Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frame 0814208959, 0814250920, 2001006168

Citation preview

Edited by BRIAN RICHARDS N

1 1mirnr11�r,1�111111,nmii � 39001103808906

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Columbus

This book is dedicated to my parents

L //

Copyright© 2002 b y The Ohio State University All rights r eser ved.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Narrative dynamics: essays on time, plot, closure, and frames / edited by Brian Richardson. p. cm. - (The theory and interpretation of narrative series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0895-9 (cloth: alk. paper)-ISBN 0-8142-5092-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Richardson, Brian, 1953-. I. Series PN212.N3735 2001 808-dc21 2001006168 Cover design by Melissa Ryan. Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Carr. Type set in Adobe Garamond. Printed by Thomson-Shore. The paper used in this publication meets the mimimum requirement of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

BOGAZi«;i UNiVERSiTESi KUTUPHANESi

1 1 1 1 Ii l l 1 1 1 1 1 1 I 0705460

cknowledgme

s

ix

General Introduction RT I T ME lntroducti n: Narrative Tempora 1.

Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics

M. M. Bakhtin

9 15 25

2. Order, Duration, and Frequency Gerard Genette

35

3. Narrative Time Paul Ricoeur

4. Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction

47

Brian Richardson

Int

II II PLO ucti n

5. Story and Plot

a

Em lotm nt

64

71

E. M. Forster

73

6. Fairy-Tale Transformations Vladimir Propp

7. T he Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones R. S. Crane

94 102

8. T he Argument of Comedy Northrop Frye

9. Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction Nancy K Miller

110 130

10. Narrative Desire Peter Brooks 11.

Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure

138

Susan Winnett

PART Iii

NARRAT VE SEQUENCING

11:rtroduction: Narrative Progressions a d

(� 2. Story, Plot, and Motivation \¾"//Boris Tomashevsky 13. Text Generation Jean Ricardou

uen ces

159 164 179

Contents 14. T he Historical Text as Literary Artifact

Hayden White

15. Narrative Progression James Phelan

16. Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative Susan Stanford Friedman

17. Queering the Marriage Plot: How Serial Form Works in Maupin's Tales ofthe City Robyn War.ho!

PART IV • BEGINNINGS AND ENDS Introduction: Openings and Closur e 18. Beginnings

Edward Said

19. The Sense of a Beginning A. D. Nuttall 20. Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel

191

211 217

Acknowledgments

229

249 256 267 272

D. A. Miller

21. Endings and Contradictions Rachel Blau DuPlessis

22. Reading Beginnings and Endings Peter Rabinowitz

B. Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure and Social Crisis Russell Reising

PART V III N ARRATIVE F RAMES Introduction: Narrative Frames and Embeddings 24. The Literary Frame john Prow

H. Stories within Stories: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative William Nelles

26. The Parergon Jacques Derrida

27. Stacks, Frames, and Boundaries Marie-Laure Ryan

B ibliography Sugg ested Further Reading Rel evant Short Narratives

viii

282 300 314

329 333 339 354 366 386

393

395

I wish to thank James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz for their excellent over­ seeing of this project, from initial encouragement though numerous judicious interventions to the satisfaction of closure. I also wish to thank Gerald Prince, David Herman, and Emma Kafalenos for much extremely good advice along the way. I thank Hazard Adams, the one who first taught me narrative theo­ ry in a classroom. I greatly appreciate the diligent work of Bryan Herek, who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. More generally, I wish to express my gratitude to the humanities faculty of the University of Maryland for their friendliness and professionalism, and to my many friends and colleagues in the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature for exemplary intellectual comradery. Special thanks, as always, go to my brother Alan for his astute advice and to my wife, Sangeeta Ray, for her insight, understanding, and love. I gratefully acknowledge the following sources for allowing me to reprint essays in this book: M. M. Bakhtin, from The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Copyright © 1981. By permission of the University of Texas Press. Gerard Genette, "Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu," from Aspects of Narrative, edited by J. Hillis Miller. © 1971 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. ix

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements

Paui Ricoeur, "Narrative Time," in On Narrative, ed. WJ. T. Mitchell.© 1981, Universit y of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and of the Universi ty of Chicago Press.

