Last Things: Essays on Ends and Endings

Endings in Literature: A Survey*

Peter Wenzel (Aachen)

Abstract

After a glance at earlier models of a typology of closure, this article distinguishes various cognitive principles on which the construction of endings in literary texts can be grounded, putting special emphasis on Gestalt principles and reader-activating strategies. In its conclusion it shows that these closural devices have also been exploited by postmodernist writers.

1. Introduction: Why Endings Matter

The claim that like the beginning, the ending of a text is a particularly interesting object for research can be grounded on principles that were already well-known in traditional literary theory, and it can be endorsed further by findings of more recent, reader-oriented and cognitive approaches.¹ Thus there is, in the first place, a long tradition in constructivist and formalist theories of literature and aesthetics which proceeds on the assumption that a writer composes his work with a particular view of the ending in mind or that he perhaps even constructs it all backwards from there. When Edgar Allan Poe laid the foundation for his theory of the short story in his “Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and in his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1842), he propagated the idea that the end was the place “where all works of art should begin” (1967, 487). He even went so far as to claim that “in the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect” was not to the preconceived “single effect” of the ending (1967, 446). Likewise, the Russian formalist Boris Eichenbaum believed that endings have a pivotal function for literature, especially in brief narrative genres:

By its very essence, the story, just as the anecdote, amasses its whole weight toward the ending. Like a bomb dropped from an airplane, it must speed downward so as to strike with its warhead full-force on the target. (Eichenbaum 1971, 231)

In less spectacular rhetoric, many other writers and critics have argued for the particular importance of the closing sections of a text, with respect not only to ← 19 | 20 → short but also longer forms of fiction,² considering not only the ending of the text as such, but also the ends of its various sequences such as verses, stanzas and chapters (cf. Lotman 1972, 14; Prince 1987, 72). In the second place, the particular relevance of endings in literature can also be accounted for from the reader’s point of view. As Marianna Torgovnick has put it, “it is difficult to recall all of a work after a completed reading, but climactic moments, dramatic scenes, and beginnings and endings remain in the memory” (1981, 3–4).³ It seems reasonable to suppose that this exceptional memorability of beginnings and endings is indicative of their pivotal role in text-perception and text-processing. Thus, just as the exposition of a text, exploiting the “proverbial tenacity and enduring influence of first impressions” (Sternberg 1976, 297), sets its readers on the track and encourages them to interpret the entire text in the light of the information first given to them, the ending attracts the readers’ special attention, inducing them to modify or even replace some of their earlier interpretive hypotheses against the background of what is established last (cf. Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 121–22). The so-called “primacy effect” of the exposition is therefore ineluctably balanced, if not overridden, by what has been termed the “recency effect” of the ending (cf. Sternberg 1976, 297). That is why the ending occupies a “privileged position” (Rabinowitz 2002, 300) in the site of the text. Often, it will trigger a “retrospective reconstruction” or even a complete “repatterning”⁴ of the information imparted so far, which is what happens most notably in the “exchange of frames” at the end of the joke or surprise story (cf. Wenzel 1989). Hence, the ending is a place to which readers will assign “a special value” and where they will most naturally expect to find “a summing up of the work’s meaning” (Rabinowitz 2002, 304). Correspondingly, the ending is also the place where “an author most pressingly desires to make his points” (Torgovnick 1981, 19) and which he is therefore likely to use for conveying a particular message, for establishing social norms, or for questioning and satirising them. ← 20 | 21 →

