“The good end happily, the bad unhappily - that is the meaning of fiction.” Oscar Wilde, whose nifty bon mot this is, unfortunately learned all too much about ending unhappily, as he died in 1900, more or less destitute in a Paris hotel, whose décor he much deplored. It is said his last words were, “This wallpaper is terrible. Either it goes or I do.” And if that’s not true, it should be.
And that, of course, raises the whole question of truth, in fiction, in art, in life. And the question of questioning truth. Francis Bacon, in his superb essay On Truth, published in 1685, was pretty scathing on the subject:
"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour, but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.
Of course, Bacon was castigating those ‘free-thinkers’ who eschewed the ‘difficulty and labour’ of finding out what is true. To him there was a truth to be found, but that is perhaps a position less easily adhered to in our post-modernist and, indeed, ‘post-truth’ age.
So - ‘a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself’ - is that what draws us to happy endings, whether as writers or as readers? The comfort of a resolution, while knowing full well that resolutions of any kind are vanishingly rare in life as it is lived?
There seem to be two paradoxically contradictory impulses at play here - the desire for some truth, for some kind of solidity in which to ground our experience, and the experiential understanding that there is no such solid ground into which we can drive our fenceposts to keep uncertainty at bay.
This certainly was the view expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a talk he gave on radio in 1948:
In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added. Where human beings are concerned, rather than merely nature, the unfinished quality to knowledge, which is born of the complexity of its objects, is redoubled by a principle of incompletion. For example, one philosopher demonstrated ten years ago that absolutely objective historical knowledge is inconceivable, because the act of interpreting the past and placing it in perspective is conditioned by the moral and political choices which the historian has made in his own life - and vice versa. Trapped in this circle, human existence can never abstract itself in order to gain access to the naked truth.
And yet, and yet, the yearning for completion, for ‘the sense of an ending’, seems fundamental to how humans function. I remember vividly my mother in her last illness - not on her deathbed, but close - saying is sorrowful frustration, “but I want to know how the story ends,” as she thought of the various entanglements of her children and grandchildren.
So maybe that’s where we as fiction writers have a function - not as truth-tellers (though that too, perhaps, on occasion, in oblique and fragmentary ways), but as the providers of solace, of a sense of completion, of palliative care to the ailing, aching, anxious human heart.