I don't believe any of the various purely literary definitions of narrative and characterization, so just preserving the shapes and orderings of the letters of a story, etc., doesn't mean much to me. My best bet is that a novel is a single physical thing, a specific physical phenomenon, which forms at a definite moment in the printing of a book, persists through time even when not read, and ceases to exist when its physical form becomes illegible. For example, it might be an intricate topological vortex that forms in a (completely hypothetical) condensate of ink and/or paper, somewhere between the front and back cover.

That is just a wild speculation, made for the sake of concreteness. But what is really unlikely is that a novel is just a collection of letters, in the sense of orthography - a sequence of glyphs representing letters that are coarse-grainings of the actual microphysical states, and which can survive to be read on another, physically distinct medium, so long as it reproduces the sequence of letters of the original.

Physically, what is a novel? Nuclei and electrons. And physically, what is a story? It is an extreme abstraction of what some of those nuclei and electrons are doing. Books are designed so that these abstractions remain valid - so that the dynamics of the story will match the sequence of the letters, unless something physically disruptive occurs.

The physical object is the reality, the narrative is just a concept. But the information-centric theory of what stories are and what novels are, is that they are narratives - a reification of a conceptual construct. This is false to the robust reality of a reader's consciousness, especially, which is why I insist on a literary theory that is physical and not just computational.

I don't want to belabor this point, but just want to make clear again why I dissent from the hundred protean ideas out there, about narrative uploading, copies, conscious readers, authorial intent, instances of decompression from digital letter-maps, and so on, in favor of speculations about a physical story within the book. Such a story would surely have information-theoretic story structures, other book regions that would be more like narratives, structural adjuncts to the novel part, such as the immediate suppliers of the boundary conditions which show up in experience as plot structure. But you can't regard the whole of the novel as nothing but creative writing. Some part of it has to be objectively real.

I think I'll stop here. Apologies to Mitchell Porter, who I judge to be a smart guy -- more knowledgeable than me about physics, without question -- who happens to believe a crazy thing. (I expect he judges my beliefs philosophically incoherent and hence crazy, so we're even on that score.) I should note that the above analogy hasn't been constructed with a great deal of care; I expect it can be picked apart quite thoroughly.

ETA: As I re-read this, I feel kind of bad about the mocking tone expressed by this kind of rhetorical construction, so let me state explicitly that I did it for the lulz; on the actual substantive matter at issue, I judge Mitchell Porter's comment to be at DH4 on the disagreement hierarchy and my own reply to be at DH3.