The Three Senses of an Ending

The Three Senses of an Ending

A. For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were,

stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings

and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end

and endow the interval between them with meaning.

–Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 190

B. The irremediable character of what has no present,

of what is not even there as having once been there, says:

it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over,

again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning.

–Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 29

     How can one ever say, like in Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings”: “Eventually they die. This is the end of the story,” and say it in a language, in a text, in writing?¹ How can a story end when, in fact, once written, it reverberates like an endless spectral haunting, engraved in cultural memory as long as it can be reiterated, reproduced, reread? How can any character “die” if these characters have never “lived” at all? This resounds like an extravagant claim, a fiction greater than fiction. Here, indeed, we can echo the text—which is already an echo of itself—and return its claim against itself that we should not be “deluded by any other endings [since] they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.” By a self-differentiating epanorthosis, the text attempts to set apart a distinct category of the end, an “authenticity” opposed to the fiction of a “happy ending,” but thereby risks drawing itself nearer the Cretan paradoxical edge by the simple affirmative statement of an irreplaceable singularity: “The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.” It seems, then, that we are being proposed “fictional” ends and “authentic” ends; the first one belongs to the fairy tale closure of popular narratives where everyone (apart from the villain) “lives happily ever after,” and where the second “authentic” ending, death, is a terminal “event” that is ideally—optimistically—always downplayed, elided, suppressed; that is, suspended.

     However, as if a certain critical linguistic or rhetorical logic or exigency demanded it, this only (singular, exclusive) authentic ending is underlined, italicized, recited tricolonially. Are these the same Johns and Marys dying thrice? Why does death need to happen thrice? A death that repeats itself, that appears thrice (well, at least thrice, for how many times should death die to finally die?), that has to happen thrice without itself succumbing to falsity or impossibility or self-parody? Thus, we sense here an extravagance of “truthful deaths” in the text, the “same” deaths that, by some popular (obsessional) narrative logic, must be skipped by a “forced” return to the utopian “master narrative” in the very beginning (death excluded, yes, but silently included). This is the “deliberately fake” ending of fiction, which is nothing but a certain “popular” narrative “optimistic” desire reflecting fairytale utopia where the “authentic” end is suspended in an Ever After. Why do we need one more, especially a more “authentic” one above the fake “deceitful” ones? Why do we need an “authentic” death in the narrative and not just a simple but “fake” happy ending where nothing is actually “truly” ended? Is this authentic ending, then, of the “unhappy” sort, the kind of ending that the fake ending seems to try often to evade or omit from openly telling, a certain denial or repression of the Death principle and the affirmation of a Life principle? Why is this other end of narrative possibility—that of death—posited as the only “authentic” end? End of what, exactly?

     To begin a sketch for a possible reply, some general argumentative provisions are in order. Let us say, then, that the “absence” of Life is the structural condition of the possibility of the “presence” of Life. Death as the absolute End: this threat or concept of “nothingness” is what allows “somethingness” to shine forth as a perceptible semantic horizon. It is my projected absence or disappearance which allows me to be conscious of my presence. It is my (imagined) unconsciousness that defines my (also imagined) consciousness. Death and the End are enfolded within Life and the Beginning, as necessarily included counterpoints in the very meaning of my Life as what I live through in the middle of the middle after the Beginning and before the End.  I am structured by this potential or projected gap, by this emptiness or self-absence. Death is not what happens to Life; it is that non-event which always happens so that Life can be Life, as that which Life lives for and against which Life pretends to struggle through the ruse of substitute “fake” ends that suspend ends. The purposes or ends of Life, those for which (“bourgeois”) Life is directed and from which it derives its teleological sense and economy of meaning, is only secondary in relation to the primordial notion of the other end called Death, the ultimate end of Life, its perceived or postulated “absolute” opposite, and yet, somehow, also the real culmination of Life, the very proof of a Life that has been and that has passed away.

