The Use and Abuse of Literature (40 page)

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.

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:

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)

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.”

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”:

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 demonstrated
³
—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.