This week I got to return to my old birthplace/stomping grounds, Amarillo, Texas, and give a talk. So, first: a quick thank you to to Chris Hudson, and to the Creative Mind Lecture Series, and the West Texas AMU Distinguished Lecture Series and the Center for the Study of the American West. It was such a beautiful homecoming. So many friends and relatives and nice people I’d never met before, including one older gentleman who asked for my grandparent’s street address, then told me with great certainty that, yes, he’d thought so: He’d been their paperboy from 1952 to 1953. What a strange moment: this guy, around 75, about the age my grandparents were when they died, referencing a time before I was born, when he was a little kid and my grandparents were younger than I am now.
And time flowed on. Not only that, I got on a billboard on I-40, which Young Me would have been, as we say in Texas, “just tickled about.”
And picked up this Amarillo Sod Poodles baseball hat:
So: a very good trip. And, as always, a crowded auditorium of bright people, not only willing but happy (!) to hear a literary talk, gave me hope.
So, one last session on “Guy de Maupassant,” on the ending, and we’ll move on. Reading through the comments, I see that many of you have already said some very profound things about it. So, I think I’ll put aside any explication of the exact meaning of the ending and use this opportunity to talk about the way this ending was set up and, by implication, about the way that endings, generally, are set up. That is: What do endings do, really? How do we know when a story is done? Is there a method, practically speaking, for “seeking around” for a better ending?
The “best” ending, to my way of thinking, is the one beyond which no new meaning presents itself. That is: we keep writing as long as the story keeps expanding. By “expanding,” I mean that the story continues to open up and mean more, in a non-trivial way; the writer isn’t just adding/cataloging new events, but those events are serving some deeper concern the story has put into play. That is: the story should go on if and only if its continuation is absolutely necessary.
Really, in my work, it’s just a feeling. I’m reading along, approaching what I’ve been assuming for a few days or weeks is THE ending, looking forward to reading it and being elevated (and then triumphantly sending that baby out, and reaping the rewards, yay, yahoo, finally!), but then I read the ending and….something fails to happen. What I don’t feel is: “YES! I’ve done it!” Or, to be entirely frank – I might feel a little bit of that, but there’s also something slightly rickety about that feeling, a little overtone whispering: “Nope. You do not want to live and die by this ending, George.” And one skill I’ve learned over the years is to be able to differentiate a genuine, “YES! I’ve done it!” from a slightly conditional, “YES! I’ve done it!” (One that has, at the end of it, a taste of: “Or have I? Darn: I think I haven’t, quite.” And when I detect this second feeling, it’s (ugh) back to the drawing board. But it’s also (hooray) back to the drawing board, because I haven’t sent an undercooked work of art out into the world.
And this – this going-back-to-work-on-the-ending – is a fraught moment. The natural tendency is to invoke the rational, interpretive part of the mind and try to “figure out” what’s missing. This is dangerous, though, because the rational mind’s solution tends to be clumsy and on-the-nose; tends to satisfy too well and too neatly. So, what to do? Well: outfox the conceptual mind in some way. Babel has, in his ending to “Guy de Maupassant,” used a technique that I’ve used before and have seen other writers use, and now I am going to make up a name for this “technique,” which is not really a technique at all but really just “a thing I’ve sometimes tried, sort of on accident, and which sometimes, but not always, works.” But let’s call it Arational Substitution. To cut to the chase, Babel gets his narrator home, and all the major events of the story have been accomplished. Have all the bowling pins come down, though? Babel apparently felt not. So, he has his narrator read a book. He sort of just tacks this riff on to the end of the story. There’s nothing theme-addressing about that, necessarily. It’s not “perfect.” It’s just a thing for the character to do; a chance for the rest of the bowling pins to come down. He could have, in other words, have him “walk by a shop” or “read an old letter from his mother,” and, the theory goes, the story still could have been beautifully completed.
Just to review, here’s what Babel has very near the ending (in the Considine translation): Back at home Kazantsev was asleep. He slept sitting up, his haggard legs stretched out in felt boots. The canary down was fluffed up on his head. He had fallen asleep by the stove, hunched over a 1624 edition of Don Quixote. There was a dedication on the title page to the Duke de Broglio. I lay down quietly so as not to wake Kazantsev.Kazantsev's lips moved, his head lolled forward.Could we end it right there? (If you have the bandwidth, reread the story, or maybe just the last few pages, and insert this ending, see how it feels.) To me, it feels truncated. There are important aspects of the story that, with this ending, don’t feel used (and therefore feel extraneous). I’m thinking in particular of the narrator’s earlier assertions about his code for living, and his longing for an adventurous life, both of which have taken up a lot of lines and have offered us a lot of pleasure (and so, in a sense, “are” the story). So, our desire for a story to be a complete and organic whole is being thwarted. Bowling pins are still in the air.