2. Research on Endings: An Underdeveloped Field of Study

In view of their privileged position in the text and their reception-shaping cognitive functions, it is surprising that endings have to a large extent remained unstudied. Thus, most literary dictionaries—whether in English or in German—still lack an entry on headwords such as “endings,” “closure,” “conclusions” or “Schlussgebung.”⁵ The same also holds true for most handbooks on text linguistics,⁶ in spite of their general awareness of the importance of text-sequences. In literary studies, then, it seems that there is the problem that interest in endings has declined in the wake of the paradigm change from formalism, structuralism, and classical narratology towards less text-oriented approaches; however, there appear to be signs of revitalized interest in the more recent development of cognitive and “affective” approaches to literature. Quite a few fruitful studies in endings were of course undertaken between the late 1960s and the 1980s, when structuralism and classical narratology were still in full swing. The well-known literary critic Frank Kermode, for example, furthered the interest in endings by publishing The Sense of an Ending (1967), which sets out his views on the ever-increasing importance of “end-determined fictions” (whether apocalypses, tragedies or novels) in an eschatologically underdetermined, ateleological world. The most significant milestone in modern closure theory, though, was Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure (1968), a theoretically demanding monograph on the structure of endings in poetry, which in spite of its basic formalist orientation also took psychological and reader-related factors of closure into account. Next in the field of closure theory came a series of book-length studies in which important steps were made towards the development of a system for classifying types of endings in novels and short stories, with a particular focus on “signals of closure.” In addition to studies by Richter (1974), Torgovnick (1981), and Gerlach (1985), Bonheim’s (1982) discussion of short story endings in the framework of narrative modes and Korte’s (1985) analysis and classification of endings in novels, based on very elaborate, but somewhat dissimilar categories, deserve special mention here. A very late offshoot from this tradition is ← 21 | 22 → a dissertation by Constanze Krings (2003) on endings in the short story,⁷ whose particular significance lies in the fact that it also includes first attempts to register different types of closure quantitatively with the help of statistical methods, thus opening up a perspective for empirical research on endings whose importance will be discussed later in this chapter. On the whole, however, it must be stated that after the poststructuralist and new historicist turns in literary studies, research on endings reached something of a dead end. No less a critic than J. Hillis Miller, for instance, expressed considerable deconstructive reservations against the idea that a given narrative could ever be called “closed”:

The notion of ending in narrative is inherently “undecidable.” […] Where does the complication, folding up, or tying together end and the untying start? […] Attempts to characterize the fiction of a given period by its commitment to closure or to open-endedness are blocked from the beginning by the impossibility of ever demonstrating whether a given narrative is closed or open. Analysis of endings leads always, if carried far enough, to the paralysis of this inability to decide. (Miller 1978/79, 3, 7)

Likewise, closure theory with its inevitable structuralist and universalist leanings would obviously appear questionable from a new historicist perspective, which is directed to the plurality and relativity of cultural norms and therefore highly sceptical about the notion of general laws of closure. That is why, except for some (non-formalist) studies of endings in feminist literature and monographs on closure in particular domains (such as film, cf. Neupert 1995), closure theory stagnated from the mid-1980s until the turn of the millennium.⁸ Since then, inspired by what has been called the “cognitive turn,” a renewed awareness of the relevance of endings is visible in research,⁹ though as Richardson has put it: “A critical synthesis of this increasingly complex, ideologically laden, and expanding field is in all likelihood a long way off” (2002, 254).

3. Types and Typologies of Endings

Among the numerous tasks for a theory of closure, two of the most pressing ones are the need for clear distinction of different types of closure and the plausible construction of a typology for their classification. As has been recognized by earlier scholars, this is not an easy enterprise. Therefore, when confronted with the task of recording the state of research in different fields of narratology, ← 22 | 23 → many of which he found in a much more orderly condition, Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze complained with an air of resignation:

The endings of narrative texts lend themselves with less ease to lucid classification. The common distinction between “closed” and “open” is grounded on a somewhat vague terminology. But since narratives must have an ending […] I will try to set up a typology of them, too. (Schwarze 1982, 160)¹⁰

Not surprisingly, the results of Schwarze’s attempt at classification are as unsatisfactory¹¹ as the efforts of other scholars who tried to identify various possible types of endings (cf. Torgovnick 1981; Gerlach 1985; Korte 1985; Ensign 1996). What is most disconcerting about all their classificatory activities is that the categories which are employed in them appear rather disparate, relating to quite different levels of a narrative in arbitrary order. It was thus an important step forward when Krings (2003, 23–45), having recourse to a model first introduced into narratology by Stierle (1971), structured her typology of endings along the lines of three elementary narrative levels—the story, the deep structure, and the surface structure of the discourse. As her typology takes up many important signals of closure discovered by Bonheim (1982, 140–64), it is worth quoting here in full, as a starting-point for a closer description of the various possible types of endings:

CATEGORIES OF CLOSURE

1)relationship ending/rest of the narrative: story

1.1closed by the fate of the main character(s)

1.2linked with an insight

1.3main problem solved

2)relationship ending/rest of the narrative: text of the narrative (deep structure of discourse)

2.1parallels of opening and ending

2.2surprise ending (after withholding information) ← 23 | 24 →

2.3coda (producing distance)

2.4refocalization of the central problem

2.5irony

2.6panoramic view (aperspectival)

2.7change of focalization before the final passage

2.7.1variable internal focalization

2.7.2from internal to zero focalization

2.7.3change to external focalization

2.7.4change of the relationship of story-time and discourse-time before the final passage

3)ending: text of the narrative (surface structure of discourse)

3.1allusion to the title

3.2closural phrase with negation or question

3.3quotation

3.4change to direct speech or substitute

3.5final sentence introduced by “and”

3.6inverted word order