Hayden White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact ." © 1974. Reprinted by permission of the aut hor.

E. M. Forster, from Aspects of the Novel © 1927. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. (HBT) and The Society of Authors, London.

porary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3. © 1999. Reprinted by permission of the University of W isconsin Press.

Vladimir Propp, "Fairy-Tale Transformations," from Readings in Russian Poetics, eds. Ladislav Matejka and Kiystyna Pomorska, Michigan Slavic Publications, vol. 8, 1978. Reprint ed w ith the permission of Michigan Slavic Publications.

Excerpt from Beginnings by Edward Said,© 1975, Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Northrop Frye, "The Argument of Comedy," from English Institute Essays,

1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr.© 1949 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

R. �- c�ane, "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," in Concepts of _ Cntz�zs"!, ed. R. S. Crane. © University of Chicago Press, 1952. Reprinted by perm1ss10n of the University of Chicago Press. Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fic­

Warhol, Robyn. "Making 'Gay' and 'Lesbian' into Household Words." Contem­

Excerpt© A. D. Nuttall (1992). Reprinted from Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel by A. D. Nuttall (1992) by permission of Oxford University Press. D. A. Miller, excerpts from Narrative and Its Discontents, © 1981 by Princet on University Press. Rep rinted by permission of the publisher. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, excerpts from Writing beyond the Ending, © 1984, by permission of the author.

Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association from PMLA vol. 96 (1981).

Russell Reising, excerpts from Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure and Social Crisis, © 1996, Duke University P ress. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Peter Brooks, from Re,iding far the Plot© 1984 by Peter Brooks. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf: a division of Random House.

John Frow, "The Literary Frame," from The Journal ofAesthetic Education 16:2 (Summer 1982). Reprinted by permission of the University of Illinois Press and the author.

tion."

Susan Winnett, "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure." Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association from PMLA vol. 105 (1990). Boris Tomashevsky, selections from "Thematics," reprint ed from Russian For­ malist Criticism: Four Essays, translated with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon a:1d Marion J. Reis, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copy­ nght© 1965 by the Un iversity of Nebraska Press. Copyright© renewed 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press. Jean Ricardou, "Nouveau Roman, Tel Quel," from Surfiction, 2nd edition, ed. Ray mond Federman (Swallow Press/University of Ohio Press) © 1981. Re­ printed with the permission of Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, Athens, Ohio. X

William Nelles, "Stories within Stories: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narra­ tives," Studies in the Literary Imagination vol. 25:1, Spring 1992. Copy right 1992, Department of English, Georgia State University. Reproduced by per­ m1ss10n. Jacques Derrida, from The Truth in Painting. © 1987, University of Chicago P ress. Reprinted by permission of the author and of the University of Chica­ go Press. Marie-Laure Ryan, "Stacks, Frames, and Boundaries," Poetics Today vol. 11, no. 4, W inter 1990. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.

xi

Time, plot, openings, endings, and frames are among the most important aspects of the study of narrative, and have been the subjects of numerous major critical investigations in the distant past, throughout the twentieth cen­ tury, and during the last several years. Plot-the events of a story and the way those events are bound together to make the story-has historically been the single most discussed area of narrative theorizing. Narrative time has been a central critical concern since Horace advised authors to begin their recount­ ings in the middle of the action being depicted rather than from its earliest origins-advice that many subsequent writers would follow, and many others, like Laurence Sterne, would flout. Recent criticism has pointed out the extreme importance attributed to the establishment of definitive beginnings and endings in all narratives, whether literary, popular, or religious, and the consequent scandal that disputed origins or the refusal of closure can cause. Similarly, how and by whom a story is told, for what purpose and to which audience, are concerns that cannot be taken for granted, since they themselves constitute so much of the narrative act: a narrative cannot be divorced from the contexts of its utterance without substantially altering the narrative itself. Surprisingly, no anthology has attempted to bring together this rich and important body of work; existing collections have only a few articles devoted to these related subjects, subjects which are proving more significant each year in all fields that use narrative analysis: literature, cultural studies, g�nder stud­ ies, history, anthropology, and much else. The term "narrative dynamics" is used here to refer to th� riioveinent of a narrative from its opening to its end.

