Does fantastic fiction need answers? mysteries? secrets?

[samedietc]

I wanted a book like this, so I took it to write in. It is full of secrets. I have a great many other books of secrets I have written, hidden in a safe place, and I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall not put down at all.
-Arthur Machen, "The White People" (1899)
Is there a Cylon God? Are

Comments

[matt_rah]

There's a big difference between the bullshit they pulled with the X-Files and, say, Children of Men (movie; I haven't read the book).

That is to say, no, you don't always need to have answers or explanations to all the mysteries of your story, to be sure. But I think you should answer any questions which are necessary for the potential inherent in the themes or premise of your story to be fulfilled.

Honestly, the X-Files thing just felt like contempt for the audience, which is my #1 hatred in any form of artistic work. "We're going to set up this elaborate overarching plot for all these seasons and drop all these hints and have all this stuff happen, and then at the end it will be revealed that we actually didn't bother to think about it very hard."

Matt

[charlequin]

Pretty much.

The alien conspiracy at the beginning of the X-Files was incoherent in a mysterious, uncanny way -- it was horrifying because its symbolic resonance pointed towards null conclusions, and it didn't provide any helpful answers. Some of the arc episodes in season 1 are pretty rad.

At the end, all the pieces are on the table, but they don't fail to fit together like a Lynch movie, just like a bad movie.

[samedietc]

Matt, I like your simple summation that works need answers that are necessary for the themes and/or premise to be fulfilled; e.g., in Children of Men, we don't need an answer about why humanity is infertile or why Kee is suddenly fertile since the story is actually focused on what people will do in situations of hopelessness when hope appears. (answer: after a pause, most people continue shooting.)

I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think this might give as a hint about when mysteries are necessary, too: as with answers, a work needs mysteries that are necessary for the themes and/or premise to be fulfilled. so, again, in CoM, the very mysteriousness of the infertility/fertility area might clue us in to some thematic resonance (the inexplicable that must be lived through, not avoided through suicide

[dr_smith]

I think it depends a lot on the construction of your fantasy.

Something like The X-Files promises a degree of revelation. It is built around discovery, and purposely uses mystery to bait the audience, and drive its narrative. Thus, answers are important. That is not to say you need to give all of them--but you better HAVE them, and dole them out to a degree that is satisfying. Consider Pulp Fiction. There IS an answer to "What's in the case?". You never find out, but you are secure in the belief that, throughout the movie, there is some consistent thing in there.

Meanwhile, something like The Sandman is all full of vagueries, and really profits by them. They create a sense of wonder and, more importantly, largeness.

For a third example, let's look at 2001 (the film). I hate 2001. Here is a movie that tells you it has tons of interesting answers and then reveals nothing. It just throws in some bait and makes you sit there for two hours, waiting for a keystone moment that never appears

[samedietc]

You're definitely right that The X-Files was premised as an investigative show, and that investigation (including a lot of the scientific investigation in science fiction) promises answers over time. (This is the model of a lot of sf: something unknown becomes known.)

Whereas something like The Sandman doesn't promise answers since the mysteries are not necessarily what drives the story over the 75 issues. I think it's interesting to look at serial forms since, institutionally, something has to drive the consumer from one episode/issue to the other. Mysteries about characters and about the Mythology may drive us from one episode of The X-Files, but in most of The Sandman, the story drives us only across a few issues: we come back for thematic coherence or to reenter a world, but not necessarily to know the end of the story. (This could be argued since The Sandman is a pretty coherent story, with a beginning, middle, and end, planned as such. Substitute Days of our Lives or The Astonishing X-Men if you prefer

[dr_smith]

I'm not thinking of ambiguity in so large a sense, necessarily. There are conspicuous ambiguities, "what's in the box?" type things, and then there are subtler ambiguities, matters of human motivation.

Oh, look, you mentioned MacBeth up there. Good timing, I just finished it. MacBeth is chock full of both types of ambiguity. On the macro level, we wonder things like "Is Banquo's ghost really there?" or "Who is the third murderer?". On the micro level, the level of questions Shakespeare doesn't tell us he's asking, are things like "What is the MacBeths' problem, anyway?", "Why does he choose to fight, in the end?", "Is MacDuff a decent husband?". All these questions are there, but none are addressed directly. Some have answers in the text, some do not, but they all fuel the richness of the story.

[tragic_ohara]

My quick reaction is to say that my favorite stories have always been the ones that don't rely on the revelation of some secret to motivate or resolve them: I like Blade Runner, for instance, because it's about everyone finding what they're looking for, and having to deal with it, and anything that could be called a central mystery (is Deckard a replicant?) is left up to the viewer and doesn't change the thematic meaning of the story. So, like Vin says, there're things like X-Files, where waiting to find out what's really happening is what's keeping you going. Which can be and has been done well, but I guess I feel like it lends a story a certain disposability: no need to watch that again. There are numerous examples of stories that transcend that, of course (Chinatown springs to mind, since I'm thinking movies, and Citizen Kane is one of those where the big mystery isn't the point

[samedietc]

For other examples of stories that don't rest on a need to know the plot, you could go to myth ("Oh, I can't leave now--I just have to know what happens to Oedipus!"), which is why I think you're right that ambiguity is embraced by modern lit in a way that is foreign or antithetical to a lot of historical story-telling.

(Which is why modern publishing genres are so interesting to me: each mystery has to be different from earlier mysteries, but they also have to be more-or-less the same: unlike the repetition of the story of Oedipus, the repetition of genre is repetition with a difference; but maybe that is why it is like the oral rendition of Oedipus: always a little different, even if the ending--the Butler did it!--is never really in question.)

[sara_may19]

Yes, the fantastic should make us wonder, but it should make us wonder productively. In cases where the writers have not been seeding the "text" with clues that make sense retrospectively, the question of "How did this come about?" (central to storytelling) is not as interesting.

Not every question that is raised needs to be answered, but if at the end of the story it's not productive to spend time asking how it happened, your story sucks.