When is something over? Though popular as an ending for fairy tales, no one, as far as I know, has ever lived Happily Ever After, in an uninterrupted state of bliss. Maybe that’s the reason why so many popular songs fade out instead of coming to an abrupt end: it suggests the song never really ends. Who wants something they like to end? Something always comes up: an unpaid bill, a doctor’s diagnosis, a war, or a soft voice and a pair of pretty eyes.
In a court of law an ending comes when the law’s satisfied; this doesn’t always coincide with the truth but often with whom can afford the better lawyer. It’s a compromise made in the name of social cohesion. In great art, all endings are also a compromise. How many artists have written to the effect that if they could, they’d modify some element in their stories, paintings or pieces of music? If an artist was to definitively finish a work there would be no point in his ever creating a new one. It’s always the next work that “gets it right.” Redundancy is self-caricature.
Leonard Bernstein once said that the greatness of Beethoven lay in his ability to create a feeling of inevitability. Yet the symphony that Bernstein used as his model—the Fifth —belies this idea. That symphony comes to an end no less than four times before Beethoven finally puts a final amen to it. Even though this symphony’s labelled The Symphony of Fate, Beethoven’s saying nothing’s inevitable.
One must just say “Enough!” and let the chips fall where they may. Once that’s done, and the work is “out there” it becomes a fact and people start to find sense in it. Robert Musil, whose book The Man Without Qualities is among my favorite unfinished works of literature, regretted in later life that he’d allowed any of it to be published because he felt that meant it could never be changed.
This “becoming used to something” is a powerful psychological reality. When I was a child I inherited a copy of The Beatles’ album Revolver from my aunts. They’d played it so many times that it skipped during “Yellow Submarine.” I heard “In the town-the town-the town-the town” until I held the needle down forcing it to play through the scratch. Even today if I hear that song it doesn’t sound “right” because the skip’s missing.
The spectator likes to be reassured, feel the artist has overcome his ambivalence to make a definitive statement. This is the secret of The Leader: just keep a straight face and let it roll. Consider Bill Clinton’s "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Which was later followed by “I misled people, including even my wife, I deeply regret that." Both said with ostensible conviction.
At a certain time I was put off by the unfinished. I didn’t trust it. When first reading Kafka’s The Trial, only the first and last chapters seemed definitely established, but the content, to the degree that it is known, was the subject of constant revision. And there’s Proust who died before he ever could revise the last few volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. Considering Proust’s penchant for massive revision, these books certainly would’ve have changed. This gave me the feeling that I wasn’t having the real experience.
I’ve changed my perspective. Kafka’s The Castle, another unfinished work I love, finds its thesis confirmed by the fact that the book is shrouded in uncertainties. Accepting work as unfinished mirrors the uncertainty which reigns in life. We’re at sea, and though we paddle, ultimately we go where the waves carry us.