Because no interpretation of literature is “final” or “definitive,” literary study, like literature, is a process rather than a product. If it progresses, it does so in a way that often involves doubling back upon a track or meandering by the wayside rather than forging ahead, relentlessly and single-mindedly, toward some imagined goal or solution. As we have noticed, one of the defining characteristics of literature and literary study is to open questions, not to close them. This has sometimes been regarded as a trait—as something that makes literature and literary study both unique and also “useless,” in contrast with problem-solving disciplines like economics, political theory, or even certain branches of philosophy. And in an era when persistent questions about outcomes and impact have gained ascendancy for legislatures, educational researchers, and the public press, the absence of answers may look like a manifest failure either on the part of imaginative writers, or of critics and scholars, or of both. Hence some of the desire to convert passages of poetry or taglines from novels into social and ethical doxa: “Good fences make good neighbors”; “Only connect.” Quotations like this, taken out of context, seem like useful advice, or wisdom.
Let me illustrate the difficulty about closure with a brief anecdote. Once, when I was lecturing to my Shakespeare class at Harvard, I decided to give them an object lesson in literary interpretation. I chose a famous crux from one of the plays and offered an extended “answer” to it. Students all over the lecture hall wrote busily in their notebooks. I then observed that although this answer once had been deemed satisfactory, it was no longer highly regarded by critics. All over the hall, students crossed out what they had written. I next offered a newer solution to the crux with the same set of results; students took down every word I said, then reacted with consternation when I remarked that this solution, too, had been questioned by subsequent critics. It took a third “solution” and a third qualification of that solution to begin to make the point, which was that literary interpretation is a conversation taking place over time and space, and that the really interesting questions do not have final answers.
Still, many students in the large introductory course left the lecture hall unsatisfied, frustrated, or worse. I had failed to convince them that such a method, if it could—in their eyes—be called a method, had value in and of itself. Why couldn’t I just tell them what the real meaning of the play was, then move on to the meaning of the next? I was the professor; they were there to write down what was true. Since Shakespeare wrote so many years ago, scholars had had all this time to get it right, hadn’t they? What was the problem, and why couldn’t the professor give them the right answer right away, instead of beating around the bush?
The absence of answers or determinate meanings—that is to say, the presence of the qualities that make a passage or a work literary—has given rise to persistent misunderstandings, including many of the rather desperate attempts we have already noted to try to make the literary work useful by “applying” it to something else. Requests on the part of institutions, officials, and government agencies for information on impact and assessment are attempts to figure out what literary study does, or accomplishes, or proves, or solves. But such requests pose the question maladroitly from the perspective of literature, where in formal terms, the beginning and ending are part of the structure, and thus part of the internal process of self-questioning and revision that is at the heart of creative work. To put it another way, a key feature of what might be called the literary unconscious is a tendency on the part of the text to outwit or to confound the activity of closing or ending.
One of the most famous and most praised themes in literature—the idea that the work lives on beyond the life of the author and serves as both a memorial and a revivification—delights in subverting closure through the agency of the living word or the living voice.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
While there is not a perfect symmetry between the activity of criticism and the activity of writing, the bridge between the two is the reader. Reading and criticism are themselves creative acts, remaking the work: making it new, making it contemporary, making it personal, making it productively strange, and therefore endowing it with fresh and startling power.
Closure as a term has suffered some indignities over the last several years, as it has become a staple of pop psychology. Closure as a synonym for “a sense of personal resolution; a feeling that an emotionally difficult experience has been conclusively settled or accepted”1 is a fairly recent addition to the lexicon, but it is all over the general media, whether the closure sought (or denied) is that of a surviving spouse, a bereft lover, a witness to a national calamity, or a soldier returned from war. Individuals who have never experienced psychotherapy or serious trauma now talk freely about needing, wanting, or getting closure, whether the closure they have in mind is their own or someone else’s.
As we’ll see, there is some connection between this wish to resolve or avoid trauma and the process that Freud called, in connection with his clinical practice, “analysis terminable and interminable.” But getting to closure in the popular sense is really the antithesis of the experience of literary reading.
“My life closed twice before its close” is how Emily Dickinson began one of her poems. Contrary to what might at first seem to be the case, the poem is about non-closure, not closure, if it can be said to be “about” anything. The non-“about”-ness of literature, its refusal to be grounded or compromised by referentiality, is one of its distinguishing traits, perhaps the one most readily underestimated or disbelieved.
Perhaps my favorite non-ending ending is the last line of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump.” Early in the poem, the speaker observes that “The dump is full / Of images,” including “the janitor’s poems / Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, / The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box / From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.” Here are the final lines, which begin by invoking the traditional bird of poetry, celebrated from Ovid to Keats to (with a twist) T. S. Eliot:
Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
The may be part of the philosopher’s quest for truth, but it is also the beginning of a poem as well as an ending for one. The inevitable recursiveness of poetry, beginning at its end, ending at its beginning, is here gorgeously and economically evoked.
It was a commonplace of formalist literary criticism that poems were inescapably self-referential, that whatever their ostensible topic in the world, they also gestured, in an unmistakable and important way, toward their own shape and structure. The idea was that beginnings and endings mattered, that the poem or work would re-begin itself at the supposed “end.” The poem might be imagined as taking the form of the ouroboros, the snake (or dragon) with its tail in its mouth, the ancient symbol of psychic continuity, or of eternal process, or of redemption, or of self-sufficiency, or of infinity. Its perfection (literally, its “finished-ness”) lay precisely in its capacity to indicate that in its beginning was its end, but also that in its end was its beginning.
We might look at some specific cases, to see how each folds in the material components of writing (or printing). Here are three examples of this poetic capacity, one having to do with rhyme, another with stanza form, and the third with punctuation. The first is from a magnificent short poem by George Herbert that takes poetic invention as its topic:
JORDAN (I)
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veiled while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?
Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
Here we have a poem that purports to rail against poetry as a fiction, against “catching the sense at two removes,” and against poets poetizing (and falsifying) themselves by calling themselves shepherds. The nightingale is a classical source of poetic inspiration, as is the Pierian spring of the Muses. But the witty (and ardent) denouement comes in the apparent abdication of earthly rhyme (“God” and “King” rhyme only in the sense that they are a perfect fit) while at the same time the final line does rhyme with “sing” and “spring,” just as in the previous stanzas, the last line rhymes with lines 1 and 3 (hair / stair / chair; groves/loves/removes). Arguably, the imperfect aural chiming of these last three words sets up the question of rhyme-that-is-not-rhyme, and thus of its obverse, not-rhyme-that-is-rhyme.
It’s characteristic of Herbert to use pairs of last lines as a way of turning the poem upside down and compelling a rereading, as he does, equally famously, in poems like “Love (III)” and “The Collar.” In all these cases, ending, or closure, is a signal to the reader about self-reference, authorship, authority, continuity, and the place of poetry in the world, the mind, the church, and the heart. Closure is both necessary and impossible.
My second example is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats, an early poem that bears the indicative title “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.”
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
I said that the poem was a sonnet, but a count of the lines will come up one short for the traditional, canonical fourteen-line form. The rhyme scheme is unusual, too: abba cc adda ee a, which means that the poet has inserted two couplets (the verse form that, in the Shakespearean or English sonnet, is the emblem of closure) in the midst of the poem, producing a formal impossibility, a thirteen-line inside-out sonnet. The challenge of the first line, the fascination of what’s difficult, is triumphantly displayed and achieved. At the same time the argument of the poem seems to rue the dailiness of work (“the day’s war with every knave and dolt, / Theatre business, management of men”) in a way that might even be glancing, sidelong, at the quotidian life of that earlier poet-playwright after whom the English sonnet form is named.
The third example is also from a modern poet, Robert Graves, in a poem that speaks directly to the question of closure. The poem’s title is “Leaving the Rest Unsaid”:
Finis, apparent on an earlier page,
With fallen obelisk for colophon,
Must this be here repeated?
Death has been ruefully announced
And to die once is death enough,
Be sure, for any life-time.
Must the book end, as you would end it,
With testamentary appendices
And graveyard indices?
But, no, I will not lay me down
To let your tearful music mar
The decent mystery of my progress.
