The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [141]
Finally, the work is a (theatrical) rehearsal, and this rehearsal … is verbose, infinite, interlaced with commentaries, excursuses, shot through with other matters. In a word, the work is a tangle; its being is the degree, the step: a staircase that never stops.7
This “staircase that never stops” might remind us of Piranesi’s prisons and dreamscapes, so evocatively described by Thomas de Quincey in his Confessions of an Opium-Eater (1820). De Quincey is reporting what he heard from his friend Coleridge, so this vivid description is actually secondhand.
Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below … But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labors: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.8
We might compare this concretely imagined vision to the “unfinished” endlessness of literature and its interpretations. But before we turn directly to the experience of interpretation, it may be of interest to consider some other material evidence of the impossibility of closure within literary texts.
One consistent example is provided by Shakespeare, whose plays all close with gestures toward the future. Not merely the idea of the future but of events—like marriages and coronations and state funerals—that, while aimed at throughout the five acts of the play, will actually take place (if they do) in some future time beyond the boundaries of the performed (or scripted) play. Examples abound and are in fact found in every one of the plays. I’ll list a few of the most obvious ones.
At the end of Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick suggests that the lovers “have a dance ere we are married,” and although the old father Leonato urges, “We’ll have dancing afterward” (5.4.118–119; 120) the marriages are not performed before the play ends.
At the end of Twelfth Night, Orsino says that he will marry Viola once he sees her in women’s clothing (rather than in the boy’s clothes she has adopted as a disguise). But the “other habits” in which he asks to see her before proclaiming her as his “mistress and his fancy’s queen” (5.1.380) are not returned within the playing space of the drama, and the transformation and consequent marriage are deferred until after the fifth (and final) act.
At the end of Macbeth, Malcolm invites the Scottish nobles, now called earls rather than thanes, to see him crowned at Scone (5.9.41). But the scene does not shift to Scone or to the coronation: that event is predicted and expected but not acted, performed, or shown.
At the end of Henry V, when it seems every major kind of closure has been achieved—a war successfully waged, a bride successfully wooed—the chorus enters to remind the audience how brief was the victory and how profound the subsequent reversal. After a brief reign Henry V died, his infant son, badly counseled and ill equipped to govern, lost all the French territory that had been gained, and the nation was divided by civil war, “Which oft our stage hath shown” (Epilogue, 12). So instead of offering closure (either structural or cathartic), this play points backward to Shakespeare’s earlier tetralogy, which told the story of Henry VI and the Wars of the Roses. Just when the story seems to be coming to a triumphant end, there is a vertiginous sense of loss and a metatheatrical