We tend to use the words story and narrative interchangeably, and when we ask if a story has a plot it often seems as if we are asking if the story has a story. The idea of a plotless story seems oxymoronic, for what is a plot if not a sequence of events strung together to make a story? Let’s see if we can find a coherent rhythm among these seemingly diverse words.

Plot means "The series of events consisting of an outline of the action of a narrative or drama" as well as "a secret plan…" Story means "The narrating or relating of an event or series of events…"

If we compare these two definitions we can see both a common factor and a striking difference. Both plot and story share the sense of "events in series." But they differ in these definitions in that the story is the thing that is told (the narrative), while the plot is a diagram or map of the story. The word narrative acts as a foundation in both definitions in that it is the "stuff" of which the story is composed.

The narrative sense of plot derives from a metaphorical extension of "a piece of ground." How would a word meaning "outline of a series of events" ever come from a word that centuries ago meant "a piece of ground"? The answer is found in the definition of narrative: "A story or description of actual or fictional events…" Now we see the close synonymy of these three words. A story is a "description" of "a piece of ground." The plot is the map of that ground, that is, an attempt at redacting the description or story of the ground. If the story you have to tell is about the enemy king, how the enemy king approaches with soldiers from many lands, with many drummers and banner-bearers, and that the king rides with a few well-know princes, and continues from there into travelogues of the lands of all the enemy king’s men, you might better plot against the enemy, cut to the chase, and cry to your king, "The enemy approaches with 10,000 men!"

A map, of course, can never be as large as the terrain it describes. But what is this "piece of ground" that lies beneath the senses of story, narrative, and plot? As it turns out, the plot of narrative is what we are able "to know" (Indo-European *gno) and the story is what we are able to articulate, what we are able "to see" (Indo-European *weid) of what we know. These ancient words of knowing and seeing have their descendents in the languages of thousands of years and hundreds of cultures, as in the English words know and gnosis from *gno, and video and view from *weid. The seeing, the map, the telling, and the story are redacted from the gnosis, the narrative, from this plot of ground.

So what’s the big deal about a plot of ground? What is meant by the word ground? This seemingly unassuming question has a history, especially in philosophy and thus in the study of literature, that fills libraries and has consumed some of the greatest minds of the Western tradition. So old is the question that it appears, from the fragments and stories that remain, that the earliest philosophers obsessively discussed the nature of ground. What appears is a meaning for our word ground that encompasses everything upon which we stand and believe. (An elaborate and careers-long justification for that last statement can be found at the Lakoff and Johnson node.) In certain contemporary systems of thought, the ground is thought to be "an endless chain of signifiers." That may be so, but for any practical purpose (the study of literature, for instance, should begin to make itself practical [praxis v theory, comix etc]) the ground is what hits us on the ass when we fall from our heights.

The butt-slamming kind of ground is the one I mean when I say ground. And I think there’s a reason the ancient words from knowing and seeing came to mean narrative, and we’ll find this reason if we look at our feet. What keeps our feet on the ground? "Gravity" is the first and easiest answer, but how easy is it, really? For we, as a story-telling and theory-making species, know very little about gravity, about how it works or where it comes from. We can measure the mechanics of gravity—we humans do great at metrics. Knowing how is often much more difficult to ascertain than is knowing when something happens. Eclipses could be predicted thousands of years before the dance of stellar bodies was scoped out, and fire had been a reasonably predictable tool for thousands of years before that. Of eclipses and fire literary scholars have had much to say, but there is little said on the topic of gravity. [link to What We Bear]

Though gravity itself needs much consideration from a literary point of view, it was merely the first and easiest answer to my question. The second answer is more difficult (for me, at least) and more startling: friction. I don’t understand the physics of friction well enough to venture a summary, but it is common knowledge among physicists (that is, is in most college physics texts) that friction is the primary reason our feet stay stuck to the ground rather than ten feet in the air.

Friction poetically or immediately evokes the raison d’être of fiction, that is, the "rubbing" of event against event, typically in the form of some sort of crisis or transformation. We call this kind of "rubbing" fiction. In this poetic comparison we can also find a ground for story in the idea of the map: go this way (not that way). Friction is a difference-making engine that plows a path that is not a path to anywhere else. A story, whether by forks and turns or by a straighter path, goes one way, as if obsessed with the footprints it has already followed. Creating friction, if done intentionally, involves detecting a grain, be it along a ranger’s ridge top or in a whittler’s piece of wood or in an ensemble of musicians.

Music is the most narrativistic type of artistic expression. To support this remark I need to make a distinction between the words narrative and story. Although a little dictionary work will prove that the two words are used synonymously, it is useful to make a phenomenological distinction between the two. Narrative, then, is a general phenomenon while story is much more rarely instantiated. I am tempted to put this in other words, though this may cause more problems than solve them: Narrative is natural while story is human. That is, everything does narrate, but only humans tell stories. But of course this is ridiculous for many reasons, not the least of which are that humans are natural and that not only humans but other animals (bees, elephants, songbirds) tell what might arguably be called stories.

