I hold certain infatuation for unfinished literature, though it also extends to other art forms.
The unfinished might comprise any of the following:
Lack of classic western or eastern multi-act storytelling structure, or any variant presenting a blend of challenge-resolution.
Lack of reconciliatory narrative. No strict element of closure. A story abruptly terminates, leaving the continuation uncertain.
Lack of a cliffhanging element to suggest plausible reconciliation.
A weakly cohesive narrative: loose or total lack of unifying threads.
Loose holes. More questions raised than answered.
Unused aspects of the world presented. Hints at props that don’t otherwise find use.
Nothing strictly remarkable. No presence of what one might traditionally consider a plot.
Nothing demands that a solid work contain the ingredients of completion.
I’ve savoured aplenty that exhibits one or more of the above problems. Many are among my favourite works of literature.
More interestingly, the more accustomed to the said imperfections, the less I tend to even notice them. Is this not the recurring phenomenon? It often demands the keenness of an external critical remark to even grab my attention at the issue.
Characteristic of the great incomplete works is usually the abundance of compensating rhetorical and literary device. I think of it as the reading of each successive micro nuance for its independent pleasure and sake.
Examples are not wanting.
Take a subset of Shakespeare’s popularly labeled problem plays: those that don’t adequately cater to the Comedies, the Histories or the Tragedies.
Pericles, the Prince of Tyre, for instance, abounds in lose threads and severe time gaps. Many of the individual fragments also present detail at an incredibly superficial level.
Something similar occurs in The Winter’s Tale, a major time gap between the tragic and the comedic sections of the play. So much of the inexplicable transpires in course that, while Time strives to fill the void by means of a choral interlude, I make a case for incompleteness.
But that doesn’t inhibit the two plays in the display of lyricism, effective dramatic discourse, suspense, wit and tons of otherwise lavishing poetics. Each segment independently allures.
Though I’d only read a handful of Bernard Shaw’s plays, these too appear to manifest the trait to varying degree. Shaw’s predecessor (and arguably mentor) Henrik Ibsen is said to have initiated the tradition.
I’ll only mention Pygmalion, which leaves little doubt. The cast reaches some notion of an equilibrium (Shaw’s nomenclature), suggestive of a closing cliché. But there the play abruptly ends, without as much as an envoi.
Shaw, however, appends a postface relating the ensuing events, in prose, of stark contrast to what the audience might normally expect.
Is that an attempt to render the work complete? Doubtfully. One, the format feels discordant with the preceding. Two, I actually agree with the playwright: it’s a reluctant effort to appease the unimaginative readership. Now I’m not of the particularly imaginative group, but neither do I care to patch the holes.
However incomplete, Pygmalion tosses some of the wittiest dialogue I’d encountered in drama. Along with his few other plays I’d read, Shaw narrates at painstaking detail: the characters realistically conceivable, a marvel to accompany. At reaching the end, I’ve not a care for lack of closure.
Of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, I’ll emphasize two cases.
The Squire’s Tale evinces the unused-props effect. Presented a galore suggestive of an epic, the tale abruptly terminates at the exploitation of a small handful.
As the case with the entire Tales, Chaucer overextended his ambition. But who cares? And the void? It triggers imagination. I welcome and embrace unused props, feeling not the slightest shortchanged.
(For a contemporary case I defer to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. The author describes a world of colossal proportion. Yet myriads of props and potential threads remain orphaned. The author even toys with the matter in a kind of meta dialogue. All the same, the epic 1Q84 made for one of my favourite Murakami readings.)
Chaucer’s The Shipman’s Tale I consider incomplete for the departure at an awkward, fragile circumstance: one of those endings you encounter and cringe, doubtful that it reconcile without a tragedy.
Yet it does precisely that with impunity. A function of the period? What a contemporary reader might deem incomplete or improbable, could have well satiated the former readership.
But at risk of perpetuating a cliché, we know Chaucer as the immortal middle-age bard of charming verse garnished in Boethian philosophy, inexhaustible historical and biblical allusion, pathos and enticing storytelling. I haven’t complained at traces of incompleteness.
I can extend the argument to Aleksandr Pushkin. Numerous poems, dramatic compositions and fairy tales in verse he left incomplete: some, adaptations of fragments of grander works, others to be taken at face value.
Be that as it may, they still exhibit Pushkin’s talent. And raised in the context of Slavic tradition, I might have fallen victim to the Pushkin fever, to revel in every line of verse as if it were of the Quran.
Dostoevsky intended a continuation to Brothers Karamazov, a fact mentioned in the preface, which I’d all but forgotten at arriving at the end of the thousand-page first half (the work we know today). It feels sufficiently tractable if you ask me. But Dostoevsky held something else in mind.
Virgil intended additional books for the Aeneid. Does that devaluate the epic?
Kafka left both the grand opus The Trial and The Castle unfinished, leaving few doubts to the respect. The novels don’t cater to every palate, though made a profound impression when I read them. I initially thought the incompletion was by design.
Kafka is said to have intended all his writings burned. But fate intervened. This too we see not infrequently.
Questions, comments? Connect.