Afterlives of Abandoned Work

Creative Debris in the Archive

Matthew Harle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781501365515
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501339431
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Afterlives of Abandoned Work considers the relevance of unfinished projects to literary history and criticism, looking beyond famous posthumous work to investigate the abandoned everyday, from scrapped plans and rejected ideas to half-written novels or unfinished artistic works. It traces how the reading of abandoned creative endeavor-whether arriving in the form of a rejection letter, a disagreement with a collaborator, or the simple act of walking away from one's desk-can change the way we think about cultural production, the creative process, and the intellectual construction of everyday life.

Over five distinct journeys through a variety of archives, from major research libraries to the unique collections of individual enthusiasts, Matthew Harle draws surprising connections between literary studies, media studies, and visual arts, exploring unfinished projects from Thomas Pynchon, Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, and others. Rooted in literary criticism, Afterlives of Abandoned Work reads unbuilt buildings, unfilmed screenplays, and unpublished novels and radio sketches as forms of text that can help us consider the enduring fragmentation and anecdotal construction of cultural form, as well as expand literary criticism's approach to the archive.

1

On the Shelf:
An Introduction to Abandoned Work

Definitions

There are many well-known abandoned projects. Examples include Tatlin’s Tower; Perec’s I Was Born; Dickens’s Edwin Drood; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; The MP Edward Watkin’s incomplete Eiffel Tower at Wembley – later renamed ‘Watkin’s Folly’; Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures The Family of Man; Raymond Williams’s historical epic People of the Black Mountains; the artist John Martin’s plans for London’s sewage system; St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (which he left unfinished in 1273 after a supernatural encounter); Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom; Bizet’s Roma Symphony; The M8 Bridge to Nowhere in Glasgow; the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid in Tokyo; the nearly 100 unfinished giant Ferris Wheels dotted around the world; Charlotte Bronte’s collection entitled Unfinished Novels; Tony Hancock’s unaired Australian Sitcom Hancock Down Under; Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 8; Alfred Hitchcock’s Number 13; Orson Welles’s Don Quixote and It’s All True; Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon; the hotly anticipated companion novel to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight vampire series, Midnight Sun; almost all of the novels of Franz Kafka; Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas’s proposed collaborative opera; Eisenstein’s screenplay of Marx’s Capital; Thomas More’s The Four Last Things; and so on

There are entire catalogues of abandoned work. The best are probably Henri Lefebvre’s extensive prose poem/collection The Missing Pieces and Harry Waldman’s Scenes Unseen.¹ But many other books, projects and pieces of journalism exist, often as whimsical lists on websites or as brief articles pondering on ‘what might have been’.² It is also a popular subject of modern and contemporary art.³ Hans-Ulrich Obrist, exemplary of the ‘super curator’ trend of the early 2000s, once declared, ‘I see unrealised projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. … It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and – in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way.’⁴ The interest of a figure like Obrist is indicative of something significant. His statement is partly an official endorsement to the art world – which in itself is a symptom of its ranging appeal across academic, arts and popular conversations – but also a simple indication of the ubiquity of the act of abandonment. Obrist continues: ‘There are many amazing unrealised projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realisable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealisable projects, partially realised projects, censored projects and so on.’

Unfinished projects are expansive texts; they present open-ended ideas without material restraint, which by their very nature spill across cultural categories and notions of genre, and this opportunity is regularly taken advantage of. There are many finished works created in the discussion of unfinished work. Francis Ponge’s processual poetics of detergent, Soap, asks sweeping questions about his own creative process, the author ‘profiting from this occasion to complete a work, begun many years ago, yet which I have never managed, despite numerous efforts to come to the end of’.⁵ The writer Arthur Machen, in his uncanny memoirs The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering, spends most of his account returning to his jottings from years past, looking at inchoate sketches for novels and short stories – all sitting in a rough, unformed state:

I have the itch too and vehemently desire to scratch myself, that is, to write, but I can’t do it – save at long intervals, and after taking the most horrible pains and racking my brains, and filling the fat notebook with hundreds of pages of plots and plans and elaborations and dark and craft schemes, I dig deep, I burrow, far under the ground, I hew out my laborious subterranean passages, I blast whole strata of unsuspected rocks which suddenly interpose themselves between me and my end.⁶

Throughout The London Adventure, the reader is privy to some very half-baked ‘weird fiction’ from Machen’s ‘fat notebook’. Some of Machen’s unfinished projects start with titles and no content, or vice versa. ‘Maze Story’ describes a maze on a bare hilltop made of limestone called ‘the way (or path) to the city’, with no other detail. His untitled stories, however, often include minor sordid details (‘An ordinary family living in the suburbs shut themselves up for certain days in the year to perform some horrible “Cave” rights’), but come with no accompanying plot or structure. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage is a travelogue of his inability to finish a biography of D. H. Lawrence, who himself was unable to finish his own biography of Thomas Hardy.⁷ The pop music critic Paul Morley begins his account of his father’s suicide, Nothing, with a list of tens of books he would have liked to start writing and leave unfinished – when in actual fact, he hadn’t written anything at all.⁸ The chief location of Richard Brautigan’s novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) is a cavernous suburban library that houses thousands of volumes of unread and unpublished works of the general public.⁹ Yet, for all of their musings, the incomplete or unfulfilled works laboured over by Brautigan, Ponge, Machen and the rest are little more than a literary device – they are not true Bartlebys. They are red herrings that discuss the idea of an unfinished work within the comfortably bound pages of a completed and published book.¹⁰