So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,
Here the “life-time” and the book speak at once, or as one. The colophon, a typographical element placed at the end of a book or manuscript—sometimes in the form of a picture, sometimes an emblem—gives the title, the printer’s name, and the dates and places of printing. An obelisk is a four-sided pillar or column, a common image for a colophon. But an obelisk is also, in the history of printing, a diacritical mark sometimes known as a dagger († or ‡), used for marginal references, footnotes, and so on. The Indexer, the journal of the Society of Indexers, noted at one point that “Suffixing a name by an obelisk … indicates that the person is dead.”2 The word finis (Latin end) was also formerly placed at the end of a book and from the literary or printers’ use came to mean end of life, death.
First the book, then the life; first the finis, then the death. Graves, perfectly aware of his own resonant name, opts to end in the middle, with a “careless comma,”: how “careless” the comma is may be debatable, but in this poem about closure, literary, typographical, and mortal, we encounter what amounts to a diacritical revolt. By closing the poem with a comma as well as with the word comma the poet fulfills the promise of his title by refusing to complete the verse line. Which is the figure? Literature, or life? As posed here, the question is undecidable, and in fact the question of decision, conclusion, or judgment (from decider, to cut or cut off) is suspended, as it were, in midair.
“Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament,” wrote Paul de Man in an essay on autobiography, romanticism, epitaphs, and the poetry of Wordsworth. The phrase could be a somewhat fanciful but not entirely inaccurate replacement for the engraved motto Et in Arcadia ego on the shepherd’s tomb in a celebrated painting by Poussin. The inscription has a famous double reading: “I [Death] am also in Arcady” is one possibility. But the other—as Erwin Panofsky marvelously demonstrated3—pulls in an opposite direction: “I [the dead shepherd buried in the tomb] once also lived in Arcady.” Either “in the midst of life we are in death” or “death cannot erase the joys and accomplishments of living.” Or, indeed, the pleasures of writing and reading, since the speaking tomb here is gestured toward, and deciphered, by shepherds who trace the letters, carefully, with their fingers. “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.” There is something shocking, as well as something puzzling, about this apparently dispassionate statement. We might think that only an artist like Mark Tansey would inscribe such a thing on a tomb. The absence of a qualifying word like only or just heightens the shock value: the sentiment seems devoid of pathos. We are used to regarding death as “the thing itself,” rather than as a figure for, much less a displacement of, something else. But in terms of that ambivalent thing called “closure,” too readily applied to an emotional state and a literary and interpretive act, death is a displaced name for a formal predicament. Ending does not end.
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:
Textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a text, can become usable by plot only when it has been bound or formalized. It cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to significant discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged with doing … these formalizations and the recognitions they provoke may in some sense be painful: they create a delay, a postponement in the discharge of energy, a turning back from immediate pleasure, to ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete. The most effective or, at the least, the most challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most highly bound, most painful.5
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.”
First of all, the work is never anything but the metabook (the temporary commentary) of a work to come which, not being written, becomes the work itself: Proust, Fourier never wrote anything but such a “Prospectus.” Afterward, the work is never monumental: it is a proposition which each will come to saturate as he likes, as he can …
Finally, the work is a (theatrical) rehearsal, and this rehearsal … is verbose, infinite, interlaced with commentaries, excursuses, shot through with other matters. In a word, the work is a tangle; its being is the degree, the step: a staircase that never stops.7
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.
Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below … But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labors: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.8
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:
Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their space they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.10
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.
“There are,” suggests Jacques Derrida, “two interpretations of interpretation.” The first “seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth and an origin.” The other, “which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play,” what he calls “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world,” “the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin.” The two kinds of interpretation, he says, were “absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously.”16 Both are part of the history of the interpretation of literature and also of its practice. Arguably, they are not only co-extensive but also complementary. But it is the second that accords more directly with what I have called the literary.
We have already seen, in the chapter called “Why Literature Is Always Contemporary,” that however deeply rooted in a particular time period a work may be, it is always being read in “the present,” a shifting concept that is itself always open, never closed. The progressive tense of being read is a further tip-off, should we need one, since many readers may re-read, or reconsider, or re-discuss the novel, poem, or play in a class, in a reading group, upon revisiting the volume on a bookshelf, when a child or friend first encounters the same text, etc. If every production of a play is an interpretation, then so is every reading of that play. This is equally true for lyric poetry, for fiction, for sermons, for treatises, for political speeches, for any work in language that makes a claim upon our literary attention.
