The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [137]
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.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
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.
Against Closure
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