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Closure has a bad name. Yet to critique closure is not the same thing as to do away with it. Humans, on the evidence, have a need for closure, even those who know it is philosophically or ideologically suspect. That, at least, is Frank Kermode's thesis in his widely-read book of 1966, The Sense of an Ending.1 The theological fiction of an apocalypse, in which the end of time would be consonant with its divine origin-for every alpha an omega, for every tick a corresponding tock-is never disproved for believers when a predicted date of the End fails to conform to human calculation. Yet while Kermode very evidently takes pleasure in writing bone-dry sentences about those who are waiting expectantly for the loosing of the beast, he is equally distanced from the intellectual impulse to merely make fun. For just as we need to recognize fact and reality, he states, we also need to live according to patterns. Thus, "the desire for consonance in the apocalyptic data, and our tendency to be derisive about it, seem to me equally interesting."2 Turning to literary plots, Kermode finds the same coexistence of naive acceptance and clerkly skepticism as he does in the apocalyptic. The popular story sticks close to established conventions, but novels that are called "major" merely vary them and reach their ends through more indirect ways. Expectation is frustrated only to be answered in a different fashion, so that our sense of reality and our sense of pattern are both satisfied.
Peter Brooks on the whole agrees with Kermode's point, but he explains the need for patterning in terms of what he calls "narrative desire."3 Plot, in Brooks s view, is not adequately explained by formalist models that spatialize the text, but requires an analysis more tuned to the dynamic experience of reading in time. In this model, reading has something of the doubleness of Eros/Thanatos, what Brooks calls "the contradictory desire of narrative, driving toward the end which would be both its destruction and its meaning."4 Plots bind the chaos of desire through repetition and difference, leading it towards an end that is, momentarily, both satisfaction and cessation. Yet Brooks also observes that the end that desire seeks is arbitrary and fictive, and that,...