On Endings
Fairy tale:
“And they lived happily ever after.”
The Return of the King (Tolkien): “And
Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Eleanor upon his
lap. He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.”
With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (Oates): “From
Chicago the train ran south across the prairies, taking Lincoln and Willie home
now, home at last to Springfield.”
The Heart of the Sea: “And then I saw,
not in imagination but in reality, the waiting faces on the shore.”
Stories
have beginnings, middles, and ends. At
least, most of them do. I suppose some
avant-garde author could try to make a philosophical point by writing a story
that has no beginning or end, just sentences.
He could try; I don’t say succeed.
Some
philosophers have suggested that endings only come in stories. Reality, it might be suggested, just keeps
going. The universe appears to be, and
for all we know it really is, one of an infinite number of possible universes
that might have followed from the big bang; and in that universe events
deterministically succeed each other (except when they succeed each other indeterministically,
i.e. by random chance, as allowed by quantum dynamics). Such philosophers might argue that the imposition
of beginnings and endings is merely a human way of looking at things. By some stroke of chance, we have evolved to
find meaning in things (and imagine the meaning is real), and so we invent
stories. In reality, the big bang is the
only beginning and the eventual heat death of the universe is the only ending.
At some point
children graduate from fairy tale endings.
They want to know what happens after the princess slays the dragon and
rescues her one true love. Does she get
old and wrinkled? Does the prince start
drinking too much? Do they produce
crabby children?
American
history did not stop with Lincoln’s assassination and burial. His successor, President Johnson, was
impeached, but not convicted. Then
President Grant presided over a depressingly corrupt administration. And then … on and on.
Sam comes
home to Hobbiton at the end of The Return
of the King. But the final scene is
followed by hundreds of pages of appendices.
The reader soon learns that Tolkien regarded the adventures of the hobbits
in The Lord of the Rings as a single
episode in a gigantic history of middle-earth.
As the creator of that world, Tolkien was more interested in its
languages, peoples, and myths than in the War of the Ring.
My story, The Heart of the Sea, ends with Denver
Milton’s reunion with his wife and son.
What kind of ending is that?
Obviously, it’s not “the end.”
What becomes of little Tervik, anyway?
So you see,
the skeptical philosophers say, beginnings and endings are arbitrary. Endings serve the purposes of storytellers,
nothing more. The only meanings stories
have are the ones we make up.
Notice that
this denial of story-meaning takes the shape of a story, a grand
meta-narrative. It is a new story, the
story of the universe as told by contemporary cosmologists. It bears the imprimatur of science, so the
skeptical philosophers present it as barefaced truth. Other philosophers, who call themselves
deconstructionists, delightfully point to the skeptics’ inconsistency. Why is their story exempt from
skepticism? Jean Francois Lyotard
famously wrote: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward
metanarratives.” He probably would
include the cosmological story of “big bang leading to heat death” along with
all the others.
I agree
with the deconstructionists that those I have called the story-meaning skeptics
are inconsistent. If you want to be
skeptical, be skeptical all the way down.
But I agree that all our little stories achieve their meanings within
the grand story. Biographies and
histories of nations fit within the human story writ large. And the human story is part of the natural
history of the planet and the physical universe.
Natural
history is part of a grander story still.
And that story centers on a single life, lived in Judea and Galilee two
millennia ago.
Our
stories—biographies, histories or novels—give meanings to events by offering
explanations. Without meaning, without
narrative, the events of the world are just “one damn thing after another.” Our propensity toward story, toward meaning,
is not just an accident of human evolution.
It is part of are essential nature as creative creatures. (Here I
am thinking with Dorothy Sayers, in The
Mind of the Maker, who points out that the creation story—story again!—says
that God made us in his image. We are
made to be makers.)
Someone
might object that I have merely asserted that our storytelling proclivities are
not accidental. Shouldn’t I give a
argument? But I already have, in the
paragraphs above.
