N.B.: While Management has always done its best to avoid plot spoilers, it finds that there may be no way around them in the present chapter. It regrets any inconvenience and apologizes in advance.
SOMETIMES I WISH I’D been born in the nineteenth century. Sure, there were lots of social strictures one didn’t dare violate and those high, starched collars, but on the other hand I could have carried one of those really cool canes with malachite or ivory heads. One could carry one these days, but the look is a trifle affected, don’t you think? Also on the plus side: being able to appreciate the endings of Victorian novels. I’m a child of the mid-twentieth century, though, and I find I prefer my endings a little messy. The greatest novel of my century ends with the word “yes,” but we’re not sure what it’s as senting to. My era is one of indeterminacy and equivocation, and I like it that way. When Updike has Rabbit Angstrom run at the end of Rabbit, Run, what is he running toward, or from? When Nabo kov has Pnin drive out of town at the end of his eponymous novel, where’s he going? Faulkner has Quentin Compson cry out in his mind, at the end of Absalom, Absalom! in response to the question of why he hates the South, “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” What is resolved by that ending? Nothing. What do we learn? By the escalation of end punctuation, going from a period to the succession of exclamation points, something is driving Quentin wild, but we can’t say quite what, nor does the text.
I love it. But then, I have lived through the era of Waiting for Godot and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, of films by Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, of novel theory by Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The novels of my era, The Magus and The Floating Opera and Midnight’s Children and Beloved, would be incomprehensible to Victorian readers. I live after relativity and quantum theory, after the Battle of the Somme and Nagasaki and Auschwitz, after the Long March and the Khmer Rouge. Certainty is a stretch, particularly in the matter of endings, after all that. Besides, I’d just look silly with a frock coat and an ivory-headed cane. But my Victorian counterparts? They loved order and completion. For them, novels needed to be finished. Resolved. Tidy, even.
Try this on for size. You’ve been reading a novel for what seems like months (may have been months, in fact). You’ve got the fat part in your left hand and a very few pages in your right. Now here’s what happens. The Hero, who has had some difficulty, is renewed. He finds his old tormentors from childhood still as nasty as ever. Two minor characters who have slid into and out of the story for absolute ages have married, as they should have done four hundred pages earlier (yes, it’s that long), and one of them has even died. One villain has been caught and put in prison for life for fraud against the Bank of England (proving, one guesses, the maxim “Go big or go home”); he says the experience has improved him immensely and recommends prison for anyone needing to straighten out his life. But wait, there’s more. Another villain is discovered to be in prison as well, this one for a more straightforward robbery that failed. Several good persons are found to be living life as ever, although if they’ve been especially good, they are rewarded with matrimony. Several characters have died, and although the circumstances are varied, the Hero learns a valuable life lesson from each. The wife who made him wretched has died, and from that he learns not to trust love, or at least the sillier romantic notions of same. One good-hearted soul who was forever in financial difficulty has, unaccountably, been made a judge. The Hero, having learned about love the hard way, discovers that a truer love was right in front of him all the time, back when he was too impetuous and shallow to notice. The owner of this love, unaccountably, doesn’t hold the Hero’s bad conduct against him, and they marry quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. Or David Copperfield.
You think I’m kidding? Okay, again, with names. Dora, the wife with whom he was so unhappy, dies. In a shipwreck, Steerforth and Ham both die, Ham in a heroic rescue attempt, Steerforth, presumably of drowning but more probably of terminal triviality and cruelty (since he led David down that path, he has to die to show David the error of his ways). Uriah Heep is in prison for life, and really rather happy about it, considering, and Littimer is there, too. In an almost Kafkaesque gesture, Mr. Creakle, the horrible schoolmaster of David’s youth, has found just punishment in being effectively jailed himself, although since he is the magistrate in charge of the prison, he cannot see the irony. David overcomes his romantic disillusionment through experiencing real love with Agnes, whom he marries in a lightning-round courtship. Along the way, he realizes the goodness of Mr. Peggotty, Ham, Miss Betsy, Dr. Strong and Annie, and Peggotty herself. He shows us that transformation to the good is not only possible, it is rewarded, through the fates of Little Em’ly Peggotty, Mrs. Gummidge, and, most especially, himself. The good people get rewarded, the bad punished, the righteous uplifted, and in general, justice prevails in the world.
