Do genre(s) of literature exist which take advantage of the Zeigarnik Effect?

Question

It is probable that humans remember unfinished/incomplete tasks better than completed tasks. I am wondering if there is a genre/style of literature which takes advantage of this to boost the memorability of stories by leaving none of the threads tied up. I know that there is no proper way to define "unfinished", especially if an author has decided that their work is 'finished', so to clarify a little further, I've drawn some diagrams (because everybody loves diagrams).

Generally I imagine that over the course of a novel various threads (goals, threats, characters) can make up the ark of the story.

Often the threads are resolved by the climax and then there is some kind of denoument. Sometimes not every thread is resolved, for example in Norwegian Wood where

it is left ambiguous whether Toru and Midori get back together

Sometimes threads are created and then lost/drift away/are never tied up, for example almost every plotline in A Series of Unfortunate Events.

And then of course sometimes extra threads get resolved after the climax of a story, like the "there's just one thing I still don't understand..." type endings of a detective story.

To be a 'Zeigarnik book' I would say that all of the plot-lines would be left unresolved, and the result is the appearance (or reality) of a book where the author got half way and then gave up.

In this case there is no resolution of anything, rather than a cliff-hanger as such. I suppose another analogy could be watching a single episode of a soap opera, where there is no sense of the character stories terminating.

Is this a real genre or style of book that anybody is familiar with?

Answer 1

Regarding the Zeigarnik Effect itself, it's a bit of a leap from an unfinished task being more memorable, to thinking that unresolved threads in a novel make the novel more memorable. In any case, there are criticisms of the effect itself. Wikipedia says:

The reliability of the effect has been a matter of some controversy.

Several later studies, performed later in other countries, attempting to replicate Zeigarnik's experiment, failed to find any significant differences in recall between "finished" and "unfinished" (interrupted) tasks (e.g. Van Bergen, 1968).

Ignoring the question of the effect itself, are there many memorable works of fiction with unresolved threads? Gareth Rees suggests The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, might fit the bill. Peter Shor suggests Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje.

I think any work that sets out to examine the human condition without offering a clear conclusion would qualify – "here's life, it doesn't make sense, no tidy endings" kind of stuff. Hugh Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn comes to mind. Maybe some existentialist or absurdist novels – e.g. Kafka's The Trial. Some of the more experimental or boundary-pushing modernist works: certainly Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable, and perhaps William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and James Joyce's Ulysses, amongst others.

But compared to the wealth of great literary works to choose from, the above is a pretty slim list. I think the difficulty in finding examples suggests one of three things:

1. Not many such works get written. They're challenging to write successfully, and not very enticing: fiction writers are generally storytellers who certainly want to take you on a journey but also derive pleasure from delivering you to the destination, rather than leaving you stranded at sea (or in space, or in the desert, or in a dungeon, or just meaninglessly dead).
2. Editors and publishers are conscious that good stories, with a dénouement where everything gets resolved (ideally with at least a satisfying if not happy ending) tend to be safe and popular, so there's an automatic filter to be overcome just to get the work published.
3. The supposed Zeigarnik Effect is about whether something is more memorable, not whether it's more satisfying, likeable or worth recommending. How many have read The Da Vinci Code compared to The Unnameable? The latter is utterly memorable, but I wouldn't recommend it to most readers. If the Zeigarnik Effect exists in literature, it's probably also self-limiting.