The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [142]
Renaissance playwrights, like modern ones, regularly rewrote speeches, scenes, and characters in response to audiences and critics, whether the audience was a single powerful monarch or a playhouse full of commoners. It’s not only Shakespeare plays that help to make this point. The third act of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was extensively rewritten by the playwright, at the suggestion of director Elia Kazan. Both versions are printed in current editions, together with Williams’s explanation for why he preferred the original script. The concept of the pre-Broadway tryout was developed to allow experimentation and change while a show was on the road. Film adaptations of novels, plays, or other films always make alterations, often significant ones, to the “original” text or script.
Nor have we yet mentioned what was perhaps the most striking nineteenth-century phenomenon of literary open-endedness: the serial writing and publication of novels, chapter by chapter, ongoing and in real time, rather than retrospectively after the novel was completed. As employed, and deployed, by creative masters of the form like Charles Dickens and Edith Wharton, this process generated remarkable acts of authorial invention, authorial forgetfulness, changes of mind, design, plot, and character personality, as well as responses to the reading public in medias res. Novels like Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth appeared in installments in periodicals prior to their publication in book form. Dickens’s novels, from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, were all published serially—some in monthly installments, some weekly. The journals he founded, Master Humphrey’s Clock, Household Words, and All the Year Round, were principal vehicles and venues for the publication of the novels, and they appeared punctually, in each case the author writing to a strict deadline. Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was to be published in twelve—rather than the usual twenty—monthly installments, but he died after only six parts were written and released.9 In this case, one kind of closure precluded another, leaving readers confronted with a genuine mystery, a story without an ending.
End Games
Closure is not quite synonymous with ending: it seems to imply a wrapping up, a completing of the circuit, a satisfaction (or relief) that puts the previous events, or text, or emotional experience, firmly if not always completely, comfortably in the past. Nonetheless, it is of some interest, historically and symptomatically, to see that the literary study of endings took on renewed energy and point in the 1960s, a time when the United States and its allies were preoccupied with the Vietnam War, when countercultures began to assert themselves, from issues of race and gender equality to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and when literary criticism was on the verge of a theory revolution. In addition to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure (1968), we might mention Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1966), subtitled Studies in the Theory of Fiction, which begins, deftly, with a chapter called “The End.” Kermode is interested in ideas of the apocalypse, biblically and fictionally, even in the modern world:
Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their space they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.10
In literature, as Kermode goes on to suggest, variation and innovation are what make for interest: “We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naïve, as some apocalyptic sects are, we do not ask that the progress toward that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we should expect only the most trivial work to conform