The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [318]
Thus ends the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of storytelling: a book so preoccupied with the ego-life of its author that it is not so much a story as a case study: the self-portrait of a man so frozen in immaturity by the unresolved tie to `Mother' that he is incapable of making any contact with the deeper Self. Because he cannot make any genuine connection with anyone else, or see anything of significance outside the unfolding of his own life, it becomes a story which cannot have any resolution: which can go nowhere except back to its own beginning, like the mythical ouroboros, the snake which ends up eating its own tail.
The three `Pseudo-Endings': Either with a bang or a whimper
The most obvious thing which happens when storytelling moves exclusively into the world of the ego is that stories no longer centre round the archetypal opposition between darkness and light. The characters thus appear in a kind of twilight, cut off from one another, living on dreams which can lead only to disillusionment. Above all, they cannot go through any real inner transformation. And because they cannot develop those personal qualities which will bring them to wholeness, it is impossible for such stories to come to a full archetypal conclusion. Where there is no real light or dark, the story cannot culminate in a climactic confrontation between them. But this does not eliminate the need of any story for an ending. What happens therefore is that the storyteller falls back on a `pseudo-ending': some device which appears to round off the story, even though in reality nothing has been resolved. And these `pseudo-endings' take three main forms (sometimes seen in combination).
(1) As we saw in Chekhov, the story may end in some shocking act of violence, erupting more or less from nowhere. At least, by bringing home the emptiness of the characters' lives, this appears to give the story a dramatic conclusion, even though nothing has really been resolved.
(2) As we saw in Proust, the story may become circular, with its ending referring back in some way to its beginning. The hope is that simply by retracing the events which have led up to this concluding moment, this may in itself give a semblance of meaning to all that has happened, even though again nothing has really been resolved. Another example is the film Brief Encounter. This begins just after the breaking off of a love affair which had ended up going nowhere. But this is then recalled in flashback, eventually leading back to the scene of non-communication between husband and wife which has been the story's starting point.
(3) A third type of `pseudo-ending' can be seen where a storyteller deliberately tries to make a virtue of the fact that nothing has been resolved. The story ends with one or more of the characters moving on into the future, but going nowhere. But because this is presented as a kind of `moral' to the tale, it purports to give an air of significance to all that has happened.
A story which combines the first two of these `pseudo-endings' is the play written by Luigi Pirandello in the year before Proust died, Six Characters in search of an Author (1921). Actors are in a theatre, preparing to rehearse a play (by Pirandello), when six strangers enter - two older adults, a young man and woman, two children - introducing themselves as the characters in a play who are looking