Against the Aristotelian tradition of tragic plot, this article argues
that beginning may not lead to the end in any teleological manner but
may instead defer the arrival of the end, deconstructing historical and
autobiographical narrative structures. In the work of Jorge Semprún,
whose corpus attests to the complexities of narrating the twentieth
century, the act of beginning is caught up with the author’s endless
rewriting, so that each new narrative beginning attests to a failure to
conclude the previous work, to tell the ‘whole’ story. In two works of
fiction, La Montagne blanche [‘The White Mountain’] (1986) and Netchaïev est de retour
[‘Nechayev is back’] (1987), the beginning intentionally defers the
ending through a structural and semantic circularity. At stake is an
understanding of how beginning may not anticipate closure but may
instead be harnessed to prevent it, inviting the reader to continue the
work of memory as an embodied co-participant.