Author: Simon Sheridan

In last week’s post, we made the case for why every story is a transformation that requires the hero to relinquish their old identity and make the transition to something new. It follows that every story requires a sacrifice. Traditional religious sacrifice is relevant here since it involves giving up something of value in order to attain something else of value. Of course, the modern economy is predicated on the same principle. You sacrifice your time to work in order to get money to buy some other things that you want.

Although society attempts to fix the exchange rates of such sacrifices, in the greatest transformations and stories, the hero can’t know in advance what they are sacrificing or what they will get in return. It’s for this reason that Joseph Campbell called the beginning of a story a “call to adventure”. It’s an adventure because we don’t know exactly where it’s going to take us. The sacrifice is the price to be paid for taking the call to adventure. But, again, the sacrifice the hero thinks they are making and the one they end up making are rarely the same thing. Every story is a journey into the unknown.

It follows from this that the most fundamental question of interpretation for any story is, ‘What is the hero sacrificing and what may they get in return?’ We will think of this in terms of the “identity” of the hero, using that concept in its broadest possible fashion to include any attribute or property of human nature. Sacrifices that involve property are part of our identity because property is part of our identity. But the more fundamental transformations of life always involve something more esoteric, such as a challenge to our worldview or our understanding of who we are as a person.

The concept of transformation therefore touches on some of the biggest questions of existence. If life is a series of transformations, then it follows that our identity is always changing. That is self-evidently true. Our physical appearance changes. Our beliefs change. Our social position changes. But as philosophical and religious thinkers have long known, transformation implies some kind of enduring entity which is doing the changing. In the Western tradition, this is normally called the “soul”, but we might just as well call it the “will” or the “I”. We can contrast this with the notion of the “self”, which we will use to denote the set of qualities which make up our identity. Thus, another way to describe the transformation process is that we sacrifice the old self in order to create a new self.

Although transformations can be truly existential in nature, it is also true that everyday life is full of countless smaller transformations that we barely pay attention to. Nevertheless, the pattern of these transformations is identical to the greatest existential crises. This is an important point to recognise because it maps to the difference between the everyday kinds of stories we tell each other and the great works of literature. Both of these have the same underlying structure. The difference is only in the magnitude the transformation that the hero goes through. Let’s take an example from everyday life to demonstrate this fact.

The hero of our story is Bob. Bob hauls himself out of bed in the morning, visits the bathroom, and then staggers bleary-eyed to the kitchen for his regular bowl of breakfast cereal, hoping that the blood-sugar injection will kickstart his brain into gear. He throws open the fridge door and reaches for the milk bottle, more by instinct than by conscious awareness. It is also instinct that signals to Bob’s brain that something is wrong. The bottle is too light. He holds it up to his bloodshot eyes and confirms the worst. Bob has run out of milk.

Although we would never think of it this way in the daily course of life, Bob has stumbled into a transformation that needs to be resolved one way or another. Our first question to understand the transformation is to identify the hero’s holy state, meaning the world which they understand and know how to navigate.

Bob eats a bowl of cereal for breakfast every day. It is part of his daily routine and therefore a component of his identity. That identity is in holy state because there is an abundance of breakfast cereal available at Bob’s local supermarket, and there is no inner compunction driving Bob to call his eating habit into question. The fact that Bob can stagger into the kitchen still half-asleep in order to eat his cereal is further proof that he is in holy state. He barely needs to pay attention to what he is doing.

Because we are using the concept of “identity” in the widest possible fashion, we also say that Bob’s identity includes his mental model of the world. In that mental model, there is a bottle in his fridge that has enough milk in it to enable Bob to eat breakfast. It is this mistaken belief which becomes the trigger for Bob’s transformation. That trigger is the next crucial point of analysis we need in order to understand the transformation that Bob is going through. It is what we call the sacrifice. Part of Bob’s identity has been called into question. That forces him out of holy state and into what we call sacred state. The sacrifice is the transition point between these states and is usually what we think of as the beginning of a story.

The first thing that gets sacrificed in Bob’s story is his mental model of the world. His belief that there is milk in the fridge has been proven incorrect. This forces Bob into an identity crisis, which sounds hyperbolic in this context, but which simply means that Bob needs to make a decision about what to do next. Note that any decision that Bob makes involves a further sacrifice. For example, he may decide to drive to the supermarket and buy more milk. That requires a sacrifice of time, energy, and money. He may decide to look in the cupboard for something else to eat. That requires a sacrifice of his plan to eat breakfast cereal. He may decide to skip eating altogether, meaning he is sacrificing the entire notion of breakfast.

