The author thought the above short sentence would be the extent of it, but unfortunately, as is often the case for this particular author, he determined that further research into the matter was necessary, and he was immediately confronted with complications. For example: is “This Is Not a Story” really not a story?
Nothing happens, the author’s wife asserted about his (non)story, so thus, it is indeed not a story, making the declaration (we might say description, argument, lyric, demonstration, watchword, bluff, forgery, manifesto, etc.) absolutely true, but unbelievably stupid and boring (her words), much like making the claim that this is (or is not, as the case may be) a piece of a paper or a pickle or a pipe. So, if “This Is Not a Story” is not a story, then the author has presented to the world a piece of writing lacking cleverness, profundity, etc. On the other hand, if the author’s wife is mistaken (heaven forbid!) and “This Is Not a Story” is actually a story, the author has contributed to the widespread dissemination of disinformation in contemporary discourse and is a bad person.
The whole endeavor feels like a lose-lose, thinks the author.
The author, recovering from his temporary reluctance to carry on, wonders: can a story be a mere state of being? The sun shines, for example, it seems to the author, is a perfectly lovely story; the author, with economy and efficiency, has elicited in his heliotropic readers feelings of warmth, uplift, and hope. By extension, the author asks: can a story be a state of nonbeing? The sun does not shine. If the first is a story of brightness, the second is a story of darkness and forlornity—but, still, a story. Could we (the author muses) extend these ideas to make a generalized theory (one, incidentally, as far as the author understands, analogous to that of subatomic particles), that every state of being by definition must have a counter state of nonbeing, and that both states are stories? All of which is to say, “This Is Not a Story” is a story. But then the story is a big lie, the author is a bad person, as stated, and the whole operation is arguably in a shambles.
Things really start to go off the rails with the story or nonstory “This Is Not a Story” when the author discovers to his horror that someone (Diderot) had written a story called “This Is Not a Story” (“Ceci n’est pas un conte”) over two-hundred years ago. But then, just before giving up on the story or nonstory or whatever, the author discovers that Diderot’s “This Is Not a Story” is actually composed of “two different stories” (Wikipedia), thus rendering any comparisons between the author’s “This Is Not a Story” (which, for all we know, isn’t even one story) and Diderot’s “This Is Not a Story” impolitic and inapt, and the author may safely move on, feeling vindicated and relieved.
Then the author stumbles across the theory (Barthes, Bal, et al.) that a story must have at least two events linked causally, or, at the very least, the changing of a state of being, from, say, S to S’. So if we define the state of there not being a story in the story “This Is Not a Story” as S, the required changed state S’ (for example, and then, upon further reflection, this story is a story) is absent, and indeed “This Is Not a Story” is not a story.
But if a story must have a structure of causal relations, thus aprioristically dooming our theories of singular states of (non)being as stories, then the author wonders: must these causal relations be explicit? Or, a related question: might causality be external to the story in question, that is, external to the storyworld? To wit: the author contemplates Magritte’s painting of the (non)pipe, which causes him to decide, without giving it too much thought, that he might approach a similar exercise with a text, in the form of a short (non)story, which causes him to write the words “This Is Not a Story” at the top of a piece of white paper, and then the author’s own tendency of not knowing when to leave things good and done causes him to begin researching narratology and story theory and semiotics and so on, and voilà: we have a whole tissue of invisible causes and effects wrapped up in our (non)story “This Is Not a Story,” thus establishing “This Is Not a Story” as a story.
(An aside and out of curiosity: is “ ‘This Is Not a Story’ is not a story” a story? The answer is affirmative, thinks the author, assuming states of (non)being are stories (see above), and assuming we can make the case that the existence of the (non)story “This Is Not a Story” causes in some way the being of its nonexistence as a story (or existence as a nonstory) (our second “event”), which seems logical insofar as one would never claim that “This Is Not a Story” is not a story if the (hypothetical) nonstory (“This Is Not a Story”) had not already been in a state of being. But, ’tis true, this is a whole other story.)
Another question: is the nonstory a species of story, and thus a logical contradiction, something akin to Russel’s paradox in set theory?
The author is not sure about any of this, but he feels strangely satisfied with his accomplishments and he puts down his pen and lifts his pipe, but then in a moment of inspiration, as a sort of discursive appendix, he lifts said pen (puts down said pipe) and writes: What if “This Is Not a Story” is actually a commentary on French structuralists’ and others’ claims that a story—a Grand Narrative—is a semiotic phenomenon of historical self-realization which transcends the very textual bonds and boundaries of the story itself? What if? What? Wha? . . .
Erik Harper Klass has published stories in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Summerset Review, Slippery Elm, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters. He writes in Los Angeles, CA.
