A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE WISHED

 Over the past month I've been contemplating the concept of consummation with respect to the insights I put forth in the 2020 essay SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

...what’s “asymmetrical” about “truth” in its connotation of factual occurrences? The sense I get from Melville’s “ragged edges” is that the real world, unlike the world of fiction and fable, doesn’t ever come to a designated end, be that ending comic or tragic. Reality just goes on and on and on—and so do people.

I may be thinking of this subject in part because year 2022 is soon to end, to be replaced by a new one. And despite what I said above about people "going on and on," every individual mortal is also destined to come to his or her respective end and to be replaced by a representative of a new generation. But to the best of our knowledge, the endings of both years and mortals are not designated to have the symmetries of fictional narratives. The Greeks liked to say, "call no man happy until he is dead," but to death, one's happiness or sadness is irrelevant. Death cuts off one's own self-narrative, leaving only the "ragged edges" of the reality that survives the individual. Imputing any particular design to a person's life-- whether as an adventure, a drama, a comedy or an irony-- would be the height of impertinence.

Stories, though, can come to definitive ends, so as to illustrate particular sympathies and antipathies, and that's why we like them. Whether the protagonists come to good ends or bad ends, the conclusions have a symmetry that life does not. Whatever emotional charge we as readers/audiences may get from the tropes that serve as the "quanta" of narrative, those tropes are far more dependable than life's vagaries, and they make us feel immortal by identifying with these symmetrical characters, even those who meet unpleasant fates. Not every reader likes the same consummations, and that's why many critics have disparaged hopeful comedies and adventures and have favored sobering dramas and ironies. But in the "end" all of these are individual preferences, and so we need all of the mythoi in play in order to accomplish the true mission of fiction: to make us feel temporarily immune to the irregularities, the "ragged ends," of life and death.