In the spirit of blog-ish notetaking, I’m here to get some thoughts down about how stories create “meaning” or “significance.” The initial question that prompted these thoughts were: how do stories create the feeling in the reader/viewer of having “come a long way”?
One method might be building up significance over time, observable in a serial narrative or a straightforward novel. Entering the story, you encounter places, characters, situations. None of these start out with a whole lot of significance. (A provocative real-world setting might cast some shades of meaning, but initially, there isn’t much to know about how it will matter to the story. Real-word characters in an otherwise fictional story could do the same thing.)
You start with a thin sense of things. Because you know you’re reading a novel, you’re willing to wait. As you continue to read, the meaning of the various elements builds, creating a “denser” texture of meaning. Like this:
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A narrative line. On a rereading, you encounter the story anew, but with the full weight of meaning/significance that you didn’t have on the first reading. You meet the start of the story with the density of the end. A character is introduced, and because you know what happens to them, their significance is made more dense. (Reading Middlemarch, the feeling you get when Dorothea meets Casaubon is completely different the second time.) That would mean repeated encounters with the story creates a denser and denser—and more meaningful—experience.
Another kind of meaning-building is possible in episodic stories and nonlinear narratives. In this form, the elements within the narrative (plots, characters, settings) are contained in their own node or point (like an “episode,” but there are other examples). The nodes are connected to each other by threads of meaning. The more nodes and connection points, the more ways the nodes call back or connect to other nodes, the more complex the web becomes. This also creates density. Like this:
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A narrative web can make a story reinventable. Big scifi series are a good place to observe this. If a new Star Trek show was made, the significance of the new show would largely be derived from the density of meaning built up from Star Trek’s narrative web. And even if the new show were able to stand on its own, its presence within the web provides a trove of endlessly reflexive, already-extant meanings. The relationships between the nodes is just as important—if not more—than what happens in each discrete piece.
This is kind of the whole thing with big IPs and “universes” and bad reboots. But the recent attempts to make all story universes commodifiable feels pretty cheap, and people can sense that.
It’s a shame, because I love the idea of a narrative web. Characters perhaps don’t “change” or “develop” in the same way in stories like this—having character types serves the structure well—but the possibilities for unexpected meanings are really interesting to me.
A lot of narrative webs are on screen. I tried to think about narrative webs in books. Comic books are an obvious example. But must there be imagery?
Prose in fragments? It would have to be the sort of fragments that could be read in any order.
Or, one writer’s work as a bunch of nodes.
Or, the narrative web created by a book of fairy tales.
I wonder if you could put a bunch of narrative lines inside a single node on a web?
I have another idea that you can “shortcut” or induce the feeling of significance achieved by repeated encounters and narrative density with iconography. An icon or image becomes meaningful more quickly, or is at least accepted as “meaningful” to a viewer more readily. Perhaps this suggests that imagery leads to false-significance, or false-density, but I think it may be more complicated than that...
