At the End of the Story

To speak of stories after the story is told—can such a thing itself be literature? Today’s writer, today’s reader, perhaps will shrug and laugh. What reader now even knows that once, once upon a nearer time, stories were not only written but also discussed—with love, with argument, with an intimacy that joined author and audience in a single breath?
 
Now the reader lives elsewhere: in the Sunday supplement, in the half-hour television serial of the afternoon. For him or her, story is consumption, not conversation. And yet—fifty years ago—the scene was different. To imagine a literary gathering where stories were not read aloud, contested, praised, debated, would have been impossible. “Storytelling”—the very phrase still rings like an echo of a vanished festival. Today, one must paint its picture for the unknowing, as though it were some lost ritual of an extinct tribe.
 
And yet the ritual is not entirely gone. In small corners of the city, in private writerly circles, in the evenings of certain cultural societies, people still gather. They read, they argue, they write of what they read. Sometimes their words even make it to print, though never with the force of commerce. No—this is not the marketplace, this is something else: the stubborn loyalty of a handful of lovers, cradling literature as one cradles an ember that refuses to die.
 
An Old Tradition, a Thin Flame
 
Art has always bred its own commentary. The poets of Charyapada wrote their glosses in the margins, as if to guide the reader’s hand through their forest of symbols. Later, in Bengal’s own renaissance of letters, Bankim’s Bangadarshan carried forward the practice. Not a review of the lazy kind we see today—twenty stories in a volume dismissed in a hundred words—but long, detailed considerations, one piece at a time, as though each text were a temple to be circled and explored.
 
That world has waned. The big papers no longer have room, the little magazines no longer have the patience. Discussion—serious, searching, collective—is almost an endangered species.
 
But literature breathes on criticism, as lungs breathe on air. Once, young prose-writers grew sharper in the crucible of adda—hearing their work torn and rebuilt by others’ tongues. Today’s writer writes alone, without compass, without counsel. What remains is only willpower, and willpower is thin bread. To write now is not to live; it is only to persist. Books are printed in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands. Even then they sleep unsold in warehouses.
 
Is the Story’s End Near?
 
So one asks: is this the end of the story itself? Will fiction as an art be forced to retreat into the jungles of Amazon.com, seeking digital refuge where once it commanded print and voice? Is storytelling to survive only as performance—on screen, on stage, in the moving mouth—while the quiet page withers?
 
It is a hard question, and it carries no easy answer. But perhaps the end is not an end, but a transformation. The story has always outlived its form: from song to scripture, from palm-leaf to press, from serial to screen. It is not the story that dies; it is we, the readers, who forget how to gather around it.
 
And yet—look closely—in the shadows of small rooms, in whispers of forgotten magazines, in the patience of readers who are few but faithful—the story still glows. Its flame is not bright, but it is steady. It is the ember that resists the storm.
 
Maybe that is the truer ending of the story: not death, but survival in exile. A fugitive art, wandering through modern deserts, waiting for those who will once again call it home.