Do novels owe us happy endings?

  

I conclude my class on 20th century American novels with students reflecting on the books we read during the semester. And I offer my own reflection: 

Do novels owe us happy endings?

I imagine you answer that question quickly: “No.”

However, many of us gravitate toward works that end happily. This makes sense if we look to literature
for entertainment. Happy thoughts and experiences are more entertaining than sad thoughts and bad experiences. There is some entertainment value in the catharsis of tragedy, but even in our favorite sad stories we look for some signal that something was gained through a character’s pain or sacrifice.

Art, though, is different. When we think of novels as art or Literature (with a capital L), we may value “honesty” more than entertainment. We may want stories that represent the world to us as it actually is, not as we wish it were (Realism vs. Romance). We could say that The Sun Also Rises is Literature because it ends ambiguously. I do not sense that Brett is going to change. I think her unhealthy behavior will continue, and I think people are really like that. I do not know about Jake. I think his final line of the novel could hint that he is done with wishing for things between them to be different, although he cannot tell her this straight. Absalom, Absalom! is Literature if only because it is constructed and narrated in a way that makes the reader do much work; in terms of this discussion it could be Literature because Quentin Compson has found no satisfying answers to his real
question – Why is the South so messed up? – despite working through the saga of Thomas Sutpen yet one more time. Perhaps he does have his answer. Perhaps he knows why the South is so messed up: because of men like Thomas Sutpen and the South’s complicity in their crimes, but this answer does not help him. Coming closer to the truth about Thomas Sutpen – and,  perhaps more importantly for Quentin, the truth about Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon – does not make him feel satisfied. Those answers do not reconcile him to his Southern heritage. I do not know that Kurt Vonnegut finds a satisfying solution to the problems he identifies in Breakfast of Champions. The novel ends with his own tear, after all.

This can be a major role for novels: articulating the problems of a generation or community. Another role could be imagining solutions to those problems. Ceremony does this. It imagines a solution to the problems created by U.S. colonialism for American Indian people: get in touch with your community’s pre-colonial culture and never forget your responsibilities to the land. Perhaps Beloved does this too for African American people: do not dwell in your trauma; live for your present and your future. The House on Mango Street may suggest to young Chicanas: do not let your community limit how you imagine your own life.

If we turn to novels to help imagine solutions to our society’s problems, we may feel frustrated because some of the solutions are not realistic. Sometimes they are not workable solutions because the problems have not been correctly or clearly articulated. That is the criticism of The House on Mango Street some students make. Some people feel Cisneros blames poverty for some of the problems faced by her characters, when instead she should ask who is responsible for that poverty. They may believe that the correct conclusion is not imagining an escape from the location of the poverty but imagining ways to fix the system that creates the poverty.

You could say that the less realistic those solutions are, the less likely a novel is to be classified as Literature (capital L). Emotionally rewarding but unrealistic solutions to big problems may classify a novel as “escapist” or “fantasy” or “mere entertainment.”

What led my thoughts down this path? In past semesters, I have sensed that some students are moved by The House on Mango Street in ways they are not moved by other books in this class. Even though Sethe learns in Beloved that she is “her own best thing” and that she needs to be present for her living daughter, and even though Ceremony ends with Tayo and the Laguna land healed, with an awareness of a transcendent connection among all living things, I sense that some students have been more moved by The House on Mango Street. It is a brief, beautiful book; I am not criticizing it, but this reaction got me thinking about what kinds of books we could or should be reading. It reminded me of a quote I had on my office door for a long time. The quote is about poetry, but it easily could apply to novels:

Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry for one reason: so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

- Christian Wiman

 

I hope you keep reading and that you look for those works which help you more fully inhabit your life and your world. I hope you find writers who help you think in new ways and feel in new ways.