In article <Pine.SUN.3.91.960415001822.14115A-100000@xp.psych.nyu.edu>,
Roger Giner-Sorolla  <gi...@xp.psych.nyu.edu> wrote:
>In particular, Trevor Barrie writes:
>>Sounds fairly innocuous, but I'm not sure I agree. There are plenty of
>>things that happen in real life whose reasons are never made clear to
>>me; why should having this happen in a work of fiction damage its'
>>realism?
>
> But this is the great confidence trick of fiction: to convince us that
>we are reading a representation of reality when in fact we are reading a
>"reality" that is more tightly structured and explicated than anything
>that actually happens to us.

Indeed. Even the most realistic fiction is fundamentally unrealistic if
you scrutinize it closely. Fiction isn't *supposed* to be realistic,
it is just supposed to *seem* realistic, and that's a totally
different thing. All readers of this newsgroup should be familiar with
the argument "I don't want a simulation of reality, I want an
entertaining game!".

It is also a matter of conventions. The audience expects the author to
explain everything and not to leave any loose ends around, and if the
author chooses no to explain something, he'd better supply a reason
for not explaining it. At least in older fiction, it's common to see
things like "They never found out who the mysterious stranger actually
was", but then there are usually suggestions (by the author or by his
characters) who it was. Perhaps the reader can guess what the
characters can't? Alternatively, it may be obvious that it doesn't
matter who the stranger was, just what he did.

If, however, the author introduces a mystery that seems to be crying
out for a solution ("Who *is* that mysterious stranger?") and neither
supplies a solution or a plausible reason for not supplying it, his or her
audience is likely to feel cheated, because they expect it.

Of course, all conventions are there to be broken, and breaking this
one can be done to great effect. For example, I think that part of the
tremendous appeal of "Twin Peaks" and "The X-files" is that they are
detective series that intentionally leave a lot of mysteries unsolved
- especially in the X-files, the point is that there are things that
we can't understand and that we will never know.

However, as always, it's easier to follow the rules than to break
them. Breaking the rules without geting a lot of frustrated readers is
*hard*. To use the X-files as an example again, in some of the
episodes it is pretty obvious that the writers have simply been lazy:
they have chosen to introduce some plot device which they don't know
how to handle, and the mystery isn't resolved because the authors
chose not to do so for artistic reasons, but because they couldn't.

>Or as the
>playwright Chekhov said in explaining dramatic structure: "If there is a
>pistol on the wall in the first act, it must go off by the fourth act."

Wasn't it a shotgun? :-)

Chekhov's example is more about dramatic economy, though: don't introduce
plot elements just because they are neat - they must serve a purpose
in the story. I'm sure Roger will return to this in a later essay :-).

--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se)