For my talk at Mythmoot, I’m comparing two exemplars of the same story. This post is a lemma in which I figure out how to show that two stories are “the same”.

If I learned anything from my safari into the jungles of literary theory, it’s that starting anywhere but absolute zero can get you into trouble. So let’s get the trivial parts out of the way, and work towards progressively more difficult cases.

👉Two copies of the same book sitting on different shelves in a bookstore are the same story.

👉Two different editions of a book are the same story.

👉A translation of a book into another language could be argued either way, but I’m going to say they’re still the same story.

Fig 1. Nephew

I’m following Douglas Hofstadter on this, but a tangible example about translation is better. Le Seigneur des Anneaux is not the same thing as The Lord of the Rings to me, but I hypothesize that its relationship to a 14-year-old nerd in France will be the same as LotR was to me. Experimental verification will take a decade or so; my nephew is just learning to read. In any case, even with a lot of differences between the original and second languages, the story can remain intact. (Assuming that’s what the translator is trying to do.) Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey, tweeted about that the other day.

Now that we’ve got the pedants safely back in their kennels, let’s look at the more-interesting case of two different novels. A story has lots of parts; some of them allow for more difference than others. What are the parts of a story? (Do I remember this from third grade? Yes, apparently I do.)

Setting

Doesn’t have to be the same. If you couldn’t tell the same story in a different setting, most of literature would never have happened. Resetting the Odyssey in 1900’s Dublin is perfectly fine. Romeo and Juliet in mid-20th-Century New York is brilliant.

Plot

The arc of the main plot has to be the same, though subplots can be different, and usually are. The presence of different minor characters is the primary driver of variation in subplots.

Characters

They don’t have to be the same, but major characters have to be isomorphic. That is, we have to be able to make a mapping of one major character in work A to exactly one character in work B. Minor characters don’t have to match at all. King Arthur stories, for example, have a literal army of extras around the perimeter. Authors use differences in minor characters to add individual flourishes to an old story. Definition: A major character is one who participates in the core conflict.

Conflict

Conflict in literature takes the form of protagonist vs. some element of the set {self, antagonist, society, nature, fate}. For these purposes, the core conflict has to remain in the same category, though I’d be willing to allow all sorts of other sub-conflicts. Conflicts with a different element of the set make a different story.

Amusing sidebar: When I was looking around the Web to make sure I’d gotten them all, I found two other possible elements of the set: technology and the supernatural. Since I’m interested in fantasy and science fiction, a.k.a. “Imaginative literature”, those two drop out. Conflicts vs. technology don’t exist — one of the most important lessons of science fiction is that technology isn’t an enemy. Any time it looks like it is, there’s a person behind it. And in fantasy, supernatural entities are just characters like anybody else.

Resolution

This one’s tricky. My first reaction was to say that the resolution has to be the same, but then I remembered the movie Roxanne . [1] This movie is unquestionably the same story as Cyrano de Bergerac, with a change of setting and the addition of a character (Dixie, played by Shelley Duvall). Adding a person to the plot who moves easily between the social classes and can talk straightforwardly to both the leads makes the resolution of Rostand’s play impossible. (Lucky for them!) I’m willing to say that the resolution can be different if the logic of the new setting and characters requires it. There are limits, certainly. Hamlet can’t have an ending where everyone lives happily ever after.

Where’s the dividing line? What kinds of stories can keep their integrity through a change in resolution? I think it’s in the core conflict. Cyrano is struggling against himself, and “snapping out of it” is always a possible outcome of such a conflict. Hamlet has a generous helping of internal conflict, but it’s subsidiary to the political battles and the inertia of armed forces. The outcome of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is constrained in ways that The Tragedy of Charlie, Small-town Fire Chief is not.

Conclusion

Two stories are the same if: Their Plot and Conflict are recognizably the same and their major Characters are isomorphic. The Resolution must be the same if the conflict requires it. Setting may change without restriction, as long as the other four properties of the story are still sensible in its context.

[1] Which contains one of my favorite cinematic sword-fights.