Stories are not declarations.
What is a story? It is different from narrative, which is the telling of any sequence of events, as happens in a chronicle of kings with some anecdotes about them added. A story is more sophisticated than that, providing irony and closure. And yet, a story is presumably as old as the time people began to speak, telling stories in caves or around campfires that projected into the future how to kill an animal or recalled from the past how an animal was killed. Story is therefore an elemental aspect of human consciousness, a construction of consciousness, just as straight lines are also human artifacts, things out of consciousness rather than from nature. But a theory of straight lines has been available since Euclid while the nature of story is not well elaborated.
The classic and best description of story is provided by Aristotle who claims stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, however perplexing the fact that he does not explain what are the aspects of each of these three states, leaving them as experienced rather than defined. Even more perplexing is that none of the great ancient theorists, such as Loginus or Quintillion, developed the idea of story. What can be drawn from Aristotle’s formula is that an incident is not yet a story though it has a close resemblance. A group sitting around a campfire talking of their setting out from home toreach game and then killing a deer or a bear and then bringing it home to be roasted and eaten is not a story but just an incident even though it has three parts because it is just a sequence of events and so is a narrative and like William Golding’s cavemen in “The Inheritors” who think ahead of what might happen and so have a form of planning and so could recall and put into their lore how they went about hunting and so mastered the technology of hunting. For there to be a story, there has to be something extra: the three parts related to one another ironically or symbolically and so to offer meaning rather than just process, as if would happen if the hunting foray regarded the deer as having the spirit of a god, conquered but unconquerable.
The best that can be done in the Classical world is to notice that Ovid, the great anthropologist as well as poet, had made precise stories as the way to render Greek myths. Each had an original tension, some surprise transformation, and then the ensuing result of the transformation. Narcissus was over-preoccupied with his own beauty and so was symbolically and correctly objectified as falling in love with his reflection in a pool of water. Ovid extends the story by showing Narcissus to be confused by his inability to grasp the object of his affection. Ovid provides associated emotions and aspects of love in relating the story, but the climax, the crucial point of the story, is that Narcissus comes to recognize the image is a mirror of his and rather than rejecting it as a hopeless love, concepts it as the best love and after beating himself succumbs to death, the story including Echo who laments that choice and even in this short narration has hope that Narcissus will abandon his fate and remain in life. There is suspense in what seems doomed or inevitable and so the reader’s sense of poignancy and tragedy is intensified, however short the story. The arts of story embellish it by offering an elaboration of the context and texture of the story itself, so gifted is Ovid the storyteller.
A more modern view of story is that the beginning of a story is the initial situation, which is followed by a set of actions and developments that transform the situation, events that did not have to happen but make sense when they do, and so are as real as the choices people make in life all the time, and the end of the story is the set of consequences of these intervening events. The best examples of this sense of story is available in Shakespeare. Brutus decides to intervene in Roman politics just as Hamlet hesitates to intervene in Danish politics. While the fate of Macbeth is ordained, he himself is the one who engages in the actions which make him powerful, including the killing of Banquo, an action that follows him, whose memory he dreads, just as in “The Godfather Part Three'', Michael Corleone carries with him that he had his brother killed. An audience or reader is present with and attends to the significant action. That sense of being there is what makes the story engaging even if it is the recounting of a story long ago. You can go back to the days when Grendel, in “Beowulf”, was a menace even if in each retelling the story is refined to make it more palatable or more dramatic.The nature of story is to be there at the long ago, such being the power of imagination and art, even of stories that never happened.
But this account of story, however much it covers, by contrasting what seem current events with the situations that preceded it and followed it, does not cover a significant set of stories which, instead, focus on the anticipation of significant events rather than the telling of them, and these include the works often regarded as the benchmarks to be used in forming literary theory. Consider, for example, “Oedipus Rex'', as clearly the example of what must be a story. The central event in the play is not the marriage of his mother by Oedipus or the previous murder by Oedipus of his father. Rather, it is the anticipation of the unfolding of these events, the audience well aware that such will unfold in that everyone knows the story before seeing the play except maybe when it first was played and maybe not because it was an older myth reworked as a drama. The suspense in the play is how the current state of affairs unraveled with such events as the appearance of the shepherd who had hidden Oedipus and Tiresias telling everyone to hold back from learning the truth. The structure of the play relates, sees before the audience, the learning of these crucial events and so not the events themselves and so its structure is a beginning of glory followed by revelations that did not have to be done but somehow always maintain, which is what Freud thought, and a consequence of woe. The anxiety attendant to the play is not what happened but what will be recounted, audiences dwelling on what has already been and so like gothic tales like “Wuthering Heights” where the past casts its gloom on the present.
