Saul asks, "i'm curious if anyone here has any insights >> into the aesthetics of incompleteness..."
In a message dated 8/30/12 6:34:57 PM, [email protected] writes: > No representation is "finished" > I'm with Michael on this. The phrase "the aesthetics of incompleteness" is a grandiloquent failure. The most constant and demanding question facing any writer -- of novels, plays, poems, even essays -- is "What to put in and what to leave out." The ultimate product is the result of compromises between two faculties in the writer: imagination and sensibility. Imagination offers, sensibility judges. Imagination's focus is never on incompleteness (except as a theme; more on that in a moment); imagination is driven to supply suggestions -- "How 'bout this? How 'bout this?" Sensibility decides if the offered bit contributes to the desired effect on the reader/viewer. Strangely, and despite all the preachments in books by how-to-write gurus, the form of a good sensibility's question never is, "Is it necessary?" For example, the most frequent of the fiction-guru's test-questions for "necessity" is: "Does it advance the plot/story?" But the six or seven most memorable chapters in the world's fiction-literature do nothing to advance the plot. The inspired authors imagined them, and sensibility allowed their inclusion, because they had a desirable effect. Incompleteness is merely a residue; it's inevitable. It is never in itself a goal. The only time it crosses the mind of a creator is, lets's say, during the consideration of "unanswered questions". In the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral", we are not told the daytime jobs of a single character because in the opinion of the sensibility of the writer, Richard Curtis, they would be a distracting irrelevancy. But other times a writer may decide that not including certain info would leave unsuppressible and distracting questions in the viewer's mind. (Curtis's movie was a failure in Japan, where, apparently, the great majority of people have a need-to-know feeling about what a person does for a living. This is bit comparable to the attitude of Victorian grande dames toward backgrounds and lineage: "Yes, dear, I know you're fond of him, but who IS he?") Of course, sometimes there is a sense of "incompleteness" sought by the author -- as in, say, a mystery, where whodunit is intentionally withheld -- for a while. And there are even certain narrow stories where the fascination/attractiveness of a character lies in her being a man or woman of mystery: Don't try to "explain" her; she is inexplicable. Such stories had better be quite short. I myself have been at work on a play that, for more than a year, was titled INCOMPLETENESS. The central character is writing an academic writing a paper, "Incompleteness Theorem for Language"; but in the play the important "incompleteness" is reflected in the lives of almost all of us. But that kind of incompleteness has little to do with "aesthetics".