Introduction

This includes the beginnings of both the story and the text, the temporality of the telling, the movement and shaping of the plot, and th�__fuflcti ()m ?f the endii:ig: Of course, these aspects often flow into one another, and it can be dif­ ficult to dise'htangle and demarcate one from the other; as Henry James point­ ed out, "really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle with­ in which they shall happily appear to do so." 1 It is also true that each of these aspects of narrative dynamics generally has implications for all the others; the traditional well-made narrative is generally conceived of as having a particular type of beginning, development, temporal arrangement, and denouement.Until fairly recently, it has been a critical com­ monplace that the best plot depicted, as Aristotle observed, an action that was complete and whole, that is, one that possessed a beginning, a middle, and an end (Poetics 7.2).2 The relative importance of each of these aspects has, how(/ever, been widely contested.For Edward Said, the choice of a beginning is cru­ . cial since it determines much of what follows; for Peter Brooks, on the other hand, it is the final climax of a narrative that determines everything that . \__/comes before and leads up to it.The notion of a single, final climax (and the ri'/' language of male sexuality that Brooks uses to depict the narrative act) has been contested by a number of feminist writers and theorists, who argue against such a narrowly gendered and baldly teleological approach. Ejner Jensen also dissents from the theoretical aggrandizement of closure; he finds the rece11t critic�! emphasis on en1_in _ gs C�Iltr�rj to the �eiiff�@-��ligif of «J comedy, wlil�.:nis 5etter appreciated scene by scene.3 This general stance can 1;\J easily be "extended- to other genres, including romance or the serial, that seek to defer in��finitely ()relude closure aTfugetiieTas-PafficiiParkerranlRobyn Warhol make clea�.Fi�ally, we may also consider Yuri Lotman's observation that different genres and historical periods privilege openings and endings dif­ ferently: thus, the heightened role of the beginning as a fundamental bound­ ary is typical of many myths and texts of the early Middle Ages.5 Looking back at Aristotle's pronouncement on the best type of plot, we can clearly discern that many kinds of work do not aspire to the kind of interconnected form he preferred in tragedy; in many texts, some of the parts are greater than the whole. The way a narrative is framed is also relevant to its interpretation; as Lot­ man and Rabinowitz point out, beginnings and endings help frame and direct the way we read the rest of the narrative; indeed, conventional ordering pat­ terns can be foisted on a text despite its attempts to elude such reading.In addition, the motives, purpose, and context of the presentation of a particu­ lar narrative will greatly affect its reception and meaning.As Ross Chambers states, "consider, for example, a 'faggot' joke told by gay people among them2

