World without end, amen

[supergee]

Fascinating essay (in ghastly dare-you-to-read-me format) from Graham Sleight on causality, closure, and other things that fiction is more likely to have than real life. Graham praises M. John Harrison for not having closure in his work (which I see as another aspect of Harrison's effort not to be an occasion of sin by allowing people to get pleasure from fiction). I'll cop to being shamefully pre-postmodern about this. I want fiction to have closure, as a special case of a view I share with Anne Rice: Fiction should be better than life. Life has excuses.

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[andrewducker]

I feel much the same. I read fiction for enjoyment. Sometimes I can enjoy a story which doesn't have closure, if I get satisfaction in other ways, but mostly I want the things out of it that it does better than reality.