“It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” Urban Peripherality and the Narrative Framing of Literary Beginnings

Abstract

“Do you know where you are?” — it is a question that one might as well ask, not only of the protagonist of this particular novel — Jay McInerney’s New York novel Bright Lights, Big City (1984) — who is trying to come to terms with a strange environment, but also of any reader who is immersed in a literary text for the first time, and who will have to make sense of new surroundings fairly quickly if he or she is not to put the book aside. For the protagonist in Bright Lights, Big City, as for the reader, the question reveals not only a position in place, but a relationship to it. It is the narrative construction of this unfolding relationship that will be the subject of this article, in which I will attempt a two-pronged analysis of the beginning of McInerney’s novel. My first concern is with how, in the opening pages of a city novel — at the fringes, as it were, of an urban world becoming visible — a complex city world is put into place. I argue that the opening pages of a novel are essential in delineating not only the spatial and temporal surroundings within which protagonists and readers are supposed to settle (or be unsettled). They are also instrumental in demarcating social, moral and (meta)poetical geographies, as well as the trappings of literary genre. Literary beginnings put in place the crude value systems and social geographies that will guide a reader’s reading and that are crucial in setting the scene for the unfolding story.

IT’S SIX A.M. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. … The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unravelled nerve endings.

(McInerney 1)