The Incompleteness of Fiction

For all of its incomprehensibility, the reading from Postmodernist Fiction by Brain McHale did contain one passage that really made me think. It begins with an excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew:

It is a rather odd house, to say the least. There is the living room and the den, but we have not been able to find any other rooms. It seems as if there are other rooms, but when we approach them, they are - I don't quite know how to put this - they are simply not there! There is no kitchen, no porch, no bedrooms, no bath. At the side of the living room, a staircase leads "nowhere." Oh, I don't mean to say that it disappears into empty space, it simply leads to a kind of . . . haziness, in which one knows there is supposed to be a hallway and bedroom doors: but there is absolutely nothing.

McHale then offers his own commentary:

All houses in fiction are like this, partly specified, partly left vague. Normally neither the reader nor the character who shares the same world with such a house notices this vagueness; Sorrentino's characters, however, are aware of being inside a fiction, and so find this house anomalous, with its permanent gaps where a real-world house would be ontologically determinate.

It's certainly an interesting observation. Authors of fiction, after all, must create entirely new realities in for which their characters to live, and individual aspects of these worlds need only be defined when it is convenient for the authors to define them. All other characteristics of the worlds remain ambiguous. The main character of a work of fiction, for example, might have a nuclear laboratory in his basement. Until the author confirms or denies this fact, either directly or through implication (i.e., "the basement of the house was entirely unfinished and completely empty, save for a single storage cabinet near the foot of the stairs"), it is impossible to know whether or not such a fact is true. It is then up to each individual reader to decide things like this for themselves. Although it would be unorthodox for a reader to spontaneously decide that there was a nuclear laboratory in the main character's basement, readers are likely to disagree on more minor details, such as what color the character's bedroom walls were painted, or whether or not the town library that the character often visited was within walking distance of his house. Each reader effectively draws a mental map of the world in which the story takes place, often having to tweak various details as they are revealed by the author.