Poot stories

I’ve been asking people for their favorite stories, and Susan T recalled Tove Jansson's Moomin story in which "the smallest of the small creatures" was asked if it knew a story. At last it volunteered this: 

"There was a wood rat called Poot."

That’s about as elemental as a story gets, I think: it’s just character.

(Endnote [1] quotes the Poot story.)

Perhaps the most famous shortest story is this, attributed (incorrectly) to Ernest Hemingway:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

This has a strong implied plot and a lot of pathos, but the characters are implicit. Ross Gale mentions an eight-word story by Guatemalan short story writer Augusto Monterroso: 

"When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

The primary character here is the narrator, and one’s imagination provides the plot.

Myth: Gods first, stories second

The Poot story is the most mythological of the three to me. As I now think about myths, the gods come first, and the stories help us understand them. The stories accrete around the gods and their cults.

The most important thing to the smallest of the small creatures was that there was a wood rat, and it was called Poot. Everything else follows from that, and doesn’t have to be told (at least this time).

This undermines some assumptions I’ve been making about tech and mythology. I’ve been looking for (and not finding) contemporary narratives that we use to understand greater-than-human forces. I fell back to trying to imagine and name the archetypes that technologies represent. I now wonder if that  shouldn’t be the primary strategy. 

Following the lead of the smallest of the small creatures, perhaps the place to start is stories like these:

There was a technology called Internet.

There was a business called Social Media.

There was an institution called Global Finance.

There was a setup called Government.

There was a phenomenon called Money.

Or, using mythical archetypes as species names (cf.“wood rat”):

There was a loki called Internet.

There was a dionysus called Social Media.

There was a reynard called Global Finance.

There was a zeus called Government.

There was a proteus called Money.

Aside: These characters differ from people, animals, and gods in not having clear boundaries. More later, but in short: the internet, social media, money, etc. overlap. While each is somewhat distinguishable, its constituent parts include parts of the others. One can create taxonomies of mutually exclusive species reasonably well; but the techno-social phenomena I’ve listed (and perhaps egregores more generally) can’t be pulled apart. 

Time

Both Baby Shoes and The Dinosaur strongly imply a series of events in the past; Poot doesn’t. This reminds me of arguments about the existence of narrative self. 

Anthony Rudd, for example, argues that the narrative form creates a unity across time which necessarily follows from the fact that we are temporal beings [2]. Galen Strawson neatly describes this position as the “widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories” [3]. However, Strawson contends that “It’s just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative.” He argues that while the human being taken as a whole persists over time, one’s self-experience does not necessarily. At this moment, the I-now is with Strawson.

How basic can it get?

Norris et. al’s “A Theoretical Framework for Narrative Explanation in Science” provides my go-to definition of narrative [4]. They propose eight elements as defining features of narrative: something happened (aka event-tokens); someone telling; narrative appetite; past time; structure; agency; purpose; and someone receiving. Of primary importance to them are “the existence of event-tokens, past time, and agency: particular occurrences involving particular actors in the past and over time.”

All three examples I’ve given meet the three primary considerations, although for the smallest of the small creature’s story, the “something happened” is rudimentary: all we know is that Poot existed. That’s why I nominate the Poot story as the most basic.

Notes

[1] Jansson, T. (n.d.). Comet in Moominland (E. Portch, Trans.). Square Fish, Farrar Straus Giroux. From Chapter 8:

“Now we should tell a story,” said Sniff, turning to the smallest of the small creatures. “Do you know one, Little Creep?” 

“Oh, no, really,” whispered the Little Creep, who was terribly shy. “Oh, no, well, really, perhaps.” 

“Well, out with it, then,” said Sniff. 

“There was a wood rat called Poot,” said the Little Creep, looking shyly between her paws. 

“Well, what happened then?” prompted Sniff. 

“The story’s finished now,” said the Little Creep, and burrowed into the moss in confusion. 

They all roared with laughter, and those who had tails beat them on the ground in appreciation.

Susan remembered the story as “There was a hedgehog called Poot,” which I much prefer since I don't know what a wood rat is, and rats have bad associations.

[2] Rudd, A. (2009). In Defence of Narrative. European Journal of Philosophy, 17(1), 60–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2007.00272.x

[3] Strawson, G. (2004). Against Narrativity. Ratio, 17(4), 428–452. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2004.00264.x

[4] Norris, S. P., Guilbert, S. M., Smith, M. L., Hakimelahi, S., & Phillips, L. M. (2005). A theoretical framework for narrative explanation in science. Science Education, 89(4), 535–563. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.20063