This highlights another quality of the transformation process which is that the initial sacrifice always leads to a greater sacrifice. What was a minuscule little factual error in Bob’s mental model of the world becomes something more tangible. But we can say the same thing using the more positive terminology of Joseph Campbell. Bob has been given an opportunity to try something new. That is his call to adventure. How adventurous Bob might get with his breakfast dilemma is partly a function of his character and partly a function of the world he lives in. In any case, Bob needs to make a decision and then to implement it. Only once he has done that does he return to holy state with the matter of breakfast resolved for the day.

One of the core characteristics of any transformation is what we have called the ‘sacred state’, and we have said that the sacred state always carries a degree of uncertainty and risk. It follows that any transformation, however insignificant it may seem, can lead to unexpected outcomes. Bob’s breakfast crisis may be the least likely to lead to anything novel, and yet it is still possible that his run-in with randomness could create a lasting identity change.

For example, let’s say Bob decides to skip breakfast altogether. By mid-morning, he realises that he feels much better than normal because the blood sugar crash he usually experiences doesn’t happen. He resolves to skip breakfast permanently. Or maybe Bob decides to have breakfast at a local café, gets talking to a pretty woman he meets while there, ends up dating, and then marrying her (there must be a Hollywood movie with this plotline). What might have been a temporary change of identity becomes something more permanent. Every transformation has this potential.

The magnitude of any transformation cannot be known with certainty in advance. However, it is true that any story we tell about what has happened must be proportional to the transformation that has occurred, meaning that a transformation of great magnitude requires an equally long and complex story in order to do it justice. That is why the everyday kinds of stories that we tell each other are usually of the level of intensity of Bob’s breakfast tale. Since we don’t normally have much time to tell stories in our daily lives, we limit our everyday storytelling to these kinds of episodes.

Nevertheless, all of us will still go through major transformations in our own lives. Most of us don’t have the time or the skills to put these transformations into stories. That is where skilled practitioners such as authors, playwrights, screenwriters, and songwriters come into the picture. Seemingly every culture has one or more specialised roles for those who are able to communicate the major transformations of life. Although those stories are not about us personally, they capture something about the larger transformations that we may go through. That is why they resonate with us.

If a transformation is always about sacrifice, risk, uncertainty, and reward, it follows that the larger magnitude transformations of life turn all of these variables up to 11, and those who confront them are forced to grapple with the greatest challenges. If that is true, then it is also true that those who tell these kinds of stories must also grapple with those challenges, at least in the sense of finding a way to express them properly. Only those who are capable of seeing what has happened may make sense of it. But this doesn’t require actual sight but a kind of inner vision, hence the trope that mythical storytellers are often blind. Their ability to “see” transcends the facts of the matter and reveals the deeper truths beneath the surface.

For these reasons and more, the most popular fictional stories of any era serve as the best guide to the worldview of the people they represent. Our interpretive model is just as applicable to these kinds of stories because they have the same structure as an everyday story. In the next post in this series, we will begin to apply the model to Shakespeare’s Henry IV and see what it has to tell us about modern Western culture. But, as a preview to that, let’s briefly look at an important fictional story from a completely different cultural background: an Australian Aboriginal dreamtime myth.  

The hero is called Yirbaik-baik. She is an old woman that keeps a large pack of dingoes and has trained them to eat humans. More importantly, Yirbaik-baik also eats humans. Although aboriginal culture allowed for ceremonial cannibalism, cannibalism for food was forbidden. Therefore, Yirbaik-baik is breaking a taboo.

The story itself is short and simple. Yirbaik-baik lures a group of hunters into a trap and then unleashes her dingoes who kill the men and eat them. In retaliation, the families of the dead men kill Yirbaik-baik and her dingoes. The dingoes turn into tiger snakes, while Yirbaik-baik turns into a small brown bird which is known to call out during drought. (Note: as with most myths, there are multiple versions of this story. The one I am using is taken from this book).

Our first questions to begin to interpret this story are:

• What is the starting holy state of the hero?
• What is the sacrifice they make to begin their transformation?
• What do they hope to gain?

