Introduction
The purpose of this 3-part series of short essays is to take a broad look at the concept of “story” and to see how it might be employed in the area of the arts in digital convergence.
A “story” is an organizing system that articulates the material that is placed within it. “Story” is most typically associated with literature, theater, film and television drama, where it is seen as something that can be verbalized. In fact, “story” is often treated as a synonym for “narrative.”
But what about “stories” that are told entirely in pictures, or the “stories” that are largely inferred, as one often finds in the 30 second TV commercial. And what about “stories” that are themselves made up of constellations of “stories”?
Part I will develop a basic notion of “story,” while part II will consist of a brief survey of “story” processes that go beyond traditional narrative forms. Part III will then discuss possible “story” functions in connection with the arts of digital convergence.
Part I: A basic notion of “story”
“By the time I had finished with the painting, the figure had moved all about the canvas (gesturing) to finally end up…(pointing) here. With all this moving about, I assume that something happened.” These words were spoken by the painter Nathan Oliveira who, when I was a graduate student in painting at Berkeley in the ‘60s, visited to critique our work and to talk a bit about his own. I believe his words were in response to a question concerning what his paintings were “about.”
“Something happened.” That seems a good basic notion of “story.” Not enough, of course, but essential; in philosophical terms, essential but not sufficient. A more complete notion might be “something significant happened” – not just some random event, not just anything, but something that is (or should be) considered important. Good, but still not sufficient.
Walker Percy, in his book The Message in the Bottle, observes that animals live in environments while humans live in worlds. The distinction is between a simple (dyadic) stimulus-response and stimulus-response enmeshed in a network of associations from which it derives its meaning (triadic). While animals attempt to satisfy their needs solely within the context of immediately available options, humans attempt to satisfy their needs within the context of a world view that transcends the particular event. So, a further development of the notion of story might be “something significant happened in some world.”
Worlds are not mere collections, they are systems. There are perhaps an infinite number of worlds that can be postulated and a storyteller can postulate any imaginable world – one could call it a “story space” – in which to tell a story. Still, no matter how fanciful or improbable that world may be it must, like a mathematical theorem or scientific hypothesis, be internally consistent. Before the 20th Century, non-Euclidian geometry described a coherent conceptual space containing “impossible” mathematical objects. In a similar fashion, stories spun from within a particular – even if “impossible” — world must remain true to that world’s foundational set of rules, whether these rules are stated or merely implied. At one end, these rules may function as unconscious assumptions, habits and patterns of familiar connection. At the other end, they may register as identifiable norms, teachable practices and even enforceable laws.
Whatever the set of rules governing a world or story space, the set serves as the basis for an implied contract between storyteller and audience – “Accept the governing rules of the postulated story space and I’ll show you marvelous patterns of coherence within that space.” We normally become conscious of this implied contract only when it is broken. A personal example: In the ‘80s, the very popular Dallas series ended one of its seasons by killing off Bobby, a central character. Both the logic of the storyline, the elaborate build up to the killing and the story telling style left no room for doubt that (NO! gulp, shock…tears in some quarters) Bobby had been killed! Evidently, this was not popular with the general audience because the next season opened with Bobby brought back to life…well, actually, never dead, not even seriously wounded. You see, Sue Ellen, his wife, had only DREAMED she killed him. This turn of events immediately struck me as cheating (at least as hugely inept on the part of the writers). I did not buy it and Dallas, previously a huge guilty pleasure, no longer attracted me.
Still, audiences do want to be surprised. Few want a story to tell them what they already know. Most want to be astonished in some manner, to discover new and unexpected connections of significance within some world. In some very general sense, most even want to grow. And, as most guides to story writing will tell you, story conflict attracts and maintains audience attention. It also powers growth.
Hegel, the philosopher who constructed a dialectical world view, and who Marx reinterpreted to create dialectical materialism, maintained that all growth in understanding was the result of a dialectical process. The dialectical process, it will be recalled, begins with a thesis in conflict with an antithesis. The conflict between the pair results in the production of a synthesis. A synthesis does more than just bring the pair together. It also preserves the kernel of truth embedded in each and resolves their conflict in a new harmony of broader understanding. In turn, each new synthesis becomes an element in a new dialectical struggle until eventually total and complete understanding – infinity – is reached.
Hegel’s notion of infinity is useful. He distinguished between two types of infinity, essentially the good infinity and the bad infinity. The bad infinity might be described as a potentially endless string of events where the energy expended in conflict produces no greater understanding. This, to a large extent, describes an environment limited to action-reaction, stimulus-response. In the context of the notion of “story”, this dyadic process can be described as change merely for the sake of change. By contrast, the good infinity may be described as a string of events in productive conflict that produces or brings to light a world. For Hegel, a world fully realized in understanding is infinite (there can be nothing more). In terms of “story,” this triadic process (conflict between two that sparks a third into existence) can be described as change for the sake of producing deeper understanding. Factoring in this dialectical process, the most basic notion of story can be stated as: “Some conflict in some world produces new and greater understanding.”
Returning to Oliveira’s painting where “something happened,” we see that a “story” need not be pinned down with many specifics in order for us to sense its presence or to profit from its organizing influence. And a “story” certainly need not be told in words.
OK. So just what is this “story” in an Oliveira painting? First of all, the “story” is not in the painting. The painting serves as the palpable interface between the storyteller (painter, in this case) and the audience (viewers) in a mental space shared by both. It serves as the structure and pretext for an audience (as co-creators) to produce a story by filling in the missing pieces. Briefly, by his painting style, Oliveira has postulated a world in the general area of abstract expressionism. This choice brings with it, ready-made, a series of assumptions (viewing habits and associations) shared with the audience upon which he may either build or struggle against. These assumptions include that the artist acts from a deep connection with the subconscious (think Jackson Pollock ), that the act of painting is a struggle to wrestle meaning from chaos and that the resulting painting is an artifact, a record, the physical residue of this heroic struggle. In its pure form, abstract expressionism specifically eschews the figurative. So, one “story” (there can be many that satisfy) has Oliveira not only in existential struggle with the subconscious and against the inert resistance of paint and canvas in his quest for meaning, he is also in a struggle against that part of the art world that would deny the validity of the human figure in painterly expression. To the extent that Oliveira is successful, he presents the audience with a masterful synthesis of his struggles, the residues of which remain evident in the painting. “Something happened.” The figure, in some sense a surrogate for Oliveira, himself, got knocked about in the charged space of abstract expressionist painting and found its just-right-place….here.
This notion of “story” may strike some as overly simple, even too obvious. However, in the following two sections, I hope to show that this notion is useful as a pocket tool for discovering this kind of meaning-making process in areas far removed from traditional storytelling. I also hope to show the usefulness of this concept for understanding a root cause when stories (both in the broad and narrow senses of that word) fall short in producing and maintaining worlds and, instead, merely offer up environments.
[to be continued with Part II: A brief survey of “story” processes that go beyond traditional narrative forms]
