The Whole of Anything Is Never Told

The finest fictions often stay vividly in our minds thanks to their deeply satisfying irresolution. I’m not speaking merely of a lingering after-effect or a brilliant image we can’t let go of, or even a revelation whose earned surprise we continue to contemplate. I’m thinking of stories that don’t so much invite recollection as, less decorously, more stubbornly, refuse to end.

One of the masterful examples of this approach is Alice Munro’s “Fits”, included in her 1986 collection, The Progress of Love.At its conclusion, a man named Robert is taking a long night-time walk in frigid winter air, “the very air in which noses and fingers are frozen,” across snow-covered fields behind his house in the small Ontario town of Gilmore where he lives with his wife, Peg. Lost in brooding thought, Robert notices neither the cold nor the distance he’s covering as he moves farther and farther away from the lights of the village. 

The riveting confoundment at the heart of the story is Peg’s behavior after discovering the bodies of two new next-door neighbors in their upstairs bedroom, the grisly result of a murder-suicide. She’d gone to their house on an errand and, though their car was in the driveway, her repeated knocks and calls from downstairs had gotten no answer. She’d known, as she related to Robert that night while they washed the after-supper dishes, that something “was terribly wrong,” but she’d needed to continue up the stairs and into their bedroom to “make sure.”

“Of course,” Robert said in offering his reassurance, “Of course it’s what you needed to do.”

Peg’s manner while talking to Robert was entirely composed, as it had been throughout the day. That morning, she’d left the bloody bedroom and driven the few blocks to the constable’s office to describe the scene, then continued on to work in the small town’s general store, which Robert owned. She’d said nothing to any of her co-workers. She hadn’t even phoned Robert, who was away for the morning. He’d learned about the deaths and Peg’s reporting them when he’d stopped at the highway diner for lunch on his way back to town and found the constable holding forth for the noontime crowd.

Robert was troubled by Peg’s failure to call him and seek his comfort, rationalizing that she was surely made numb by what she saw, and reminding himself that she was by nature “self-contained,” an aspect of her personality he’s always admired. Indeed, it was what first drew him to her. But what he hasn’t been able to reconcile, what has caused him finally to set out on his ruminative winter walk, is a discrepancy between the constable’s words in the diner and Peg’s to him as they washed the evening dishes. 

She’d said that the first thing she saw when she reached the top of their neighbors’ stairs was the dead man’s leg and slippered foot “stretched out into the hall” and, seeing this, she knew she “had to go on in and make sure.” And again Robert had nodded and said he understood.

But he hadn’t understood. What he’d heard the constable describe in the diner at noon was something altogether different than Peg’s account — a shotgun blast so powerful it threw the dead man “partways out of the room. His head was laying out in the hall. What was left of it was laying out in the hall.”

“Not a leg,” the story tells us. “Not the indicative leg, whole and decent in its trousers, the shod foot. That was not what anybody turning at the top of the stairs would see and would have to step over, step through, in order to go into the bedroom and look at the rest of what was there.”

These are the story’s final words, a concluding image of unfathomable bloodshed far more violent than Peg’s account implied, made more haunting still by Munro’s negating syntax detailing what Peg apparently did not confront. Not the whole and decent leg. Not what one would have had to step past in order to see more.

When I once asked a class for its reactions on reaching the end of “Fits,” a young woman whose insightful comments through the term had made it clear she knew very well how to read a story said her first thought was, “No! Don’t leave me here.” She smiled, but she meant it. She’d felt a sense of being left to trod the frozen crust with Robert, trying with him – and without the story’s help – to imagine what the future held for a man whose love of the small-town life he’d adopted, and of his married life in that town, had been built on his certainty of both the social vernacular and the predictable pattern of his wife’s emotional reserve. 

No! Don’t leave me here. When a narrative fully engages us, we’re having a conversation with it. At the moment the student reached the conclusion of “Fits,” she understandably felt this conversation had been suddenly, even rudely, cut off. She hadn’t been given enough, hadn’t been sufficiently prepared to fend for herself once she was on her own. And she responded as any reader in intimate conversation with her story would: she talked back to it, in this instance protesting.

Such is the effect of the endings I most admire: That feeling of being abruptly stranded, not so much in the story as by it, feeling left to sort through its events and their ramifications after it has exited the confines of the page.

Whatever our first reaction, on reflection we might no longer complain that it’s inhospitable of a story to behave in such a fashion if we recognize that what’s fundamentally at work is less inhospitality than the aesthetic responsibility of a narrative whose aim is to “compete with life”, as Henry James put it in his classic essay, “The Art of Fiction.” We can recognize in these sort of endings that fiction can be comprised, as life is, of unanswerable questions, ornery contradictions, and deeply rooted inconsistencies.

