I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions with a special episode on narrative endings.
Let's begin with a quote from Stravinsky.
"Far too much music finishes far too long after the end.
Far too much music finishes far too long after the end."
Something along these lines applies also to novels, I believe.
Some of them end before they finish, some finish before they end, while others, and this is increasingly the case, are essentially endless.
They just finish where they happen to break off.
I agree with Gertrude Stein that conclusions are the weak points of most authors.
That's a quote.
The last lines of many modern poems tend to be lame, and the art of bringing a novel to a culminating end has all but disappeared from the literary fiction of the past few decades.
But we don't traffic in laments here on entitled opinions.
We may keep it dark, but we don't like to be wail and be moan, so instead of an ode on dejection,
I propose to share with you today a few of the novelistic endings that I find notable or beautiful.
So turn out the lights, and take a deep breath. We'll be right back.
[Music]
I'll start with a book that many people agree comes to a memorable conclusion.
I mean the great Gatsby, which ends with the narrator Nick on a shore of Long Island sound,
thinking about the Dutch sailors who first set eyes on the wild and wooded place that would later become New York.
Most of the big shore places were closed now, and there were hardly any light except the shadowy moving glow of a ferry boat across the sound.
And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away gradually,
and I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes,
a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.
For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,
compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,
face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder
when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light theorgastic future that year
by year, recedes before us. He diluted less than, but that's no matter,
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning.
So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.
The only thing that approaches infinity in human nature is our desire for more life,
more prospects, and more future. Nick refers to man's capacity for wonder, but it's more
than wonder, it's a craving for unlimited possibility, or the illusion thereof. And those Dutch
sailors when they approached the new land came face to face for the last time in history
with something commensurate to man's desire for unbounded horizons.
The so-called American dream that brought so many people to the shores of this sprawling continent
existed well before America itself did. And Fitzgerald, more than any other author,
probed in his novels, the bitter disappointment that America's promise holds in store
for those who dream the American dream more earnestly and audaciously. People like Gatsby,
who came so close or so he believed to achieving his childhood dream of winning over Daisy
and living with her happily ever after. He believed in the green light,
says Nick, meaning the green light of hope, which in America is invariably linked to the green
hue of its duller bills. But the orgasm future that recedes from us really belongs to the past
because it's in our youth that we're intoxicated with future expectation.
As we progress morosely into adulthood, the horizons that stretched out before us in youth
now lie behind us. So we beat on boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.
Speaking of dreams and open horizons, their eyes were watching God by Zora Neil Hurston
as a fully achieved ending in my view. Inside its third person narrative frame,
the main character, Janey Crawford recounts to her friend Phoebe in her own voice,
the story of her life with T-Cake after she left Eatonville and how she buried the one great love
of her life T-Cake after a fierce hurricane in the Everglades led to his death.
It's a dramatic story full of twists and turns. The novel's ending is bound up with its beginning,
which starts like this, I quote,
"Shifts at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide.
For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the
watcher turns his eyes away in resignation. His dreams mock to death by time. That is the life of men."
Now women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't
want to forget. The dream is the truth, then they act and do things accordingly.
Janey's dream is bound to the horizon. The main narrator says of Janey's life before she met
T-Cake, quote, "she had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons."
In her own voice, Janey speaks of the love and life, she had with T-Cake as a venturing out to the horizon.
I'd done been to the horizon and come back now. She tells Phoebe when she returns to
Eatonville after T-Cake's death, adding, "You got to go there to know there."
With those words, she wraps up her own narrative and Phoebe goes back home with renewed hope.
The novel ends with Janey making her way from the porch to her upstairs bedroom.
I quote, "Janey mounted the stairs with her lamp. The light in her hand was like a spark of sun
and this stuff washing her face in fire. Her shadow fell back and headlong down the stairs.
I skip a little. Then T-Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the
sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. T-Cake with sun per a shawl.
Of course, he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.
She pulled in the horizon like a great fish net, pulled it from around the waist of the world
and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes. She called in her soul to come and see.
One thing we can say about Janey Crawford is that she is no gatsby whose dreams are mocked to death
by time and she certainly isn't a daisy who mocks dreams altogether.
Janey's story does not end happily, at least not in any conventional sense of the term,
but it does end truthfully in the sense that her dream never died but sought out its inner core of
truth at the outer horizon. Only those who venture out can draw the horizon back in
rather than watch it recede ever further out of reach. It takes a special kind of power to dream
truthfully and pull in the vista like a great fish net and find so much of life in its meshes.
We need a word for this power to lead the horizon back into oneself and wrap it around like a
mantle. Let's call it the transcendental reduction of the castle in the sky.
One of the great endings in modern fiction comes in the last paragraph of James Joyce's story,
The Dead. The scene is winter. Upon returning with his wife Greta to their hotel room after a
dinner party at his aunt's house, Gabriel Conroy is chilled to the bone to learn that in her youth,
Greta was loved by a boy who had died for her. The boy, Michael Furry, leaving his sick bed one
cold and rainy night, had come to her window to tell her he didn't want to live without her.