In the case of Yirbaik-baik, she is already in sacred state when the story begins because she has become a cannibal and a pariah. Nevertheless, we can fill in her implied holy state because she is an old woman and there must have been a time earlier in her life when she was not a cannibal. If that were not the case, then she would have been put to death well before reaching old age. Therefore, it is implied that Yirbaik-baik was once a normal woman and a functioning member of her tribe. That is the her starting holy state.

The next question is what sacrifice did Yirbaik-baik make and what did she hope to gain in return? The sacrifice is self-evident. She gave up being a normal woman and became a pariah. What she hoped to gain in return is also self-evident: she wanted food. That leads to a further question: why has Yirbaik-baik given up the normal food she once ate in order to eat human flesh?

To answer this, we need to expand a little on the starting holy state to include not just Yirbaik-baik as an individual but also the society in which she lives. In that society, there is a form of cannibalism that is perfectly normal. When a person dies, the family of the deceased eat some of their flesh because it is believed that you ingest their manna, or spirit, by doing so. That is a normal part of the mourning process and therefore something that everybody in that society will experience. Since Yirbaik-baik is an old woman, it is guaranteed that she will have engaged in this kind of ceremonial cannibalism multiple times in her life.

Once we understand that, we can better understand the nature of the sacrifice she has made. The taboo that Yirbaik-baik has broken is not around eating human flesh as such. Rather, it is about doing so for the wrong reasons. In her society, human flesh is not eaten for material but for spiritual nourishment. You eat the flesh in order to imbibe the spirit (the Christian rite of Eucharist stems from a related idea). Yirbaik-baik has begun eating flesh for food. This implies not just a moral but a spiritual transgression on her part.

There is still the question to be answered: why would she do that? The story tells us implicitly by equating Yirbaik-baik with dingoes. She has not just become estranged from her society, she has taken up living with these pack animals. Dingoes are carnivores and will happily eat human flesh if the opportunity arises. Clearly, dingoes do not eat humans for spiritual purposes but for food. Yirbaik-baik has become like them. She is no longer eating human flesh in order to imbibe manna. She is eating for food, just like a dingo. In a very real way, Yirbaik-baik has become a dingo.

Here we need to factor in yet more cultural background. The theology of Australian Aboriginals is what is sometimes called animalism, meaning they see little fundamental difference between human and animal spirits. As part of this belief system, Aboriginals have a totem animal, which signifies a kind of kinship or spiritual relation. However, it is still unacceptable to behave in accordance with the negative traits of the animal. If your spirit animal is a dingo, that doesn’t give you the right to eat humans. Moreover, dingoes are not usually capable of hunting humans alone, and the story tells us that Yirbaik-baik has trained them to do so. Therefore, she is leading them astray as well as herself.

Yirbaik-baik’s sacrifice is to give up her status as a human member of the tribe in order to transform into a negative manifestation of a dingo. What she has done is to break the law and bring herself into conflict with her society. This is another very common theme in stories from around the world, and it forms the sacred part of the story which, as we remember, is where the hero’s identity becomes un-whole, unholy, and unhealthy. Yirbaik-baik has broken the laws of her tribe. While she is an outlaw, we say that her identity is in sacred state. It must be brought back to some kind of holy state.

The final step in every story is the return to holy state where the hero attains a new identity that is stable and secure, but not necessarily the one they wanted. Yirbaik-baik may have thought she would become a dingo, but that is not how it ends for her. Her final transformation is to be killed by the tribe and then to turn into a bird. This resolves the transformation and returns the situation to holy state in multiple ways.

Firstly, Yirbaik-baik is brought to justice for her crimes. Secondly, her transformation into a bird is fitting with Aboriginal concepts of what happens to the spirit after death, which is a return to the eternal dreamtime state. Yirbaik-baik’s final transformation is to become a force of nature represented in an ongoing fashion by her association with a species of bird.

It is because of these symbolic meanings with deep resonances with the Aboriginal worldview that stories like those of Yirbaik-baik are called “myths”. However, every story implies a background of theological and cultural beliefs. Even Bob’s breakfast adventure contains a web of connections that we normally call “culture”. The return to holy state at the end of the story is always a kind of affirmation about how the world is because the transformation that has occurred creates that world to some extent.

