The tonic chord of the last line — that’s our topic. The tonal and thematic closure of a literary episode found with the right string of words. The well-struck final sentence of a well-structured novel or essay or even film brings a session of the reader’s consiousness to a close. Within a definable portion of one’s finite existence, the last line marks the cessation of a who and a when and a what that was spent with a piece of writing.
Meaning does not stop with the final line, of course; that’s not my claim. The life of a lived work does not stop when we close the cover for the first time. A piece of writing is alive after it is read, learned by heart, sometimes, though it need not be learned by heart to live, and then it is alive in us until our death, if it meant a lot to us. We may return to the work even if we never see it again.
Rather, when I say that the final line, if right, brings an end, what I mean is that an aesthetically, even ethically comprehensible finitude has been created in the space of life. A mortality in miniature, a totem is there in the soul where before there was none; an object round on all sides (or jagged if that is the author’s purpose) to be studied, kept in one’s spiritual pocket, remembered, cherished, or perhaps disquietedly revered. A thing with meaning.
We can think of examples. Restful return, as in Sam Gamgee’s “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said,” at the end of The Lord of the Rings. The lyrical-philosophical frustration at the end of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logico-Philosophical Tractatus — a book about, literally, the construction of the world with words — “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Virginia Woolf’s self-reflective close to To the LightHouse: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
I have my favorites. The close of Mark C. Danielewski’s tale about a photographer and a haunted house (maybe), House of Leaves.
Navidson does not close with the carmel covered face of a Casper the friendly ghost. He ends instead with what he knows is true and always will be true. Letting the parade pass from sight, he focuses on the empty road beyond, a pale curve vanishing into the woods where nothing moves and a streetlamp flickers on and off until at last it flickers out and darkness sweeps in like a hand.
A novel about the labyrinthine darkness of an infinite house which becomes, in the novel, a literal sort of metonym for something still larger. And which refuses to be lit.
Or, joyously, wisely, happily, knowingly, a look back at a time that cannot have been as good as you remember it. Michael Chabon ends The Mysteries of Pittsburgh like this:
When I remember that summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems to me that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness — and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true rememberance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.
Marge Gunderson’s restorative and somehow sunny morality at the end of Fargo:
So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.
Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a fictionalized Aileen at the end of her disastrous life in Monster:
Love conquers all. Every cloud has a silver lining. Faith can move mountains. Love will always find a way. Everything happens for a reason. Where there is life, there is hope. Oh, well. They gotta tell you somethin’.
A note, I take it, of final bewilderment.
I have a point.
What I mean to get at in all of this is that eras have endings, too. Like novels and movies they are cultural, and are themselves quasi-literary, constructions. But I cannot for the life of me think of a close to the Bush years that will have any tonic note at all. I cannot leap myself forward into a future imaginarium and look back and see what all of this, that we are living through now, “meant”.
No doubt the future, and even our future selves, will construct a narrative about all of this. We will have our history. We will give it meaning. And it will be a sealed finitude in the continuing meaning of our lives — those of us still alive, American and otherwise. I can see the end of all of this. It’s only 14 months away. But I cannot fathom what it will feel like; what it will have felt like when felt in the rearview mirror.
Will there be in all of us a sense of some disquieting refusal to end, as with House of Leaves? Will the recall be merely or mostly projection, as with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, though hardly happy as there?
What will we, our future selves, tell each other that this, all of this, this darkened and darkly hilarious coda to the twentieth century, meant? What will we have done with it, and what in the world will we say?
