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Closure and the Critics

Ever since Aristotle insisted, in his brutally commonsensical way, that literary works were wholes requiring a beginning, middle, and end, and that an end "is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity or as a rule, but has nothing following it," the issue of closure has remained at least a minor topos within the critical tradition. The issue has been, by and large, not whether closure is necessary, for any work not infinite must stop somehow, but what constitutes good closure. Dryden's Lisideius, for example, attacks the English playwrights for ending their dramas "with a conversion, or simple change of will," in disregard of probability, while Johnson, in his judicial overview of Shakespeare, observes that "in many of his plays ... his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented." The rise of the novel-less trammeled by convention throughout its history than the stage-and the advent of social and psychological realism sharpened what had always been the dilemma: how was one to bring a work to a satisfying conclusion without being false to the boundless nature of human life? Gide's principle of "pourrait etre continue" was one response to the dilemma: to subvert normal narrative closure in the interest of showing one's commitment to the endless flux of being. The other side was taken by Henry James in his preface to Roderick Hudson: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."