We can see, then, that both the holy and sacred state of the hero of a story is never just about their individual lives but also about the society and culture in which they live. Every transformation has a culturally specific element, both in the objective nature of the events that happen and in the way in which the storyteller understands them. This is another reason why the great stories of any culture provide such insight, because they communicate in detail what both the storyteller and the audience understand to be real.

With that in mind, we are now ready to tackle Shakespeare, who is so valuable not just because he is a genius-level storyteller but because his work sits at the pivot point of what was the major transformation in Western culture that still dominates in our time.

Henry IV is not normally considered one of his top tier plays, but it does reveal a new kind of character and a novel resolution to his story. As we noted last week, the true hero of Henry IV is not the king but his son, Hal. Hal’s transformation also brings him into conflict with the society in which he lives. Unlike Yirbaik-baik, however, Hal will not be brought back into line by others, but by his own will. His story implies notions of self-creation and self-authoring, which is a fundamental theme in Shakespeare and which has become fundamental in modern Western culture. We’ll see all this and more as we begin our analysis next week.

Following on from my recent series of posts on stories and transformations, I thought it would be better to change tack from the theoretical side of things and demonstrate the ideas in a more concrete form by way of an analysis of one of the stories I left out of my recent book on Shakespeare: Henry IV. We’ll get to the details of the story in future posts. What we need to do first is to lay out the method of interpretation we will be using.

In some respects, the method is very simple. We start by recognising what both Aristotle and Joseph Campbell discovered independently two and half millennia apart: stories are always about the transformation of the hero’s identity. Furthermore, transformation has its own logic, which begins with an event that sets the hero on the path towards their new identity and ends with either its attainment or the failure to attain it.

Given the universal appearance of storytelling in the cultures of the world, it is clear that people intuitively understand the structure of a story. We are “in a story” to the extent that a process of transformation is underway. The story ends when the transformation ends, meaning the hero has attained a new identity, although not necessarily the one they thought they were getting.

If every story is a transformation, our fundamental method of analysis to get to the heart of its meaning is to utilise the logic of transformation. This does not negate any of the other qualities we can admire in stories, such as the poetry of the language, the vividness of description, etc. These are all valid in their own way. But our assertion here is that stories are first and foremost about transformation, and that is where the core meaning is to be found. To understand the transformation properly, we need to know how to unpack its logic.

At an abstract level, the transformation process is always the same. The hero begins in what we will call holy state. The word “holy” is related to the word “whole”. It means the hero’s identity is stable, secure, and complete. The society in which the hero lives recognises no deficiency, and the hero has no internal desire for change. They are in a world they understand and know how to navigate.

In order to begin the transformation, the hero must leave the holy state by sacrificing some part of their starting identity. The sacrifice does not need to be consciously understood or deliberately initiated. In fact, most of the time, transformation happens to us whether we like it or not, meaning that the sacrifice is forced upon us. If you are made redundant from your job, you enter the transformation we call “unemployment”. It’s not a sacrifice you wanted to make, but you will have to deal with the consequences nonetheless.

Once the sacrifice is made, the hero enters what we call sacred state. The word “sacred” means “to make holy”. While we are in sacred state, we are striving to get back to holiness, to attain a new identity that is once again stable and complete. Sticking with the redundancy theme, unemployment is the loss of your former identity as an employee of whatever company you were working for. The transformation to unemployment involves the sacrifice of your old job leaving you without an economic identity. Your identity has been made un-whole. There is a gap that needs to be filled.

For a person who is a wage earner that doesn’t have any other source of income or a large amount of savings in the bank, unemployment is not a state that can be ignored. It is possible to pretend that everything’s okay. Indeed, this kind of dissociation is quite common. But a failure to find a new identity (a new job) will only lead to even larger problems later on. Once we are in sacred state, a transformation is going to happen whether we like it or not. We can consciously accept that and try to influence the outcome, or we can dissociate and let events dictate it for us. In this respect, the transformation process aligns to what has traditionally been called “fate”.

This leads to another characteristic of the sacred state of a transformation: there is an irreducible degree of uncertainty and risk involved. The loss of a job may be a minor inconvenience if you find a new one quickly. If you fail to do so, it can spiral into something much more profound. Anybody who doubts that is free to look up the statistics that correlate long-term unemployment with divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and a range of other problems.

It is precisely because of the inherent uncertainty and risk involved that stories resonate with us because we understand intuitively that the hero is in danger until the matter is resolved. The greater the potential transformation, the greater the risk and danger to the hero. That is why the most memorable stories usually feature a hero whose life is in danger, since that is the highest sacrifice that any of us can make. It is the final transformation.