Introduction

selves, by straight people among themselves, [and] by a straight person to a gay person....In each of these cases, the significance of the story is deter­ mined less by its actual content than by the point of its being told, that is, the relationships mediated by the act of narration." 6 The same of course is true for any narrative, and the way a story is framed or embedded will indicate how it is intended to be received.This is true regardless of whether the narrative in question is told by the wife of Bath, Br' er Rabbit, or one of the narrators with­ in a novel by Faulkner. The essays assembled below are intended to represent both enduring clas­ sic accounts and the most significant work recently done on time, plot, sequencing, beginnings, closure, and frames.Throughout, I have tried to pres­ ent a variety of viewpoints as well as to show how some of the recurring the­ oretical positions develop over time and are applied to adjacent subjects.The reader is thus invited to follow out the century-old battle between analytical and dynamic notions of plot, or trace the contributions of formalist, psycho­ analytic, or feminist approaches across different areas of narrative analysis. The introductions to each section are intended to place each contribution within the larger body of work in each field, sketch relevant historical antecedents, and suggest the directions that contemporary discussions seem to be heading toward.In doing so, they offer additional bibliographical resources for those interested in further study. Narrative theory continues to embrace more areas of analysis, as seen by the proliferation of studies of autobiography and life writing, narratives of pop­ ular culture, and national and cultural narratives.The basic as_2�g�Qf!!.?:r.rati�e dyn�rnics �re i11creasingly rec°-g�_i!:�d as being pro�i�;;-�t-i� an ever expanding number of discipli11:�,· Indeed, according to cognitive scientists, ��!!at��is,!:h�­ fundamental'rn()cl� of hum�n.�ovyle?ge.A companion volume could easily be assembi�d �tfi-�;;iys �� n;rra�ive in ,philosophy, history, law, anthropology, psychology, politics, and popular culture. New subdisciplines continue to emerge, and even include narrative therapy and narrative theology.As the interest in narrative continues to proliferate, it is naturally important that the more capacious and sophisticated models of narrative analysis be the ones transported across the disciplines, and that issues under debate be recognized as such. Just as, in an earlier such migration, the importance of voice, unrelia­ bility, and the speaker's situation were emphasized by students of first-person historical and cultural accounts, so ought the contemporary investigator read carefully on the dynamics of plot production, the problematics of beginnings and closure, and the insistent push to keep reinscribing "the marriage plot " in patriarchal society and discourse.Indeed, a general-though not uncritical­ sensitivity to ideological issues in the production of narrative is very important, as so many recent theorists have demonstrated. 3

Introduction

K .\_

OQ', '( )

i:�'•

�-

Ideology has always been present in narrative theory, though its appearance is often disguised and its putative effects frequently mistaken. Here too we may begin with Aristotle, whose discussion of goodness of character is filled with the prejudices of his time, as he concedes that even a woman or a slave may be good, though the woman may be said to be an inferior being and the slave worthless.7 Even the austere morphology of the folktale is inscribed with unfor­ tunate scriptings of stereotypical gender role divisions; as Teresa de Lauretis points out, Propp identifies the attaining of a princess as a typical goal of the folktale hero, 8 as the passive woman is reduced to a token within an exclusive­ ly masculine economy. Christine Brooke-Rose notes a similar sexism built into the plot grammar of A.J.Greimas, as the cultural double standard for adultery is explicitly inscribed as an elementary structure of significance.9 Models derived from adjacent disciplines often carry with them stny pieces of ideological baggage as well. Using the metaphors of human sexuali­ ty as part of his fusion of Freudian psychology and narrative theory, Peter Brooks described narrative desire as "the arousal that creates the narratable as a condition of tumescence, appetency, ambition, quest, and gives narrative a forward--looking intention," and plot as "a postponement in the discharge which leads back to the inanimate." 10 ��!these are not metaphors of human sexuality, but merely male sexuality, as many feminists quickl:v pointed oi_a.As Susan \Vinnett observes, female sexualresponse does not necessarily conclude with a single orgasm; female experience includes instead two d.ifferent instances of tumescence and detumescence: giving birth and breast feeding. Their ends, however, are "quite literally, beginning itself \Vith this change in focus, the 'middle' and its repetitions must be conceptualized anew." 11 Straightforwardly ideological claims are occasionally made for specific narrative techniques.John Dennis denounced episodic narratives as inherent­ ly heretical, since they seemed to call the order of providence into question. Georg Lukacs condemned novels that limited themselves to the life or per­ ceptions of a single individual, thereby obscuring the totality of social rela­ tions within which all individuals' acts occur. Under the aegis of conceptualizations formulated by Roland Barthes and others, Lukicsian direc­ tives were inverted, as the conventional realist narrative-relentlessly linear, causally connected, teleologically directed, formally closed, omnisciently nar­ rated, and realistically feigned--was conde:mned as inherently conservative and repressive, while the innovative, politically progressive and artistically challenging text was claimed to be open-ended, multitemporal, fragmented, full of gaps and wayward movements, self-reflexive, and narrated by one or more decentered voices. Balzac, the preferred novelist of both Marx and Lukacs, now seemed to incorporate every possible reactionary narrative tech­ nique.For a while, such conceptions held great authority in many circles (and