He died shortly thereafter. The ghostly resurrection of Michael Furry in his wife's memory that evening,
thanks to a song that she had heard at the party, opens an unbridgeable distance between her
and Gabriel, precisely at the moment when he feels an urge to draw close to her. After she falls
asleep in the grief of her memory, Gabriel lies awake, thinking about the boy who died in his
17th year. I'm thinking about his wife, himself, his aunts, and all the people he knows and does not know
who slowly but surely are on their way toward becoming dead. The story ends with a vision.
A few light taps upon the pain, made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again.
He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right,
snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plane,
on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the bog of Alan, and farther westward,
softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too,
upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furry lay buried.
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones on the spars of the little gate
on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The best response to an ending like this is silence, but let me intrude upon it here with a few
brief comments noting that a clause in that last sentence like the descent of their last end
associates the snow with human mortality. Falling thinkly through the universe,
the snow is symbolic of the vast accumulation of the dead over many generations,
an accumulation to which the living in their time bound falling will add their heavy numbers.
The snow is general, it falls all over Ireland on every part of the plane on every part of the
churchyard upon all the living and the dead. Yet one thing we know about snowflakes is that
despite their countless numbers, each one is unique. There have never been two completely identical
snowflakes in the history of the earth. And for all the emphasis on the general,
the snowflakes in the last paragraph of the dead are implicitly
individuated as well. For Gabriel's vision is linked to the image of a shivering boy standing
under a tree in the nocturnal rain telling a girl named Greta that he no longer wants to live.
The lonely lyrical image of Michael Furry gives the countless flakes falling silently to the ground.
There's a blind, almost unbearable palpable.
The spirit of Michael Furry not only animates the snow, but in some subtle sense is the symbol
of what the snow symbolizes, namely the drift of life towards inevitable death.
It's as if all the snow over Ireland falls in a medium haunted by the soul of one boy
who died for a passion his society would not permit him to live.
Michael Furry is dead, but as it goes to his more alive than any of the doubleneurs of which
Gabriel is the every man, or so Gabriel imagines in his moment of self-examination.
Gabriel embodies the rule of his class, his people, his society.
Michael Furry remains an exception to that rule. That is why the presence of his ghost is able to
carry Gabriel outside of himself. That night, an inspiring him, his vision of a universal snow.
Only after this symbolic breakthrough into the realm of the universal does a story we have just read,
assume a meaning that seemed painfully lacking in the prolonged, excruciatingly boring account
of the dinner party at the Morcans. Suddenly all of these unacceptantly,
eminently forgettable characters at the party become translucent. They now appear to us
as individual snowflakes in their common descent towards a Bolivian, and their dinner party figures
as a last supper of sorts. Back in 2008, I devoted a show to Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness,
and I would like to give honorable mention to the ending of that novella here.
Marlow is on the deck of the Nelly, a ship anchored near the mouth of the Thames River.
He's wrapping up his story about his journey to the heart of darkness in the Belgian Congo
to retrieve the remarkable Mr. Kurtz, who dies on the return trip down the Congo River.
A year after returning to Europe, Marlow goes to Brussels to visit Kurtz's fiance,
whom Kurtz called his intended. In order to hand over Kurtz's personal belongings tour,
the intended, who idealized Kurtz, asks Marlow if he was with Kurtz when he died. I quote,
"To the very end," I said shakily, "I heard his very last words. I stopped and frightened.
Repeat them," she murmured, "in a heartbroken tone. I want, I want something, something, to live with."
"I was on the point of crying at her. Don't you hear them?"
The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us in a whisper that seemed to swell,
menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. The horror, the horror.
His last word to live with, she insisted, "Don't you understand? I loved him. I loved him.
I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. The last word he pronounced was your name.
I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead, short by an exulting and terrible
cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. I knew it, I was sure.
She knew she was sure. I heard her weeping, she had hidden her face in her hands.
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape,
that the heavens would fall upon my head, but nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a
trifle. Would they have fallen? I wonder if I had rendered Kurtz that justice, which was his do.
Hadn't he said he wanted only justice, but I couldn't, I could not tell her it would have been too dark,
too dark altogether. Marlow ceased and sat apart, indistinct and silent in the pose of a meditating
Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. We have lost the first of the ab, said the director suddenly.
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds and the tranquil waterway leading to the
uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky, seemed to lead into the heart
of an immense darkness. We'll be right back.
[Music]
Back in 2006, I did a show with the Australian American author Shirley Hazard, who died in 2016.