The sacred state constitutes the main body of any story. The hero must struggle to create for themselves a new identity. The story comes to an end when they have attained a new holy state on the other side of the sacred, meaning they have gained a new identity. For our unfortunate employee who was made redundant, the most common resolution is to find another job. The transformation resolves as a change of employer.

But note that all kinds of other outcomes are possible. A failure to find a new job may force the individual to try something completely different, such as returning to study, trying to retire, starting their own business, or any number of other options depending on their circumstances. In these cases, the transformation process becomes longer and more difficult and only resolves once the new identity has been stabilised into a new holy state.

Since every story is about transformation, every storyteller must describe the process we have just outlined by showing the starting holy state of the hero, the sacrifice they make to enter the sacred part of the journey, and their return to holy state at the end with a new identity. These are the “rules” of storytelling. The rules are very similar to those of grammar in that they may be broken for effect and even stories that are “ungrammatical” can still be understood to some extent.

There are a couple of key points to make about this. It is perfectly possible to write a narrative that does not describe the transformation of a hero. In fact, a great deal of what is considered “high art” in the modern world revolves around avoiding the telling of a story. Thus, not every work of literature or art is a “story” as we have defined it. Furthermore, life itself is not composed entirely of transformation. There are religious and philosophical schools which deny transformation or which see the purpose of life in transcending it. Not everything is a transformation, and therefore not everything is a story. Nevertheless, to the degree that a story is being told, it must follow the pattern just described.

Some people may disagree with this approach on the grounds that it is “reductionist”. In fact, the opposite is true. There are several reasons for this.

The first is that every transformation is about the identity of the hero, and we are using the term “identity” in the widest possible fashion to include everything that is involved in being human. Since we don’t have any definitive understanding of what a human being is, it is not possible for this approach to be reductionist. In fact, the very process of transformation often shows us something that we didn’t previously understand. All learning is a transformation, and therefore transformation is the process of discovering new aspects of human nature.

It’s also the case that, even though we may come up with some useful categories of identity, a human being is a whole entity whose wholeness transcends any of the more specific properties we may ascribe. Thus, a change in just one property may have cascading and unpredictable effects. The loss of a job is not a mere change of social status. It comes with all kinds of internal emotions. It changes our relationship with others, especially if we are married. It may lead us to re-evaluate our entire worldview. The sacred state of a transformation is inherently unpredictable. Therefore, transformation can never be reductionist.

Note also that the kinds of identity that an individual may have are fundamentally tied in with the kind of society in which they live. The identity of “employee” is specific to modern Western society. It did not exist in feudal times. It did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome. It may be that similar roles have existed in other civilisations, but the evidence is scant. Therefore, the transformation of unemployment is itself specific to the modern West. Even then, it has changed significantly over time. Nowadays, destitution as a result of unemployment is mostly mitigated by way of the welfare safety net. Thus, becoming unemployed in the modern world is very different from what it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Transformations have both a dynamic inner nature and a highly specific cultural aspect too.

But the most important reason why transformation can never be reductionist is because it is the very process by which something new is ushered into the world. The social role of employee must have begun at some time. From there, it must have grown in prominence until it arrived at the near universality it enjoys today. In fact, we know in great detail how that happened because it coincided with the enormous social transformation that came with industrial capitalism. Along the way, countless people lost their identity as feudal peasants and took up the new identity of employee. A new kind of society was thereby created.

It’s also the case that any individual transformation, while it can result in a number of negative outcomes, may also give rise to something new. It’s a very common story in the lives of notable individuals that they used the disappointment that came from being fired from a job to go on and create not just something new in their own lives but something that changed their society too. The great historian Arnold Toynbee believed that all major historical turning points are born out of this kind of crisis that leads to a novel transformation on the part of a single individual.

Thus, not only are transformations inherently non-reductionist, but we have barely begun to understand the transformations that have taken place in the past, and there is little agreement about how and why those transformations took place. Aristotle’s belief that history could be captured in story form was predicated on his implied understanding that history is made up of transformation. However, the great philosopher also stated that fictional works were better suited for this purpose because storytellers did not get bogged down in the details but were free to explore the more abstract meanings.