By attention, I mean to suggest not only a close analysis of language, rhetoric, grammar, figure, and argument but also the complex psychic process that has engaged the interest of modern-day observers from William James, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin to contemporary cognitive theorists. James defined attention as “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form,” and he opposed it to “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.”17
Walter Benjamin addressed the question of distraction, which for James was the opposite of attention, and found in it an alternative modern mode of cognition: art and architecture, he thought, were apprehended “much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion.” Indeed, “reception in a state of distraction” was “increasing noticeably in all fields of art” and was “symptomatic of profound changes in apperception.” But the preeminent modern genre for reception in a state of distraction was the film. At the movies, the public is put “in the position of the critic.” But at the movies, “this position requires no attention.”18
And yet “no attention” can also be a different kind of paying attention.
Freud, analyzing the dream state and the “preconscious,” distinguished between the application of attention to issues of conscious thought and the ongoing processes by which “the train of thought which has … been initiated and dropped can continue to spin itself out without attention being drawn to it again, unless at some point or other it reaches a specially high degree of intensity which forces attention to it.”19 Such preconscious or unconscious rumination, the train of thought running, so to speak, on a side track until it is ready to rejoin the main line—is how much intellectual work takes place: distraction, or sleep, or dream, or any other apparent act of inattention often accomplishes what conscious attention cannot, in reframing or rephrasing the issue or problem in order to present a different kind of attack upon it. This is another instance of “the impossibility of closure.” The way Freud describes a dream is closely analogous to how we might describe a work of literature, and the activity animating and energizing these mental artifacts or rebuses is what we have come to call, as in the English-language title of Freud’s own great book on the topic, interpretation.
In early use, interpretation was a term applied to religious scripture, to writing of all kinds, and to law, but over time it also came to apply to the decipherment of human character, the assessment of military information, the translation from one language to another, and the rendering of a musical, dramatic, or artistic composition (a song, a play, a landscape). It seems important to distinguish interpretation from definition or any other “conclusive” practice; as the examples of artwork, law, spy photographs, and linguistic translation all suggest in their different ways, interpretations can be motivated, personal, fallible, opinionated, compelling, insightful, and/or brilliant. They may also be time-bound or time-linked. Biblical or scriptural interpretation (and the secular editorial practices that followed from it) was frequently cumulative: an interpreter’s views became part of the textual apparatus, to be read and interpreted, in turn, by those who came afterward. Biblical exegesis is one prevalent model for this practice, and it was, together with classical philology, the framework on which modern literary studies was based—and from which it has evolved. The expounding of an interpretation, once part of homiletics or preaching, is a matter of (learned) opinion, whether put forward by a cleric, a literary critic, or, as in the case of Freud and dream interpretation, a psychoanalyst. In any case, interpretation remains, as a practice, open-ended, always subject to revision, challenge, augmentation, change.
In 1937, long after the publication of his landmark Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote an essay that speaks even more directly to the question of closure. The essay’s title, translated into English, was “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” and it is one of the few papers on technique that Freud published this late in his career (he died two years later, putting closure of a different kind on a remarkable lifetime of work). Freud was seeing few clinical patients then; almost all the analytic sessions he conducted were training analyses—that is, the analysis of other analysts.
What would be meant by the end of an analysis? Freud asked rhetorically, and he then proceeded to offer a range of possible answers. An analysis could be ended because the patient felt he was no longer experiencing symptoms, or because the analyst felt that “so much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that was unintelligible has been explained, that there is no need to fear a repetition of the pathological processes concerned.”20 But there was also what Freud called a more “ambitious” meaning to the end of the “end” of an analysis. “In this sense of it, what we are asking is whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were continued. It is as though it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality—a level, moreover, which we could feel confident would be able to remain stable, as though, perhaps, we had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in filling all the gaps in his memory.”21
There are so many differences between the psychoanalyst-patient relationship and the literary analyst–literary work relationship that it is easy to jettison the analogy completely. For one thing, why not imagine that the literary work is the analyst, rather than the patient? Surely it reads us as much as we read it. And even if we were to agree with the suggestion that there is something called “normality” attached to the psychic health of human beings, there seems no possible equivalent in the realm of literature, where works are, like Tolstoy’s famous families, each, happily, unhappy in its own way. But the idea of repressed material and things that seem unintelligible does seem related to the kind of questions we ask of literary works.
