In Search of Perfection: Unfinished Literary Masterpieces

Whenever people admit to me that they’ve never finished Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, I always reply, “Well, neither did he.” In fact, Kafka never finished any of his three novels. He was a consummate perfectionist, but he had very little stamina as a writer, and he was never able to bring anything longer than “The Metamorphosis” to perfect consummation. The unfinished states of Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle have in fact given rise to foolhardy critical conceits treating their fragmentary texts as somehow complete and forming an aesthetic of their own.

In a completely different approach to a text’s lack of completeness, when discovering that Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was only half finished, many readers respond with a combination of exasperation and relief: “Good God! It could have actually been longer?”

In his great study Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams writes of the unfinished cathedral of Beauvais as perhaps the pinnacle of what Gothic architecture could have achieved. Although it’s hard to imagine anything more sublime than Chartres, the full plan for Beauvais, which has resulted in an astonishing stone half-sketch, was grander and more unified than any of the completed marvels of the Île-de-France. Likewise, many of literature’s greatest and most ambitious works astound us even in their unfinished state and have stood as monuments to humanity’s dual nature as infinite imaginers and finite beings bounded by time and space.

Aside from Shakespeare’s cosmically dense condensations of universal reflection (being relatively short plays rather than towering epics), Dante’s Divine Comedy is often considered to be the single greatest example of a work to achieve total perfection within its intended bounds and aesthetic. Dante finished his lifework in 1320, just a year before he died, and even though Dante’s life was unenviable in many ways, his work stands as a masterpiece toward which so many subsequent arists aspire.