The Completist

This paper investigates incompleteness by focusing on the properties and causes of voids in complete systems or works which cause these increments of the system to be incomplete for us, and importantly how that void is a germ or a seed which could be called inspiration, in the growth of our own making of the world.

The vehicle for the paper is a character or personality type, The Completist. The completist is a collector. The completist is tormented by intrasystemic incompleteness: those points in a potential collection, a complete system, which, through one’s inability to claim them, remain impenetrable and exclusionary. They desire the sense of completeness underpinned by the belief that their potential to claim the landscape is complete. As collectors they perceive the total system as complete. Their claim in the landscape of things is not consumption, but the desire to pass through, to project lines through objects and ideas.

A narrative investigation, following the completist through the landscape of disappointing terminal objects, can be structured upon the relationship of ‘K.,’ the ‘land surveyor’ of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, to both the bureaucracy and physicality of the titular construct. The Castle stands as an intrasystemic solid within the text which is impenetrable to the reader and to K., both of whom consequently fail at their respective tasks of assimilating the castle objectively and accessing its spatial core, both perceived as a claiming of power, or completing. Although thematically prominent in the text, “there is not textual evidence for the existence of the Castle as a building separate from the village… (the Castle) only exists on its own terms.”