N a r r a t i v e1 0 3Henry James, who was unafraid of tragic outcomes, writes
sardonically in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ of the ‘distribution at
the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions,
appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks’ which we find in the
final pages of so many realist novels. The point of such conclusions
is to console, whereas the effect of many a modernist ending is to
unsettle. The Victorians believed that one of the functions of art
was to raise the reader’s spirits. Gloom was regarded as morally
debilitating. It could even be seen as politically dangerous. A
dispirited people was a disaffected one. This is one reason why
almost all Victorian novels end on an affirmative note. Even the
work that sails nearest to outright tragedy, Wuthering Heights,
manages to pull off a tentatively positive conclusion. These happy
endings are really fantasies, and fantasy, as Freud remarked, is ‘a
correction of an unsatisfying reality’. We know that in the real
world the distribution of benefits leaves something to be desired.
Admirable women get loutish husbands, crooked bankers stay out
of prison and cute little babies are born to white supremacists. So a
spot of poetic justice does not come amiss. Perhaps the novel is
one of the few remaining places where such justice is possible. It is
not a particularly consoling thought.
In an essay on Henry James in his Notes on Life and Letters,
Joseph Conrad speaks of conventional fictional endings in terms of
‘solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune,
by a broken leg or a sudden death’. ‘These solutions,’ he continues,
‘are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for
which our hearts yearn, with a longing greater than a longing for
the loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of
mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at
rest.’ This hunger for closure, this constant cry of ‘What happens