I’ve been thinking a lot about endings lately: what makes a good ending, what demands that expectation of satisfying closure puts on a story, and how writers arrive at endings. So I was interested to read Ian McEwan’s fascinating essay on apocalyptic consciousness in Saturday’s Guardian. It’s become common to think about this desire to imagine the end of the world as a narrative impulse, and McEwan brings on Frank Kermode to make the point that our need for endings is a form of psychological resistance to “our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity:”
In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a “consonance with our more naive requirements of fiction”. We are born, as we will die, in the middle of things, in the “middest”. To make sense of our span, we need what he calls “fictive concords with origins and ends. ‘The End’, in the grand sense, as we imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations.” What could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is.
In the essay’s second part, McEwan walks us through contemporary forms of apocalyptic eschatology, including the contributions of science and the genocidal impulses of 20th Century racial politics to this fatalism, but as a novelist, he can’t shake the sense that this apocalyptic impulse originates in the narrative structure of human consciousness:
It does not need a novelist to tell you that where a narrative has a beginning, it needs an end. Where there is a creation myth, there must be a final chapter. Where a god makes the world, it remains in his power to unmake it. When human weakness or wickedness is apparent, there will be guilty fantasies of supernatural retribution. When people are profoundly frustrated, either materially or spiritually, there will be dreams of the perfect society where all conflicts are resolved, and all needs are met.
That last point strikes me as especially important. McEwan cites Edmund Cohn’s history of apocalyptic sects in Northern Europe from the 11th to the 16th Century, The Pursuit of the Millennium, in which Cohn notes that such sects were “typically led by a charismatic prophet who emerged from among the artisan class or from the dispossessed,” and frequently combined an impulse to purification with genocidal rage: to prepare the way for the Kingdom of God, “it was believed necessary to slaughter Jews, priests and property owners.”
What’s striking here is the combination of dispossession and class rage with the promise of divine justice. McEwan describes these sects as “fanatical rabbles, tens of thousands strong, oppressed and often starving and homeless, [that] roamed from town to town, full of wild hope and murderous intent.” If Kermode is right that the psychological impulse to seek out narrative closure is a way of claiming meaning, then the other element that can’t be ignored is the hunger for justice. Slaughtering Jews, priests and property owners might seem to us an odd way to please God, but it satisfies the underlying sense of rage that drives all apocalyptic movements.
Endings, at their most primal, demand a kiss or a kill — the wedding or the gunfight ??? to satisfy our need to right what we perceive to be a wrong. The governess wins the nobleman’s heart not because she’s caught a glimpse of the main chance and put her sexuality at the service of economic ambition (unless she’s Becky Sharp), but because there’s a fundamental injustice to a culture that leaves a poor, witty, and virtuous girl to watch as the wealthy breed interest between them. Literary endings may become more ambiguous ??? epiphany, the return of the traveler, the hard lesson learned ??? but the impulse to justice is just sublimated into a symbolic form, like the blood sacrifices of primitive faiths as they evolve into wafer and wine. Poetic justice, with its satisfying ironies, is the kiss we feel in our minds as our higher consciousness brushes against the complexity of the world. Molly’s “Yes,” Gatsby’s boats beating against the current, Dilsey’s “They endured,” each seems a kind of inrush of breath, an ending only in the sense that there are no real endings, only culminating moments of awareness. That’s the modern way of pushing back from the table, a magician’s wave of the hand as he vanishes from the stage, but is it really so different from what came before?
Even the timeless fantasy of apocalypse imagines not an ending but a satisfaction of desire: those who devoutly wish for it don’t imagine their own annihilation, but salvation and, more importantly, the satisfaction of watching all those other folks cry out in anguish as they burn. What we wish for in an ending isn’t really an end at all, but confirmation of our beliefs, which we can celebrate as justice or greet with an ironic smile, depending on whether our taste is for blood or bitter herbs.
When I’m writing, my eyes tend to blur slightly as I approach an ending: I know I’m getting close, but I can’t see it as clearly as I once did, back when I was first sketching out the story’s plan, until I suddenly realize I’ve arrived. Like a good kiss, or death, the best endings feel inevitable but seem to come by accident.
So how about the rest of you? Do endings come as planned? Are they a long-awaited culmination, or the window you climb out when you’ve painted yourself into a corner? Any nominations for best endings? I’ll leave it to you to complete this post.