4

Introduction

certain facets of this opposition are still maintained by some). Recently, addi­ tional investigation however has tended to eat away at this d�cho�o_q10us vision (see the introduction to the section on Time in this volume), and more simple or sweeping positions are reformulated or aba;1do�ed.Theorists are increasingly inclined to follow the example of Michal Peled Ginsburg, who attempts "to dislodge the underlying assumption that a certain form has an inherent ideological content to it-that dosed form, for example, is inher­ ently conservative.... [N]o form is inherently 'conservative' or 'radical'­ every form can be put to various uses." 12

being

,rj_ de France, 1921), 382. 4. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Norton, 1970). 5. Ford, Some Do Not . . . , bound with No More Parades (New York: NAU Signet, 1964), 28 (pt. 1, chap. 1). Further page references are given in the text. 6. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, in Cain x 3 (New York: Knopf, 1969), 3 (chap. 1). For the rhetorical significance of the definite article in such contexts, see Walker Gibson, Tough, Sweet, Stuffy, esp. 37-40. 7. Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel, 19. 8. Forster, Aspects ofthe Novel, 66. 9. Bierce, "Fantastic Fables," in The Collected Writings ofAmbrose Bierce (New York: Citadel, 1963), 640. 10. Torgovnick, Ctosure in the ]\Jovel, 115. I, of course, would prefer to reword that final sentence: the inversion indicates regression because it is assumed beforehand to have thematic value. See also Jonathan Culler's claim that "The "lt'.aste Land can be unified by thematizing its formal discontinuities" ("Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading," in Reader in the Text, ed. Suleiman and Crosman, 48; much of this essay ended up, in altered form, in chap. 3 of Pur­ suit ofSign s). This interpretive technique is applied to ancient as well as to modern texts. See Alice M. Colby-Hall's analysis of the "double ending" of Renaut's Bel Inconnu in the special issue of ¼le French Studies devoted to closure ("Frustration and Fulfillment: The Double