     But the question again arises: is Death really possible in language, in fiction, in writing? Can death take place in a space without time and presence (Blanchot: “Ecrire, c'est se livrer à la fascination de l'absence de temps” ²)? Is not the claim that it can happen also as fictional and as deceiving as the fairytale endings that govern the logic of the popular narrative (whose formal limits have now been wholly identified as a simple transformative loop from A to not-A and back to A)?  Won’t this loop merely revive or resurrect everyone and everything else for another judgement day and reiterate its more “authentic” logic as part of nothing more or nothing less than a self-referential chain of signifiers? What has always happened—this perpetually iterated absence of presence and time—cannot happen anymore as a singular and irreplaceable event apart from the rest. For in language, Death is the same in all directions, and it happens all the time as a completed event, and hence cannot happen once and once only once again. One death looks the same as another, and cannot stand out as itself, and therefore cannot be recognized as such, cannot be pointed out or singled out, and cannot be spoken of. The same thing can also be said of Life: that it, too, cannot be spoken of once and only once as such and as itself in a writing space already full of death.

     It is “here,” in a utopian realm that is actually atopic, that ‘characters” (as both the personnages that people narratives and the alphabetical scripts that compose them) are in a sense really “immortal.” They have always existed in an “Afterlife.” This Afterlife—if “this” can be deprived of its deictic or indexical function and can be read as “somewhere” without becoming a new positive presence at a distance—is the space of writing and the ontological mode of the sign. It neither speaks of Life nor of Death but of what has always been dead and alive, and hence cannot be fully dead or alive. The characters have always been in an Afterlife, for the sign is neither alive nor dead. How can absence be embodied? How do you unname an absence? Or, conversely, how can you unname a presence? Since both cannot be unnamed, it would be then necessary to name them both at the same time so that one can become the unnaming of the other. Here, the “unnameable” is not that which resists naming, the realm of a putatively impossible Real or Sublime. What is really unnameable is that which cannot be unnamed, that whose status of Being-Named cannot be undone and whose destitution, by an imposition of an absolute poverty of signifiers, would allow us finally the (fictive) opportunity to “experience” the unveiling of its essence.

     We will, therefore, be able to speak here of three senses (meaning/direction) for an “ending.”

1) “Inauthentic”: or the suspension of the singular end via the utopia of a perennially reiterable Happy Ending in the Ever After;

2) “Authentic”: or the singularity of the end as the punctuality of an absolute and terminal event called Death; and

3) “Interminable”: or the simulation of both “inauthentic” and “authentic” ends in or as an Afterlife where both Life and Death are impossible as singular, unnameable, unique events.

     As a recapitulative structure containing “what Dante calls the point where all times are present, il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti,^{” 3} the narrative as a species of writing is like the Borgesian “Aleph” (the Hebraic equivalent of the Greek letter A/α). It contains both the lives and deaths of its characters in a synchronic loop that a reader can traverse back and forth, characters like John and Mary whose diachronic or “temporalized” presences and absences are merely a function of textual “spatialization” and are never singular non-iterable events. In fact, we can imagine the continuously present and iterable “death” of a character as a sort of rhetorical figure. For example, we can look at it as an “Apostrophe” since the text addresses or names the now “dead” or “eliminated” character; or, a certain kind of “Apophasis,” a denial of x by mentioning its “disappearance” from the field of action; or maybe as “Prosopopoeia,” where the absent item is still made to speak through a certain “pronominalisation” (a group of words replaces the character which would indicate that “it/he/she is gone”). The important idea is to consider the rest of the text starting from a character’s point of disappearance as a “mass” that is as constitutive of the character’s lingering presence in which the same character can still be seen “alive” and acting or speaking. It is because the text continues to speak much further on as a semiotic “gesture” of Life that a Death space or moment could be marked off from it.

     The context of Dante’s journey can serve as a useful illustrative point. As a narrative journey set essentially in the Afterlife, the temporal horizon of Dante’s progress is no longer inscribed within a human history as “presently lived.” All the characters and personnages he meets no longer possess that presence that characterizes living beings and are “alive” only as literary artefacts of the Cantos. As poetic or literary artefacts, the souls that populate the Afterlife, both fictional and historical, are neither dead nor alive. Also, some of their destinies are not yet all complete. The Commedia still reserves for the souls in Purgatory a secondary teleology: they either gain eternal life or eternal death after some purgation. This dynamic possibility where a soul is in transition is no longer possible for those in Inferno or Paradiso: they already have attained the opposite extremes of eternal Life and Death, states that would not make sense without the contrasting mediatory and transitory midterm logic of Purgatorio. The interesting part here is that, again, however absolute eternal damnation may be, the dead souls never really disappear. They can no longer die since they are already dead. The non-space and the non-time of the Afterlife of writing invalidate any distinction between authentic and inauthentic deaths and suspend the possibility of any absolute death as a singular punctual event. The fictionality of the present life as the historical midstream of Divine arch-history that we read in Dante’s conversation with Farinata in Canto X of the Inferno doubly inscribes all eventualities in the Afterlife. In the impossible space where the “historical present” is invoked, we can see how, by being already part of the narrative of death, it is also an artefact of the Afterlife where the singularity of Life as self-present actuality assumes the same lifeless as well as deathless reiterability of the atopic topology of the Commedia.