Indeed, it’s true that the great fictional storytellers of any age are able to intuit and then communicate the subtleties that go unnoticed in everyday life. Therefore, it is perfectly valid to use great literature as a form of historical analysis. Shakespeare provides an unusually clear case since he sits at the turning point where the modern West emerged from the medieval world and Renaissance. By investigating the kinds of transformations he puts his characters through and how they differ from the fictional works that preceded them, we gain a deep insight into the worldview which is still dominant in our time.

And that is what we will be doing in this series of posts. By analysing Shakespeare’s work from the point of view of transformation, we not only gain a better understanding of the meaning of those works individually, we open up new perspectives on the nature of transformation, especially as it changes as a culture evolves. Shakespeare’s stories are perfectly suited for such an analysis because his plays are entirely about the transformation of the hero. There is not a word spoken or an action undertaken that does not impact upon the hero’s journey. This is in contrast to the more sprawling works of Dickens or Dostoevsky, for example. Their stories are also fundamentally rooted in the transformation of the hero, but the transformation takes place in a far less condensed form.

But the thing that sets Shakespeare’s heroes apart from those of other great writers is the degree to which they are conscious of the transformation they are going through because they deliberately choose it for themselves. Every Shakespearean hero consciously relinquishes their old identity and strives for a new one. To understand their journey, we must follow the pattern described in this post by first identifying the holy state at the start of the story, then finding the sacrifice that signals the transition into sacred state, and, finally, understanding the path that returns to holy state with the attainment of a new identity. In the case of Hal in Henry IV, the story is a comedy, which means that the prince successfully makes it to the other side, unlike his fellow Shakespearean adolescent heroes Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet.

We’ll begin unpacking Hal’s journey in two weeks’ time. Next week, however, we’ll need to spend some time bedding down our method of interpretation by showing how the model of transformation just presented can be used to interpret nominally different kinds of stories.

The physics and metaphysics of Aristotle might seem like the last place to look to enhance our understanding of stories, but there are several good reasons to do so. The first is simply that he, along with Plato, represents the foundation of the Western intellectual tradition and is therefore the primary source of our attempts to understand anything. His influence on our thinking is still profound.

The second reason is that Aristotle’s philosophy is what is sometimes called ‘realist’ in that he believed that the reality we perceive is reality as it is. By contrast, the dominant philosophy of our time is what we can call scepticism, whereby we assume that reality is not what we perceive and never can be. The schismatic nature of our thinking follows from this. It is also why our default position is that stories are just mental constructs with no necessary relation to “the real world”.

What we can obtain from viewing stories through the prism of Aristotle’s philosophy is more context about where stories fit in the grander scheme of things. Aristotle was correct that they belong to “nature”. But, more specifically, stories are a subset of nature. To understand that, we need to know more about what Aristotle meant by the term “nature”. Fortunately, this is quite straightforward because it maps to a distinction between what he called first and second philosophy. First philosophy later earned the title metaphysics, while second philosophy was physics. However, the Greek word for “physics” is better translated into modern English as “nature”. Therefore, stories belong to the category of second philosophy.

Second philosophy is concerned with how things in nature change and grow. It is about transformation, while first philosophy is about things that are eternal and do not change. Another way to say the same thing is that first philosophy is about being and second philosophy is about becoming.

Thus, when Aristotle says that a story should imitate nature, he is saying that a story should accurately represent the manner in which things change and transform in the real world. But in order to know how something has changed, we must first know what it is. Therefore, we need both perspectives. We need metaphysics to determine the identity of a thing in the first place and natural philosophy to figure out how it changes.

In the modern world, we study the nature of change and transformation via all the various sciences. Physics is concerned with change in position, biology with changes resulting from life processes, economics and sociology with changes resulting from social considerations, and so on. Most of these disciplines were already presupposed in Aristotle’s work on second philosophy, which is why he can be said to be the father of modern science. However, as we have already alluded to, Aristotle took a more holistic approach in comparison to modern science. He was concerned with the broader principles of transformation and change.

Although we don’t need to get into the details, there is one of these principles that is directly relevant to our understanding of stories and which Joseph Campbell discovered by coming at the problem from a completely different perspective more than two millennia later. Aristotle found that transformation in nature is always grounded in what he called “privation”. Every change begins with the absence of the state that the changes denote. This is logically a tautology, but its explanatory power becomes clear when you realise that there are many different kinds of privation, each related to the kind of thing that is going to change. A rock does not transform in the same way that a human does.

