Once upon a time there lived a writer who became famous (and perhaps even notorious) for always beginning his stories with the cliched opening sentence: "Once upon a time..."
Whether this curious literary style was a product of a pathological level of nostalgia (which may well explain the reported bouts of depression that the writer frequently suffered from) or a quirky modernist experiment (in which case the writer was way ahead of his time) has remained as a matter of great debate among critics and readers. Even to this date his admirers proclaim him as a true visionary, while his detractors reject him as a hack who lacked even the slightest imagination to come up with variations in his opening sentence. But most scholars have noted that his stories were all very original, and each of them was unique in their content and style. Therefore, it would seem more likely that the writer had deliberately chosen to use the same opening line in all his stories. While the debate on the quality of his works raged on, few took the trouble to identify the possible source or inspiration that motivated the writer to adopt this whimsical style. Only recently, a renowned critic and Fabrication Times columnist, Dr. I.M.A. Sinik, presented an idea that best elucidates the reasons for the writer's style. Dr. Sinik argues that the writer got the idea to use the same opening line in all his stories after coming across a fictional account written by some unknown writer in which the protagonist was a quirky writer who always began his stories in the exactly same way. In his last Sunday's column Dr. Sinik revealed that this fictional account, titled "The loop without a hole", was written by a relatively unknown writer (an errata issued later in Fabrication Times clarified that the unknown writer was in fact a resident of a mental asylum for the most part of his adult life), and he cited the following excerpt from the original fiction to justify his claim: Once upon a time there lived a writer who became famous (and perhaps even notorious) for always beginning his stories with the cliched opening sentence: "Once upon a time..."
Whether this curious literary style was a product of a pathological level of nostalgia (which may well explain the reported bouts of depression that the writer frequently suffered from) or a quirky modernist experiment (in which case the writer was way ahead of his time) has remained as a matter of great debate among critics and readers.
Whether this curious literary style was a product of a pathological level of nostalgia (which may well explain the reported bouts of depression that the writer frequently suffered from) or a quirky modernist experiment (in which case the writer was way ahead of his time) has remained as a matter of great debate among critics and readers. Even to this date his admirers proclaim him as a true visionary, while his detractors reject him as a hack who lacked even the slightest imagination to come up with variations in his opening sentence. But most scholars have noted that his stories were all very original, and each of them was unique in their content and style. Therefore, it would seem more likely that the writer had deliberately chosen to use the same opening line in all his stories. While the debate on the quality of his works raged on, few took the trouble to identify the possible source or inspiration that motivated the writer to adopt this whimsical style. Only recently, a renowned critic and Fabrication Times columnist, Dr. I.M.A. Sinik, presented an idea that best elucidates the reasons for the writer's style. Dr. Sinik argues that the writer got the idea to use the same opening line in all his stories after coming across a fictional account written by some unknown writer in which the protagonist was a quirky writer who always began his stories in the exactly same way. In his last Sunday's column Dr. Sinik revealed that this fictional account, titled "The loop without a hole", was written by a relatively unknown writer (an errata issued later in Fabrication Times clarified that the unknown writer was in fact a resident of a mental asylum for the most part of his adult life), and he cited the following excerpt from the original fiction to justify his claim: Once upon a time there lived a writer who became famous (and perhaps even notorious) for always beginning his stories with the cliched opening sentence: "Once upon a time..."
Whether this curious literary style was a product of a pathological level of nostalgia (which may well explain the reported bouts of depression that the writer frequently suffered from) or a quirky modernist experiment (in which case the writer was way ahead of his time) has remained as a matter of great debate among critics and readers.
2 comments:
extremely interesting
what's interesting about it? I was bored at 3 am and just wrote down "once upon a time", for I didn't have anything particular in mind, and then the rest of the scribbling was a product of free association of thoughts.
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