She was a good friend of mine. Shirley knew how to end her stories better than most of the writers
of her generation. Her output was slim, but she did write one literary masterpiece, the Transitive Venus,
which puts her in rare company indeed. I can't discuss the ending of that novel without
spoiling me for those who haven't read it yet, but in a certain sense, Hazard herself includes a
spoiler at the beginning of the book, where the narrator mentions that the character Ted Ties
would go on to commit suicide later in life. At the end of the novel, Ted Ties puts the
novel's main protagonist, Caro, on an airplane bound for Rome, where he is supposed to join her
later that day. This, after a long odyssey of years filled with difficulties and disappointments,
finally brings Ted and Caro together in a genuine love. Ted has taken leave of her as the
passengers prepare to board the plane. I quote, "The passengers were claiming, clutching,
harboring. Departure was doing this. There was one man, heavy in pale, familiar, who wore
American sea sucker and used a leather bag as a battering ram. He did not greet Caro and might have
been myopic. This was the doctor from New York who had proposed she wear glasses. Your flight
they said, all the while she was looking back in case Ted should be there, your flight is boarding.
On the plane she was shown to a seat by the window. Beyond the runway you could see a grove of
spruces, dark, reclusive, genuine. On the airfield the technicians were gesturing with hands and flags,
their blonde hair and blue clothes were blown in the slipstream. They wore devices to shield
their ears from the roar. The roar could be seen reverberating on blue overall, surging into the
spruces. Within the cabin nothing could be heard, only as the plane rose from the ground along
his of air, like the intake of humanity's breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant,
or the great gas of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.
The reader reaching this end is bewildered. What has happened? Why did Ted Tyson go on to commit
suicide out of grief when he was on the verge of attaining a life with Caro with whom he had been
in love for many years? Then you read that last page again and notice the detail of the doctor
from New York who had proposed that Caro wear glasses. We met that doctor a couple of chapters
earlier and so you go back and reread the very brief scene where Caro had visited the doctor about
her eyes, where it's written, quote, "The doctor handed her a slip and pushed away his prescription pad."
Three months later he was to die in a plane crash on his way to an ophthalmologist's
Congress in Rome. So there your question is answered, the plane went down, but the shock of it remains.
And then in the final analysis, this is a novel that ends not with human words, but with the sound,
in fact with two sounds, a long his of air, like the intake of humanity's breath,
when a work of ages shrivels in an instant or the great gas of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.
I'd like to turn for a moment now to a novel by Etello Colvino. Among Colvino's many stories,
invisible cities in my view has the best ending. In that book's last section,
we learn that the world atlas of the Great Khan contains the maps of promised lands visited in thought,
but not yet discovered or founded. It also contains maps of, I quote, "the cities that menace
in nightmares and mal addiction." Leaving through the latter, the Great Khan declares to Makopolo.
I quote, "It is all useless if the last landing place can only be the infernal city,
and it is there that in ever narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."
Makopolo answers him. The inferno of the living is not something that will be. If there is one,
it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day that we form by being together.
There are two ways to escape suffering from it. The first is easy for many,
except the inferno, and become such a part of it that you no longer see it.
The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension,
seek and learn to recognize who or what in the midst of the inferno are not inferno,
and then make them endure, give them space.
That's what I'd like to think we try to do here on entitled opinions, create an oasis in the midst
of the wasteland and allow it to grow. But we're not done yet. One last ending to share with you.
I can't say that it's the best ending of any novel I know, but it's certainly the one I find most
moving, most evocative, and most powerful. And that's why I'll conclude this show with the long,
a vanishing sentence that brings to an end Louis, Feddi no Celine's remarkable novel,
"Voyaggio Budlanyi," or "Journey to the End of the Night."
The hour is auroral, pre-don fact. A group of friends has just lost one of their own,
Robinson, who earlier in the night was shot by his lover Madalon in a taxi after telling her
that love discussed Sim and that he will never marry her. After hours at the police station,
the narrator and a few others go to a bar on the Sin River that opens before Don,
since it's a bar that caters primarily to the bargemen who want to drink before they set out on
their workday. These friends go over what has just happened. They argue, they drink. One of them
thumps a little stove and breaks it, and then without fanfare, the novel's last paragraph shifts
the scene from inside the locale to outside. I'll read the French original first.
"The French is a very nice place to become a black man." "The French is a very nice place to become a black man."
"The French is a very nice place to become a black man."
Far in the distance, the tugboat whistled. It's called Pass the Bridge. One more arch,
then another, another bridge, farther and farther. It was summoning all the barges on the river
every last one, and the whole city and the sky and the countryside and ourselves to carry us all
away, the sin too, to have it all done with and speak no more about it.
That's how I imagine history coming to an end, neither with a whimper nor a bang,
but with the sound of a tugboat calling everything around it, to follow its recession beyond the
bridge, beyond the lock, and beyond the river itself into a place where history,
having exhausted its chaotic energies, deliqueses in waters beyond the city,
where the noise of the world finally falls silent.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
[instrumental music]
Can you think you want to be?
So in the country, just read me a name
Well done, to straighten your head.
Just with love.
[Music]