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SENSE_OF_CLOSURE

                                             June 12, 2020
My sense of what "closure" means,
is that it's that feeling of               This is in the context of
hammering home the theme with a            stories, of narrative art.
conclusion, the point at which the         "Closure" is a term with
main conflict is resolved and the          different meanings in other
tension is released. When the              contexts.
disparate elements are tied
together into a whole, there's a                 Wikipedia has a definition
"sense of closure".                              from Psych involving "an
                                                 individual's desire for a firm
  Perhaps: the art work is                       answer to a question and an
  full and now can be "closed".                  aversion toward ambiguity."

Scott McCloud in Chapter 3 of his
"Understanding Comics" leads off with a
discussion of an epistemological issue: the
reality we live in is only partly percieved,     https://canvas.umw.edu/courses/930511/files/37667946
it's a built-up mental construct, a set of
expectations based on past experiences.

  "Our perception of reality is an act of faith,
   based on mere fragments."

I would say the word *faith* is not quite right:
it's a reasonable set of inferences based on
*some* evidence, however incomplete.

  "This phenomenon of seeing the parts
   but perceiving the whole has a name.
   It's called closure."

This strikes me as a peculiar use of
the word closure, but it gets used in     I don't think that "McCloud Closure"
*so* many different ways I'd want to      could be called "epistemic closure",
be careful about claiming that            which in philosophy has a fairly
McCloud just made it up.                  technical meaning which I would say
                                          has to do with the internal
To my eye, his idea of "closure"          consistency of beliefs.
is at best only loosely releated
to narrative closure, which is                GESTALT_CLOSURE
what I'd expect someone talking
about comic books to be talking
about...                                If you watched the first half of a movie
                                        and the film broke in the middle, what
McCloud runs with it, with multiple     then would you call that incomplete
examples making it clear that *any*     mental construct of the story that got
mental construct built-up from any      left in your head, what's that sense of
sort of perception is what he means     dissapointment you feel?  I would say
by closure.                             there's a distinct "lack of closure",
                                        though your perception of the experience
   There on p.66 of                     of the situation would seem pretty
   "Understanding Comics" there's       clear.
   the spiel that I think leads
   Serpeli astray a bit, where
   McCloud starts pointing
   to "the gutter" as a place of
   mystery, the location of the
   act of inference that the          WHO_WILL_CRITICIZE
   comics reader makes to
   percieve the action sketched
   in by the panels.  His example
   of a transition has an implied
   axe murder occuring without
   being explicitly shown.

   McCloud comments:
                                                  (McCloud eventually puts this
     "-- then in a very real sense,               stuff aside, and gets down to
     comics *is* closure!"                        more interesting material,
                                                  classifying transitions and
   Along with everything else, Jack.              taking some simple stats of
                                                  how often they're used...)
   He then starts jamming about how
   comics requires the reader to
   fill-in even more of the mental
   model than artforms like film,
   and so-- getting back to the
   McCluhan allusion of the title.






    Travis Reynolds has some reasonable
    reservations about McClouds mind in
    the gutters:

                                                    https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/06/blood-in-the-gutters/

    "Scott McCloud is quick to introduce the
    concept of closure as the defining aspect
    of comics and is nearly as quick to locate
    it as existing in 'the gutter', the blank
    space between the panels in comics.  This
    is a useful shorthand, but as he further
    develops these ideas it becomes clear that
    closure is actually a continuous
    involuntary act on the part of the reader
    that does not rely on the panel or gutter
    at all.  In fact, closure occurs within
    panels quite frequently and is the result
    of time being represented, usually implied
    by sound or motion."


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