     The space of writing, therefore, is the interminable and incessant atopic realm where death and life never end, but also (with equal importance) where they never begin. It is not the space of the singular, irreplaceable, punctual, and unique event. In many places in The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot incessantly speaks of the interminable as the paradoxical operational mode of writing (“To write is now the interminable, the incessant”⁴). It is also what characterizes the nature of the word or of language: “Everything is word, yet the word is itself no longer anything but the appearance of what has disappeared -- the imaginary, the incessant, and the interminable.”⁵ As a mode of disappearance that has never taken place, writing is the lifeless and deathless operation of the interminable “where nothing reveals itself” as itself and where “nobody speaks.” The Afterlife of writing is this “empty, dead time [which] is a real time in which death is present -- in which death happens but doesn't stop happening.”⁶  Because of this, “death admits of no "being for death"; it does not have the solidity which would sustain such a relation. It is that which happens to no one, the uncertainty and the indecision of what never happens. I cannot think about it seriously, for it is not serious. It is its own imposter; it is disintegration, vacant debilitation -- not the term, but the interminable, not proper but featureless death, and not true death.”⁷

     An “untrue” death loop that keeps happening and functioning as the double of life. In other words, the interminable is the suspension of both life and death, the non-event that keeps happening not as a singular or punctual event, but the repetition of what has never been present. The myth of the event, structured with beginnings and endings, is the “sense” created by fiction to give meaning to our lives which are “stranded in the middle” (Kermode). That is, the “middle,” this midstream state of lives flowing in medias res, is always already an Afterlife viewed sub specie aeternitatis. The structure of our daily lives, read as they are under days and months named after mythical figures and counted following a historically contingent calendrical system, or even located following a still theoretical cosmic event (the Big Bang), represents the pre-inscription of our “present lives” within the Afterlife of the narrative. Hence, the being of our being is not lived as a series of singular events where any punctual beginning or end can be fixed, but as the interminable iteration of undead middle states already written in the Book (Edmond Jabès). Time travel narratives exemplify this excellently and rather amusingly by their “calibration” of spatio-temporal coordinates using the artificiality of arbitrary human historical time-keeping, as if there were an absolutely and punctually known point of reference for the beginning of universal history, a transcendental or hyper-clock with absolute coordinates, and not the Julian or Gregorian system, or the navigational maps that have been drawn without reference to any other dynamic coordinate system greater than (politically) written history or the (geopolitical) maps themselves.

     As Kermode has demonstrated, the explanatory power of “apocalyptic” myths or fictions of the end ⁸ lies in their capacity to endow the midstream with a structural “concordance” that links its “transitional” nature to a beginning and an end. Like in the Afterlife of Dante’s Commedia, the arch-narrative of the Alpha and Omega supplies human history with what we can call a theological and teleological systematicity or “langue.”⁹ This fictive System whose modelling has always been theological connects the “stranded” unassembled series of what in an ensemble of the One and the Whole, in a logic of reading that requires the corollary logic of Parts and Wholes, Beginnings and Ends. What remains stranded must enter into a dialogue simulating a Beginning and an End, even if this stranded What is nothing but the postulation of the System itself (in both the active and passive modes of this syntax). If la langue doesn’t exist theologically, it must still be posited fictionally so that the dialogue can begin (and end). For the logos is never alone fictionally (it is theologically, but as fictionally theological): it is always a dia-logos, always a binary, always a double. For example, “Happy Endings”—although in the plural, as if there were that many endings—assumes its readability only because of its singular form somewhere and its negative “Unhappy Endings” variety. From the very beginning, we jump headlong into the middle of things, or into the heart of the “story,” even if it only appears to be a beginning, a simulation of the Alpha (“try A”). Right here, we are already torn between the dialogical demands of the Tragic and the Comic, or between Necessity and Arbitrariness, ancient complementary dialogical pairs whose interior dynamic informs the very conceptuality of both langue and parole as inseparable, symbiotically and mutually-constitutive co-signs; that is, as conceptual limits that allow us to imagine “systematicity” itself and its “other.”

