Revisiting E.M. Forster's Story and Plot

Compared to other ways to categorize narrative, Forster's division of Story and Plot seemed to me the least useful.  It did not distinguish between different narrative levels like the other division we examined.  Instead, it seemed rather pretentiously self serving, implying that some read for the Story, while others, more sophisticated, read for the Plot.  But as we have examined the ways in which the audience is an active participant in the creation of narrative worlds, and especially as we have moved into the realm of cognitive narrative theories, I have come to reconsider Forster's division.

Before going further, I should probably restate Forster's definitions.  Story is the sequence of events, the "what happens?"  Plot is the causal relationship between those events, the "why?"  Right away, I think I was turned off by the lack of intuitiveness in this division.  Prior to this course and really thinking about these sorts of things, I considered Plot to be the sequence of events, while Story was those events and their causal relationships.  Then we added Discourse and Fabulas and other clearly not English words, and, well, that simple view went flying out the window.

Now, though, I think more about my and other audience members' own roles in building narrative worlds, and I don't find Forster's division so damn snooty (though I still would like to reverse his word choice).  Stories exist as sequences of events, dormant on the page or disc or whatever medium.  The events are ordered with regard to an external logic, the choices of their author or the accidents of history.  Luke Skywalker's face gets all messed up because Mark Hamill got into a nasty car accident.  But when an audience member engages with the Story, it becomes a Plot, for the audience member seeks to discover or impose an internal logic for the ordering of events.  Luke Skywalker's face gets all messed up because the wampa slapped the Force out of him.

Seen this way, plot is the product of our tendency to over-read, which is essential to our making sense of narratives.

Or maybe it's just that I'm more pretentious now.