That's pretty broad. I think my answer is "it depends".

I have a general preference for explanation. Especially early on, when the novel/show/game/whatever is building it's plot/world/characters/etc. But that said I think that leaving space for interpretation can be good in some places. Occasionally, the viewer can probably even do more with what isn't there than most things  that could be placed there. A lot of good horror movies use that sort of negative space for example (as opposed to others that show the monsters or w/e frequently and often). Who was it that made a thread about that Red Riding Hood game awhile back, Yasha? I think leaving things open to interpretation in situations like that can be pretty interesting too. The audience can do a good job filling in awful events. Quite possibly better than the camera could show, at least in some cases. I'm sure you can make some very abstract genres either, in which explanation isn't as needed/needed at all. I'm doing a psychology project on death acceptance/mortality sallience now, and one of the journal articles I've been looking goes on about how some people are particularly disgusted by modern art because it has no fixed structure and reminds them of death on some deep subconscious level, and they have a deeper subconscious fear of death than others.

I think there generally needs to be a purpose to having things unexplained though. I don't want a pink toaster to suddenly appear and serve that warm evenly baked everything bagel our heroine needed to graduate on time, where previously there was no toaster or bagel. If something is hidden, I think it's absence should be serving some function (similarly to how I feel things should only be included, in general, if they're relevant).

To me, it depends on the reason for the unexplained thing. If it's done deliberately for artistic effect, or it's layered into the other elements of the story and actually forms a cohesive whole when one considers the mythology of the setting, or because the reader/viewer is sharing a non-omniscient narrator's point of view, then sure. If it's because the writer is an idiot and doesn't know what they are doing, then no.

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

Do you need a TV show, movie, novel, poem, videogame to eventually explain/justify unusual or unexpected elements, or are you cool with them just being some weird thing that totally happened?

I can write a story where Hamlet says "To be or not to be: that is the question," and then he straps on his jetpack and blasts off from the courtyard at the Castle Elsinore, which is suddenly made of cheese, and then he wraps himself up in an air chrysalis and emerges as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who looks into the fiery surface of the water far above him to see the face of God, which speaks, saying How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if chuck chuck a woodchuck a wop bam boom.  It is possible the literary community would hail me as the next James Joyce, or the inventor of some kind of New Dada, or maybe a genius of post-postmodern metafiction.  But I expect most of my readers would go "well, that was stupid" and go back to reading Fifty Shades.  The problem is not that my story was too weird, or even that the weirdness was unexplained; the problem is that the weird stuff didn't do anything.  It didn't develop a theme or a character or even a coherent narrative.

Elements of a story should pull their weight.  That goes for weird stuff, and it also goes for ordinary stuff.  Weird stuff is sometimes narratively "heavier" then ordinary stuff, and therefore has more weight to pull, but not always.  It depends on how the author would like to use the weird stuff.

Brandon Sanderson has a wonderful essay more or less on this subject, discussing the use of magic in fantasy writing.  His proposed First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

I would suggest, more broadly, that an author's ability to make weird stuff serve the story is directly proportional to how well the reader groks said weird stuff.

On one end of the spectrum, we could invoke Vonnegut.  Slaughterhouse-Five begins with the line "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."  Bam, exposition over.  Now the reader understands the weirdest element of the story.  We can visit and revisit moments in Billy's life, use recurring motifs, and just generally exploit the idea of viewing moments in the same life from different angles and in different contexts to create a unique and compelling character study and exploration of free will.  "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time" is a simple, grokkable premise, so it can inform everything about the book.  Whatever weight it has, it amply carries.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can write a good book where there is weird stuff that the reader can't grok.  You just can't make that weird stuff do very much work.  1Q84, which I imagine prompted this question, is a good example.  No one explains to us what the Little People are.  Nor do we grok the Little People (whereas we grok, say, Cthulhu, or the dreamlike metaphysics of Borges' Labyrinths, even without explanation).  If anything, Murakami goes out of his way to sever any intuitive idea we might have about the Little People's nature.  He gets away with this because the Little People do not actually do much work in 1Q84.  They color the setting, perhaps even instigate the difference between the parallel realities of 1984 and 1Q84, but that's it: the real action of the book is well downstream of them.  They are narratively light, and so they don't need much explanation to carry their weight.  (Lots of fantasy authors writing in original settings pull the same trick all the time.  There's tons that the reader doesn't understand, but that's just background.  The foreground elements, the ones that move the story and develop the characters and the themes, are explained or grokkable.)

A wonderful way to understand this is supplied within 1Q84's own commentary on itself.  Tamaru reluctantly hands Aomame a handgun with the warning that, according to Anton Chekhov, once a gun appears in a story it has to be fired.  Aomame never fires that handgun.  But it recurs over and over throughout the novel -- as a symbol of security or of escape, and as a focus of Aomame's contemplation of free will and whether the real world is like a drama by Chekhov.  The gun is not fired.  But it is used.  Tamaru didn't give it to Aomame for no metanarrative reason.  It carries its weight.  That gun, in its way, is heavier than the Little People: more is demanded of the gun than of the Little People, in terms of how it will help characterize Aomame and help us explore the world of the story.  But we grok the gun much better than we grok the Little People -- and the part we might not grok, the Chekhov's Gun part, gets explained to us by Tamaru.  So it carries its relatively heavy weight very easily, while the much less grokkable Little People carry their weight because they have little weight to carry.  That's how I see it, anyway.