     My significance derives from being part of a chain of beings. I am not determined by my self-regard, by the self-emergent autonomy of an identity, but a non-isolable component of a history, that of a species, even if the origin and the end of this chain is indeterminable. As infinities that stretch on both extreme sides of the chain, the Past and the Future must then be divined and postulated so that the middle part of the chain, that which can be perceived as existing, can be rescued from its arbitrariness and solitude. Hence, the middle where I am, the short known history of humanity, will no longer be an island disconnected from an Order, but a manifestation of this Order. Despite my desire for autonomy and its notion of self-determining identity (like in Romanticism where the significance of the self derives wholly from an independent self-definition, as a mode of solitude and existence apart from this chain of history), I recognize the necessity for this Order, for absolute autonomy. And yet, this extension of the chain from opposite ends, an extension that posits a limit called Origin and End, is as mythic as the idea of autonomy. In short, both Heteronomy and Autonomy, as being named by the Other and being named by the Self, despite an appearance of being in opposition, are not originary or genetic, and are both mythic principles of the Afterlife where the Ever After resembles more strongly the interminable space of writing than the singular Death of any “authentic” ending.

     The simulation of both the suspension of the singular and of the singularity of suspension, where what takes place is suspension itself, is the interminable waiting for the End, this suspension which is simulation itself. Hence, the authentic end is simply what is more inauthentic than the inauthentic, a fiction greater than fiction itself. It is a punctuality or singularity that denies its iterated and interminable status, but denies it so that it can allow the iterable to be iterable, for the sign to be interminable. As a simulation of a singular point of termination, death—or the sign of death, allows the interminable to be possible, but structured as impossible, as the iteration of the impossible signs of Life.

Notes

1. “Writing” here is used both in the narrow sense and in the general Derridean sense of différance as “arche-writing,” the historical opening of differences that set up languages. Like the “trace,” arche-writing can no longer be worked out within the metaphysical notions of time centered on a present. “The concepts of present, past, and future, everything in the concepts of time and history which implies evidence of them-the metaphysical concept of time in general-cannot adequately describe the structure of the trace.” In Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 67.

2. Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 25. It is not the simple positive absence of time, but “le temps de l’absence de temps” (26).

3. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6.

4. Blanchot, op. cit., 20, my translation.

5. The translated passage here is from Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 44.

6. Op. cit., 31.

7. Op. cit., 155. My emphases.

8. Just to cite a few passages again from Kermode:

Virgil and Genesis belong to our end-determined fictions; their stories are placed at what Dante calls the point where all times are present, il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti.... The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning ('In the beginning...') and ends with a vision of the end ('Even so, come, Lord Jesus'); the first book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse. Ideally, it is a wholly concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end. The end, Apocalypse, is traditionally held to resume the whole structure (6).

But there is one important element in this apocalyptic pattern which I have as yet hardly mentioned. This is the myth, if we can call it that, of Transition. Before the End there is a period which does not properly belong either to the End or to the saeculum preceding it (12).

Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified.... This has relevance to literary plots, images of the grand temporal consonance (17).

In so far as we claim to live now in a period of perpetual transition we have merely elevated the interstitial period into an 'age' or saeculum in its own right, and the age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics. And so, changed by our special pressures, subdued by our scepticism, the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world (28).

9. Derrida, in Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (1998): “car la langue n’existe pas, personne ne l’a jamais rencontrée” [For the langue does not exist, nobody has ever seen it]. This is the essential inexistence of a theological/teleological Whole, something we should differentiate from its ad hoc inessential existence as myth. Without the application of a mythic whole, the middle becomes a different kind of interminable interval, which would be that of the Fragment where a different logic occurs: the Non Sequitur.