“Here pause: pause at once”

Well, folks, here it is. For at least a year or so I’ve threatened to start a literary blog, so now I’m making good on that, in the year of our lord 2020, no less, when no one is actually reading blogs anymore. Sources close to the author who are much more “extremely online” than I am advised me against it. These days, they said even podcasts are on their way out: it’s youtube or bust. I defy them! Well, for now. We’ll see how this goes.

I don’t know yet what shape this blog will take, but it is born of my love of talking books far and wide: in person, on social media, with friends, with acquaintances, with strangers. I foresee sarcastic listicles and short-form parody in some posts, but decided to start on a more serious note for this one.

Recently I was reflecting on lines of literature that have stuck with me, and I circled back again and again to a deceptively simple one: Charlotte Brontë’s “Here pause: pause at once” from the final page of her final novel, Villette. It’s a short sentence, but one that both left me devastated and taught me much of what I love about good literature.

[Spoiler warning: yeah, I’m gonna talk about a line from the last page of the novel, so that, um, will involve the ending.]

I first read this book around 16, slipping the dense but compact paperback into my school bag and reading it slowly everywhere: between classes, before my after-school activities, at the bus stop, in my room at home. It took me months, as I remember, and adult me is mildly surprised that teen me made it through at all. Its 474 pages describe few events; rather, they examine the psyche of the deeply lonely protagonist and narrator Lucy Snowe, an Englishwoman who flees personal tragedy at home—a personal tragedy that is described only in vague and metaphorical terms—and becomes an English teacher at a girls’ boarding school in the (fictional) French town of Villette. Much of the dialogue moves in and out of French, a language I did not read at the time, though I do now.

Well, 16-year-old me must have been determined, because finish it I did, and promptly proclaimed it my favorite book. But I want to be perfectly clear on one point: I did not relate to the heroine. I often hear much made of the importance of teens identifying with the authors and characters they read. No doubt this is often a motivating factor, but to assume that teens will only find interest in books that speak to their personal experience is to underestimate them. No, I had little in common with Lucy Snowe. Lucy is an orphan with no relations; I had two loving parents at home and a doting extended family. Lucy draws deeply into herself at every new pain she feels or anticipates; I was just developing into the nerdy extrovert I am today. Lucy finds, resists, embraces, and then loses the great romantic love of her life; I had known only school-girl crushes. Lucy is, in a sense, an exile, existing uncomfortably as a foreigner in Villette; I had never spent more than a short vacation away from my hometown. I had no personal reason at all to care what became of Lucy. Except that I did care, deeply. Brontë had made me care.

I realized just how much I cared when I read that fateful final chapter. You see, that same tragically lonely Lucy Snowe finally finds companionship in M. Paul Emanuel, another teacher at the school that employs her. She didn’t expect this; once she found his wiry and angular appearance and abrupt manners off-putting, but they have now found love, a union of both minds and souls. After hundreds of pages of agony, Miss Lucy and M. Paul begin to plan their future together. The two of them will open and run and new school, just as soon as M. Paul completes one necessary voyage. I will skip the details, but up until the very last page, the final chapter shows us a radiant Lucy we have never seen before, a Lucy whose happiness, now finally realized, we have suffered and agonized and hoped for. Her hard-won happiness transforms her as she opens her school and prepares busily for her beloved’s return.

Until the LAST. DAMN. PAGE. And then—well, I’ll let you read Brontë’s own words as you turn that last page:

And now the three years are past: M. Emanuel's return is fixed. It is Autumn; he is to be with me ere the mists of November come. My school flourishes, my house is ready: I have made him a little library, filled its shelves with the books he left in my care: I have cultivated out of love for him (I was naturally no florist) the plants he preferred, and some of them are yet in bloom. I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own.

The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but—he is coming.

Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but—he is coming.

The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God watch that sail! Oh! guard it!

The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—"keening" at every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong: by midnight, all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm. That storm roared frenzied, for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm.

Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!

I gripped that paperback and read this page in pure disbelief. Brontë could not possibly have made Lucy—have made ME—work so hard for this happy ending, only to wrench it away on the LAST. FUCKING. PAGE.

But now what? We haven’t heard about M. Paul yet. It seems unlikely that his ship, of all of them, survived, but surely we can at least mourn with Lucy. That last page still has two paragraphs left. That can’t be enough, but surely all will be explained somehow?

That’s when Brontë drops the line:

Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.

It’s a refusal, a refusal to let us back into Lucy’s pain, the pain we’ve shared with her for the last 473 pages. She’s given us enough, and we’ll have to be content. She even has the audacity to invite us to imagine a joyful reunion, the consummation of the happy ending she has promised us and then withdrawn. Do what you like with my ending, she tells us, but leave me in peace.

Except we can’t do what we like with that ending. She’s spelled it out for us as clearly as she could without writing it. M. Paul is dead. Lucy is heartbroken--again. No rational imagination, no matter how “sunny”, could possibly conclude otherwise. So why not tell us?

And that, friends, is why I’ve reread page 474 of this book over and over again in the intervening years (I have since also re-read the novel in full—it holds up to my adolescent admiration). No literary ending has ever bowled me over the way this one did, and the reason gets at one of my favorite things about literature: the power of what is not written.

To use that power requires an immense amount of trust in the reader. I understand this even better now that, like Lucy, I teach a foreign language (Italian). Let’s say a student asks me a basic grammatical question: “gli amici o i amici”? Which of these two definite articles is correct? If my lesson is running behind schedule, if three other students have their hands up, if I’m just tired, I might simply answer and move on: “gli amici.” But that requires no leap of faith in the student, the student who clearly knew enough to ask the question to begin with. What I should do instead is turn the question back to them. Make them guess, even if they’re wrong, and say why. Maybe nudge them in the right direction with another question. Any good teacher will tell you this is a far more effective response, one that is certain to stick with the student longer. But to do that, first you have to trust them, and that requires its own kind of work.

Charlotte Brontë trusts us with the ending of Villette, and she does so knowing we are not going to “conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror.” It’s not truly an ambiguous ending of the kind beloved by more modern authors. But it does rely on the unwritten, on our own imaginations filling in the blanks, and it is all the more powerful for that.

The same concept lies at the bottom of, oddly enough, all my favorite horror novels. We fear the unknown, so an effective horror writer has to know when to stop, lest the mysterious become ridiculous. The presence in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House disturbs us precisely because it remains unexplained.

Passionate love scenes similarly can work best when they leave a stylized veil between our own real or imagined intimate experiences and those of the fictional lovers. Umberto Eco’s Adso of Melk sublimates his first encounter with erotic bliss into bible verses in The Name of the Rose, leaving little to make a schoolboy giggle but much for an adult to ponder with fresh eyes (of course, Eco had his own special preoccupation with the “already said,” but we can go there another time). In these cases and many others, the authors knew what not to write, and to know that, they had to trust us.

Brontë trusts us to write M. Paul’s ending in that short sentence. Sixteen-year-old me stumbled over those words, reread them with ebbing disbelief and a tightening chest, and fell into the chasm between them, awash with another woman’s grief. And I’ve done so over and over again.

Well, now that we’ve cried together (or not? I mean, did we? That was awkward), I hope I can make you laugh next time. New posts every other Friday. We’ll see how this goes.