{"id":266,"date":"2017-06-14T14:07:42","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T13:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=266"},"modified":"2017-08-18T11:48:26","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T10:48:26","slug":"plot-and-story","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=266","title":{"rendered":"Plot and story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It might seem natural to assume that\u00a0<strong><em>story<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>always precedes its\u00a0<em><strong>emplotment<\/strong><\/em> in a particular narrative. Thus, to take the example of detective fiction, we might reasonably imagine that an author would need first to have established that event A led to event B which in turn caused the murder of C, whereupon character D decides to hide the murder weapon E at point F in order to implicate character G, before that author\u00a0could then start to turn this story into a plot by starting with the discovery of C\u2019s body, then allowing the detective to find the weapon E at point F before unravelling the events B and then A, thus resulting in\u00a0that detective exonerating character G and arresting\u00a0character D.<\/p>\n<p>There is, however, another point of view which states that there is no such thing as a story except in as far as it exists as an abstraction\u00a0produced retrospectively by the plot. There are several planks to this argument. One is that the moment we humans start to connect one event with another, we cannot help but narrativise those events, which is to say organise them into some kind of plot. We simply cannot think in a pure and unadulterated fashion in terms of \u2018story\u2019. We can only think of story <em>through\u00a0<\/em>plot.\u00a0Only once a plot has been produced, that is, can we extract from it an abstract notion of its story.<\/p>\n<p>Another plank in this argument involves comparing two or more narratives that ostensibly tell the same story \u2013 for instance, William Shakespeare\u2019s 1599 play <em>The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet<\/em>, Arthur Brooke\u2019s poem\u00a0<em>The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet<\/em> from 1562 or its reworking into prose by William Painter in his collection <em>Palace of Pleasure\u00a0<\/em>five years later (upon both of which Shakespeare\u2019s play may have been based), Leonard Bernstein\u2019s retelling of this story in musical form in his\u00a0<em>West\u00a0Side Story<\/em> of 1957, or Baz Lurhmann\u2019s film\u00a0<em>Romeo+Juliet<\/em> of 1996. If we were to study all these works very carefully and extract the \u2018story\u2019 from each and every one of them, the argument goes, we cannot ultimately conclude that they do indeed tell (or re-tell) the same story. Rather, whilst there will of course be some significant overlaps between them, each of them ultimately has its own distinctive story because it has its own distinctive plot \u2013 and stories, to make the point once again, cannot exist independently of the plot by which they are generated and from which they are accordingly extracted.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Return to <a href=\"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/?page_id=203\">Plot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It might seem natural to assume that\u00a0story\u00a0always precedes its\u00a0emplotment in a particular narrative. Thus, to take the example of detective fiction, we might reasonably imagine that an author would need first to have established that event A led to event B which in turn caused the murder of C, whereupon character D decides to hide [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":203,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-266","page","type-page","status-publish","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1563,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/266\/revisions\/1563"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/licor.hivolda.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}