Unfinished symphonies

Jean Santeuil was Proust's first unconscious dry-run for A la recherche; his second was Contre Sainte-Beuve.  The first is the same fictionalised account of the key experiences of his life, but glamourised and without the insight, wisdom and humility of the final version.  The second begins as fiction, moves across into literary criticism, and soon finds itself in the half-familiar, but as-yet uncharted territory of the later book.  Perhaps because he realised they were both fatally flawed - mostly as a result of his own personal failings at that time - Proust never finished either of them. Neither have I.

With Jean Santeuil this came about imperceptibly but almost inevitably.   I had been lulled by the parallels between the two versions into a false sense of security; page after page of beautiful but undirected reflection on lilacs and sunlight, on the French nobility and art, had left me pleasantly stupefied.  It was as if I had embarked on a course of an enervating but deeply enjoyable drug: I found myself drifting with a fundamentally wayward and irresponsible plotline.  After several hundred pages, most of which coalesced into a kind of rosy vision of Jean's eternal childhood, it just happened that I read no further.  This was no value judgement, not even a conscious decision.  It just happened.

With Contre Sainte-Beuve I was more alert.  I could see what was going on.  Just as the book itself was a kind of déjà vu, so was my experience of it.  As the book drifted back and forth between the subjective and objective worlds, I could feel myself pacing out the pages.  It was like eating a cake, but keeping an eye out all the while so as not to eat the very last piece.  So that it would not end, but merely stop.

And I realised that just as Proust only came to understand his unconscious memories after several of them, so only now had I grasped what was going on with these unfinished Proust works.  If I had read them to the end, I would have demonstrated unarguably that they went no further, that the last sentence ran thus.  By leaving them, I did not rob myself of the infinite potential which remained in those last few unknown pages.

Or strictly speaking, in the pages which came after those.  It was in the pages not written, the next ones Proust would have formed, that I could construct my huge palaces of fantasy.  By not finishing I have kept them spinning, suspended eternally like chords held without resolution.

And the same is true of unresolved chords themselves.  I know of no more poignant sound than the single voice at the end of the great four-part fugue in Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge playing itself out into the waiting silence.  Nothing speaks more eloquently of the blind old man dying in his bed, still composing, bound to this world by that last thread of music. It is almost as if the music had become so ethereal, so heavenly, that it had passed to a realm inaudible to gross mortal ears.  And so it should be with all unfinished works, be they symphonies or sonnets.  We should allow them the ultimate grace, silence; not because it mourns their passing, but because it is the ultimate rich and complex sound which contains all resolutions, and all endings.

(29.7.86)

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