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.