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of actions requires, for instance, for any action an intention, a person (agent), a state or possible world, a change, its cause, and a purpose to which one can also add mental states, emotions, and circumstances. A description of an action should then be complete and relevant while the actions described should be difficult, the agent should not have an obvious choice of which course of actions to take in order to change the state which is inconsistent with his wishes, the following events should be unexpected, and some of them should be unusual or strange (van Dijk, 1974).
Many other requirements could be added. But this strict definition concerns only cases of so-called natural narrative ("I'll tell you what happened yesterday to my husband . . .") and, among artificial or fictional narratives, the classical forms of novel and romance. The requirements of unexpectedness or relevance seem not to hold for cases of contemporary experimental novels, whereas the Book of Genesis from the beginning to the creation of Adam undoubtedly tells a relevant story (with an agent, a purpose, changes, and causes), but none of the reported events is unexpected either to the agent or to the reader.
Therefore we can assume a more flexible notion of story (not so dissimilar from the one proposed by Aristotle's Poetics) in which it is enough to isolate an agent (no matter whether human or not), an initial state, a series of time-oriented changes with their causes, a final (even if transitorily so) result. In this sense there is a story even in the chemical description given by Peirce (see Chapter 7) about the production of lithium.
Thus one can recognize one or more fabulae even in those avant-garde narrative texts in which it seems that there is no story at all: at most it is difficult to ascertain who the agents are, what causes what, and where a relevant change takes place. 17 It is even possible to assign a fabula to a metaphysical treatise such as Spinoza's Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. Consider its opening sentences:
(19) Per causam sui intelligo id cujus essentia involvit existentiam; sive id cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens.
There is at least a presupposed agent (Ego) who makes an action (intelligo) concerning an object (id) who becomes in turn the agent of an embedded story (God is causa sui). As a matter of fact, in this story there is no change: the Ethica tells of a universe in which nothing 'new' happens (since the order and the connection of things is the same as the order and the connection of ideas). There is an agent which causes its own absolute permanence through any lapse of time (before time existed). It is not true, however, that change and time order are denied: they are at a zero degree. The fabula can be an antifabula. It is also true

 
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