At its most mediocre, narrative theory is simply a collection of various features of narrative. The best of it, though, does more than catalogue, and pushes us into why--why these features happen, why they resonate, why they matter.

When I wrote my abstract for Brian Richardson's collection on narrative beginnings, I thought I had the latter, but I'm afraid I may have the former. The argument looks at ways that playwrights and directors play with their beginnings to disrupt the audience's smooth entrance into the narrative world--delayed openings, real world features bleding into the narrative world, theatre environments that induct audience members into the narrativce world well before the narrative begins.

These are certainly interesting cases, and I've always been convinced that drama and performance help us sharpen up our sense of how narratives work. But while I'm convinced that these instances work to call attention to audiences relationships with the fictional worlds being represented, I'm not sure yet what this tells us about the very beginnings in question, in drama particularly, or in narratives generally.

So while performance gives writers and directors the flexibility to disrupt the audience's schema for entering the narrative world, how might this map back onto our sense of beginnings in, say, fiction?

The best analogic example I can think of is Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity where the narrative starts on the cover, traditionally the paratext, but I'm not sure how that paratextual example formally inflects the thematics of the narrative itself.

Perhaps this reveals a limitation for fiction, its ability to disrupt its audience's induction into the narrative world, something that can only be done with narrative frames, like in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse or Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Still thinking about this, must start writing very soon.