The meaning of a story exists outside the text. I was struck recently by the way a story can be simple but its meaning can be perplexing.

A story is a set of events linked by causality—the kingdom withered because the king died of grief. The king was sad because the queen had died.

Meaning depends on understanding how things fit together. The meaning of an event in the story (the queen died) lies in the part it plays in the whole, what it causes (the king died).

Stories tell us what goes with what, what is important and what is unimportant, who to praise and who to blame.

But the chain of meaning also extends beyond the story. To follow it, we need to know what a king is, what marriage is, what love is. This knowledge pre-exists and lies outside the tale. Meanings are social—they depend on how a particular community understands the world. These shared references and a stock of agreed narratives allow an audience to decode the story and clad it in meaning.

So, it is possible to create a story in which the chain of linked events is clear, but the meaning is opaque because it depends on assumptions that subvert social understanding of how to code events.

An example

This is what happened with a story I wrote. It imagines a world being destroyed by a race of giants. The giants are the offspring of people and angels. A man and his grandson are chased by a giant. The grandson says the angels have warned him a great flood is coming and that he should build a boat. The old man argues the important thing is not to survive the flood but to stop it by preventing the destruction of the world.  He believes the angels’ mischief is the root cause of the problem and decides the solution lies in taming the giants and putting their great strength to work in repairing the world.

Simple, right?

Yet many readers were perplexed. I wondered why. One told me he didn’t understand bad angels—angels, he felt, were good. The Noah figure, with his Old Testament resonances, who wants to build the boat is young and credulous rather than old, wise, and virtuous. This too creates what psychologists call cognitive dissonance—the discomfort caused by trying to hold two contradictory beliefs.

If we lack the key to decode the story’s meaning, the story doesn’t work for us, even if all the events and the connections between them are clear. This, I believe, is what happened with my tale.

Allegory, unreliable narrators, and allusion

The allegorical implications also perplexed readers. Did the giants represent machines, they wondered? Were the angels fallen angels? In allegory, the meanings necessarily exist outside the story itself since everything in the story is doubled by a set of mappings onto another space.

But there are other circumstances than allegory where a simple story may have an opaque meaning. An obvious example is the unreliable narrator, where not only the credibility of the narrator but also of the events is brought into question. Another is stories that make extensive reference to other stories, which may not be familiar to the audience. The use of classical allusion, once readily understandable among educated people, may be an example here.

Plot, Story, and Narrative

Here’s a simple way of thinking about this.

• Plot is the causal sequence of a tale (the WHAT of a tale).
• Story is the way this sequence is told (the HOW of a tale),
• Narrative is what it means (the WHY of a tale), the interpretation of events and characters within the tale.

Note that narrative can only come into existence when a work is read or heard. The writer may have intended something, but the reader may pick up quite a different interpretation. Meaning comes in existence through an interaction between the writer and from the reader, not from the text. Both writer and reader participate in the creation of meaning.  In an important sense then, meaning must always lie outside the story itself.

The novel is a fairly recent invention. The history of fiction goes back much further with works such as Chaucer’s 1387 Canterbury Tales, Shishuo Xinyu’s fifth century A New Account of Tales of the World and Homer’s eighth century BCE Iliad.

The novel, however, is a distinctly modern and European. Its earliest examples can’t be traced back further than the seventeenth century and its real flowering was in the eighteenth.

The word novel comes from the Italian “novella” meaning a story. A novel is a prose work longer than a short story in which the trials and tribulations of a central character is a major feature.

The rise of the novel reflects the growth of a middle class with the leisure to read and the money to buy books. It is no accident that many of the early novels were written in English in the United Kingdom, where the industrial revolution created such conditions.

The eighteenth century English novel was concerned with complex, middle class characters struggling with morality and circumstances. The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of romanticism, but the impact of industrialism forced a growing engagement with social reality in the Victorian era. In the twentieth century, two world wars, the struggle for the emancipation of women and the dismantling of the old European empires led to a flowering of new voices from those who had hitherto been silent and silenced in literature.

Though I can make no claim to full inclusivity or canonical justification, this is my list of the 20 most important novels that shaped the way we read and write.

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes’ (1605) can lay (contested) claim to being the first novel in the modern sense.
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719) is arguably the first modern novel in English, following over a century after Don Quixote. An adventure story, it invented many of the tropes of colonial literature
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) spawned the genre of social satire.
4. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749) is among the earliest coming of age stories.
5. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764) is the first Gothic novel, combining magic with realistic settings.
6. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811) ushered in the realist novel, which dealt with everyday life
7. Waverley by Walter Scott (1814) pioneered the first historical novel.
8. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) though Gothic, can be seen as the first science fiction novel and also the first horror novel.
9. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens’ first novel (1836). Though less socially engaged than much of his later work, it nonetheless paints sharp portraits of English life. Like many of his novels, it was first written as a serial and thus introduces a succession of cliffhangers.
10. Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe (1841) features the first fictional detective. He pioneered the rational analysis of truth which influenced the subsequent development of the genre.
11. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow (1852) is less significant for its literary quality than for the way it fused fiction with the abolitionist events of the day.
12. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert (1856) codified literary realism
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869) broke new ground in Russian literature by abandoning narrative in favour of philosophical reflections in large parts of the book. Tolstoy did not even see it as a novel and regarded Anna Karenina (1873) as his first novel.
14. The Sheik by Edith Maude Hull (1919) forged the tropes of the modern romance genre.
15. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) pioneered stream of consciousness writing
16. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (1936) is the first modern work of fantasy.
17. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1945) articulated the angst and rebellion of post-war teenagers. Though by no means the first coming of age story (among which might be included Henry Fielding’s 1749 Tom Jones, Voltaire’s 1759 Candide and Laurence Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy) Salinger’s book arguably opened up the YA market.
18. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) is a classic of post-colonial literature.
19. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) is an anti-colonial and feminist riposte to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
20. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967) is a seminal work of magic realism, using fantastical elements to express the absurdity of social reality.