'Completeness' is the front-word for yet another vague "concept" in
aesthetics, very like the word 'necessary'.
Creative-writing instructors regularly say to their students, "Put in only
what's necessary." In the book I wrote about novel-writing, I said the single
most vexing question for novelists is not, say, "Where do I get Ideas?" It's,
"How do I decide what to put in and what to leave out?" Orwell said the signal
mark of Dickens's genius was "the unnecessary touch".
Similarly, there's no litmus test for "completeness". For me, the most
compelling evidence of this lies in the revisions created by great artists --
of
every genre I'm familiar with. Shakespeare wrote with astonishing speed, and
we're inclined to think -- as Ben Jonson said of him -- "he never blotted a
line".
I don't believe it. Not a single performance script survives -- i.e. the
script actors worked from during rehearsals. Shakespeare was a member of the
actor-companies. (He himself played the Ghost in the first production of
"Hamlet".)
I feel sure he regularly revised stuff on the spot. There is evidence, albeit
disputable, that Shakespeare revised "Hamlet" over time. The now usually-cut
passage about the the little-boy acting companies in the early 1600s ("the
little eyases") was almost surely added by WS some time after the original run
of
"Hamlet" began.
One of the most "perfect" farces ever written, "Noises Off" by Michael Frayn,
had several productions in England in its first decade. Frayn was on hand,
and he revised it anew every time.
Playwrights regularly report their revision work during out-of-town try-out
productions. I know I did it regularly in rehearsal for each production of
mine. Tolstoi revised "War and Peace" eight times.
When we revise, we might sometimes say we are adding something we'd
overlooked, without which the play would be "incomplete" -- often an element of
backstory or set-up -- but other times we're just making it different, opting
for a
changed effect. Still other times, we cut passages. I hope none of us ever came
to a point where we considered one of our works "perfect".
And what might seem "complete" or "right" can be changed by evolving history.
References become outdated. Plays in preparation when 9/11 happened were
often revised. Movies got altered, even in such minor ways as editing out
frames
that showed the Twin Towers still standing.
Surely the visual artists and historians on this forum can cite various
versions of the same "picture" painted by an artist. I think we'd be hard
pressed
to decide that only one was "complete", the others "incomplete". All I mean to
suggest in this posting is that "completeness" is an interesting but fuzzy
notion in my own mind, and, I suspect, in the minds of others listers.
In a message dated 4/29/08 3:51:23 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> Somebody said that all beauty implies completeness.
> Is not, Derek, your examples of not beautiful Goya's or Isenheim Altarpiece
> have that spiritual completeness?
> Even reasoning is beautiful when it has flavor of completeness.
> Boris Shoshensky
>
>
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