The Use and Abuse of Literature (41 page)

In her book
Poetic Closure
, the literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith wrote convincingly about the “tensions created by local deferments of resolution and evasions of expectation” that are derived from the experience of art. Writing in 1968, Smith was prescient about developments that were later to take place in the field of cognitive theory, suggesting that terms such as “tension” and “states of expectation” are “likely to appear naïve and become obsolete when the psychology and presumably the physiology of perception are better understood.”
⁴
Such tensions and expectations formed the central argument of Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920), which in turn provided a narrative arc for Peter Brooks’s argument about narrative in his 1984
Reading for the Plot
. Here is Brooks, reading Freud, and envisaging the writing and reading processes as patterns of vital and sexualized tension:

When it first appeared, Brooks’s influential argument about the structure of plot and the deferral of discharge attracted some attention from feminist scholars who saw the pattern he adumbrated as that of (singular) male orgasm rather than (multiple) female pleasure.
⁶
With or without this physiological substrate, the claim—made by Freud, Brooks, and a number of other theorists of narrative—was that the ending was both
desired and withheld, and that the pleasure of waiting, of anticipation and of delay, was part of the pleasure of stories, storytelling, fiction, and plot. Freud’s discussion, which focused in part on what he called the death drive or the death instinct in human behavior, drew the same kind of analogy between the “little death” of sexual orgasm and the Big One.

Roland Barthes makes a discussion of “la petite mort” and the experience of reading literature central to his own literary theory—and his theory of pleasure in and of the text. Here is an extended description by Barthes of what he nicely calls “these dilatory maneuvers, these endlessly receding projects,” which, in his analysis, “may be writing itself.”

This “staircase that never stops” might remind us of Piranesi’s prisons and dreamscapes, so evocatively described by Thomas de Quincey in his
Confessions of an Opium-Eater
(1820). De Quincey is reporting what he heard from his friend Coleridge, so this vivid description is actually secondhand.

We might compare this concretely imagined vision to the “unfinished” endlessness of literature and its interpretations. But before we turn directly to the experience of interpretation, it may be of interest to consider some other material evidence of the impossibility of closure
within
literary texts.

One consistent example is provided by Shakespeare, whose plays all close with gestures toward the future. Not merely the
idea
of the future but of
events
—like marriages and coronations and state funerals—that, while aimed at throughout the five acts of the play, will actually take place (if they do) in some future time beyond the boundaries of the performed (or scripted) play. Examples abound and are in fact found in every one of the plays. I’ll list a few of the most obvious ones.

At the end of
Much Ado About Nothing
, Benedick suggests that the lovers “have a dance ere we are married,” and although the old father Leonato urges, “We’ll have dancing afterward” (5.4.118–119; 120) the marriages are not performed before the play ends.

At the end of
Twelfth Night
, Orsino says that he will marry Viola once he sees her in women’s clothing (rather than in the boy’s clothes she has adopted as a disguise). But the “other habits” in which he asks to see her before proclaiming her as his “mistress and his fancy’s queen” (5.1.380) are not returned within the playing space of the drama, and the transformation and consequent marriage are deferred until after the fifth (and final) act.

At the end of
Macbeth
, Malcolm invites the Scottish nobles, now called earls rather than thanes, to see him crowned at Scone (5.9.41). But the scene does not shift to Scone or to the coronation: that event is predicted and expected but not acted, performed, or shown.

At the end of
Henry V
, when it seems every major kind of closure has been achieved—a war successfully waged, a bride successfully wooed—the chorus enters to remind the audience how brief was the victory and
how profound the subsequent reversal. After a brief reign Henry V died, his infant son, badly counseled and ill equipped to govern, lost all the French territory that had been gained, and the nation was divided by civil war, “Which oft our stage hath shown” (Epilogue, 12). So instead of offering closure (either structural or cathartic), this play points backward to Shakespeare’s earlier tetralogy, which told the story of Henry VI and the Wars of the Roses. Just when the story seems to be coming to a triumphant end, there is a vertiginous sense of loss and a metatheatrical injunction to go back to the beginning of the playwright’s career. Closure in dramatic terms—as well as in history—is always a caesura rather than a period or full stop.

Renaissance playwrights, like modern ones, regularly rewrote speeches, scenes, and characters in response to audiences and critics, whether the audience was a single powerful monarch or a playhouse full of commoners. It’s not only Shakespeare plays that help to make this point. The third act of Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was extensively rewritten by the playwright, at the suggestion of director Elia Kazan. Both versions are printed in current editions, together with Williams’s explanation for why he preferred the original script. The concept of the pre-Broadway tryout was developed to allow experimentation and change while a show was on the road. Film adaptations of novels, plays, or other films always make alterations, often significant ones, to the “original” text or script.

