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As Binet introduces characters and events peripheral to the main characters, he either introduces them with a statement that they really have no place in his story, or omits their story altogether by simply saying their part is another story he could write a whole book about. I think there are two points worth discussing here. The first is the power of the narrator to decide what is and is not important to his or her story. The second is the sheer byzantine nature of life and the very unsimplistic realities that lead up to major events. The quote Terry introduced into another thread exemplifies this second point perfectly:

"'I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates and the infinite branching of cause and effect -- and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it -- even higher and denser, like a creeping ivy -- the unmappable pattern of causality."

Thoughts?

From an article on about Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'Black Swan':

"[The] great human need for causality, narrative and meaning has led us to frame the world as a controllable, malleable model.

Taleb [argues] that the narrative fallacy, “our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths�, contributes to our blindness.

Historians are singled out because of their need to look for causality. Taleb does not write off the study of history, nor does he deny the value of it in understanding human civilization. But he argues strongly that history unfolded as it did because, well, it just did."

I think Taleb's ideas dovetail perfectly with Binet's about causality. It is unmappable. But What Binet has done is make the story more believable by admitting that again and again.

He achnowledges his power and his decision-making (and sometimes, his capriciousness) about defining what the story relates and what it doesn't, and so makes us question this process for all stories, and particularly all histories.

What I thought of right away is when Binet sums up another historical novel which uses the premise of an alternate history where Hitler passes his art examinations and WWII never happens. Mostly, that's because of your discussion of causality. And I think Binet does an excellent job of addressing that with his comments on the alternate history premise. I'm sure it's a decent story, but summarized in this fashion it seems risible that we could accept one little quirk of history as the hinge upon which the whole swings.

This conversation is (very nicely) leading to a vague theory I have about an important thing that stories do for us, as readers and writers both.

We know or can be convinced that 10,000 events all contributed to some situation. But (1) we can't hold 10,000 things in our heads, and (2) we intuit, quite rightly, that not all have equal weight. The making of story is about tracking the most influential vectors to give us a summarized, human-sized -- and sometimes rationalized and self-serving -- map of what happened. With the end-result that we can then proceed apace with some degree of confidence in our assessment of how things stand given the impact of all these events.

Lacewing, I agree to some extent -- we have to simplify to live. The problem comes when we assume -- and we do, too often for comfort -- that the map is the territory. That our historical digest represents all that's worthwhile about the situation. I think on some level we do this even if, intellectually, we are aware of all of the above.

I think it's human nature. So we need historians/novelists - the narrative makers - to give us new maps, again and again.