Fabula

Fabula is the totality of a work's events in their natural, chronological, and causal sequence — that is, 'what actually happened', as opposed to plot, the artistically recomposed manner of presenting those events. The distinction between fabula and plot was introduced by theorists (in particular the Formalists) to describe how a writer creatively organizes event-material: rearranging episodes, applying retrospection, delaying or anticipating the narration. For example, a detective work often begins with a consequence (the discovery of a crime), while the fabula's beginning (the crime itself) is reconstructed only at the end. The divergence between fabula and plot is an important means of artistic expressiveness: it creates intrigue, tension, and the effect of surprise. A complex plot-fabula organization marks, in particular, modernist works with their shifts of temporal planes, such as the prose of Valerii Shevchuk or the world novels of the 'stream of consciousness'.