Unfinished

Yesterday evening I watched a program on BBC2 called Unfinished, in which the attraction and use of unfinished art was discussed. Of course there was talk of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Austen's Sanditon and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", but they also mentioned a portrait of George Washington that was deliberately never finished, and that has been on the 1 dollar bill for 100 years now.
Now I have to admit that I did not watch the whole program, so I may be saying some stuff that is unrelated or unrelevant, but as I thought about it this morning, there were two things that surprised me.

Firstly, when the presenter, Alastair Sooke, asked (random, non-Austen-reading) people whether they would rather read the unfinished Sanditon by Austen, or one of the completed versions by other authors, all of them chose the unfinished version (there may have been dozens who chose one of the others, but they were not in the program). All of them said something along the lines of "this is the way she meant it, and the other author doesn't know for sure how it was to finish" or "this is the real thing, because it is just her words". Now this is interesting, because there have been so many people who did try to finish it, starting with one of Austen's own nieces. So why do people try to finish novels, when others don't really want to read their versions? Is it just to satisfy their own curiosity, or because they are so sad or frustrated that it isn't finished? Do they really try to finish it so that others can read it, or do they write mostly for themselves? But why publish it then? I don't know the answer to these questions. I am also not a person who would read a finished version by someone else, or who would try to finish it myself, because it just is what it is, she died while she was writing it. The same goes for the Dickens story, which has recently been completed and turned into a tv series. Again, just to make money out of it? What purpose is served by finishing something that you don't know how to finish? We just don't know how it was supposed to end, can't we just leave it at that?
(Now I think I should put in a disclaimer for the Robert Jordan fans, because he also died before he could finish his Wheel of Time series, and Brandon Sanderson finished it (and added some more books in the process). Now Jordan actually wrote down how the series was supposed to end, and he wanted to choose his successor, but in the end his widow had to do that for him. So I think this is a very different situation, because the author knows that they are going to die, doesn't want to disappoint the fans of the series, and thus deliberately asks another writer to finish it for him. So here we actually know how it was going to end, and it is with the author's consent, which makes all the difference, to me.)

Secondly, the issue with the painting surprised me, and not only because I had never heard of it before. Apparently, Gilbert Stuart realised that he could make money from the unfinished painting, made 130 replicas, which he sold for a lot of money. So could we then really call the thing unfinished? I mean, Stuart clearly did not intend to finish it, because he could make a lot of money without doing so, and even Washington himself was quite content with the unfinished thing, he even ordered a replica for himself. So when do you call a painting unfinished, or finished for that matter? I know I have had difficulty deciding whether a painting was done, and I have heard other artists express the same problem. But can we call something unfinished when the artist clearly has no intention of ever going back to finish? I mean, if the artist isn't sure themselves, it is another issue, but in this case the label of "unfinished" just adds to the value of the thing. (The same really goes for "Kubla Khan", because it is generally thought that Coleridge just added the mystique of saying that he was interrupted when writing it, but this is what makes it so popular, the air of "there could have been so much more!" even when there really couldn't.)
For me, with a story (novel) it is different, because you have your overall story arch and when that is done the story is "done", and you can keep adding minor characters and in-between-scenes all you like, but when the story is told, it is finished (and for those authors who write in a linear manner, like Austen, it is even easier than for people like me, who jump ahead and leave blanks in the middle that may or may not be filled in at a later point). But for a painting... I don't know, maybe it is because I am more a writer than a painter, but sometimes an "unfinished" painting, with areas of canvas still showing, really is finished. And I would say that that is the case with Stuart's painting, because we can all agree that he never intended to finish it anyway.

So what is the draw of these unfinished works? Is it because we can fill it in for ourselves, imagine what the ending must be like, and thus in a way become artists ourselves? That is something you do whenever you read a book; you always have a picture in your head of what the characters or the buildings or the surroundings look like. With paintings it is the same, I think; I always try to imagine what lies outside of the canvas area, or what a scene would look like if it were painted from a different angle. So personally I cannot understand the obsession with finishing unfinished works by others, because I think that the only goal that is served by it is putting yourself in the shoes of the artist, and in the case of Austen or Dickens, those shoes are just a little bit too large for us to fill!