Quoting James again, this time from his Notebooks: “The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.” James’s unmet “whole” is the combination of that which reasonably fits together, to borrow Munro’s title, and that which doesn’t, but extends instead, untold, beyond it. The question then becomes whether or not a story that artfully “competes with life” can seem completed, and complete, in some sense “whole,” when we confront the fact that there happen to be no more words on the page.

No life is simplistic, no matter how simple, and no moment of it makes that clearer than the reverberant silence that sounds when one ends. Analogously, a narrative begins and ends in a kind of literary temporal fashion. Ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust. But dare we say that the best ones have something like the imaginative equivalent of soul, a vibrancy that lives on after the story is typographically done?

I think we do dare.

If the most successful endings have a depth and a power that carry the story’s unfinished life beyond its formal close, there’s nevertheless considerable variety in what we might think of as the direction it takes after it leaves its world of explicit language.

Most often that narrative direction is simply straightforward, the story continuing into its ambiguous future on a more or less linear path. In Chekhov’s  “Lady with the Lapdog”, Gurov and Anna are bound at the end by a poignantly committed love. Their affair – the innocent Anna’s first, the cynical Gurov’s most recent of many – has grown to something far beyond the calendrical conveniences of scheduled passion. This comes as a great surprise to them both, particularly to Gurov, whose liaisons have for years provided him an escape from the miseries of his marriage. For they’ve come to love “one another as people who are very close and intimate, as husband and wife, as dear friends love one another.”

But “How? How?” Gurov famously asks, “clutching his head” in frustration as he and Anna try “to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting.” How, in other words, can they find what he’s been so long in flight from? As Chekhov writes, they both feel they “were within an inch of arriving” at a solution. But the only thing they’re sure of, the story’s ending tells us, is that their “end was still far, far away, and . . . the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.” 

If they do somehow discover how to close that inch of distance and answer Gurov’s “How?” it will happen out of earshot and beyond our view. And perhaps they’ve escaped Chekhov’s eyes and ears as well, so that he didn’t know the couple’s future any more certainly than we do. He wrote three versions of a crucial phrase that comes very near the end. (I am dependent on the translator’s art for these differences.) As Chekhov first had it, Gurov and Anna, “felt that this love of theirs had made them both better.” After which he reconsidered, and sent them off with their dilemma joined by a somewhat more tempered love, one that had merely “changed them both for the better,” [emphasis mine.] But apparently even that modest alteration was finally too transformative for Chekhov. As finally published, Gurov and Anna only feel that their love has “changed them both.” Not made them better? Not even changed them for the better? After all, they’ve both found devoted and responsible love for the first time in their lives. But no, in the end, something profoundly more ambiguous is at work. For until, or unless, they find some way to live it, how resilient, how supportive, how lasting can that “change” hope to be? And how can we – and how could Chekhov — know its permanence when the story’s final moment describes the two of them joined in deep but stupefying affection? It’s on the strength of these uncertainties that the story, if not Chekhov’s allusive prose, continues.

I said that after formally ending, the most frequent narrative direction is onward. But of course there are innumerable variations of that “onwardness.” James thought a great deal about endings, as he did about every other aspect of fictional form and technique. And no ending offers a greater invitation to delight in its enigma than the conclusion of The Portrait of A Lady, where both the reader and Isabel Archer’s fiercely determined American suitor, Caspar Goodwood, learn on the final page that she has left England and “started for Rome.” She’s resolved, after a last passionate plea from Goodwood and despite – or maybe because of — his kiss that “was like white lightning,” to return to Italy where her “wretched” married life with Gilbert Osmond awaits her. Not only has James prevented us from entering Isabel’s mind at the end so that we might learn her thoughts and her decision, or indecision, as she departs. More emphatically – and I want to say more conclusively – he’s removed her entirely from the novel at its close. Literally, her train has left the station, leaving us to stand with poor Goodwood on the steps of the London row house where she was staying and where he (and we) get the stunning news from her friend, Henrietta Stackpole. Whatever clarity Isabel has come to, she hasn’t stuck around to explain it to Caspar, or to us. 

Or even, in a sense, to the novel itself. A narrative intelligence has periodically intervened in the book in the voice of an unidentified “I” narrator, who serves as a kind of interpretive historian. But that persona is likewise nowhere evident at the end. The book itself is left as speechless as its readers and her ardent suitor are. Is her return simply an act of surrender, a kind of martyr’s submission to “the honor of the thing” as she’s put it to herself? Or is it somehow a statement of her reclaimed independence of mind, which she has felt slip away over the course of her disastrous marriage? James has provided enough material to lend support to either interpretation, knowing well that readers will accept such uncertainty at the end if the writer has rendered a world where the evidence for several possibilities is present, clean, and clear, even if inherently contradictory.