The phenomenon of narrative is "of nature" just as the phenomenon of information exchange is "of nature." In this sense, the human participation in "natural" things such as narrativizing and exchanging information is obvious. But what does that make narrative? Narrative is a fundamental force of the universe that carries (bears) information, the Aum, the rhythmic droning syllables that do the work of bearing information. Narrative is rhythm.

Rhythm, like melody, has been a bone of definitional contention among musicologists and musicians for centuries. What exactly—or even approximately!—is rhythm? "Any kind of movement characterized by the regular recurrence of strong and weak elements: the rhythm of the tides" (AHD). The Greek root of rhythm, rhuthmos, "recurring motion," sets us down squarely on the plot of ground from which narrative arises. To "map" the ground of story we must move through the plot’s features in order to attain gnosis of "the lay of the land." The Indo-European root of rhythm is even more explicit. *Sreu was a verb that meant "to flow" and is the source (through various "channels") of our English words stream, diarrhea, and rhythm. A narrative, then, is any process which flows through the events of a landscape or "plot."

The terminal sounds of both the Sanskrit Aum and the Indo-European *sreu invite the speaker to hold the sound indefinitely, to let the sound continue to vibrate deep in the throat. Anyone familiar with the play of children and animals can see that this is also an invitation to chorus, or more philosophically, an invitation to participate in mimesis. "One dog barks and they all join in," as the saying has it. There is, then, nothing uniquely or peculiarly "human" about participatory mimesis. When we speak of "an infectious rhythm" we are not speaking of something unique to humans, but rather of an instinctual dialogue between livings things: to live is to chorus.

The relationship between chorus and the narrative "plot of ground" is intriguing. In ancient Greek, chorus meant a "dancing ground," and especially an "enclosed" or mapable area of shared rhythmos or "flowing." This flowing in the enclosed space of the dancing ground invokes our own sexuality, for it is in the chorus where "the wet meets the hard." To be alive is to exist in a wet or liquid state flowing narratively across the hard, unyielding ground of existence.

In contemporary narrative theory we often encounter the idea that a plot is formed by the exclusion of all the other possibilities. But this is only a "glass half empty" view of the real situation. The Indo-European root of chorus is *gher, "to grasp." No exclusion, the act of grasping is a bringing together, an embracing that is embodied in Heidegger’s idea of "dwelling-bridging." To be alive, as the philosophers used to say, is to be "contingent": we are not individuals, unique and separate, but rather we are maps of our shared dancing ground, the very ground from which the maps of our lives, our stories, arise. "No man is an island," but if two or more gather upon that island, the dance of story begins. The idea of mimesis, then, doesn’t mean merely "to copy cat," but rather has the sense of the connective tissue which bridges and binds us together.

The musical and narrative (which are here synonymous) ligature (a musical as well as physiological term) is no where better understood than in our word melody. In ancient Greek, a melos was "a limb," the legs we dance upon, the legs we walk upon as we survey the plot of ground. This melos gives us the first syllable of the word melody, while the second syllable comes from the Indo-European word *wed, "to speak" which became in Greek the verb aeidein, "to sing." (The connections between singing, speaking, and writing are perhaps no where better surveyed than in the writings of Walter J. Ong.)

Melody suggests a metonymy between the limbs of the body and the events or features of a narrative plot with the whole of the rhythmic enclosure. "Upon this ground I do dance / Upon this land I make my stance." A better way to state this is to say that the "singing limb" is an identifiable part of the surveyable ground. In musical terms, the melody is the moving or flowing liquid which is enclosed or channeled by the rhuthmos. Melody is the othering bridge of our dwelling ground. Melody is the connective tissue that makes possible the rhythmic movement across our plot of ground.

What emerges from these etymological surveyings is the idea of the speaking mouth as the singing limb and an identity between the ideas of "dialogue" and "chorus," for to dance together is to speak together. We may speak of "one man’s story" but such a story is never individual: a story is always contingent on our being "dwelling-bridges." That stories are shared, and that narrative gives us a common ground, is no where so painfully obvious than in the cases of human children who are isolated in the critical periods of speech acquisition. Earlier, paraphrasing a line from the Bible, I said that the dance of story emerges wherever "two or more gather." A child raised in isolation has no gathering ground, no way to learn the chorus dance of dwelling-bridging. The very ground has been removed from beneath that abandoned child’s feet. In contrast, it is common linguistic knowledge that tow or more children, gathered in the absence of adult language users, will spontaneously "invent" a language of their own. The literature of language acquisition in general supports this idea, while the studies of language acquisition among deaf children is especially revealing. (Vygotsky, Luria, Piaget, and the American neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks all have made contributions in these areas.)