Final Exam

Final Exam Alvin Greenberg Is that aU there is? —Peggy Lee Question #1: You are at death'sfamous and always open door—your wrists strapped tightly to the arms ofthe electric chair, your car doing a graceful backflip as it skids off the icy bridge and divesfor thefrozen riverfar below, thefamily that yourfading consciousness barely recognizes gathered glumly around your bedside, take your pick—and to yourgreat surprise what you've always heard is true: your whole life isflashing before you! By what principle would you, if you could, selectfrom among thoseflickering scenes the ones most meaningfulfor you, and why would you choose that particular mode of selection? (Note: this question does not ask you to write your autobiography—please, please! save thatfor another time—but simply tofind an organizing principlefor it.) I was reading the autobiography of a fine writer—someone I even met years ago and Uked very much—who complains that his "Ufe has been pointless , one long search for meaning, which in Ufe means identity."1 And as I read I remembered Beckett, one ofwhose characters bemoans the depths to which he would have faUen "if ever I am reduced to looking for a meaning to my Ufe . . . ."2 Beckett's characters, ofcourse, become less and less articulate as they "go on" (The Unnameable's favorite phrase: movement devoid of . . . just about anything) with the long and apparendy meaningless process of melting back into the earth. On the other hand, Clark Blaise, the author of the above statement on the search for meaning, goes on to say, "Whatever lesson my Ufe might impart to others, unless I write about it and can do justice to it, has been lost." It's obvious, from Blaise's text as weU as his tide, J 62 Alvin Greenberg63 Had a Father:A Post-ModemAutobiography, who's the modernist here, who the postmodernist—the one whose life doesn't reaUy exist for him unless and until he writes about it—but there's more I'm concerned about here than the defining periods of twentieth-century Uterature. And it's not just the difference between fiction and autobiography, either, though clearly the autobiographical urge is powerful for a writer Uke Blaise trying to derive something coherent from his parents' perennial peregrinations across Canada and its southern neighbor and his own later and aU-too-simüar wanderings. What interests me here, as articulated by these two most dissimilar writers—and articulated in clearly dissimilar ways, ofcourse—is this whole notion of the search for meaning in one's life, the who, what, where, why, and when ofit, especiaUy as opposed to the Beckettian just-going-on. Isn't it enough, we might ask, simply to have the life lived, a considerable quantity ofit preferably, and as weU-lived as possible, one would hope, without this need to discover within it, or apply to it, or have it lead up to—whatever the operative mode is—something caUed "meaning"? And what would that meaning consist of, if one were to have it—or find it, or invent it? How would one know that it was the meaning of one's life? That it was genuine and not a delusion, a wiU-o'-the-wisp of sense, a mirage ofmeaning , a parody of purpose, product of an affliction like that suffered by the born-again? Or that it was the meaning of one's life? That it wasn't just a meaning, one of many, arbitrary at that, a single aspect among so many as to render it, hmm, meaningless. Or that it was the meaning of one's own Ufe—which seems to be the goal ofBlaise's search—and not just (just? weU . . .) the meaning of life in general, or of human Ufe in particular, considerations which raise stiU larger questions, of course, less autobiographical than theological and metaphysical, different kinds of fictions. Not my territory here, or Blaise's. Beckett's, maybe. Question #2: Complete the following sentence in the usual twenty-five words or less: "The meaning of my Ufe is ... . " So where shaU we go with this search for meaning? Is it the root of the autobiographical...