News that David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last September, left behind an uncompleted novel is of course exciting. After the monumental achievement of Infinite Jest (1996), he had produced non-fiction and short stories aplenty, but I have no doubt that his many fans had always hoped for another novel. The tantalising extract in the New Yorker, and the beautiful and exemplary account of his work and life by DT Max that accompanied it, suggest that Wallace had become worried by his own aesthetic and personal choices, and was trying to do something new. Since he was one of the most intelligent, humane, ethical and self-critical of authors, any self-conscious redirection of his talents is of great interest.
At the same time, with posthumous publications, there are also concerns. Wallace was a compulsive drafter and re-drafter, and we cannot know what decisions and revisions lay ahead on a book with which he had clearly been wrestling for years. Press coverage so far suggests that the editing of The Pale King for publication will be undertaken with extraordinary care and commitment. But the fact remains, this will not be the book that Wallace would have sent into the world if he had had more time.
The other detail that provokes a necrophilic twitch is that Wallace left behind bag-loads of drafts and versions of Infinite Jest. Given that this novel of obsession and addiction, written by a man who had experienced both obsession and addiction, has provoked an equally obsessive and addictive response in its bewitched readers, there will be a painful yearning to find out what is in those bags. Fans on the wonderful Howling Fantods website have speculated for years about material cut from the final version, which might have shed more light on the novel's enduring mysteries.
Perhaps that's one of the differences between "literary work" and simple entertainment. If John Grisham were to pass away and leave an unfinished novel, one's interest would be limited: and it would be easier, in a work faithful to the conventions of its genre, to deduce from the fragment the probable trajectory of the whole work. With "literary" work, other interests are involved: plot is a mere inducement to rest awhile in other mysteries, of a more philosophical or political or spiritual nature. A writer like Wallace is helplessly dedicated to those questions; he wants to share them with the reader because he thinks they will improve that reader's existence. (Wallace's beautiful commencement address at Kenyon College, due to be published later this year, gives a good idea of this aspect of his life and his work.)
But there is a difference between the open-endedness a writer chooses to produce, and the mysteries of unfinished and posthumously published works. In the first case, the author has chosen the degree to which a reader is uncertain, and has determined the wider parameters within which questions can be asked; in the latter, a different curiosity emerges, for instance with biography being crudely used to analyse the work, or rejected material being used to clarify the author's decisions.
It is this second case I have trouble with; it moves us away from the literary work, and towards an undue concentration on the individual who produced it. We become completists, collectors, avid for diaries, letters, school essays, bar bills and laundry lists. I know what this feels like – before the various Collected Poems of Philip Larkin emerged, I spent hours in libraries trying to find the stray poems he had published in small magazines.
Yes, it's hard to shake off that curiosity. We're fascinated by what is irretrievably lost – many of the plays of Sophocles; Aristotle's treatise on comedy; Byron's memoirs, and so on. A few years ago Stuart Kelly, books editor of Scotland on Sunday, wrote The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read, on this very subject. He also mentions The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens, unfinished and posthumous, which many people have attempted to complete, and which retains that allure. Indeed, Edwin Drood alone is at the centre of three new or forthcoming novels: Mr Dick, or the Tenth Book by Jean-Pierre Ohl; The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl; and Drood by Dan Simmons.
Literature encourages us to fill in all sorts of gaps; it's hardly surprising that we don't know where to stop.