In the immortal words of that eminent literary critic John McEnroe, you cannot be serious.
Ah, my dears, but I’m afraid he is. And the crowd—for he entertained the masses—went wild. Me? Less wild. You know, Dickens is great. The grotesque characters, the wild improbabilities, the low comedy and high ideals, the full-contact narrative approach, all great. Except the endings. His endings are just so tidy. Everybody, no matter how minor, gets his or her story finished. But of course there are still problems, as there are in all novels. Even when things look wrapped up, there are plenty of loose ends.
Don’t get me wrong; I love Dickens. He would be my favorite Victorian novelist if there weren’t Hardy, but who can resist that much misery and gloom? Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the most exquisitely painful reading experience I’ve ever had. Or painfully exquisite. Whichever is the adjective and which the adverb, I mean them in every possible combination and connotation. Jude the Obscure is merely wretched (the emotional ride, not the novel), but Tess is the train wreck you can’t stop, can’t take your eyes off, and can’t believe how beautiful the carnage is. Even there, excessive tidiness. Hardy also wraps up his novels with neat bows. The bows drip blood, but they’re very neat. The main differences are that, first, Hardy’s novels are much less populous, with minor characters falling from view long before the end, and, second, at the end everyone is dead. Okay, not everyone, just villains and heroes. That’s perhaps the difference between Hardy as tragedian and Dickens as essentially comedic. Both cause their characters to battle their share of demons; only one believes they can survive the battle. But what I intended to say before Hardy butted in was that I’m not singling Dickens out for abuse. Allowing for differences in cosmic outlook, Victorian endings are pretty much all the same. Neat. Tidy. They achieve that word that drives me crazy: closure. With a vengeance.
Not only that, I don’t think it’s Dickens’s fault. It’s God’s. More specifically, it the fault of the God the Victorians fashioned for themselves, one who brooked no nonsense, who meted out punishment and reward absolutely (no half-baked purgatory for them—it was grace or perdition all the way), who was very strict in his requirements, such as insisting on widows wearing black for a half century or so, but who was above all things just and fair, if demanding. Good and evil got what they had coming to them with that God. Apparently, Dickens never noticed the irony of a loving and above all just deity who could consign all of those working people to the most degrading sort of poverty, but we’ll let that pass. David Copperfield is just early enough that he can believe in that God still. Once his beautiful young sister-in-law dies and his marriage has turned to dust, he begins to have some questions, theologically. He also begins to kill off “young, beautiful, and good” heroines at a serial-murderer rate. Agnes has no idea how lucky she was to be in this book and not the next several. But the endings don’t really change much; they still tumble out as so many neatly wrapped packages.
Now I have several objections to the Victorian ending, some literary in nature and some entirely private (and which shall remain so). For starters, and this is no small consideration, life’s not like that. Novels, except for the Hardy sort, end as if all the questions of life have been settled even when the protagonists have several decades to go. That’s like calling a mile horse race done after six furlongs. A lot of interesting things can happen in that last quarter mile. In fact, that’s the part where the crowd rises up and starts paying serious attention. Yet somehow a life’s story has been settled at the sixth furlong pole, or the fifth, or even the midpoint. Since many novels not only begin but end in the middle of life’s way, laying on a perfect, happy ending seems a bit precious. This tendency is worst in the bildungsroman, the novel of childhood and youth, which ends typically at twenty-four or thereabouts. The best a bildungsroman should say is that the hero is rather less callow (clueless, unconsciously cruel, naïve, take your pick) than before. Yet they are often the worst offenders, as witness David Copperfield or Great Expectations, giving us the whole nifty bundle in the hero’s midtwenties. Good heavens! Most of us at twenty-four have scarcely begun to straighten ourselves out and still have plenty of screwups in front of us. In the real world, in fact, there is only one ending, and it’s not particularly tidy. There are always loose ends with a death: estate taxes, probate, disagreements among relatives, varying interpretations of the deceased’s life. When Auden says that, dying, Yeats “became his admirers,” he doesn’t say that the admirers were all in agreement. Auden himself was of at least two minds. At a conservative estimate. Saints preserve us from the untimely definitive ending.