This same modified structure for story also applies to a central story of “Genesis'', that of Abraham and Isaac, where commentators center on the traditional story line and so focus on Abraham up with Isaac when the scapegoat emerges and so saves the day, which may mean God is merciful, when the real drama is Abraham anticipating what he is supposed to do and Isaac perhaps aware of what might happen to him in that he asks his father what sacrifice he will take and is told it will be provided for. Kierkegaard was onto this as a story of anticipation, the agony of the journey to the sacrificial place, the mixed emotions Abraham must endure as both a dutiful servant to God and as his own son about to be sacrificed, a deed more dreadful, I think, than merely killing one’s own father or having sex with one’s mother, but similar in that both of what seem the natural orders whereby people interact and already well identified as such three thousand years ago.
The classical idea of story is seen as an arc in that it heightens to a climax and then the drama dissipates in its resolution while a way to visualize a story of anticipation is to see either an incline or a decline that need not end. A good example of an arced story is Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” which in fact includes a number of stories contrasting the conditions of women in matters of love as their age changes, the young modest made eventually followed by the ravenous older woman, each of these stories having some crucial revealing event about the nature of her relationship to a man at her stage that sums up her condition as a woman. There are so many stories adjacent to one another in the story that they point to one another. An example of the story of anticipation is also in Dante’s “Inferno” where the individual stories are also short and reflect on one another but point to a descent from lovers wafting through the air without moorings, true enough as far as it goes, but avoiding the complexity whereby even conventional people well settled in their society and customs can also find love, but also anticipating the long decline till the betrayers like Judas and Brutus are imprisoned in ice so as to indicate and establish the worst form of Hell. Every step of the journey will indicate to Virgil and the reader that things are going to get even worse.
This contrast between the story as an arc and the story as a rise or decline is evident in the greatest writers of Nineteenth Century English novelists. Jane Austen is following Shakespeare in using a dramatic arc whereby Elizabeth realizes that she had been a poor judge of character in spite of her wit and straightforwardness because she had been taken in by Mr. Wickham and so was able to reevaluate Darcy especially because he had been there to rescue Lydia as best could be done. Action is less important as the dramatic climax than is a change in consciousness. Charles Dickens, on the other hand, presents a change of consciousness as occurring gradually in one direction that is both incline and decline in that Pip gradually becomes free of Esmeralda and makes up his own life rather than forever bound to his youthful fascination and so free of the romanticism which would think that young attachments are destined to be fulfilled in later events even though Pip only later learns that his benefactor was not Esmerelda’s own benefactor but the ex convict who later discovered had supported him but which Pip honorably treated when Pip found out about it. Pip is judged as an adult not his childhood and his childhood fantasies. Pip makes his way in the commercial world both despite and because of his youthful adventures which shows people to have free will rather than to be fated.
The predominance in the Nineteenth Century of anticipation as the way to organize stories, everyone on board and the reader knowing that Ahab would lead to disaster, allows in the Twentieth Century for the idea to be turned from a convention of literature into a theory of how social life is actually organized, the basis for sociology. Theorists argued that the glue that kept together social life wass the mutual accommodation of expectations, everyone made up of roles, such as wife, employee and indian chief, which meant that you could expect how people would behave and so be reliable, bakers offering bread in bakeries but not light bulbs, and women looking after husbands and children while engaging in bringing home the bread. It was unnecessary, as Durkheim thought, that violations of usual behavior had to be punished to allow the practices to remain. Just practicality enforced the idea that people acted according to their titles, doctors being doctors and children indulged in being childlike. Anticipation is all and violation of anticipation is just confusing. And that was the view of sociologists into the mid Twentieth Century with Merton and Parsons.
It is not surprising that sociologists would try to substitute or transform stories into objective generalizations or what properly can be called explanations, which are assertions of truth or falsity about the world rather than relating stories within the world. An explanation is a set of words or formulae which replace other words or observations as their equivalent or introduced meanings as when one says F=MA is a set of words that describe the relation of physical attributes just as saying “the path to evil is paved with good intentions” is an adage that generalizes what seems to be an ever present aspect of human morality. Adages, generalizations and formulae, such as Aristotle’s Golden Mean, are as old as Greek thought and apply to the nature of the physical and the social world, while Biblical culture emphasizes story with the exception of the idea of law itself, which like the God to which it is identified, is invisible and universal. But in the sixteenth century and onwards, explanation replaces story as the vehicle of understanding, becoming so primary that story becomes thought of as an entertainment or, at best, a way for lesser lights to appreciate life.
