The ‘story’ is an elusive concept. In narratology, it has traditionally been defined as a set of events that are narrated in the work, and opposed to the ‘discourse’ – the manner in which those events are narrated. The story is the level of the ‘what’, while the discourse is the level of the ‘how’ (Shen, 2002). But, it is precisely the story’s opposition to the discourse that reveals its paradoxical character. On one hand, the story is inextricably linked with the discourse. Ontologically, it is nothing but an effect of signification, a product of the demands of discursive and aesthetical coherence. On the other, it is exactly the story’s separation from the discourse that generates the aesthetical appeal of the work of fiction. Or, to approach the issue from a different perspective, all the narrative and discursive experiments would be utterly ineffective if there didn’t exist a stable, pre-given fixed story.

How are we to bring together these contradictory tendencies? Is the story-narrative distinction still tenable in the light of these clashing insights? These questions do not only problematize “an indispensible premise of narratology” (Shen, 2002), but also open up further areas of enquiry, areas that are, undoubtedly, of crucial importance for post-structuralist narrative theory. Namely, what is a story? What is its ontological substratum? And, consequently, how does that substratum relate to the level of the discourse? This essay will explore these issues, focusing primarily on the contradictory tendencies of the story-discourse relationship pointed out by Jonathan Culler. In addition, it will propose a Hegelian interpretation of that relationship, one that will hopefully generate a potential new ontological framework for understanding the “problem of the story”. Although ambitious in its scope, the essay is conceived as a minor contribution towards answering some of the biggest questions of narratology. Continue reading