But that’s the lesser argument I would make. My chief complaint is aesthetic: too much tidiness kills the book. We find ourselves reading merrily along, following this meandering course where, it seems, anything is possible, and then a couple of chapters from the end, the corps of engineers has shown up, dredged a channel straight as a string, and lined the bottom with concrete. Such a strategy may get you to your destination sooner, but it doesn’t make the trip more enjoyable. Rather the opposite. There’s more than a little of the deus ex machina at work here. In Greek drama, when the writer had managed to get the plot hopelessly entangled, he would sometimes resort to lowering a god onto the stage by means of a cranelike device (the mechane, or in Latin, whence comes the phrase, machina) to apportion reward or punishment and make things work out to the playwright’s satisfaction. The problem with such a solution is that it is unearned, that neither the plot nor the characters have taken us to the resolution. In other words, it’s a cheat. You needn’t take my word for this; ever since Aristotle, critics and theorists have decried such devices as unfair play that cheapens the work. Not only that, but in the case of the novel, there’s a multiplier factor. The more plot threads you tie off smartly, the more obviously contrived the narrative becomes. This artificiality is the more jarring in the Victorian novel, since it strives so mightily to hide its artificiality, only in the final chapters to parade that very artifice, and clumsily at that. Were these postmodern works that ceaselessly conk us on the head with reminders that they’re all made up, we would be less surprised. Yet those are precisely the works least likely to violate common decency by foisting off an ending with hospital corners.
I’ve said before, and it bears repeating at this late date, that all novels are inventions. They aren’t true, even when they are about real personages. The appearance of reality or fidelity to life is an illusion, achieved through devices every bit as conscious as those of writers pushing the artifice of their creations. Writers, either singly or as a function of their literary milieu, decide the degree to which they will embrace the illusion of verisimilitude. Realism, therefore, is not a necessary condition of narrative but a literary construct. Yet writers of the age that accepted the limitations of literary realism freely rejected those limits when it comes to endings. Why? Commerce. Novels were big business in the nineteenth century. The competition on one level was limited: no films, television, Internet, radio, recordings, or video games. On another, it was fierce. There were dozens of novelists who were quite good and popular (or in danger of becoming so), so you had to woo your readership. And part of that was to leave them, if not laughing, at least satisfied. Provide answers for every question, including a few that weren’t asked. Wrap every package. Tie off loose ends. Police the area. This was a big deal, because the ending is the last thing readers see and what they’re likeliest to remember. Then, too, as I’ve already noted, they had lived with the novel for up to two years as it came out every month, and who would deny them this last chance at happiness? Certainly not Dickens or Thackeray.
Which is part of what’s going on with endings. It’s like chess—opening gambits you can learn from a book, take from a list of possible strategies, but endgames are a combination of necessity and who you are. You make what you can from the pieces left on the board. The possibilities you see will be limited by availability, naturally, but even more so by your tendencies and outlook. Bobby Fischer finished off opponents one way, I’m told, Garry Kasparov another, Anatoly Karpov yet another. All were great, none quite like another. So, too, with novels: Dickens could no more write an open-ended, provisional finale than he could fly. Some of it was who he was and some was how he thought about readers and his relationship to them. Which brings us to the Law of Shutting Doors: The degree of closure in the ending of a novel is in direct proportion to the eagerness of the novelist to please his audience. The nineteenth-century novelists were extremely eager to please, far more so than any “literary” writers since. To find the kind of loyalty in the twentieth century between artist and audience that Thackeray or Dickens enjoyed, you have to look to the popular culture, to romance novelists like Barbara Cartland or to daytime talk television. Think Oprah Winfrey minus the daily visual contact and you’ll about have it.
