Stories and Transformations: Part 2

Most people have probably heard the one about how Eskimos have a heap of different words that all refer to snow. This is meant to prove that language adapts to reflect the needs of the speakers. If you live in the subarctic, you get to know snow pretty well, and you need to talk about it a lot.

If that’s true, what can we surmise from the fact that the English language has about the same number of words that mean “story” as the Eskimos have for “snow”? Here’s a list:-

Story, fable, legend, myth, tale, fairy tale, folktale, saga, epic, memoir, history, parable, biography, autobiography, narrative, account, anecdote, yarn, spiel, novel, novella, short story, plot, parable, apologue, chronicle, drama, tragedy, and romance.

Then there’s a bunch of words that are as good as stories:-

Report, record, deposition, recitation, testament, tip, gossip, tidbit, message, rumour, hearsay, scuttlebutt, and scoop.

A big part of the reason why we have so many damned words that all mean basically the same thing is because modern English has three main sources of linguistic inheritance: ancient Greek, Latin, and old English-Germanic. The majority of the words listed above come from Latin and Greek. “Saga” is the odd one out, as it came from Norse and must have arrived in England with the Vikings. Although, note that “saga” simply means “story”. So, we’ve inherited the words for “story” from four different languages.

As is usual in modern English, the words that actually come down from old English or Germanic have a common, “lower-class” connotation because the intellectual language for most of modern European history was Latin. Therefore, the English words for “story” never got used in the serious business of academic research. But even the everyday word “story” is itself derived from the Latin “historia”.

Just as we have inherited this profusion of words that all relate to some kind of story, we also have a number of different scholarly disciplines which study them. Among these are mythology (myth, saga, epic), literature (novel, novella, drama, tragedy, romance), theology (legend, biography), literary criticism, history, philology, and even journalism and social science. That is before we get into the more specific frameworks of understanding which have seen fit to apply themselves to stories such as the Marxist, psychoanalytic, or postmodernist schools of interpretation.

What we need to do in this series of posts is try and forget all of this noise and get down to the underlying structure that unifies all of these nominally different concepts.

In his work Poetics, Aristotle did not set out to define the nature of stories. He was actually concerned with Greek tragedy. He defined six categories of analysis, but it’s the first two that we still use. One is “plot” and the other is “character”. Plot relates to the events that occur in the story, and character relates to people in the story and how their personality and agency shape it. Of these two, Aristotle believed plot was the most important, and his influence is still reflected in modern dictionary definitions which emphasise that stories are about the “events” that occur.

Joseph Campbell’s big innovation was to focus on character instead (i.e., the hero). However, his work has not seeped through into modern definitions of stories, presumably because he was studying something that we think is unrelated: myths.

Ancient Greek tragedy was performed on a stage and had music and other accompaniments. Myths are quasi-mystical things told around the campfires of hunter-gatherer tribes. Because of the superficial differences in the way the story was delivered, we tell ourselves that they are two different objects. In fact, the underlying structure of both is the same. It is only once we understand that structure that we can truly appreciate what really is different between the stories of hunter-gatherer tribes and ancient Greek tragedy. This is one of the main reasons to bother with what would otherwise be nothing more than semantic nitpicking.

Still, even semantic nitpicking sometimes turns up something important. Consider this. The actual word that Aristotle used in Poetics was “mythos”. That gets translated into modern English as “plot”. But, in fact, its meaning in ancient Greek was simply “story”. What Aristotle was really saying was that the story was the most important part of Greek tragedy.

Now, “mythos” appears in modern English as “myth”, and “myth” refers to just one specific kind of story. A myth is a story that usually features supernatural beings and is assumed to be foundational to the culture out of which it arises. This perspective would never have occurred to Aristotle or the Greeks. In fact, it arose out of a very specific intellectual milieu in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a heady mix of anthropology, linguistics, comparative history, and psychoanalysis.

Scholars and missionaries had gone off collecting stories from the various peoples of the world, including tribal societies. Meanwhile, historians and linguists had made great breakthroughs in the understanding of stories told by ancient civilisations. In addition to all this, there were developments in biblical interpretation, which moved away from treating the Bible as the source of literal truth. Out of all this, a new category called “myth” was created to account for one kind of story that was presumed to be found in every culture. Joseph Campbell was a comparative mythologist. He took the various “myths” from around the world and looked for what was similar about them.

It’s funny, isn’t it? The first great breakthrough in our understanding of stories came from Aristotle, who was studying Greek tragedy and realised that the story (mythos) was the most important part of it. Then, about two and a half millennia later, the next most important breakthrough came from a man who was studying “myths” from around the world. Neither of them thought they were studying “story” even though they both used the word that meant “story” in ancient Greece (“mythos”).

It’s not hard to see why we still don’t have any unified understanding of what a story is. We have been studying the superficial differences and not paying attention the underlying structure. In next week’s post, we’ll start to do just that.