musing on narrative closure

[jrtom]

"One drawback in belonging to a race of storytellers is a tendency to forget that life isn't a story, however great the need to perceive it as one. And one of life's chiefest failings, from a storytelling perspective, is that life lacks closure."

"Closure in what sense?"

"Closure in the sense of narrative convergence, all the elements coming together, loose ends tying off neatly after a final climax. Real life is never that tidy, and it doesn't stop happening just because someone's won a victory. Where the endpaper would come in a novel, actual events are followed by more actual events."

--Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy

Not an original thought, I'm sure, and I'm pretty sure that I've even inflicted it on my friends before (although not on LJ, as far as I can tell :> ). But worth observing . . . especially for the sake of those (occasionally me) who sometimes say, or think, "As soon as I finish school/get the kids out of the house/get out of debt/get married/etc., then my life will really start." It doesn't, of course; it just starts another chapter . . . and thinking in those terms can cause one to treat the time until the end of the chapter as something to be gotten through as quickly as possible, rather than something to be appreciated for its own sake. (Besides, those that try to insist that the universe provide or respect narrative closure are bound to be continually, or at least periodically, frustrated.)

Comments

yes yes yes

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

It's been hard convincing myself that life is not, in fact, a story, and that it may be better to spend more time living it now rather than telling about how I lived it in the past or would like to live it in the future. (I think this is part of the reason the Archipelago has pretty much dropped off my radar lately, in favor of LJ -- not that it was a rational decision so much as what I just find myself doing.)

No, not an original thought, but a valuable one nevertheless.

Re: yes yes yes

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, if the quote speaks to you, cool...but that's not what I got out of it. (For me, it was not so much the "The unlived life is not worth examining" message as the "Your life will never resolve with a nice G major triad and a sigh of relief, so don't wait up" message.)

Part of the reason why the Archipelago dropped off my personal radar was that while I had a lot to say, it wasn't really obvious how to say most of it in the context of my personal "island". The blog form lends itself much better to the random expository essay on subject X, and that's a lot of what I realized I wanted to say/do with my island. That said, there may still be some interesting explorations to do with shared universes and such, but that's more likely to happen when I can discuss some of the possibilities in person.

Re: Re: yes yes yes

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, that too. It's basically that I started my Island in order to be able to write random stuff (mostly autobiographical) in some kind of amusing setting. But I had always wanted whatever it was there to be the latest last word, and whatever I wrote there seemed to be outdated by the time I was happy with it. In that respect the blog format does, in fact, work better. The other three members of our quintumvirate seemed to be more interested in playing Zoltar on completely fictional islands, so I suspect they weren't bothered as much by this aspect of things.

Re: yes yes yes

[hypgnosis.livejournal.com]

The other three members of our quintumvirate seemed to be more interested in playing Zoltar on completely fictional islands, so I suspect they weren't bothered as much by this aspect of things.

Yeah, I think there is some truth to that. But also, my island is indeed intended to capture pieces of the real me; I just don't mind if later I discover they have expired. They were true once, and thus may belong in the museum.

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

The chapters overlap, too. Look at yourself: you're a new dad and a PhD all at once.

Life is poorly and unrealistically written and our screenwriters like yanking us around. :)

[hypgnosis.livejournal.com]

At one point years ago, I was discussing Machiavelli, and our friend Miacid said "The reason why the ends don't justify the means is that there are no ends." After stuff happens, more stuff happens.

On a related note, an abbreviated version of this piece ran twice in Ann Landers, and is posted up on my fridge.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Um, well, it's a nice quote, but "ends" in that context doesn't mean "terminations", it means "goals"--or the original concept wouldn't mean anything. I respect M. a lot, but in this case I think that he was doing what you and I often do and letting the language run away with him. (Assuming you've quoted him correctly, anyway.) People can and do have goals, and the fact that things will change after that doesn't mean that the goals don't justify the methods used to achieve them--it depends on the goals, and the methods.

Related note: that's a nice piece; thanks for linking to it.

Chitter! Squeak!

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're making a semantic distinction without a real difference. The reason why "end" for "goal" is the same word as "end" for "final state" is that (I believe based on no real linguistic research) goal based planning pretty much makes the implicit assumption that you do stuff for a while, then that stuff causes the goal to occur, then nothing else of interest happens.

And, yes, the fact that things will change after the goal is achieved often DOES mean that the goal doesn't justify the means. It's essentially an optimization problem. If I spend [some finite time] doing something painful and nasty the afterwords I get to spend [essentially infinite time] is a steady state where everything is OK now, the cost of the painful stuff can be neglected as small compared to the nearly infinite benefit of everything being OK forever thereafter. If what happens is I spend [some finite time] doing something painful and nasty then afterwords for [some trivial amount of time] everything is OK, then some new thing happens and I spend [some finite time] doing something else painful and nasty... then the cost ends up being essentially continuous pain (always with the hope that just a little later everything will be OK...)

In any case, almost certainly whatever I really said way back then I was quoting Dr. Manhattan from _Watchmen_.

Re: Chitter! Squeak!

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Congratulations: you've just refuted both homework and physical exercise. :)

Also, consider the situation in which not achieving a particular goal has a very high negative cost. Even if you have to keep re-achieving that goal (or something analogous)--that is, if there is no persistent benefit--it still may be worth the cost of achieving it.

There are also often circumstances in which the achievement of one goal makes another easier.