Incipit

A incipit is the beginning of a text, in general of a novel (of the Latin incipio, is, era : “to start”).

In the beginning, one indicated by this title the first sentence of a novel, also named Sentence-threshold. It is however common nowadays to rather regard it as having a variable length. It can last only some sentences, but also several pages. Contrary to the incipit, the Excipit (or Clausula) is the end of a chapter, of a work (the last paragraphs, last sentences).

In the case of an article (of encyclopedia, newspaper), about a description, a technical note… one speaks sometimes about hat or Chapô to indicate in a less erudite way the incipit intended “to hang” the attention of the reader.

Role of the incipit

The incipit generally answers three characteristics. It informs, interests and ties the Contrat of reading.
  • It informs by setting up the places, the characters and the temporality of the account.
  • It interests by various technical processes, for example the use of Stylistic devices or an entry In mediae LMBO (the account begins in fire from the action).
  • It ties the contract of reading by indicating to the reader the code that it must use within the framework of his reading; in short, it places various signs heralding the literary kind to which it belongs.

Incipits famous

Some incipits are strange (for example diverting them first pages of Jacques the Fatalist and its Master of Diderot), and désarçonnent the reader while playing with conventions of the novel; others, by their concision, their force or their humor, marked the spirits and knew to remain in the memories.

Comment had they met? By chance, like everyone. How were they called? What imports you? From which did they come? The nearest place. Where did they go? Is it known where one goes? What did they say? The Master did not say anything; and Jacques said that its captain said that all that arrives to us of good and evil ici-bas was written up there.
I hate the voyages and the explorers

  • Not of following day (1777), Alive Denon:

I loved passionately the countess of ***; I was twenty years old, and I was ingenuous; she misled me, I was annoyed, she left me. I was ingenuous, I regretted it; I was twenty years old, it forgave me; and as I was twenty years old, that I ingenuous, always was misled, but more left, I believed the lover best loved, leaving happiest the men.
Call me Ismaël. A few years ago of that - it does not matter how much exactly - as I had the empty purse, or almost, and than nothing interesting retained me with ground, the idea me had sailed a little and had just re-examined the marine world. (translation of Philippe Jaworski)
It was in Mégara, suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar.

  • On the side from Swann (1913), Marcel Proust:

Longtemps I lay down early.
Today, Maman died. Or perhaps yesterday, I do not know.
All my life, I had a certain idea of France… The feeling inspires it as well as to me the reason.
Adreas Schaltzmann started to kill because its stomach pourrissait.
We being studied, when the Headmaster entered, followed again were equipped as middle-class man and with a boy of class which carried a large desk.
In the close-cropped plain, under the night without stars, of a darkness and a thickness of ink, a man followed only the main road of Marchiennes in Montsou, ten kilometers of paving stone cutting straight, through the beet fields.
the first time that Aurélien saw Bérénice, it found it frankly laide.
Many years later, vis-a-vis the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember this distance afternoon during which his/her father took it along to make knowledge with the ice.
a spectrum haunts Europe: the spectrum of Communism.

External bond

  • the site of Gilles G. Jobin devoted to the incipit

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