312

Reading Beginnings and Endings

Ending of the Bel lnconnu," ¼le French Studies, no. 67 [1984]: 120-34). 11. Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, in Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (New York: Harper, 1899), 224 (Conclusion). It is, though, risky to talk about coher­ ence in a work as textually tangled as this one; for a discussion of the problems, see Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, chap. 5. 12. Hubert, "T he Tableau-Poeme: Open Work," ¼le French Studies, no. 67 (1984): 43 Hubert's claim, of course, applies only to a fairly restricted text-milieu. See also Gerald Prince's distinction between hermeneutic, proairetic, and tonal closure later in that same issue ( "La Nausee and the Question of Closure," 183). 13. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1950), 492 (Epilogue, chap. 2). 14. O'Brien, The Secret ofNJMH (New York: Scholastic/Apple, 1982), 249 (Epilogue). The novel was originally entitled Mrs. Frisby and the Rats ofNJMH, but was later renamed to conform to the tide of the film version. 15. Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Dog," trans. Ivy Litvinov, in Anton Chekhov's Short Stories, ed. Ralph Matlaw (New York: Norton, 1979), 235. 16. Prince, although he uses almost the opposite terms, is describing the same paradox when he says that there can be "a closure of uncertainty (making sense of or exploiting incon­ clusiveness, hesitation, and contradiction)" ( "La Nausee and the Question of Closure," 188). 17. Walker, ''Advancing Luna-and Ida B. Wells," in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Harvest, 1982), 98. 18. More generally, as Fredric Jameson puts it, the "contamination of the central mur­ der" by the "random violence" of what he calls the "secondary plot" ("the search") in Chan­ dler's novels in general is part of a strategy of "de-mystification of violent death" ("On Raymond Chandler," 648-49). 19. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, trans. Desmond Vesey and Eric Bentley (New York: Grove/Evergreen Black Cat, 1964), 96. 20. Knight, Form and Ideology, esp. 150-51. 21. Luke Parsons, "On the Novels of Raymond Chandler," Fortnightly Review, May 1954, 351. For a fuller analysis of this novel, see my "Rats behind the Wainscoting." 22. Cawelti, Adventure, 111ystery, and Romance, l 49. 23. Philip Durham, Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler's Knight (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 33. See also his claim, about Chandler's novels in general, that "the action and violence more or less covered up the fact that everything came out alright in the end" (97). 24. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary judgment (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World/Harvest, 1964), 229. 2.5. Radway, Reading the Romance, esp. chap. 4. 26. Elliott, "Country Full of Blondes," 356. For a different perspective on this prob­ lem, see Stephen Knight's claim that Chandler holds a "conservative and elitist position" (Form and Ideology, 136-38). 27. See Russel Nye's claim that "popular art confirms the experience of the majority, in contrast to elite art, which tends to explore the new" ( The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America [New York: Dial, 1970], 4). See also Donald Dunlop, "Popular Culture and Methodology," journal ofPopular Culture 9 (fall 1975): 375/2-383/31; Dwight Macdonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press/Falcon's Wing, 1957), 59-73. 28. "Mysteries," New Yorker; 11 February 1939, 84; Ralph Partridge, "Death with a Difference," New Statesman and Nation, 10 June 1939, 910; "Detective Stories," Times Lit­ erary Supplement, 11 March 1939, 152.

313

Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure and Social Crisis

23 Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure and Social Crisis RUSSELL REISING

While the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and while the countless tribe of com­ mon dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate -Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

When Mark Twain stops Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by having Huck decide to "Light out for the Territory" rather than return to "sivilization," he "concludes" his work only nominally. T he abruptness of the novel's stopping i is only slightly less jarriig than thaTcessation Mark Twain must have felt when, after having a riverboat smash Huck and Jim's raft, he earlier stopped work on the novel, putting it aside for about three years, from 187 6 to 1879. T his second stoppage provides no satisfactory conclusion to the narrative's generative thematics, no clarification, no tense ambiguity, no protomodernist frustration of easy solutions, no liberating (or puzzling) openness: it simply ends. Adventures of Hucklebeny Finn shapes a fictional narrative world and navigates its various communities and stresses without completing its imagi­ native work. Given the ignorance, stupidity, brutality, hypocrisy, fraud, heartlessness, and exploitation that Mark Twain's narrative posits as definitive of the antebellum U.S. South as well dS of his own Reconstruction era, Huck's choice of running farther vvest is indicative not only of his own desire to escape the world he has laid bare, but also of Mark Twain's unwillingness, perhaps inability, fully to resolve the very issues his picaresque narrative has conjured. While it might itself function as an emblem of the westward mania that has driven isolatoes, idealists, and malcontents into newly occupied ter­ ritories at least since the time Eric the Red decided that Greenland was too 314

