To Episode or Not

With the pending re-release of the Winter of Different Directions podcast over on Podiobooks I had to make a decision on what to title the "episodes." Most podcasts on Podiobooks are novels and frequently the authors release the chapters one at a time, and hence they title the episode (podisode?) "Chapter X." In other instances an episode will include multiple chapters. When I first went live with the Winter podcast I didn't give the naming decision much thought. They were stories, not chapters, and using "episode" seemed as good a convention as any, particularly after adding in the title of the story, like so: "Episode 19: Fresh Sludge." I was troubled a bit at the outset by this decision because the stories were not linked, not episodic in the sense of a continuing drama, and, really, the stories can be read/listened to in any order. (Although, to digress, I did spend considerable time choosing the sequence for the book because of the off chance that if someone were to read them in order—which I must confess is a reading strategy I almost never employ when reading a story collection—they would come away with a particular feel. Yeah, I know, how ludicrous a supposition is that? And to further digress, the order in which the stories were read for the podcast did follow the order of the book, at least through the 12th episode, when I skipped a couple of stories and then went out of sequence, but that change really had more to do with the difficulty of recording some of the stories than it did any sequencing based on meaning or an attempt to procure a particular listening experience.) So I set aside those stray concerns and stuck with what seemed a mere convention and called them episodes.

Back now to where I began: For the Podiobooks release I've decided to drop "Episode X" from the title and just go with the name of the story as the title. So, see, five months later those digressive concerns I just mentioned, came back into play. Mainly because I didn't want to risk implying any longer that these stories are linked. But, damn, it's still an episodic podcast!

So then I embarked on one of my favorite reading games, which is to play follow the definitions. Any dictionary will usually do, but in this case I chose Gerald Prince's "Dictionary of Narratology" (revised edition) and looked up "episode" and then followed it to ground . . .

episode: A series of related events standing apart from surrounding (series of) events because of one or more distinctive features and having a unity. [27]

So far so good. The first x-ref term, however, is "goal."

goal: A desired final state for a character. Story Grammars take a story to consist of a series of episodes which bring a character closer to or farther from the goal through the reaching or not reaching of a subgoal. [39]

Story grammars was also the second x-ref term in episode so I check it out, too:

story grammar: A grammar or series of statements and formulas interrelated by an ordered set of rules and accounting for the (the structure of) a set of stories; a grammar specifying the "natural" constituents of (a set of) stories and characterizing their relation. [93]

Which leads to the inevitable black-hole question: "What is a story?" Here's what Prince has to say:

The content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression plane or discourse; the "what" of a narrative as opposed to its "how;" the narrated as opposed to the narrating; the fiction as opposed to the narration (in Ricardou's sense of the terms); the existents and events represented in a narrative. [93]

Where each italicized word is another term to look up. And that is the first of 5 definitions given. See how much fun this is? I assure you that even after leaving out the circular terms you can spend hours down this rabbit hole. Get out quick before the ferret waiting down there sups on your life blood!