A story or a novel has two constituencies, the readers of it and the characters in it, and it seems to me that an ending that continues to resonate, that creates a kind of lyrical half-life, most frequently allows one of these constituents to see clearly what’s essential, while leaving the other in a state of some bewilderment. Which one is bewildered and which one clear, that doesn’t matter so long as a tension between clarity and confusion is present. 

Isabel discovers, seven paragraphs from the end, that “very straight path” she’s sure she must follow, leaving readers deeply perplexed on learning she’s discovered it. On the other hand, in Chekhov’s story it’s the characters, Gurov and Anna, who search each other’s eyes for answers while the dilemma of their desire is obvious to readers, increasingly so as it becomes more and more complex.

But wait. Certainly there are stories and novels that do end completely, the tale explicitly finished, all ambiguities resolved on the page. Readers wait for the Austen ending, or the Dickens ending, with marriages made and fortunes awarded and all the narrative threads tied in satin bows. But what was convention for the Victorian tale doesn’t align so naturally with our contemporary sensibilities, wary as they are of the thought that any of life’s episodes can conclude fully or neatly, never mind happily. To give a contemporary narrative such an ending is to subject its characters to the risk of melodrama, and the heavy humid air of sentimentality. 

Indeed, even the grand sentimentalist, Dickens, perhaps grown suspicious himself by that point in his life of the possibility of life’s happy endings, composed one that was remarkably contemporary and virtually astringent of sentiment in his late novel, Great Expectations. Pip, subdued by life’s lessons, living quietly and working hard, his expectations modest, is walking along a London street “when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving, and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.” It is of course Estella, whose cynical gestures toward and withholding of love had for years driven Pip to a kind of frantic mourning. She says to Pip, “’I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip’.” And then Pip watched her drive away into the teeming London streets.  “I was very glad afterwards,” he tells us, “to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”

Unfortunately, Dickens was persuaded by his friend, Edward Bulwer-Litton, to abandon that beautifully restrained ending and he wrote a second one in which Pip and Estella coincidentally meet on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s abandoned and crumbling mansion. Here, Pip tells us, that after a brief conversation, “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

It’s an ending more in keeping with the literature of its time. And yet for its time, though not to the bracing degree as the original, Dickens’ prose again plays Pip and Estella’s happiness in a decidedly minor key: the quiet promise, rather than the celebratory conviction, of the chastened lovers’ reunion.

And so a story ends, with force, with impact; or it ends with something more ethereal, a wafting trail of mood and moment. And the best of them continue, most often, as I said, straight ahead but off the page.

But there are endings that enlist a reversal of direction. In Hemingway’s “A Canary for One,” what we thought was an omniscient narrator is revealed to be a first-person American husband, who’s been listening to a witless woman, seated across from him and his wife on a train to Paris, proclaiming that American husbands are the most desirable. Arriving finally in Paris, they all leave the station and we’re informed only then that the narrator and his wife will in fact be taking up separate lives. Desirable American husband indeed! So we turn around, head back, and start the story again, now with the knowledge of who’s telling us the tale, a vastly changed perspective we were given only at its end.

There are endings that divide, that fork, and ask us to follow in first one direction and then another, as John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman does. And there are endings where the protagonist dies again and again and again and, therefore, literarily speaking, never, as is the case with Ursula Todd (“Darkness fell.”) in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.

Sometimes the ending suddenly lifts off, rising above the narrative ground, achieving what Flannery O’Connor called “altitude.” The ending of James Joyce’s great story, “The Dead”, climbs and climbs until it reaches a height that allows it, and us, to see the snow falling softly on all the living and the dead. It’s an ending we might read as omnisciently final, leaving nothing unaccounted for, nothing further for us to wonder about. If the narrative eye sees all the living, and sees the all-inclusive inventory of the dead and, hence, all souls, then surely there’s nothing more to see. But I read Joyce’s ending as forever in motion, eternally unfinished, to meet the challenge of such an ambitious cosmic surveillance. The whole globe to watch over. The newly born, the newly dead; the multiplicities of new souls to be continuously recording.

Whatever the pattern, the direction – straight ahead or reversing or forked, ascending or metrically repeating death and return — we find ourselves as readers being asked to take charge at the end so we can, in James’s phrase, tell ourselves what is “never told.” We readers become authors in our desire to complete the Jamesian whole. We are grateful for all that the story has given us explicitly. And despite our protests (No! Don’t leave me here!), aren’t we at least as grateful, maybe more, for what it hasn’t?