Of all the pop psychology detritus that litters our culture, none bothers me more than the fatuous idea of “closure.” People talk about it as if it were not only a real thing, but an obvious one. But “closure” is a purely literary concept, ill suited to describe the actual events of our lives.
By “literary,” I mean that it fulfills the esthetic necessity we humans feel to round out a story. A story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end (“but not necessarily in that order,” said French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard). For each of us, our “life story” is a kind of proto-fiction we create from the remembered episodes of our lives. We are, of course, the hero of our own life story, and the supporting characters all fit into a tidy plot.
But, of course, actual life is not like that. Rather it is a bee-swarm of interconnecting and interacting prismatic moments seen from the billion points of view of a riotously populated planet. There is no story, only buzzing activity. Eight billion points of view — and that is only counting the human ones. One assumes animals and even plants have their own points of view and no narrative can begin to encompass it all. It is all simply churn.
Of course, there are anecdotes, which are meant to be stories, and end, usually, with a punchline. Like a joke, they are self-contained. But our lives are not anecdotes, and tragedies, traumas, loss, are not self-contained. There is no punchline.
So, there is a smugness in the very idea that we can write “fin” at the completion of a story arc and pretend it means something real. It is just a structure imposed from outside.
In his recent book, Knife: Meditations After and Attempted Murder, author Salman Rushdie notes the meaninglessness of the concept of “closure.” After he was attacked by a would-be assassin in 2022, he came desperately close to death, but ultimately survived. The thought that he might face his attacker in court might bring some sort of closure is dismissed. He went through medical procedures and therapy, and even the writing of the book. “These things did not give me ‘closure,’ whatever that was, if it was even possible to find such a thing.” The thought of confronting his attacker in court became less and less meaningful.
Writers, in general, are put off by such lazy ideas as “closure.” Their job is to find words for actual experience, words that will convey something of the vivid actuality of events. Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body was also the victim of a knife attack, and her book is a 218-page attempt to come to terms with her trauma: The book opens up a life in connection with the whole world. She never uses the word “closure.”
Both Bernard and Rushdie to their utmost to describe their attacks with verbal precision and without common bromides. It is what all serious writers attempt, with greater or lesser success. It is easy to fall into patterns of thought, cultural assumption, cliches. It is much harder to express experience directly, unfiltered.
The need to organize and structure experience is deeply embedded in the human experience. And art, whether literary, musical, cinematic or visual, requires structure. It is why we have sonnets and sonata-form, why we have frames around pictures, why we have three-act plays.
The fundamental structure of art is the exposition, the development, and the denouement. Stasis; destablization; reestablishment of order. It is the rock on which literature and art is founded. When we read an autobiography, there is the same tripartite form: early life; the rise to success with its impediments and challenges; and finally, the look back at “what we have learned.”
We read history books the same way, as if U.S. history ended with the signing of the Constitution, or with Appomattox, or the Civil Rights movement, or the election of Reagan. But history is a continuum, not a self-contained narrative. Books have to have a satisfying end, but life cannot.
Most of us have suffered some trauma in our lives. It could be minor, or it could be life-changing. Most often it is the death of someone we love. It could be a medical issue, or a divorce. We are wrenched from the calm and dropped into a turmoil. It can leave us shattered.
And the story-making gene kicks in and we see this disruption as the core of a story. We were in steady state, then we are torn apart, and finally we “find closure.” Or not. Really no, never. That is only for the story. The telling, not the experience.
In truth, the trauma is really one more blow, one more scar on the skin added to the older ones, one more knot on the string. We will all have suffered before, although the sharpness may have faded; we will all suffer again.
Closure is a lie. All there really is is endurance. As Rushdie put it, “Time might not heal all wounds, but it deadened the pain.” We carry all our wounds with us, adding the new on top of the old and partly obscuring what is buried.
There are myriad pop psychology tropes. They are like gnats flying around our heads. Each is a simplifying lie, a fabricated story attempting to gather into a comprehensible and digestible knot the infinite threads of a life.
I have written many times before about the conflation of language and experience, and how we tend to believe that language is a one-to-one mirror of reality, when the truth is that language is a parallel universe. It has its own structure and rules — the three-act play — while those of non-verbal life are quite other. And we will argue — even go to war — over differences that only matter in language (what is your name for the deity?)
Most of philosophy is now really just a branch of philology — it is about words and symbols. But while thoughtful people complain about the insular direction that philosophy has taken, it has really always been thus. Plato is never about reality: It is about language. His ideal bed is merely about the definition of the word, “bed.” As if existence were truly nouns and verbs — bits taken out of context and defined narrowly. Very like the question of whether something is a particle or a wave, when in truth, it is both. Only the observation (the definition) will harness it in one form or the other. It is all churn. πάντα χωρεῖ
A story attempts to make sense of the senseless. I’m not sure life would be possible without stories, from the earliest etiology of creation myth to the modern Big Bang. All those things that surpass understanding can only be comprehended in metaphorical form, i.e., the story.
But stories also come in forms that are complex or simple, and are true or patently silly. My beef with “closure” is that it isn’t a story that reflects reality, but a lie. A complacent lie.
Like most of popular psychology, it takes an idea that may have some germ of truth and husks away all the complex “but-ifs” and solidifies it into a commonly held bromide. It is psychobabble.
That is a word, invented by writer Richard Dean Rosen in 1975, which he defines as “a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.”
And afternoon TV shows, self-help books and videos, and newspaper advice columns are loaded with it. It is so ubiquitous that the general populace assume it must be legitimate. We toss around words such as co-dependent, denial, dysfunctional, empowerment, holistic, synergy, mindfulness, as though they are actually more than buzz words and platitudes. Such words short-circuit more meaningful understanding. Or a recognition that there may be no understanding to be had.
(In 1990, Canadian psychologist B.L. Beyerstein coined the word “neurobabble” as an extension of psychobabble, in which research in neuroscience enters the popular culture poorly understood, with such buzz words as neuroplasticity, Venus and Mars gender differences, the 10-percent-of-the-brain myth, and right- and left-brain oversimplifications.)
As a writer (albeit with no great claim to importance), I know how often I struggle to find the right word, phrase or metaphor to reach a level of precision that I don’t find embarrassing, cheap, or an easy deflection. Trying to find the best expression for something distinct, complex and personal — to try to be honest — is work.
This is true in all the arts: trying to find just the right brown by mixing pigments,; or the right note in a song that is surprising enough to be interesting, but still makes sense in the harmony you are writing in; or giving a character in a play an action that rings true. We are so mired in habits of thought, of culture, that finding that exactitude is flying through flak.
Richard Nilsen 