At some point, after we’ve been working on a story awhile, it starts to get nicely complicated. It feels meaningful and organized. It has, let’s say, an opinion regarding what it’s about. It has summoned forth a certain complex energy. That complex energy now wants…to resolve. It wants to go somewhere. It’s like, let’s say, a river gathering behind a dam; it longs for a sluice. However, that river isn’t just one thing (solid, discrete, simple), but a set of fragile, immensely complicated idea-bubbles, the satisfaction of which is beyond the conceptual mind’s ability to deliver. So, if we rely on the conceptual mind, the reader is going to get that undesirable, “Oh, right, that’s what I figured,” feeling. Our Arational Substitution Technique assumes that this complex energy is so intense and well-earned and precisely constituted that it will happily “map out” onto literally anything we put in front of it. Yes, anything.
What Babel puts in front of his story’s complex energy is a simple vignette: “What if my narrator reads a book when he arrives home?” In doing this, he’s essentially saying, “I want to make a home for that complex energy.” The complex-energy river goes, “Of course, I’m powerful, I’m sure of myself, I can assert myself anywhere.” And it rushes into the book-reading moment in a way that is surprising and natural and is also (as we’ve seen in the comments) ambiguous, open to interpretation, not too neat, wonderfully rich. A container is presented and the complex-energy flows into that shape - but still entirely itself (still fully possessed of its essence, we might say).
I had this experience once (that is I, uh, utilized the Arational Substitution Technique) in a story called “The Wavemaker Falters.” I was writing at work in those days and had got to a certain place in the story (not the ending, but the Technique can be applied anywhere) where I just sort of froze up. I could feel that I needed one more burst of action, but what was it to be? It was so important! I was afraid I’d choose the wrong thing. This was dangerous because, writing at work, I tended, when blocked, to stop writing and….well, go back to work. And, while working, I was prone to thinking about my story – and here would come the conceptual mind, simplifying everything into dorkiness. So, on this one occasion, I had the good sense, when I hit that wall, to jump up and go out to the bathroom, which was located in an atrium outside our office. As I stepped out there, I saw this fit-looking guy wheeling in some big metal contraption, and although that contraption was actually some sort of hot-food transport system, a sentence leapt into my head and I raced back inside and dropped that sentence into the story, right at the place where I was stuck: “At noon next day a muscleman shows up with four beehives on a dolly.”And the story moved forward, forming around that incident (infusing it with its energy) and being influenced by it. That beehive does nothing for the story, really, except that, trying to figure out what that guy was doing there, a wedding broke out. That unblocked the blockage and gave the story new life. It didn’t really change the story’s energy; it just gave it a channel to move forward in. It wasn’t “the perfect” sentence or “the right” sentence – it was just a sentence, just any sentence. And whatever that story was trying to be about, just kind of went, “Ah, thanks, thanks for the little bridge, now I can proceed to be about what I am going to be about no matter what.” Let’s say you’re in a really good mood (or a really bad mood). No matter where I put you, that mood is going to get acted upon - it’s going to be “mapper out on to” that environment. This is like that.
So, Babel decided to have his narrator read a book; that is, he inserted a sort of meta-text into his story (as we’ve seen him do previously in “In the Basement” and earlier in this story, too). Sometimes, of course, as is the case here, what we “put in front of” that energy isn’t entirely random. We naturally use what’s at-hand (that is, what the story has already coughed up). We might imagine Babel’s mind working as follows (and likely his mind was “working” simply by “writing;” that is, I don’t think he was actually reasoning everything out, but): “My narrator is on his way home. When he gets home, what might he find there? Well, his roommate, Kasantsev. What do we know about Kasantsev? He loves Spain. So, let’s have him reading about Spain. It’s late at night. Therefore, let’s have Kasantsev be asleep. Since he’s asleep, the book has fallen open, to the title page. Aha! Let’s let our narrator continue this mirroring he’s been doing with Kasantsev through the whole story, and sit down to read about his obsession (DeMaupassant/ France).” Then Babel asks (and, of course, “asks” is not quite right – this, too, no doubt, all happened in a quick, intuitive flash) what part of the book the narrator should be reading. And that pent-up energy finds a landing place (and a “solution”) in the penultimate paragraph: That night I learned from Edouard de Maynial that Maupassant was born in 1850 to a Norman nobleman and Laure Le Poitteviri, Flaubert's cousin. At twenty-five, he had his first attack of congenital syphilis. He fought the disease with all the potency and vitality he had. In the beginning, he suffered from headaches and bouts of hypochondria. Then the phantom of blindness loomed before him. His eyesight grew weaker. Paranoia, unsociability, and belligerence developed. He struggled with passion, rushed about the Mediterranean on his yacht, fled to Tunis, Morocco, and South America, and wrote unceasingly. Having achieved fame, he cut his throat at the age of forty, bled profusely, but lived. They locked him in a madhouse. He crawled about on all fours and ate his own excrement. The last entry in his sorrowful medical report announces: "Monsieur de Maupassant va s'animaliser (Monsieur de Maupassant is degenerating to an animal state)." He died at the age of forty-two. His mother outlived him.See how this Arational Substitution has allowed the story to keep opening up, even to this point? I always think of this as giving the story’s energy a place to play – we’re just providing any old idea or object or interruption. It’s sort of an act of faith. We’re assuming that the story’s energy is so sure of itself that it doesn’t care where it dances; it just needs a place to dance. You're currently a free subscriber to Story Club with George Saunders. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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"Guy de Maupassant"
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