something there to build on one day (I even have a folder for it on my computer). And, in the first paragraph of my book, I mention the significance of transition for our contemporary thinking about gender – but this is one of many pathways that I was unable to take any further. For now, I still have much to learn before I do take that path, and make this book’s beginning into another thing’s beginning also.
My book, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions: The Art of Transition was published in March 2021 by Cambridge University Press. You can order it direct from the press, with a 20% discount, by using the code SMITH2021.