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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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| PAST COMMENTARY | MORE COMMENTARY |
Endings : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
I don’t need to describe the obvious overview presented here, a consciousness that looks down from a virtually celestial height. But, risking a kind of secular heresy, given the regard in which O’Connor’s work is deservedly held, I believe the closing of "The Artificial Nigger" and those of a few other of her later stories suffer from having gained, in some sense, too high an altitude. The degree of explicit catechism in the first of the two paragraphs of "The Artificial Nigger" has the feel of nearly transcribed Scripture, its tone verging on insistent polemic.
O’Connor frequently described in correspondence her irritation at the critical ignorance and wild misinterpretation of her work. In another letter in the volume, to her anonymous friend "A.," she wrote, "Mr. Head is changed [by the action of grace] even though he remains Mr. Head… Part of the difficulty of all this is that you write for an audience who doesn’t know what grace is and don’t [sic] recognize it when they see [sic] it."
One gets the sense from her letters that the longer she wrote in her mercilessly brief life the more annoyed she became, so the temptation toward increasingly unsubtle explanations of her meanings is understandable, a conundrum every serious writer is in sympathy with.
Still, her frustration may have convinced her to point too plainly to her thematic origins.
Having said that, I’ll add that the ending of "The Artificial Nigger" is rescued to a real degree by the last paragraph, where the language returns to earth to complete its summarial task, leaving readers with a ground-level picture of the newly humbled Nelson and displaying all the sensory specificity which O’Connor understood was the dusty work of writing and which she applied with her peculiar brilliance.
* * *
Turning to endings which convey a sense of less completion, I’ll risk too sweeping a statement by saying they’re more typically the province of the short story, which, in contrast to the novel’s span, delves for the relevant moment, the distillate fragment.
The challenge in writing a partial closing is in great part one of timing. Writers must have sufficient understanding of their stories’ intentions and a sufficient feel for their rhythm and direction, so that they can guard against ending them prematurely. They must not, on the other hand, allow a story to continue on past the point of maximum impact – its drama having been played out, the effect like that of a stage curtain refusing to close, leaving the actors, their last lines spoken, to mill mutely about the stage.
The partial closing, in other words, should constitute a moment of earned surprise.
To this end, I’ve found it helpful to think of closing a story at its penultimate, rather than its ultimate moment. That is, if you as a writer have the requisite clarity for where your story is headed, and for how the forces and tensions you’ve put into play are ultimately going to collide, you might then cut the ever more thickly braided thread of your narrative at that point just before they do. At this juncture, the story should be carrying readers swiftly toward a conclusion that seems more or less inevitable and if it’s ended right there, just as it’s arriving, an effect is created that is at once satisfying – readers don’t feel cheated or short-changed or that the writer has worked an unfair gimmick on them – and elliptical.
This judgment is not a necessarily easy one to make, which is why a writer must know fully beforehand where the story is headed and why it’s headed there. It’s been my experience, both as a writer, wrestling with lackluster endings, and as a reader of inexperienced writing, that writers often extend the telling of a story well past the point of its most powerful closing – take it understandably enough to its ultimate gesture – and only see on revision that the story could more powerfully end some moments before that.
There are a generous handful of examples of such perfectly timed closings in Richard Bausch’s collection, Spirits, especially the story, "What Feels Like the World," another depiction – by happy coincidence – of a day in the life of a grandfather and the young grandchild he is raising, though all similarity to "The Artificial Nigger" ends right there.
