What Is the Whole Story

Contents

1. The whole story, stated fairly
2. The neighbours
3. Three cases the picture cannot hold
4. One totality, not one branch
5. Where a telling is made
6. Whole relative to what
7. “That’s not the whole story”
8. What it does not mean
9. What it costs
10. An ordinary Tuesday

The phrase does two jobs. One is an objection: that’s not the whole story. It is said across kitchen tables and conference tables, in newsrooms and group chats, usually a beat after somebody has finished speaking and usually with a little heat. The other is a promise: the whole story — the book that finally tells it, the inquiry that will get to the bottom of it, the long evening on which a parent at last explains what happened between them.

Both rest on one picture. There is a way things went. Each telling of it covers some share, and the shares can be added. A short telling covers a little; a careful one covers more; a telling with nothing left out would be the whole story, sitting at the end of the line that every other account is somewhere along. On this picture that’s not the whole story means you stopped too soon, and the cure is more.

The picture is not foolish. Most of the time when somebody says the phrase, something that matters has been left out, and adding it helps. So the question here is not whether a particular telling left something out. It is what the whole story would be, if there were one — and whether a telling is the kind of thing that could be it.

The neighbours

Four earlier pieces sit close enough that the differences should come first. The piece on my truth asked how many pasts there are, and answered one, with as many readings as there are readers. This piece takes that as read and asks something else: whether any reading, told out in full, could be the whole of the one.

The piece on secrets owns the commonest use of the phrase — we’ll never know the whole story, said when records are missing, destroyed or withheld. That sense is legitimate and it belongs there. It is set aside here on purpose, by a case in which no record is missing at all. The piece on ancestors separated how settled something is from how much of it can be read; this piece needs neither quantity. And the piece on near misses dealt with what almost happened. This one says nothing about what might have happened instead.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is the same in all three. The picture treats the whole story as the far end of a scale of length. The first case does not reach the end; the second shows two people each able to lengthen without limit; the third reaches the end of length and, I will argue, is still not there. The third case is a thought experiment and is marked as illustration. Nothing in the derivation below depends on it.

Figure 01

Three things “the whole story” can point at, and which of them a telling can reach

The sense	What it is	Can a telling reach it?
A missing piece	A particular mark not yet made public, read, or found — the report, the letter, the thing he said that night.	Often. This is the secrets piece’s subject and is set aside here.
A telling finished to its edges	An account drawn to boundaries somebody chose — from the email on Monday to the meeting on Thursday. A made thing, present and revisable.	Yes. This is what a finished account is, and it can be done well or badly.
The whole	One settled totality, not one branch. Not a telling, and not a place where a telling is kept.	No — and not for want of length.

One totality, not one branch

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and the results derived from them. The one doing the work today is the second of them, read here at the clause this series has not yet taken as a subject. The Past contains one settled totality — not one branch (P1). It goes on to say that the unity is at the totality, and it ends with a sentence that is easy to read past: we inhabit one branch of it.

Two things are being kept apart in that primitive, and they are the two things the phrase the whole story welds together. There is the totality — one, settled, complete. And there is a branch, which is what anybody inhabits. The primitive does not say how the two relate beyond this: the totality is not one branch, the unity is at the totality, and we are in a branch. That is enough for what follows. Whatever else is true, the primitive puts the one — the whole — at the totality, and puts every one of us somewhere else.

The piece on my truth was about counting pasts: one, not several. This is a different distinction. It is not between one past and two. It is between the one and any branch of it — which is where anybody telling anything is standing.

The foundation stakes itself on this. Among the ways it says it could be shown wrong is this: if two incompatible past actuals of one event ever became jointly accessible in one present, this primitive would be false. It adds that the many-worlds picture in physics does not count against it, because decohered branches do not become jointly accessible. Put plainly: whatever is to hand, in any present, is consistent with one branch, and the foundation stakes this primitive on no present holding two incompatible ones side by side.

Where a telling is made

Now ask what a telling is, in the foundation’s locked vocabulary. Telling is an act — a process. Many tellings leave a mark: the statement, the email, the transcript, the memoir, the book. That mark is an artifact, an imperfect historical mark made in relation to an exemplar. And history, in the locked sense, is the artifacts — present, surrounding, revisable. It is not the Past under another name. The Past, in the same vocabulary, is the node: one totality, complete, and it does not exist.

So a story, in the ordinary sense, is history in the locked sense. It is made here, in the present, out of present marks — documents, recordings, recollections read now — by somebody who inhabits one branch. The first clauses are ordinary. The primitive adds only the last. The last is enough.

Go back to the perfect archive. Nothing was missing from it. It was still made in one branch, of marks from one branch, and it is still history: present, revisable, somebody’s. It is the longest telling there could be, and it is a telling. That is the first half of the shortfall, and it has nothing to do with inner lives.

The whole story is not the longest telling. It is not a telling.

Whole relative to what

There is an obvious reply. Nobody asking for the whole story of an evening wants the totality. They want the whole of the evening. Surely the evening happened in this branch, and a perfect archive of it would be the whole of it.

