An unfinished work is a funny thing. The whole time you’re reading it, a ghostly tone hangs over the entire text. It’s almost as if the author lingers there on the page, taking care to remind you that by the time you reach the end it won’t be the end he or she envisioned. In the book sense, it will be over. But, of course, the story hasn’t actually ended. The act of reading these incomplete works might seem, in some sense, empty gestures.
I remember back in high school when I took on the unlikely task of reading Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls—one of the most famous unfinished novels. After hundreds of pages of grueling (Not knowing any better, I chose to maintain my tenth-grade opinion; “grueling” is how I remember my reading of the book) scrambling around a not-so-nifty English translation from Gogol’s (ostensibly) nifty Russian, I arrived at the last page. Simultaneously, I experienced an incredulous anger at Gogol for lopping off the last sentence and a fall-down-on-my-knees variety of thankfulness that it was over. Even though I was glad the ordeal had ended, I could not help some hair-pulling at the thought that the story had been lost to history.
[Not only was the novel nowhere close to a conclusion, but Gogol couldn’t provide me with a clean sentence and a dot of black ink when it really mattered. Fudge sentences in the middle all you want, but don’t you dare kill the first or the last one. (I should point out that I feel differently about circular texts a la Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which I have not read, but much admire for its neat composure in returning right to the first page.)]
~
These reflections on my not-so-savory experience of an unpublished novel bring me to my latest experiences of not one…but two unpublished novels in the last week. One of the novels, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, about which I have already posted. The other is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon.
I doubt that this criticism will hold much water, but the only thing that truly seemed suspect about The Pale King was that it should have been longer. Already at 538 pages, that sounds like a bit of a fanboy’s complaint. But let’s take into account that Wallace’s previous novel—the behemoth Infinite Jest—weighed in at 1,079 pages with the sort of typeset that literally dwarfs the version of The Pale King currently in bookstores. The novel—complete in the grammatical sense (no hanging sentence)—seemed stylistically whole, but still read as if there might be more material lurking out there.
That said, there has already been much discussion in reviews about how this sense of incompletion and shortness may have been part of Wallace’s hand to begin with. Even Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s longtime editor who compiled the drafts and notes into the final form of the novel, is not sure how much more there might have been to the novel had Wallace lived to see its completion. In the novel’s Editor’s Note, Pietsch notes, “the manuscript pages suggest that the did not intend for the novel to have a plot substantially beyond the chapters [in the final version].” On the other hand, Wallace’s widow Karen Green claims that she understood through Wallace himself that the novel was only a third of the way finished and that much more material might have been included.
Regardless of how much more there might have been to the novel, Wallace’s style subsumes the faults of the incomplete manuscript. “Of course he intended it more or less this way,” Wallace aficionados can comfortably claim. “That’s how he writes! It’s not supposed to obviously cohere or follow the established rules.”
There's the sense out there among most critics that Foster Wallace can do whatever he wants and get away with it. I agree with this sentiment.
~
My more recent experience with novelistic incompletion, however, lends me no illusion that the lack of “ending” may have been purposeful. Fitzgerald’s final novel is certainly incomplete and, while Wallace’s work may in some ways thrive by its non-totality, Fitzgerald’s work thereby suffers.
Almost by convention, I find myself comparing The Last Tycoon to Fitzgerald’s visionary magnum opus The Great Gatsby. I quoted the last paragraph of Gatsby in a post not too long ago; it would not be overstating the case to claim that reading his final, incomplete novel is like reading Gatsby and skipping not only that last paragraph, but skipping the moving dénouement before that and the ghastly car accident scene before that…and really, you get it…it’s quite incomplete. The novel can never escape from that sense the same way that The Pale King can.
None of this is to say that The Last Tycoon doesn’t have its highlights. For one, Fitzgerald creates a truly masterful character in Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood producer who figures as “the last tycoon,” notably his only “hero” character without a crippling weakness. Surrounding Stahr is a cast of quick-talking Hollywood types, including the ostensible narrator Cecilia Brady.
Any awkwardness the text suffers is due to this first-person narrator, who mixes her own narration rather cumbersomely with omniscient third-person narration to tell Stahr’s full story. It’s been theorized that Fitzgerald, given his success with that narrative formula in the past with Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, sought to recreate it with the characters of Brady and Stahr. [Although one might read Cecilia as an unreliable narrator in the vein of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, but I think that approach is neither entirely possible nor even that helpful—nor do I think Fitzgerald even ever had that thought.]
We are left with a work partially realized—filled with passages of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose and characters who jump off the page just like in his masterwork Gatsby. Describing an editing room as Stahr reviews footage: “Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed—to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded.” In my opinion, that sentence is the equal of almost anything in Gatsby.
~
But after finishing these two novels, I couldn’t help but ask myself the inevitable question: Why read a work that hasn’t been finished? In some sense, I think it’s the desire for further knowledge, the desire to encounter an idea that would not find bloom in any other place. This, at least, is certainly the pleasure derived in reading Kafka’s works (mostly unpublished during his lifetime; he ordered them burned in his will, but they were saved by a friend). Many of his stories are unedited fragments, but that does not make their ideas any less valuable than his few published works. (And, in fact, Kafka’s unfinished works as a whole are probably more valuable than the finished work of most authors.)
In the same way, Wallace’s novel is worth being read because it tackles a subject most others entirely avoid: boredom. Wallace channels boredom in a subject for philosophical thought and inquiry throughout the novel in a manner unlike anyone I’ve read before.
And Fitzgerald? Unlike Gogol (and, at times, Foster Wallace), Fitzgerald was a barrel of monkeys every page. I find myself recommending the slender volume (less than 150 pages), despite its lack of an ending. It’s a quick read with a roster of engaging characters who do not once fail to amuse.
No comments:
Post a Comment