Stories of either sort, arced or inclined, allow but do not require explanations even though stories have been associated with meanings ever since Aesop’s fables added morals and every story is structured so that its basic processes can be treated as its meaning. Why Cain slew Abel is unanswerable even if people for millennia try to explain why it happened that Cain felt he had been unjustly treated by God for Cain’s offering. Similarly, a sense of what life is like in not just Ireland can be assessed by consulting “Ulysses”, But stories can stand on their own as a compendium of event sequences striking for their drama or poignancy without offering a moral even though the book of ruth is easily understood as how people follow customs and so manage a marriage rather than a disaster. Meanings are brought up by writers and critics but the story is inside itself a different kind of enterprise than just the making meanings.Stories therefore are not memoirs whereby authors do claim to find meaning in their adventures while stories are only true to being a recapitulation of a real or imaginary event as if the reader were present when it happened and so apart from and permanent in time. Stories are also part of time in that they mark changes over time and so is a way to observe the invisible nature of time itself except as whatever it is that causes of is caused through time. Story is therefore always metaphysical because it cannot elude the ideas of time and cause as well as the specificity of a particular story however many similar stories may take place. “The Good Earth” is about a typical peasant individualized by story into being a particular life even if Pearl Buck did not do a very good job at individuating Olan. Story, not the author, does the magic.
The first offered descriptions of readers and audiences to stories is to offer the topic, the moral and meaning of the story or maybe the genre of the story, such as tragedy, comedy or romance. “Oedipus Rex is “about”, as the expression goes, a man who kills his father and weds his mother, or has the moral that overreaching will lead to bad things, or that the story is a tragedy. But these are already abstracted observations about the story rather than engaging what makes the society able to be moving. To do so takes craft, the ability of a critic to penetrate through the meanings and categories, to notice the mechanisms that actually allow its emotions to be created and whose meaning can be overlain. “Oedipux Rex”, more accurately is about the plot devices whereby coincidence can lead to murder and incest and the ironies of reversals and the horror of what is gradually unfolding to the audience. The critic looks at what is most primitive or basic rather than of just its significance. For otherwise, literature is just a puzzle in which a meaning is the reward for having unraveled a story rather than something compelling in itself.
So the conclusion is that stories remain with us even if meanings and explanations are out to replace them and have done so since he Scientific Revolution where stories are regarded as cumbersome and misleading and crude versions of explanation, the wonders of national monuments explained by geological and climate forces rather than experiencing their own grandeur for themselves alone, just as myths and other stories are grand even if man made.
Here is an example of how stories and explanations can coincide in that they accomplish different purposes and so, despite the long reign of the preference for scientific explanation, explanations are not likely to replace story as a form of intellectual endeavor. People can offer any number of explanations for their religious beliefs. People have available to them various proofs of God and treatises about why God had to make history happen as well as persuasive arguments as to why, for example, abortion is a violation of God’s teaching. But oftentimes when people speak of why they really came to engage with religion, they become candid by telling the story about how they came to their road to Damascus rather than the reasons that are publicly and generally available to support religious conviction . A person says he risked death because of war or illness and that made it important to find something important and external to themselves as the basis for a positive way of life. A person might contemplate the awesomeness of the universe and need a story to place oneself within it so as not to feel lonely. A person, like Stephan Daedelus in Joyce’s “The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” , might trace the tribulations of experience that led them to faith. The story is a substitute for an explanation and seems more accurate as an arc of development from anxiety to epiphany to peace than would the explanations adopted so as to justify religious belief as an afterthought, a rationalization rather than a cause.
The same preference for story over explanation as if story were more truthful though more exactly being a different sort of thing happens when a person “explains” how they got a profession or a spouse by telling the story of how it happened rather than offering the concomitant circumstances that led to becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a bricklayer. You met a girl and found the reasons she was attractive at the same time when you felt your own need to settle down. The particulars matter rather than they are within a set of parameters. And, not by the way, it is easier to fashion a story than it is to list variables