Freud may help us out a little by proceeding, in his argument, to draw a textual analogy of his own as a way of describing what he means by repression. The analogy he offers (“though I know that in these matters analogies never carry us very far”)22 is one that may strike a modern readership with an uncanny familiarity, since it is the image of a book, a historical record, that has been defaced and blotted out like a security file. I will quote his long passage, which reads rather like a dream narrative:
Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times we regarded as undesirable—as, for instance, according to Robert Eisler (1929), the writings of Flavius Josephus must have contained passages about Jesus Christ which were offensive to later Christendom. At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case the book could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified. It no longer contained what the author wanted to say; and it is highly probable that the corrections had not been made in the direction of truth.23
With this dispassionate and chilling, proto-Orwellian vision (1984 would be written ten years later), Freud presents his analogy, one he wants to insist should not be pursued too strictly, between the operations of repression and the operations of literary censorship, forgery, and bowdlerized editing. The text conceals a secret, or a series of secrets, that have occurred as a result of a process of concealment. The censor is the pleasure principle, which does not want unpleasure to be experienced, and so overwrites, deletes, or defaces the text.
Can we use Freud’s analogy to understand the way in which closure is both sought and deferred, claimed and mistaken, in literature and literary interpretation?
The objection that psychoanalysis is not like reading and writing is answered in a way by Freud’s own text, which takes as its image for psychic repression or withholding the idea of a defaced or edited book. Although for Freud, the main topic is repression, and the image of the book occurs only as a comparison, a metaphor, or an illustration, the process he is describing can be turned on its head, since the image of unconscious rewriting is at once the story of literary history and the story of reading and interpretation. But where Freud is trying to account for a psychic economy of pleasure for the individual, an allegorical understanding of his analogy might point toward the inevitability of a reading and a writing that not only overwrites and defaces but also continues the editing process until it is newly “legible.”
When texts and authors bring this practice to consciousness, the activity of rewriting and defacement is not always or reliably in the direction of pleasure. The most striking example from George Orwell might not be 1984 but, rather, Animal Farm, in which the apparent victory of the animals over their human oppressors leads to the painting on a wall “in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away,” the Seven Commandments that “would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live forever after.” These were the commandments:
One by one, as these commandments are breached or broken by the animal leadership now in power, the commandments are mysteriously rewritten. Pigs begin to sleep in the beds left vacant by the previous human occupants, and the Fourth Commandment is found to say, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.”25 After false confessions of treason are forced from some of the animals and they are summarily executed, the Sixth Commandment is discovered to read, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.”26 When Napoleon, the tyrant pig, develops a taste for whiskey, the animals come to realize that they must have misremembered the Fifth Commandment: “there were two words that they had forgotten. Actually, the Commandment read, ‘No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.”27 At the end of this truly disturbing “fairy story” (Orwell’s subtitle for the book), when every ideal has been lost, the animals find that instead of the Seven Commandments, only one now appears on the wall, the commandment that most readers remember (though often not in context): “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”28 The animals on the farm are bewildered: some, at least, believe that their own memories are faulty and that they have misread, or misremembered, or misunderstood the commandments.
Orwell’s novel does supply some ironic closure, in the return of Animal Farm to its previous name, the Manor Farm, and the effective erasure of the entire rebellion and the brief-lived animal utopia. For an adult reader returning to this short novel so frequently taught to children, the untrustworthiness of writing is as disconcerting and as convincing as the untrustworthiness of man. (And since the novel is itself written and read—or misread—as a children’s story, it provides an instance of the very process that it holds up to critique.)
Animal Farm was published in 1946. Six years later, there appeared another book about writing and unwriting on an animal farm, this time with a distinctly uplifting tone: E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Written by a major contributor to The New Yorker, this “children’s book” offered the story of a spider who labored to write messages in her web in order to save her friend Wilbur the pig from slaughter. From “Some Pig” to “Terrific” to “Radiant” and “Humble,” the words that “magically” appeared in the web caught the attention of farmers, fairgoers, and the national media. “Right spang in the middle of the web there were the words ‘Some Pig,’ ” Farmer Zuckerman tells his wife.
