Inaugural Lecture by Professor Richard Allen
Story-telling is one of the oldest elements of culture and society. What happens in a story - and what happens next - is always of interest, but equally interesting is how an author succeeds in ending their story. There are many examples where the aim is evidently to avoid an ending. In its longest form the Indian epic the Mahâbhârata has 90,000 verses; the ending is hardly ever in sight. The gospel of St John evokes a similar situation: ‘And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that - should be written. Amen.’ Other texts (for example, James Joyce’s epic Finnegan’s Wake), meantime, swallow their tails and end by returning to their beginnings.
More often, though, texts offer the listener, reader or viewer an experience of satisfaction and pleasure as the story is brought to a close. In this respect art offers something life cannot. The ending of a story is also the author’s final gesture - the final chance to persuade the reader/viewer that he or she must aesthetically and ideologically accept the particular vision of reality embodied in the text. This gesture can be very different, from the cool closure of a novel by Jane Austen to the emotional tug of Dickens to the rhetorical storm of a modern ‘Bollywood’ film.
In this lecture I will explore some of those gestures in a variety of texts. One key question in my enquiry will be how in some texts the reader or viewer is caught up, even imprisoned, in the story teller’s view of the world, while in others even as the story is closed off the reader or viewer can retain their own view of the dilemmas and futures opened up in the novel or the film. What - in other words - is the relation between the power of the ending of a text and any earlier more open parts of the story; must the reader choose between these alternatives or can they co-exist in the reader or viewer’s imagination.
These questions about imaginative fictions are significant in other areas. Stories have in recent years found a role in the strategic management of companies and institutions, and I will argue that the questions I am raising have a relevance here too. Do the stories developed formally in Scenario Planning or implicit in Vision Statements require a grand rhetorical gesture to bind the institution to a single view? Or should the story provoke something marked by ambiguity? And how can a Scenario Planner avoid the equivalent of the reader throwing the book across the room, or the viewer stalking out of the cinema?
Richard Allen is Professor of Literature at The Open University and was Dean of Arts there from 2000 to 2007. Developing broader academic and educational links between The Open University and Indian universities has been a particular ambition for him; with Professor Harish Trivedi of the University of Delhi he wrote and edited Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 and he has been joint leader of an Open University - Delhi University project on teaching methods in the UK-India Educational Research Initiative.