Nor have we yet mentioned what was perhaps the most striking nineteenth-century phenomenon of literary open-endedness: the serial writing and publication of novels, chapter by chapter, ongoing and in real time, rather than retrospectively after the novel was completed. As employed, and deployed, by creative masters of the form like Charles Dickens and Edith Wharton, this process generated remarkable acts of authorial invention, authorial forgetfulness, changes of mind, design, plot, and character personality, as well as responses to the reading public in medias res. Novels like Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence
and
The House of Mirth
appeared in installments in periodicals prior to their publication in book form. Dickens’s novels, from
The Pickwick Papers
to
Our Mutual Friend
, were all published serially—some in monthly installments, some weekly. The journals he founded,
Master Humphrey’s Clock, Household Words
, and
All the Year Round
, were principal vehicles and venues for the publication of the novels, and they appeared punctually, in each case the author writing to a strict deadline. Dickens’s last novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, was to be published in twelve—rather than the usual twenty—monthly installments, but he died after only six parts were written and released.
⁹
In this case, one kind of closure precluded another, leaving readers confronted with a genuine mystery, a story without an ending.

Closure
is not quite synonymous with
ending:
it seems to imply a wrapping up, a completing of the circuit, a satisfaction (or relief) that puts the previous events, or text, or emotional experience, firmly if not always completely, comfortably in the past. Nonetheless, it is of some interest, historically and symptomatically, to see that the literary study of endings took on renewed energy and point in the 1960s, a time when the United States and its allies were preoccupied with the Vietnam War, when countercultures began to assert themselves, from issues of race and gender equality to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and when literary criticism was on the verge of a theory revolution. In addition to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s
Poetic Closure
(1968), we might mention Frank Kermode’s
The Sense of an Ending
(1966), subtitled
Studies in the Theory of Fiction
, which begins, deftly, with a chapter called “The End.” Kermode is interested in ideas of the apocalypse, biblically and fictionally, even in the modern world:

In literature, as Kermode goes on to suggest, variation and innovation are what make for interest: “We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naïve, as some apocalyptic sects are, we do not ask that the progress toward that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we should expect only the most trivial work to conform to pre-existent types.” Alluding to Wallace Stevens’s great poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Kermode adds, “the fictions must change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations must change.”
¹¹

Another important book of this period, by the literary critic Edward Said, might seem at first to be the obverse of “the sense of an ending” or “how poems end,” since its title is
Beginnings
. But Said’s list of words and ideas that “hover about the concept of ‘beginnings’ ” is also a list that has everything to do with the impossibility of closure:
innovation, novelty, originality, revolution, change, convention, tradition, period, authority
, and
influence.
¹²
Said’s study, as he explains in a preface to an edition released ten years after the first, was at least in part intended to “describe the immense effort that goes into historical retrospection as it set out to describe things from the beginning,
in history.
”
¹³
So “beginning” itself is a concept viewed—and possibly constructed—retrospectively from some later position. In the end is the beginning.

Said ends his book about beginnings with some remarks about its relevance to literary scholarship. “A beginning,” he says, “is what I think scholarship ought to see itself as, for in that light scholarship or criticism revitalizes itself.” And “a beginning methodologically unites a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method.” And again, “beginnings for the critic restructure and animate knowledge.”
¹⁴
If we link this idea to Kermode’s apt paraphrase of Wallace Stevens, “the fictions must change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations must change,” we can ourselves begin to see that the activity of rebeginning, of making new, of revitalization is the work not only of the poet or the novelist but also of the literary critic, the literary theorist, and the literary reader.

That such new beginnings have social and cultural effects and motives is part of Said’s argument.
Beginning
, he insists, is a very different concept from
origin:
“the latter divine, mythical, and privileged, the former
secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly re-examined.” The work of critics writing in the years following the appearance of his book, he notes approvingly, engaged such topics as “the critique of domination, the re-examination of suppressed history (feminine, non-white, non-European, etc.), the cross-disciplinary interest in textuality, the notion of counter-memory and archive, the analysis of traditions … professions, disciplines and corporations,” and the “social history of intellectual practices, from the manipulation and control of discourse to the representation of truth and ‘the Other.’ ”
¹⁵
Citing some by name and others by the catchwords and phrases that had become associated with their work, Said thus argues that new beginnings were undertaken by theorists from Michel Foucault to Eric Hobsbawm to Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas. That some of the seminal work of these theorists appeared prior to the publication of
Beginnings
and was being newly read and put to new critical uses, presumably would have supported, rather than undercut, the central point.