Look at what the whole of the evening needs. It needs edges. When did the evening start — at the door, at the invitation, at the argument three weeks earlier that explains why two of the guests sat apart? Which rooms? Which people? Which causes, and how far back? The first case is this question asked over and over, and each answer was a decision. An evening does not come with its own edges. A telling of it has edges because somebody drew them.

The foundation names one whole, and says where it is: the unity is at the totality (P1). It does not supply a second kind of whole, sitting in the Past with edges of its own — an evening-sized piece of the settled totality, pre-cut and waiting to be told. The node is not a place with rooms in it. So when whole is said of anything smaller than the totality, it has to mean something else. It means complete to a boundary. And the boundary is the teller’s.

Now the perfect archive has both halves of its answer. It is a telling finished to a boundary — one evening, these rooms, these hours — and, finished that well, it is a remarkable thing. It is not the evening as settled, because that is not a telling, and it is not the whole, because the whole is the totality and the archive is made in a branch. None of that is a complaint about the archive. It is a description of what it is.

• Finished to its edges The account from here to here, with nothing inside the edges left out. Achievable. A made thing, in the present. Somebody drew the edges. Can be done, and done well.
• Whole One settled totality, not one branch. Not a telling. Not reached by adding, because adding happens in a branch. Cannot be told.
• Longer The same telling with more in it. Moves the edges. Changes how much the first column holds. Leaves the second untouched. Not closer. Wider.

“That’s not the whole story”

With both constructions in hand, the objection can be read exactly. Said of a telling, that’s not the whole story is true. It is true of the late arrival and of the perfect archive, of Anna’s account and of Ben’s. It is true of the telling in which it is said. Because it is true of each telling, it does not distinguish one from another. On its own it is not an objection to anything.

What it can be is a preface. Its weight is in what comes next — a particular mark, left outside somebody’s edges, that would change how the telling is heard. You left twenty minutes late is that kind of mark. So is she had been undercutting him for months, and so is his team had missed three deadlines. Each is a claim that can be checked, argued and weighed. The phrase in front of it adds nothing to that weighing except heat.

And when the mark is supplied, what happens is not that the first telling becomes whole. Records update expectation forward and never re-open (R2). The addition is a new telling beside the first. The listener hears differently from then on. The first telling stays what it was, and so does the second: two made things, each finished to its edges, neither of them the whole.

This is why the ratchet in the second case has no end. Each of them can say the phrase with perfect truth, and each can go on saying it. The argument between them was not about the phrase. It was about whether the months of undercutting and the three deadlines change how the meeting should be heard — and that argument can be had, and sometimes won, the moment both of them stop reaching for the whole.

What it does not mean

Three misreadings are close enough to this argument that they should be named and refused.

Settled is not decided. One settled totality can sound like it was all written in advance. The primitive speaks of the Past. The telling you give tomorrow is an act in the present, and it is yours: the host can occupy a position from which its response to a readable condition is revisable (P5), and agency is relocated, not abolished — the person is the site of conscious responsibility (R13). Where you put the edges of a story is exactly that kind of response.

Short of the whole is not all the same. Each telling falls short of the whole in the same way. That does not make tellings equal as tellings. Some are finished to fair edges; some have their edges drawn to leave out the inconvenient part. The difference is large, and it belongs to the teller. Nothing here says which telling, in any particular dispute, is the fairer one.

Asking is not pointless. The missing-piece sense of the phrase — what was in the report, what he said that night — is legitimate and often answerable. This piece does not touch it. It only removes the hope that one more piece, or all of them, would turn a telling into the whole.

What it costs

Three costs, and each takes away something people lean on.

The definitive account loses its finish line. The authorised biography, the official inquiry, the headline promising the full story: each can be careful, fair to its edges, and finished. None is the whole, and none is a step toward it. People who have waited years for the definitive account are waiting for something that cannot be a telling. That is unwelcome, and it should be said rather than softened.

The phrase stops working as a trump card, for both sides. Anybody who has won an argument with that’s not the whole story has to give some of it back. It was true when they said it. It was true of their own account too.

The teller loses cover. I told you the whole story is not available to anyone. I told it from here to here is. The edges are the teller’s, and the teller answers for where they were put — including when they were put, quietly, just short of the part that would have changed how it was heard.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. When someone says “that’s not the whole story”, ask for the part that changes it. And ask it of yourself when you are the one saying it. If there is no particular part, there was no objection.
2. Say your edges out loud. Here is what happened from the email on Monday to the meeting on Thursday. A telling finished to stated edges is the only finished telling there is, and it is the only kind somebody else can check.
3. Stop lengthening to win. Longer is not closer. Weigh the next addition as a new mark on its merits, not as a step toward completion.
4. When the missing part arrives, add it; do not pretend the first telling was whole. Records update expectation forward (R2). The earlier telling stays what it was — an account finished to the edges you had then.
5. Hold the edges as yours. Where a story starts and stops is a response to a readable condition, and it is revisable (P5). You answer for it (R13). Move them when they were drawn to leave something out.