In other words
August 6th, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |One response to my earlier question is to say that all texts - stories, music, whatever - are re-tellings of something else. There’s no new story to tell.
Two interesting books on this subject:
- Vladimir Propp - Morphology of the Folk Tale (includes the 31 functions of folk tales)
- Christopher Booker - The Seven Basic Plots
As these books suggest, the re-telling works on the unconscious level - a storyeller doesn’t set out to copy, but he cannot help it.
Where does this leave so-called “authors” - people like me who try to originate, to invent new things, through stories?
It might be that Daniel Handler is onto something in Adverbs, where he makes his narrator suggest: “It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done.”
You can’t tell a new story - you can’t change its basic elements. But you can change the telling - the way the story is told.