crowded for his tastes and voyaged to Vinland, Huck's and Mark Twain's "lighting out," their refusal to address or to impose any effective resolution onto the social world the novel constructs, can equally be read as a failure. The arbitrariness and abruptness of Huck's decision not to struggle to right the wrongs he has experienced suggests Mark Twain's cynicism, perhaps, but it could equally suggest his honesty. Adventures of Hu,ckLeberry.EinrL StQ]2S without in any way ameliorati11g�-he moral, economic, cultural, juridical, racial, and political evils it has so pointedly represented; no changes of heart, of law, of ethics intervene into the sickness of the novel's world. T he death of Pap Finn,, the tarring and feathering of the King and the Duke, the clarifica­ tion of Jim's actual status as a free man following his manumission by the widow on her deathbed, and Tom and Huck's safe return to their homes pro­ vide no catharsis, no metaphorical or conceptual counterforce to the systemic brutality of life under slavery. Buck Grangerford's murder, the emergence of other con men to replace the King and the Duke, and the narrative's expos­ ing of the inhumanity and racism underwriting the consciousnesses of all but one or two of the novel's "good and kind" characters serve at least to neu­ tralize the impact of any putatively "happy" implications of the work's more upbeat moments. T here are obviously various ways of accounting for Mark Twain's choices. His own deepening cynicism and misanthropy could surely produce a novel content to expose the absurdity of life in late-nineteenth-century United States. Exhaustion and/or some writerly crisis of confidence could again have proven too oppressive for him to work more rigorously through the issues he raises. We might even speculate that Mark Twain's failure to "resolve" the loose ends of his narrative constitutes his triumph as a realist who refuses to impose utopian closure onto his recalcitrant subject matter. Or we might pursue the possibility that no novel, no social text, can resolve in itsimagi.native work the crises, tensions, and vexations diat characterize the social and cultural world of its genesis, {h;� �;Y?f>pearance �f having done so is tantamount to politi­ cal, moral, and rhetoric:c1l bad faith. It is this possibility and some of its related issues that I examine in Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text. I will be reading works as diverse as Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Charles Brock.den Brown's Wieland, Herman Melville's underread and underrated Israel Potter: His Fifty Years ofExile, an Emily Dickinson poem, Henry James's late fiction, and the Disney Studio's animated classic Dumbo, works that span nearly the entire history of the United States of America, paying special atten­ tion to the ways in which these and other works struggle to cordon off their narrative worlds, and to how the moments of stoppage with which they con­ clude paradoxically function to exacerbate, to reopen, the very tensions they are meant (or are to appear to mean) to "conclude." -·---- - --,

- - -- -· - --

315

T !

BEGINNINGS AND ENDS

I hope I am not falling prey to some naive expectations about just how cultural works are supposed to conclude. I am certainly not advocating some neat, thorough, premature, or totalitarian imposition of an ending that clari­ fies the e�tirety of a narrative world. I am not proposing any prescriptive utopian agenda. As Frank Kermode cautions early in his still provocative The Sense ofan Ending, we cannot ...be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely na"ive, as some apocalyptic sects still are, we do not ask that they progress towards 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. (24)

Loose Ends will instead examine moments of closure in works that are any­ thing but trivial with an eye toward reading the significance of what I will call a particular kind of anti�lo�L!_�eJ am concerned, in other words, not with pro­ posing that PhillisWheatley-should have written differently, but with what it means that she can stop a poem celebrating the rising of the morning sun with an image of herself blinded and violated by the appearance of that sun, the very moment her ode exists to represent. No approach to closure in American literature has yet accounted for such conundrums. In-fict�-two recent considerations of closure in American litera­ ture concentrate on different issues entirely. Joyce A. Rowe, for example, attempts to define the essential difference between literature produced in the United States from "that produced by comparable writers abroad" by relating what she calls "equivocal endings'' to the ostensibly visionary ambitions of lit­ erary production in the United States. According to Rowe, the endings of American works are equivocal in a special thematic sense, as they simultaneously promote and deny a visionary ambition already defeated in the body of the work.... Yet these endings all adhere to a similar convention: they redeem or rehabil­ itate the ideal by recasting it in alternative terms.However equivocally it is stated, the proragonist refuses either to reconsider or to abandon visionary hope. (1, 2)

The endings Rowe characterizes as "equivocal" are, as these remarks suggest, closely and coherently related to the thematics of the works they conclude. I would also add that the conventional approach governing both Rowe's iden­ tification of an "essentially" American theme and also her choice of texts (all mainstream, canonical works by white, male authors-The Scarlet Letter, 316

Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure and Social Crisis

Adventures Huckleberry Finn, The Ambassadors, The Great Gatsby, and, briefly, Moby-Dick) seems not a little anachronistic. In another consideration of "the politics of openness and closure in American literature," Milton Stern has thematized openness as utopian and closure as "a pulling in, tight control and gravitational centralization, compacted time and space," associating, even in 1991, such qualities with the cold war demons of totalitarian grayness: "conservative control and limitation" (4-6). Reminiscent of R. W B. Lewis's alternatives of "the party of hope" and "the party of irony," Stern's model deals largely with the thelll�tic binary opposition central to approaches to Ameri­ can literature popuTarizecloy��D�H.-Lawtence, William Carlos Williams, George Santayana, Van Wyck Brooks, and other early-twentieth-century thinkers, many of whom pitted some image of openness to possibilities of existence in a "new world" and the United States against "Puritanical" forces of resistance and denial. Interested as they are in advancing thematic defini­ tions of American literature, neither of these studies concerns itself with the structural problems posed by what I am calling antidosure and the "loose end? associateJ-witli it. Clostire; whether poetic, narrative, cinematic, or other, can surely take many vexingly ambiguous and frustrating forms. Not only are we suspicious of a conclusion that appears to tie together most of a work's vagrant energies into some neat bundle, but effective and provocative conclusions often frus­ trate readerly expectations for the reconciliation or re�olution of major ten­ �ions that have driver{thefr- iiari-atives. The gigantic and enigmatic white presence at the conclus1otr of-Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative ofArthur Gor­ don Pym brings that work to an abrupt and puzzling halt, but its enigmatic appearance conjures up horrors more or less consistent with those of the entire narrative. Similarly, Melville's warning that "something more may follow of [the] masquerade" of The Confidence-Man projects that novel into an unknown, dystopian future of cynicism and hopelessness, but one largely anticipated and prepared for by the twists and turns of the entire work. Hes­ ter Prynne's return from Europe to c:og11s� womeg against utopian desire and revolutionary praxis at the end of The Scarlet Letter may crush many readers' desires for Hester to emerge as a feminist heroine, but it merely consolidates the misogyny driving much of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fictional project, just as Miles Coverdale's "shocking" announcement that he loved Priscilla closes out The Blithedale Romance in an anticlimactic, almost hackneyed, expose of his own horror before the feminine. Henry James strands Isabel Archer, who can­ not but return on "the very straight path" to Gilbert Osmond at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, in what is not only an oppressive but also a problem­ atic (but thematically consistent) conclusion to that novel. Carrie Meeber­ Wheeler-Maddenda's rocking near the end of Sister Carrie posits a future of 317

GIN

GS

N

s:

this lack of final fulfillment in no ,vay the unfulfilled logics of Dreiser's first novel. Nor does the word at the conclusion of Edith Wharton's The House ofMirth force us back into the novel to revisit some moment we aren't even aware of having missed or misread.Nick Car­ roway's rhapsodic conclusion to The Great Gatsby orJake Barnes's cryptic "isn't it pretty to think so" at the end of The Sun Also Rises are both metaphorically and dramatically related to their respective novels, even though they interpose different types of ambiguity.Flannery O'Connor's story always ends ,vith some superficially cryptic but ultimately coherent, violent epiphany consoli­ dating her rigicily conservative religious beliefs. \X!hen he has Oedipa Maas await the "crying oflot 49'' at the conclusion of his second novel, Thomas Pynchon strands the reader amidst wildly diverse speculations, but we can hypothesize either some clarifying climax or, more likely, an anticlimax con­ sistent with the novel's own plays on paranoia, entropy, or some covert and totalizing alternative postal regime. The fact that we don't know what lot 49 (or, for that matter, what V) is, while tantalizingly frustrating, is fully consis­ tent with Pynchon's thematics. Bob Dylan's concluding stanza to "All Along the Watchtower"-

-resonates with apocalyptic mystery, though its ambiguity i§ faA!y