-OpEd-
BOGOTÁ — I struggle to understand the quibbling over whether or not it was right to publish En agosto nos vemos (“Until August”), the draft of a novel by the late Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. In our time more than ever, it is absurd to think that a work of art must be finished. Indeed, who can tell when a work of art really is complete? As someone observed, “finished” is a way of saying you’re tired of the work.
If it is for the author to decide, we’ll find that certain literary classics are unfinished because their authors considered them so. One is Virgil’s Aeneid. The Roman poet asked his friend and patron, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, to destroy it. And we owe its very existence to the fact that he loftily ignored the request.
Praise for the incomplete
This year, 2024, is full of anxieties and horrors, like the “beacon of black lights” described by Colombian poet León de Greiff. The only light may be the unflinching lucidity of that murky fantasist Franz Kafka, who died 100 years ago. Some 20 centuries after Virgil, Kafka, too, asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had written. Practically everything he wrote was unfinished — which would be a fitting title for an edition of his complete works!
The list of unfinished works is long and admirable.
Brod also refused. Except Kafka did not want his writings destroyed because he considered them incomplete. Rather, he saw them as flawed, unsatisfactory or even useless — which is different. Any author can feel that about any of his or her works. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said it best when praising the incomplete: “A good poem is one that may be improved, because you could never make a bad one better.”
It is said (and if it isn’t true, it should be) that Michelangelo left an unpolished fragment on the crown of his David sculpture, so that a tiny piece of it would remain connected to the quarry the stone came from — or its “ancient, original disorder” as the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin put it. The list of unfinished works is thus long and admirable.
Absent beauty
For works of art, an unfinished quality adds to their attraction, giving them mystery and intrigue and fueling conversations on their flaws and virtues. We love and are fascinated by the unfinished symphony — and not just Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s. A memorable chapter of German writer Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus has a professor elaborating on why German composer Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111” has no third movement.
Time is an independent actor here. We have come love the marble white of classical Greek sculptures, only to learn that they were originally colored. In our eyes, time perfected them. Some of them even have even lost arms or a head, or everything but a head. Yet we consider these fragments as perfect, and poignant symbols of beauty.
Often a single phrase or verse will say it all.
Who today would put arms on the Venus de Milo or a head on the Winged Victory of Samothrace? We may regret the loss of an object, but it is bittersweet regret and typically modern. Our love of broken, lost or absent beauty is itself a sign of our evolved, aesthetic sensibility.
Modern art has adopted the unfinished — if only for its love of dynamism and hatred of all that is staid, over-finished and unimaginative. No poem needs a particular number of perfectly balanced, rhyming verses, for that is merely an exercise or assignment. Beauty is necessary, fundamental, clear and contagious. There is nothing crucial about rhymes.
Art in fragments
There is art to be found in fragments then. Borges suggested, rightly I think, that the 12 verses of the sonnet to the Duke of Osuna by the Spanish poet Francisco Gómez de Quevedo were there merely to contain two verses: “His tomb the campaigns of Flanders / His epitaph the bloody moon.” French author Marcel Proust’s work is vast, but many are happy to browse through or dip into it, without undue concern about reading every page of this monument of words.
The best of an author is not always found in his or her complete works; often a single phrase or verse will say it all. Homer, Dante and Borges have this quality. The French poet Paul Valéry wrote that sublime temples were built in history so beauty would endure intact in a single column or friese.
So, welcome En agosto nos vemos. It is certainly complete. And if not, this is the great and tragic era that can see the beauty of all that is unfinished and fragmented.