Did I mention that it’s a century thing, a tale of different epochs feeling different things about writer and reader? Well, it is. In case you’ve not heard it before, you should know the secret: literature is a fashion industry. We literature types are often loath to admit this unpleasant truth, yet truth it be. Writerly fortunes come and go with time. From Wordsworth on, for about a century, John Donne and the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century couldn’t get arrested, until the modernists, chiefly T. S. Eliot, came along with an appreciation of irony and intellection to rescue poor old Donne from the trash heap of literary history. And there’s a fairly predictable arc of fame and regard when a writer dies. First, there may be an outburst of sympathy and interest, but then there will certainly be a couple of decades at least of neglect when we’re so over whatever he or she specialized in. Lawrence Durrell? Who needs that anymore? Iris Murdoch? How quaint! Anthony Burgess? Too mannered. Then the wheel will turn another time and the reputation will rise again. Virginia Woolf was buoyed back to the surface and even above it. Henry Green rose slightly, got reprinted, had a few articles written about twenty years after his death, then slid into neglect again. I live for the next revival.
Sometimes we get to see the cycle run through a couple of times. When I first started in the academic racket, D. H. Lawrence was one of the Big Two of modernist British fiction, along with Joyce (with Woolf largely an afterthought). This, I hasten to say, was after his period of enforced oblivion following his death in 1930. By the 1960s and 1970s, he was the hottest thing going. The novellas The Fox and The Virgin and the Gypsy and the novel Women in Love were made into “major motion pictures” in fairly rapid succession between 1967 and 1970. But there were other trends rising, too, and he seems not to have survived the combination of feminism and deconstruction. He’s just too sloppy for our contemporary tastes. A world that made Raymond Carver’s cool minimalism the toast of the time can never appreciate the overheated looseness of Lawrentian prose. Too much late, dark romanticism there altogether. And while Lawrence would unquestionably have seen himself as demanding that women be strong, his “feminism,” if we can even call it that, bears little resemblance to what we know as feminism after Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir. In fact, Kate Millett was one of the early but by no means solitary feminist critics of Lawrence’s sexual politics, which are murky in the best of times. Finally, we can’t discount entirely the possibility that Ken Russell’s over-the-top cinematic take on Women in Love did in Lawrence’s reputation. Coming as it did at the end of the decade that began with the 1960 obscenity trial (and acquittal) of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it frames the era nicely.
Fair? Not really, neither the rise nor the fall. But whoever said literary fortunes should be fair? Follow a writer long enough, and you’ll see the shifting winds of fashion do their work. But I digress. (Now there’s news.) The topic under discussion was supposed to be the wheel of history and our previous, “modern” century.
We hit about 1910 (the year Woolf claims human nature changed) and endings just went all to pieces. Modernity, or more particularly modernism, decided it could live without certainty. Oh sure, some of the old guard, folks like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, along with writers of genre fiction from Rafael Sabatini (who had a bestseller nearly every year in the 1920s with books like Captain Blood and Scaramouche) and Dashiell Hammett were still doing the old thing, more or less. But others were moving on. Consider, if you will, two examples, neither of whom could be described as wildly experimental. E. M. Forster found early success in the first decade of the century with fairly conventional novels like A Room with a View (1908), which, as a romantic comedy, ends quite predictably with the appropriate couple honeymooning where they first encountered each other. Fast-forward sixteen years to A Passage to India, an altogether more problematic story of intercultural misunderstanding amid the evils of colonialism. At the last, the wronged Dr. Aziz, now exonerated, and the well-meaning but not wholly effectual Cyril Fielding, representing India and England, argue over the possibility of friendship as equals between the two. Even the conversation, which consists largely of exchanging passionate statements of the obvious, cannot be completed; their horses and the landscape conspire against definitive closure. Much the same thing, minus horses, in Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), where, after great upheaval and mayhem for the two principal couples, Birkin and Ursula close the novel with an argument whose final words are, “I don’t believe that.” Critics and readers are sometimes tempted to take Birkin’s impassioned speech as the last word, but that honor belongs to Ursula. Not the most definitive resolution you’ll ever read.
And what of others? “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” After all the bull-running and bull-fighting and bedding and fighting and loving and despising, the ending of The Sun Also Rises comes down to an ironic question. Lady Brett Ashley asserts to Jake Barnes, the man she probably loves but can never have a physical relationship with, “Oh, Jake . . . we could have had such a damned good time together,” to which Jake responds with “Yes,” but then appends his famous query. What does he mean? That he agrees and the idea is pleasant? That he sure wishes they could have tried? That it’s easy to say so when the theory can never be tested? That based on current data (Brett’s recent amorous record), her claim strikes him as unlikely? That it’s killing him that they’ll never find out? Take your pick. Or come up with another interpretation. One will work about as well as another. This is pure Hemingway: the statement dripping with ambiguity that forces readers to undertake some soul-searching to reach their conclusions. If Dickens wants to put readers at their ease, buddy to buddy, Hemingway wants to put them to work.
