Fantastic Experience

          "It's just a story," is the worn and jaunty phrase used to deflect attention from the puzzling effect of that imaginary experience. A story joins two experiences, each as real as the other. One is the visible shared listening place. The other is invisible. Although the places, events and objects of the story are intangible and unsubstantiated, participation there is very real in several ways. A story may be experienced as personally and profoundly significant. They carry emotional effects. A story can provoke action and attitude. A retold story becomes a familiar place which a listener revisits for nuances of meaning, reassurance and pleasure in the same way one returns to favourite retreat. Consider how words like "Hogwarts," "Little Toot" or "A house in Paris all covered with vines..." arouse memories and associations. A physical and emotional sense of familiarity urges listeners back, back over a worn trail to a private imagined place. They return to the shared world with experiences and understandings only gained inside a story world. The experience of being somewhere else, even being 'someone else' is common to all accounts of a story engagement. Two experiences are conflated. Listeners weave the physical present with an invisible space, out of the time and place of telling(6)
           In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion (of times and places) characterizes the artistic chronotope (Bakhtin 1981: 84).
This is a conundrum: a story is experienced in imagination; it's an event that didn't happen. At the same time, it is affective and deeply felt. Later, a story experience takes a particular place in remembering that is similar but distinct from other lived events. It leaves a memory trace.
           The world, created by storybook reading aloud, opens a real and private place for each participant. When we all stand together at "Bob's door," or in "Roger's cage," each of us forms the picture with the material of our own imaginations. But the book itself is not present in the story-worlds we make. The reader-listener's attention is located beyond the book and storyteller, held inside an imaginative space sprung and bounded by the story's words, teller and other listeners. Our reader, Linda, is the passage to the story place. She leads and opens up a world beyond the classroom using the book; and she ferries us there. Drawing attention to the page is pointing outside the story space.
A story: a language not of its own words
A story doesn't mean what the words seem to say.(7) For example, the story of the tortoise and hare is not about a race or animal behaviour. Instead, 'what it says' is orchestrated through an arrangement of images, events, characters and allusions. A similar story can be told changing characters and events and all the words. Imagine an economically challenged single mother who wins a Harvard graduate fellowship, beating out her well heeled classmates. It's the 'same' story: tenacity wins.
The words of a story are "read" in a specific story-way. Understanding a story depends on the reader's ability to bring together the complexity of images and events together in one dynamic whole. As already discussed, the reader must be able to leave the world of the text to look around in the story world, to be there. And there, inside the story, the listener-reader brings her own experiences and knowledge into participation with the story to make meaning and applications for the story. This applies to the story as a single communication as well as to the words of the story.
          It's easy to think that inside such imagined places where "anything can happen" readers and listeners suspend themselves from reality. This is not true. They expect a particular sort of logic and accuracy from a story. The usual ways of confirming accuracy of information, corroboration with other texts or replication in laboratories, don't work. Instead, a story is made believable by its inner consistency of images and events and by its personally felt resonance with the listener's life experience. Thus a story about a dog or dragon, about a wizards' school or boy in a dungeon are sensible and believable. The so-called fantastic is experienced fully and as being natural when they meet the listeners' conditions of personal resonance and consistency. Thus, listeners ride dragons with familiar exhilaration, meet rats with empathy and identify with being locked in a cage in a dungeon.
          As the logic of a story operates by its own conventions, so does the assignment of meaning to words. The words of a story are not easily reduced to its subject. Story words are not "a set of designative signs, fully in our control and purview" (Taylor 1985:246). Readers of a story reach beyond the designation for connections and associations. For instance, Pullman's tender chapter titled "A Pair of Old Trams," describes how Bob and Joan, an old cobbler and his wife, are despairing of finding Roger, the scrap of a child who brought such light into their home. In their nearly hopeless search they bind together in new ways. "Who are you calling a tram?" demands Joan gruffly. She concludes, "If I wasn't with you all the way to the depot, Bob Jones, I'd have gone off a long time ago" (Pullman 2000:109). Trans, a depot, a scrap and light - none of these are what they "designate." These words are carefully chosen. "Tram" sparks a meaning far more accurate than "dependable friend." Such words as "depot" and "scrap" are exact and pungent in story-ways. Understanding the story depends on listeners' facility to make connections and associations from a personal bank of remembered experiences and interactions.
          This way of meaning making is part of metaphoric speech, the heart of story language. Egan (1997), in his description of mythic understanding, writes:
"Metaphor, like myth, has long been a puzzle to scholars. Those of a positivist inclination have tended to sweep it under the academic rug, deeming it a linguistic frill that can always be reduced to the kind of literal language with which they are more at home. This last sentence is, of course, awash with metaphors... I could have written: "Positivists ignored metaphor because it entailed no features not reducible to literal language..."