Ashes: DeLillo’s Departure from the Referent

There is something impossible about writing a first sentence. Any other sentence, even last sentences, have something to build on; they come from somewhere, are continuing something. Whatever precedes them already stipulates their direction. Even if they break off from what comes before, as the anacoluthon would, what’s previously there fundamentally conditions the diversion’s very possibility. Prior to the existence of a sentence there exists another sentence. But is this also true for first sentences? Where exactly do they come from? What prepares their occurrence? What do they have to work with? In what follows, I propose to interrogate the possibility of the first sentence with regard to the constitutive rift between literature, or language in general, on the one hand, and phenomenal reality on the other. My suggestion would be that first sentences have to negotiate this rift in complex ways, which is to say, they need to secure the integrity of their linguistic environment by somehow tearing away the possibility of a literary world from referential reality. First sentences interpolate reality and thus draw a boundary between words and experiential objects and events. I will be expounding this issue by drawing on a series of theoretical takes on the problem of reference and will be arranging these interrogations around a discussion of Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man, specifically its first sentence: ‘It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night’.