What's in A Prologue?

I often hear prologues discouraged. I am mystified by that. A prologue seems the perfect way to make a preemptive, immediate case for a book, a way to offer the reader a cheat sheet about themes and intentions. If teaching a reader how to read a book is an important task in the early pages, prologues can serve the purpose. As a piece of writing, a prologue is wild westish in form. There are no guidelines, no writing books on the subject that I’ve ever come across. They can be weirder than anything else in the novel. It is generally believed that readers skip over them in their eagerness to get to page one. Epigraphs too are lucky if they get a once-over.) The general advice about prologues is to write one if you must but then find a way to delete it by incorporating the content into the body of the book.

I'm a fan, however. I remember suggesting the addition of a prologue to a friend for his book, and he wrote something quite beautiful that framed the tone and the mystery of the novel in a neat out of sequence scene. I began thinking about prologues again when I prepped The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz for teaching this fall. He doesn’t call his opening section a prologue, or anything, but a prologue it is, a stirring 7-page opening with a first sentence that claims the mechanism that controls the lives of the characters.

“They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku Americanus, or more colloquially, fuku—generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”

Yowza! So powerful, so curious. Next we learn about the two exemplars and disseminators of fuku, the Admiral, aka Christopher Columbus, and El Jefe, aka Raphael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (the dictator Trujillo), both of whom made it impossible to live a free or safe life in the Dominican Republic and whose cursed disregard for the lives of the people sent ripples across the sea into the Dominican neighborhoods of New Jersey where Oscar, our hero, grew up. Right up front we are told this isn’t a story that assumes free will; it assumes a curse. The prologue goes on to offer a theory of how JFK was a victim of fuku. “It wasn’t the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe. It wasn’t aliens or the KGB or a lone gunman. It wasn’t the Hunt Brothers of Texas or or Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission. It was Trujillo; it was the fuku.” Who isn’t interested in another angle on the Kennedy assassination?

The prologue goes on the explain why Kennedy succumbed to fuku, and by the way why fuku caused the Americans loss of the war in Vietnam. Every sentence of this prologue, buttressed by lively footnotes on pertinent histories, advances the case for fuku’s potency. This is not a neutral presentation. The speaker, who goes by the moniker the Watcher (we don’t yet know their identity and won’t until halfway through the book) is an opinionated teacher of philosophy and history. We are enjoined to accept fuku as an explanation for why things happen. Yet not everyone agrees. “I’m not entirely sure Oscar would have liked this designation, Fuku story. He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that was the kind of story we were all living in. What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fuku?” At the end of the prologue we are offered another concept, a counter spell. Zafa. The prologue ends like this: “Even as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a Zafa of sorts. My very own counter spell.”

This is a tight brilliant piece of writing that lays out an interpretative mechanism and a context for the whole story to come, and for the narrator’s motives, thereby implicating them, too. They are a lot like the narrator of another gorgeous opening, the paragraphs that open The Great Gatsby and introduce a similar observer narrator, Nick Carraway. (Basic principle: The point of view character is the moved/changed character. These stories seem to be about Gatsby and Oscar Wao, the larger than life characters, but Gatsby and Oscar Wao don’t survive them. We come to understand that the stories actually happen to Nick and to the Watcher, who make meaning of the events among other involvements.) These are not officially a prologue—they come under the heading Chapter 1— but I think of them that way, as they introduce a narrator more by philosophy and temperament than action. For a long time F. Scott was my literary crush. Not the man—the sentences. He schooled me in uses of color, in scenes and transitions, and in plot. “Babylon Revisited” remains my favorite story; I will write a post on it soon. F. Scott is like a lead singer, vocalizing his yearnings. Well, I fell for that! Even as I read it now, I fall for these sentences:

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”

“He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened upon many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”

(I relate. That was my college experience too. :) )

But honestly, that’s so concise and grounding and tells us so much already. We trust this narrator and expect some wildly romantic man to tell him a few choice secrets, and we are down for it. A few lines later he writes: “Reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.” What an extraordinarily gorgeous, sophisticated, complex thought and sentence. I feel a fangirl shriek forming in appreciation of the judgment passed on the advice to reserve judgment by the word snobbishly, twice repeated. Cunning and divine. I read those snobbishly as having two different shades of meaning; the first acknowledging his father’s well-meant concern teetering atop a class-based assumption; and the second, that but also Nick’s pride at having a wise if flawed father. A lesson in how to shade a repeated word. This opening goes on for another paragraph, putting up front the lessons he learned from the story we are about to read, a spoiler we take in stride until we finish the book and then go back to the beginning and see how he has given us the moral of the story right up front. Here he is on Gatsby: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” He goes on to characterize this sensitivity as …”an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I will ever find again.” (His alter ego, right?) That phrase, “romantic readiness,” two three syllable words beginning with r that have different syllabic emphases— draws our attention equally to how it sounds and what it means such that we learn the phrase instantly and carry it with us through the book and beyond. Then the next sentence, the end of this introduction: “No—Gatsby turned out all right in the end: it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interested in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” I mean, you can ask questions here, like what is that foul dust, and what specifically are abortive sorrows, but you follow. You are in. What would the book be like without this prologue, if it began “My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this mid-Western city for three generations.” I don’t think we’d trust Nick as we do going in, nor would our own romantic readiness be primed to receive this emblematic American story. And how about that “No—”? A person could love a writer who thinks to put that in.

On to my very favorite prologue. Open your copy of Middlemarch and read the Prelude. Again we are given a precis of the themes and foreshadowing of the fates of the major character.

“Who cares that much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking hand in hand with her still smaller brother to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? … Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object that would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos it the reform of a religious order…That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born…With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these latter born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that one was disapproved as an extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.”

Big sigh. Plus ca change. It goes on for another paragraph that bemoans how women are misperceived and unseen, and ends with: “here and there is born a Saint Theresa, founders of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long recognizable deed.”

Then we glance at the following page and see the title of Book One; Miss Brooke. Uh oh! We have just been told how it’s going to go for her, that she isn’t going to have the context for order-founding or sainthood, that her goodness will be dispersed among hindrances. And yet we read, and reread, and reread this great novel. Did we need to be warned up top? Or are we reading a small manifesto portraying the author’s own sense of history and her pity for those who can’t fulfill their gifts? Did she wonder where her own gift might land in a world unaccustomed to major creative feats by women? I wonder. I love this prelude and reread it often. I had read the major works of Saint Theresa, a great writer herself, way before I read Middlemarch, so to find her referenced on the opening page immediately bonded me to the book. It took me a few readings to fully grasp this prelude, but it again strikes me as a way the author can offer a commentary that is more like an essay than a dramatic necessity. (Think of all Henry James’ anxious introductions explaining how he figured out the structures of the books you are about to read—in case you take it too much for granted.) I don’t see these openings much these days, Oscar Wao notwithstanding. I say, bring ‘em back!

A couple of notes: sorry for being quiet for a while. I do intend to post every two weeks, but the past month has snatched away time for this Substack.

Thanks to all of you who have made generous pledges of payment should I decide to monetize this Substack. ( l love that word, monetize, it sounds like the name of an island.) I have no plans along those lines for now, but I really appreciate that you value this writing.