“A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Zuckerman, “it seems to me you’re a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.”
“Oh, no,” said Zuckerman. “It’s the pig that’s unusual. It says so, right there in the middle of the web.”29
It’s not necessary to see Charlotte’s Web as a deliberate response to Animal Farm in order to note the several connections between them: mysterious writing, a clueless pig hero rather than a manipulative pig tyrant and villain, a team of animals of various kinds working together, a frame story involving thoughtful rather than scheming humans. Both texts, to be sure, have formal closure: in Orwell’s powerful satire, the pigs and men become visually indistinguishable (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which”),30 while in White’s book, despite the heroic death of Charlotte, her spider offspring live on, and so does Wilbur. “Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.”31 In Orwell, animals become more like men, to their detriment; in White, men become more like animals, to their benefit. What remains “open” rather than “closed” however, is not only the ambivalent power of writing but also the question of interpretation. Political satire? Children’s story? Moral fable? Through the presence in both novels of the manifest theme of writing, reading, and interpretation, each becomes itself an allegory of the dangerous activity it describes and enacts.
This Möbius-strip structure—the shape of a surface with only one side that can be formed into a continuous loop—is a familiar image from modernist art and sculpture. It was a favorite, for example, of M. C. Escher, as well as a recurring presence in science fiction and time-travel narratives. This image goes back to ancient times, when it was associated, as we’ve seen, with the ouroboros, the serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail. Is this a figure of closure, or of its impossibility? The riddling form suggests that the answer to both is yes.
For a literary practice that turns this set of ideas and concepts to brilliant account, we might look to the works of Jorge Luis Borges. His short stories, essays, and parables render the sense of history, and literary history, a mise en abyme (or, as the title of his collection puts it, a labyrinth) in which ends and beginnings, befores and afters, are put in serious, witty, and profound question. The opening paragraph of “The Library of Babel” sounds strikingly similar to the Piranesi vision of staircases leading ever onward: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors.” Borges’s compelling story, which has been seen to predict the vastness of the information network and has been subjected to a philosophical analysis by W. V. Quine, concludes with a meditation by the narrator:
I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end—which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order).32
As André Maurois comments, “in Borges’ narratives the usual distinction between form and content virtually disappears, as does that between the world of literature and the world of the reader.”33 This does not necessarily mean that there is no distinction between them but, rather, that Borges plays with consummate skill upon the apparent differences. His stories end where they “ought” to begin; his narrators and heroes find themselves not only quoting other authors but, in the process, becoming them. In his works, characters discover that history copies literature and not the other way around. Here is a discourse—or, if you prefer, a fiction—of literature as a first-order phenomenon, offering readers a chance to rethink priorities, whether we understand “priority” to refer to chronology or to importance. Thus the short parable entitled “Everything and Nothing” closes with the voice of the Lord speaking from a whirlwind to a figure heretofore unidentified in the text: “I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”34
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), a philosophical romance about the pursuit of happiness, ends with a chapter titled “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded.” The phrase seems apposite for Dr. Johnson’s rather stoical account (the prince, his sister, and their philosopher friend decide that none of their wishes can be obtained, and resolve to return home). But it also strikes me as a fitting way to conclude my much more optimistic narrative.
We sometimes talk about literature and language in a figural way: for example, as an enfilade—doors opening onto other doors that open onto other doors; a vista that stretches out between rows of trees into the infinite distance—or a mise en abyme, a term from heraldry describing a shield that bears at its heart the image of another shield. Like the enfilade, the mise en abyme is an image not only for self-reflection within a literary work, but also, equally powerfully, for the process of reading, which is never-ending, always opening outward into another scene. The device itself tempts the eye and the mind to move beyond what it can see, to an imagined and imaginable space that is both a plurality of meanings and a future of thought.
Literary interpretation, like literature, does not seek answers or closure. A multiplicity of persuasive and well-argued “meanings” does not mean the death or loss of meaning, but rather the living presence of the literary work in culture, society, and the individual creative imagination. To say that closure is impossible is to acknowledge the richness and fecundity of both the reading and the writing process.
The use of literature begins here.