Unknowability

I feel like I should post something, but I don't really have a subject or topic of interest to discuss here. So I'll just ramble a bit and see what of value - if anything - comes out of it. Maybe I'll talk about the title of this entry: Unknowability. It's a term I threw around liberally when I was writing my thesis. I used it to describe the poem's multiplicity of possible meanings, but resistance to definition. My third reader had a problem with the term; she believed it was a slippery slope sort of word that allowed one to stay on the surface and not dig deeper for meaning. I didn't care because I was quite happy with the word, and felt that it allowed me to go deeper without being stuck in a rigid template. But I like the term in general as well; it it is, I think, something that drives me. The possibility of figuring something out - whether it is a crossword puzzle, a mystery, the location of a lost letter, the identity of Jack the Ripper, or a reason for someone's behavior - fascinates me. The solution is never as satisfying to me as the possibility of a solution and the attempt to figure it out. Not having answers stimulates my imagination. Definitive answers are comforting to some degree, but are cold, set-in-stone truths - I can't do anything with them. In literature and film unknowability plays out quite nicely because, I assume, the author or director wants to stimulate that creative part of the brain, wants to tease the reader or viewer with the promise of an answer and then never offer it.

I remember suggesting once to a theater group that I belonged to that we should re-adapt an Agatha Christie play, "And Then There Were None" (a.k.a. "Ten Little Indians," a.k.a. "Ten Little Niggers"), to more closely resemble the novel on which the play was based. Only my idea was to remove the solution from the play altogether: After eight of ten guests at a weekend party on a secluded island are killed over the course of a few days (in various gruesome ways), the two survivors (each supposing the other to be the killer) confront one another on the beach. The young woman has a gun; the young man doesn't. She shoots him, returns to the house, finds a noose hanging from a hook in an upstairs room. Knowing that the only survivor on an island with nine corpses will most likely be hanged anyway, she kills herself. After this, Christie offers a pretty complex solution. I suggested to my friends that we should end it after the woman kills herself and never offer an explanation. My thinking was that the audience reaction would be much more interesting. One of the group immediately dismissed the idea as ridiculous, stating that it would make the audience feel unsatisfied and possibly angry. This was the reaction I would want. That way people would leave the play discussing possibilities.

Here are some books and films that I like to read because of their unknowability on different levels:

1. A Passage to India (book and film)
2. Picnic at Hanging Rock (book and film)
3. The Turn of the Screw (and the film, The Innocents, which is based on the novella)
4. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
5. Julia (Memoir and film)
6. When We Were Orphans
7. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
8. Bach's Art of the Fugue is great because It's incomplete - the final piece in the collection peters out wonderfully

If anyone else has good suggestions of books or films that deal with this kind of ambiguity, I'd love to hear from you.

How's everyone's summer going?