To take an example, we could say a child lacks biological maturity. The transformation of puberty is born out of that privation. Similarly, a caterpillar has not yet become a butterfly. It lacks that mature state. The transformation is born out of privation but it also implies a sacrifice on the part of the thing undergoing the change. A butterfly never goes back to being a caterpillar. An adult never returns to childhood. Even a change of physical location requires a sacrifice. In order to be here, I cannot be there. This gives us two principles of every transformation: we gain what was previously denied us, but we lose what we previously had.

These general principles of change and becoming hold in all of nature. They also apply to stories, which are a subset of natural transformations. In fact, stories very often centre around the major transformations that we go through in life. For example, Joseph Campbell realised was that many popular folk stories from around the world are about the transformation of puberty. They don’t literally describe the process, but they convey it in metaphorical terms.

Thus, what Josephy Campbell termed the “call to adventure” is the other side of the coin to what Aristotle called “privation”. Every transformation in nature has these properties. The difference lies in the kind of thing that is being transformed. Human beings are not the same as amoeba. The transformations we go through are far more varied.

And that is ultimately what a story is. A story is always about the transformation that a human being is going through. As far as I’m aware, there are no stories about amoebas and I’m quite sure that, if there were, they wouldn’t be very popular. Stories are about human transformation and they encompass the full range of identity that a human can have, including physical, biological, psychological, social, economic, political, spiritual, etc.

Unlike modern science, which divides each of these transformations into different categories and studies them separately, a story is holistic. A biological transformation is never just biological because a human being is not merely biological. We don’t experience the world in clearly demarcated categories. We experience it with our whole being and that means a biological transformation is never just that, in the same way that an economic or political transformation is never just that. The schismatic nature of our modern science denies these holistic realities, and that is why stories end up being closer to Aristotle’s natural philosophy than modern science.

As Aristotle said, stories must imitate nature, which means that stories must convey the transformation of the subject. That is true for the everyday kinds of stories we tell all the way up to the great stories of any culture. They are all about transformation and they are all based in some privation that is affecting the hero. Prince Hamlet is deprived of his father via murder and then his rightful place on the throne via political subterfuge. Romeo and Juliet are deprived of the possibility of consummating their love in marriage due to the enmity between their families. Iago is deprived of a promotion to lieutenant by Othello. He retaliates by depriving Othello of his chance of a happy marriage. Macbeth is deprived of the possibility of attaining the throne via lawful means.

Stories are the subset of all “natural” transformations that feature human beings. More specifically, as Joseph Campbell discovered, stories are always about the transformation of a specific hero. Great works of art can feature multiple characters, but each of them is the hero of their own journey, meaning each is going through their own transformation.

Putting it together, we get the following definition:-

A story describes the process by which the hero’s identity is transformed.

That may sound simple, but remember that Aristotle wrote two entire books discussing the meaning of identity (metaphysics/first philosophy) and transformation (nature/second philosophy). Fortunately, we don’t need to get tangled up in millennia-old questions of philosophy. Instead, we can approach the subject the other way around and ask the question, ‘What do stories have to tell us about identity and transformation?’ We’ll do that next week.

The definition of a story that pretty much everybody seems to agree on is that it is a collection of events combined together in some form. Thus, if we want to get to the essence of what a story is, we first need to ask the question: what is an event?

The meaning of event in general language is similar to occurrence, occasion, or happening. Most people would agree that an event is discrete, meaning that it must have a clearly defined start and end point. That’s certainly how we organise things when we put on an event. A wedding ceremony, a party, a concert, the voting in an election – these are all events, and they typically have well-defined beginnings and ends.

Not everything in the world is an event. As a first approximation, we can say that anything continuous is not an event. This follows logically from our definition of events as discrete. Waves crashing on a beach, clouds floating across the sky, the motion of the heavenly bodies – these are not events because they have no start or end point.

A tree falling in the forest would seem to be an event, since there is a start and an end time. But everybody knows the famous thought experiment about trees falling in a forest. If nobody perceives the event, did it really happen?

Th notion of an observer to an event sits at the heart of modern physics. The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics explicitly incorporate the observer or potential observer into the model. In fact, in some versions of quantum mechanics, reality is almost entirely predicated on the observer. An event does not exist until some observer is there to observe it.