It only gets worse from there. We get novels with two endings, as with John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), novels that leave the protagonist hanging—literally, in the case of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977)—and novels that end with unfinished business, even an unfinished sentence. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) ends with “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”—not one you see every day—which seems to tie into the opening, “river-run, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay . . .” You can hardly get more provisional than that. The later twentieth century is full of examples, and we needn’t trot them all out to prove a point.
Popular genres typically stick to the tidier ending. Who, after all, wants a mystery novel that doesn’t get its man? From Agatha Christie to Sue Grafton, the genre that begins with the smoking gun ends with justice, polite or rough, but justice nonetheless. Romances, Westerns, sci-fi epics, horror novels. And for good reason. Does he get the girl or doesn’t he? Who wins the shootout? The aliens and the evil thing are either thwarted or they aren’t, no two ways about it. Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman, Maeve Binchy, Stephen King, and Robert B. Parker are going to give you pretty decisive endings.
The more “literary” crowd? Not so much. Especially after Beckett, after Heisenberg, after deconstruction, it’s hard to embrace certainty with the same enthusiasm that our Victorian forebears displayed. Sometimes the text deconstructs itself. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi gives us a harrowing tale of a boy, a tiger, and a lifeboat, but then offers a perfectly plausible alternative explanation that undermines the entire narrative. Martel very cannily refrains from giving us a clear reason for choosing one over the other. Some readers will find the strategy frustrating, others exhilarating. What he really provides, of course, is nothing more or less than what many readers would devise for themselves, a rational explanation for a completely irrational tale of survival. Oh no, they’ll think to themselves, that couldn’t have happened. It must have been X. In this case, the author very thoughtfully offers X for us. Long before Martel, Henry James offered a beauty of a self-deconstructing finish in The Turn of the Screw (1898).
I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
Did young Miles die because of Peter Quint’s ghost? Or of being exorcised of it? Or of the smothering adoration of the governess? Or of her repressed anger or her psychosis? James gives no answers and indeed steered clear of any indication that it was other than a ghost story. But then, why the title? Why the emphasis on “another turn of the screw” in the lead-up to the narrative? Readers are forced into making their own determinations as to what really happened and, by extension, what that actual event tells us about the rest of the novella. Now that’s canny writing. About the uncanny.
It was ever thus. Even with the most Dickensian of endings, we accept or resist as we will. I never bought the Pip-and-Estella thing, and when I discovered he’d written an earlier, superior (from my perspective) ending, I was all over it. Some endings you can’t overwrite. Tess is dead and no mistaking it. Jude, too. And Gatsby. Even there, however, we don’t necessarily take delivery on the authorized interpretation. My experience from many years of classroom teaching is that we read actively, right up to the last word, and as often as not, students don’t like the way a writer ends the novel, and say so. In fact, I’ve had quite a lot of former literature students tell me years later that so thoroughgoing was their rejection of a novel’s ending that they misremember their alternative as the actual denouement. Talk about being involved with your reading. And why not? Openings tell us where we’re going. Endings tell us where we went. We ought to have some say in the trip.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I generally read the ending of novels first. Seems like cheating, doesn’t it? Well, not first-first, but a long time before I’ve earned it, usually once I have the novel’s premise safely in hand. Chiefly, I’m interested less in the surprise than in how the writer will get there. And it’s the ending that is our reward for plugging on, giving us the satisfying wrap-up, but also the hint of what-if, of what-then. Because the worst thing an ending can be is ended.
You want a nineteenth-century novel that has a proper ending? Okay, here.
But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
What will Huck find in the Territory? What will that new life be like? His problems and adventures aren’t over but merely beginning in a new realm. Some doors have closed off—the juvenile antics of Tom Sawyer, Aunt Sally and proper behavior, the world of immorality and duplicity that lines the north-south axis of the Mississippi—but others are opening. He’ll go west into the uncharted lands, not knowing what they hold, and who blames him? It can’t possibly be worse than sivilization.