What Satyr said is very much what I meant to get at with my last sentence or two, albeit put in a much nicer way. I concur.

I do. I just didn't want to set a tone before the thread got going.

Inexplicable or causally-inexplicable things don't really bother me at all. I like a Chekhov's Gun, sure, or long-throw plotting, where the ball goes in the air casually in act one and doesn't come down again until act three or four. I even like Michael Chekhov's associative stuff (where a gesture or physical tic is made to relate to an emotion or event). But flat out symbolism, surrealism, or whythefucknot work fine for me. Jessica Lange saying "We've got dead aliens, stacked up in warehouses," in Masked & Anonymous, the there and gone "We've got dinosaurs" in Dark Knight Strikes Again, scenes that are impossible to lock down as a series of definite actions and intentions but are emotionally pure and clear in Finnegans Wake. I care a lot more that a scene or a moment is ethically or artistically of use than anything about it making narrative or causal sense. David Lynch's Inland Empire, narratively, is a completely different movie if you've seen its sister movie, More Things That Happened, because it turns several key scenes and motivations around, but it doesn't mean that Inland Empire is lying or that what you feel or understand is untruthful. Each understand, any understanding, can be valid in its context.

Luke Skywalker having white under his black clothes all along, in the second two Star Wars movies is purely symbolic, but it works and it means that, if you watch him going through darkness and stress and feel he might be turning evil, that's a legitimate understanding, because it's an emotional understanding, not a causal or narrative one. He's not actually doing anything evil in the movies.

Emotion or novelty are more important for me, than causality.

I like proper surrealism, where your first idea, your initial image or idea has to be produced, no matter what. Want to paint "Mother," and the first thing you think of is a rhinoceros? Paint the rhino, call it Mother. I enjoy a really well-laid plan of a story, too, but there's only so many times I could watch, say, The Spanish Prisoner or Golden Eye for the plans and their executions, not because they are poorly constructed, but because they play the long ball gme without any world around them and there's always a world, seemingly-random, complex, invasive. If the very last thing I saw of a show was a giant lion turtle spitting wisdom, as long as it was impressive, I'd be okeh with that, because, hey, it could happen and even if it couldn't it just did.

I take things as they come and my enjoyment doesn't diminish just because something wasn't telegraphed. Whereas I can only, usually, appreciate the telegraphing in retrospect. My favorite Chekhov's Gun, possibly, is in Nabokov's Transparent Things, where the narrator flat out tells us the gun on his mantle isn't a Chekhov's Gun, a couple times, and then ignores it forever, while he and his wife sleep, and dream, and live, and have nightmares, and have sex on the couch, and look at the gun, and sleepwalk, and dream, drive around in the car, and then... he murders his wife while he's sleepwalking. It's built up to, but it's not the long throw you're expecting. Too many of those long throws, too many Chekhov's Guns are stock and we can see them coming, they're ironic only for characters in the story, or at this point, in the post-Scream world, they're sardonic, at best.

The unexplained or undefended-but-undeniable will always have more power for me than the stock, and much of the time, more power than after it's explained at all. Velociraptors in Jurassic Park going for the electrical system or hunting the kids in the kitchen is awesome and scary, because wtf? But once you explain (as the second book does), that they were targeting those things for very simple reasons of heat and food, not because they might be crazy smart, the threat goes out of it. Once you tell me why Michael Meyers can drive a car, eats dogs, and keeps making art out of murders, with his displays or putting a ghost costume and glasses on but never showing enjoyment in his art or humor... it defangs the thing.

satyreyes wrote:

I suspect we might not disagree very much, but I want to learn more about what you think before I say so   How would you react to the stream-of-consciousness Hamlet story I put up in my first post?  To borrow some of your terms: my story is certainly novel.  If my goal is to illustrate the absurdity of completely abandoning literal or symbolic coherence, then my story is certainly artistically of use.  And events in my story are certainly unexplained and undefended-but-undeniable.  Does that mean my Hamlet story is pretty good literature?

I think it'd depend, for me, on the execution. If it was told/shown excitingly, that Hamlet could be amazing. You could certainly get an eight minute music video out of it, if not a 90 minute movie. I'm almost guaranteed to prefer it over lifting the plot mechanics of Hamlet and sticking them onto a new story, which to me, is entirely more tiresome. When it's done poorly, it's not the randomness or the unexpected element that'll hold me back, it's something like that Batman fanmovie where he fights Predators and Aliens, and it's just tin-eared, plodding, poorly edited with doorstop acting.

I don't know that "to be surprising" or "to be exciting" isn't enough being "of use," to justify something. "Hamlet activates his jetpack, flies past pterodactyls, hums his theme song to himself, and carpet bombs the castle while his uncle and mom rage below, and then he resurrects Ophelia with the power of love" can be performed poorly, but if you hit just the right visual notes, time the sequences well enough, and give an emotional build up that makes us want that to happen, I think you can get an audience to rejoice in it, even if twenty minutes later they question why they liked it so much in the moment.

(If your goal is to entertain, and you accomplish that, or if your goal is to make the audience feel a certain way in the moment, that's as valid as communicating a more complex message or examining a social issue in depth.)

To put it in anime terms, I like Eva a lot more if it ends with the TV series and not the movies. But the small market in Eva tie-ons and explanatory reference books shows there is an audience who needs the explanations. When they reinvented Eat-Man for the second season, the major thing they changed was the second season was full of explanations for everything, from the weird background shit to character motivations.