There’s a more straightforward example of how an observer can create an event. The sun’s journey across the sky is a function of the earth’s rotation. Therefore, it is a continuous process and not an event. However, a person may decide to go and watch the sunset. The act of setting aside time to do that creates an event because the person’s arrival at the location is the start time and the disappearance of the sun beyond the horizon is the end point.

Thus, it’s possible to turn a continuous process into an event by simply deciding in our minds to do so. You could sit on the beach watching the waves and think to yourself, “The event starts now.” Later, you decide, “The event stops now.” Is this any less of an event than one that happens “naturally”? Is this any less of an “experiment” than one which aims to measure things that happened between the start and finish?

Note that this approach contrasts with the kind of practice that comes from Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, which are about attuning yourself to the continuous aspects of existence. “Emptying your mind” could then be seen as not imposing start and end points on things. You don’t try to create discrete events, you “go with the flow”. Once again, the question of what is discrete or continuous seems to rely on the observer.

For now, let’s set aside questions of observers and how events get created and just define an event as a “discrete occasion that has a beginning, middle, and an end”. We contrast this against the continuous aspects of existence.

Now that we know what an event is, we are a ready to understand how a story can be a “collection of events”. But think about it. Doesn’t a story have a beginning, middle, and end? And isn’t that the exact definition of an event?

The answer is yes. Thus, if we go all the way back to Aristotle in Poetics, we find this definition of a story:

“Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, whole…A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

A story is discrete like an event, and it has a beginning, middle, and end like an event, but a story has a different form which confers on the events that constitute it qualitatively different properties. Thus, per Aristotle, the event which begins a story:

“…is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.”

This is quite an extraordinary sentence, so let’s say it again. The event that begins a story does not “follow anything by causal necessity”. Remember that all of modern science is concerned with demonstrating causal necessity. Aristotle knew perfectly well what that meant, but he is here claiming that a story begins with something that is not a causal necessity. A story begins with something “new”. That is our first approximation for knowing when a story has started.

In relation to how a story ends, Aristotle says it is terminated by an event:

“…which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.”

The final event follows naturally from the first but triggers no subsequent causality. Aristotle is not saying that the end of a story does not have any effects afterwards, just that the final event terminates the internal logic and structure of the story. Whatever new state of being began with the event that started the story has now resolved itself one way or another. Any events which follow cannot be part of the story.

Thus, we can sum up our first approximation of the definition of a story as a chain of events that brings something new into the world. The story begins with the arrival of the new complex whole and describes the manner in which it comes to fulfilment.

A story is therefore its own discrete chain of causality, but not in the material sense of modern science. Aristotle had a much wider definition in accordance with his understanding of “physics” as being about “nature”. Modern physics is concerned with measurement, experiment, and material causality. In order to achieve that, it abstracts events and objects down into simple points. Aristotle was talking about “nature”, and that means he was trying to account for growth, change, and motion in relation to natural wholes, not to individual particles or objects that behave like them. That’s why his version of an event is larger and more complex than modern physics and that is why it is not amenable to measurement.

It’s also why there is almost no distinction between Aristotle’s understanding of physics and of stories. For Aristotle, art was good art to the extent that it exactly imitated life and therefore presented causality as we find it in nature. More than two millennia later, the Romantic movement of the 19th century would rediscover the same idea, and it did so largely in opposition to modern physics.

Thus, Aristotle sees no important distinction between a fictional story and a story about the real world:-

“It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen – what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The word of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. ”

Whether a story is about real events or fictional ones, it has the same properties, i.e. the same relations hold between the events which constitute the story. Thus, “nature” is full of stories since stories are about the events in nature which bring some new thing into existence. (Note that I am using “thing” here in order to be deliberately vague. Things can include events, objects, properties etc. The new “thing” can also be the destruction of an existing thing).

It’s for this reason that we find a fact which is hard for us even to imagine in the modern West because of the split between physics and art that began with the scientific revolution. Because stories are natural, our main point of reference in Aristotle is not his work on Poetics but on Physics (physik just meant “nature” in Greek). For Aristotle, stories and physics are both concerned with growth and transformation, properties which deliberately are left out of modern physics.

That’s why our next port of call as we continue to build our understanding of what a story is almost the last place anybody would look for it these days, namely, one of the founding texts of Western science – Aristotle’s Physics. We’ll see what it has to teach us next week.