Many ideas lie unfinished and abandoned, and the sheer breadth of the works listed above highlights a problem in the particular phrase we use to describe them, exemplified by the fact that the term ‘unfinished’ leaves us intrigued about what kind of work has been produced, or how much has gone unfinished. Much thought has gone into this in literary theory. As James Ramsey Wallen notes,

Like ‘work’ itself, ‘unfinished work’ does not actually refer to a specific type of text, but is rather a label we apply to texts that influences the interpretive practices we bring to bear on them. Most frequently this label is applied to texts still being written at the time of their author’s death, but unfinished works can also be created through authorial abandonment, deliberate or accidental arson, or scholastic controversy regarding ‘who wrote what’. Beyond this, the unfinished label actually tells us very little since it specifies neither how the work in question came to be unfinished, nor just how unfinished it is.¹¹

While I agree with Wallen on the unspecific nature of the phrase, I would say the term ‘unfinished work’ is still a useful phrase to depict unfulfilled effort, if it is accompanied with additional contextual detail to elucidate each instance of its use. As such, the phrases I repeatedly use throughout this piece of writing – abandoned unfinished, incomplete, unrealized – are used as illustrative or notional phrases for texts that exist in a half-formed or planned state. They refer to the condition of a piece of work, a project, or a set of documents in a rudimentary and embryonic form. In short, there must be a conjectural image to supplement the material evidence of the project in order to obtain a full representation of the work. This study, therefore, splits its attention between examining the qualities of these two states, the material and the conjectural – their relationship to one another – and how this dialectic has a role in propelling cultural history. This is an exploration of the remains of designs, plans, unfinished narratives, drafts and pilot tests that were never completed. It is this k ind of text – the blueprint, half-completed, or proposed work – that I refer to when I use terms like ‘abandoned’, ‘unfinished’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘unrealized’ interchangeably during the project.¹² Working through the difficulties of what constitutes an unfinished work and the constraints around the ways we have to describe it, is just the first stage to this project, however. Commonly, a piece of research on the subject must then decide upon a definitive direction to pursue. In former studies, Balachandra Rajan chose to look at the poetics of incompletion: Saverio Tomaiuolo, the literary form of unfinished Victorian literature; and Wallen, the notion of ‘unfinishability’ within the novel.

Like these prior works, this project is firmly rooted in literary studies. The difference here is that I have chosen to take a material and cultural-historical mode of analysis as the primary route of investigation. It is through this method that the project hopes to account for the historical contexts, critical interpretations and contiguous narratives produced during the process of research. Put simply, it is an enquiry into the literary status of the unfinished cultural work within the archive; and, as is characteristic of literary studies, the various chapters in this project treat a range of archival material as ‘texts’, to be read and scrutinized as works of literature. In this spirit, the archival works here are considered literary texts that look outwards and point to broader socio-historical cultural structures. This methodology approach is extended over a variety of disciplines, subjects and historical periods, hoping to broaden the focus of literature’s relationship with the archive, from studies of fiction and literary history to non-literary forms.

One of the conditions that shaped this particular approach was the frequency with which one encounters the limitations of critical and creative responses to unfinished texts. Abandoned works are more often than not presented as defective objects of study. They are to be lamented over, treated with the utmost suspicion, or subjected to literary continuation or editorial publication in an unfinished state. This is where literary executors, academics and devotees, in the face of a work that lacks what Frank Kermode called a ‘sense of an ending’,¹³ attempt to shape fragmented remains into something that could be evaluated alongside a satisfactorily final work, usually mimicking the form of a complete work in the process.¹⁴

The first iteration of the unfinished work’s inadequate reception is a relation to Obrist’s description of the ‘nostalgic and melancholic’ reflection upon the unrealized project, or, what Wallen calls the ‘tragic rhetoric of failure’.¹⁵ Classically, this is recurrent around the incomplete work of great writers: ‘In more than one way, the loss of Edwin Drood is one that will always be mourned.’¹⁶ But it persists beyond literature and into other fields. As Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde’s introduction to their engrossing London as It Might Have Been declares, ‘discarded designs and rejected plans lurk like unhappy ghosts behind every important building in London’.¹⁷ A subsequent constraint upon the unfinished or abandoned work’s discussion is the suspicion or wariness as to the work’s significance as an object of culture. As a commentator in the London Review of Books confesses in a review of David Foster-Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King,

It’s impossible to know if I’m projecting this, but the work just seems so obviously unfinished: brilliant, certainly, but also dim and fudgy in places; ideas laboriously reworked and repeated … writing that hasn’t found its way yet; an author who hasn’t quite found the right angle to make the writing catch light.¹⁸

Would the same prose have seemed ‘dim and fudgy’ or ‘obviously unfinished’ if the book had declared itself ‘complete’? It is impossible to know – just as the reviewer doesn’t know if they are ‘projecting’ their doubt upon the text. This is, obviously, because an unfinished project is innately unknowable, absent and infinite in its prospects. It is a form that takes the interminable, ambivalent and unsettling qualities of literature into focus, unable to reconcile the distance between reader and text. Consequently, comparing the words on the page that constitute The Pale King to the imagined finality of the reviewer can only slip into solipsism – of authorial intentionality and perfection. On this note, Ralph Ellison would not have approved of the previous commentator’s view on Wallace’s leftovers, explaining that ‘incompletion of form allows the reader to impose his own imagination upon the material with too little control from the author, thus I don’t like to show my work until it is near completion’.¹⁹ But then (and this moves us on to the third variety), the only reason we know Ellison thought this is because it was inserted there by the editor of his estate, as the final note of his posthumously published unfinished novel Juneteenth.²⁰ This representation o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work
• 2 The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano Del Rio
• 3 Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Post-War London
• 4 A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust
• 5 The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives
• 6 Remains to Be Seen: Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright