At first, it seems like a commonplace observation: stories, whether oral or written, do not exist independently, but only in relation to a teller and an audience. To tell a story, whether that means speaking it or writing it, is to realize, to bring into existence, something that has up to that point only been a kind of potential or possibility. Likewise, to listen responsively to a story is to participate in the process of the story’s creation, bringing the story into being by an act of imaginative possession so that you can say, “This is my story, even if it is not only mine.” Yet that is no small thing.
This is easier to grasp in the case of an oral culture, in which a story cannot be said to be lodged in a written text when it is not being told. It is startling to realize that the Iliad only existed in the moment that Homer was singing or reciting it to an audience. We live in a culture with a strong materialist bias, and are most willing to grant the status of reality to objects. But the Iliad was originally not an object but an act, a performance. We would be happier if some time traveler had videotaped it, so that there was something objective that conferred the status of “real” upon the poem.
This may seem like some kind of Zen-and-the-art-of-poetry philosophical quibble: does a story exist when there is no one to tell or hear it? But some profound implications may be teased out of this conundrum. One of our great living fantasists, who is also one of our great living writers, John Crowley, writes novels that almost always include a secondary level of meditation on the relationship of stories to human identity and human life. As we read his early novel Engine Summer (1979), we become aware that the narrator, a character named Rush that Speaks, is in fact a sequence of memories—in other words, a story—recorded on a set of crystals. But we only know the story by means of its being downloaded, so to speak, into the personality of some person, who then speaks it; and the values and feelings of that mediating personality change the story. Because the story is long, it takes a succession of volunteers who allow the story to possess them, to take them over temporarily. But if the story possesses them, the recipients also possess the story, investing it with their values, feelings, and understanding, so that certain story details are sometimes either enhanced or minimized, and sometimes a few details appear that were not in other versions. There is a kind of Kantian dilemma: we can never know Rush that Speaks’ story “in itself” but only as it is constructed by the minds of those who mediate it. But the same thing is true of any listeners or readers of any story. As Marshall McLuhan famously said in the 60’s about communications media, “The medium is the message.” (This was back in an era when people still knew that “medium” is the singular of “media”). Applied to Engine Summer, the aphorism becomes a pun, Rush that Speaks’ reciters being mediums very much in the sense of a medium in a séance.
This disturbs us: we would like to think of a medium of communication, whether print, electronic, or oral, as a neutral conduit conveying a message without alternation. McLuhan’s aphorism tells us that that is never true. The oral tradition is even more disconcerting to those who yearn for the security of a fixed message conveyed without alteration. For, until it was finally at some point written down in a later period, the Iliad did not even exist as a kind of virtual text in Homer’s mind which he recited by rote memory. According to Albert Lord’s famous book The Singer of Tales (1960), summarizing the research of Milman Parry after his premature death, all that pre-existed in the mind of Homer or any oral performer was a bare story outline and a set of formulaic metrical component parts, oral Legos that could be spontaneously assembled into a recitation. The Iliad was improvised, on the spot, all 15,000 lines of it; and it was never improvised the same way twice. Every performance would have been at least somewhat different, perhaps accidentally, perhaps due to the performer’s love of creative variation. The same is presumably true of all epics going back to an oral period, including Beowulf.
This is not news to those of us who have lived with and loved the still living oral tradition of folk and blues music. The more traditional and unmodernized the performer, the more likely the blues song will be different every time, whole verses appearing and disappearing, sometimes migrating from another song altogether, the guitar part also varying. On guitar instructional material, it is common enough for the teacher to play something as a demonstration and then say, “Now let me take you through what I just did—if I can remember what I just did, because it comes out different every time.” In fact, the teachers will counsel, don’t play it the same every time in some rote, mechanical way. Part of the art is the art of creative improvisation. As for folk music, it took five volumes to publish the most famous collection of English and Scottish ballads, the Child ballads, because, for each of the 305 ballads, Francis Child collected as many variants as he could find—as many as a dozen for some of the ballads. Nothing is commoner than to have in one’s collection, say, five utterly different versions of “Sir Patrick Spens” by various folk artists with different lyrics and different tunes.
Contrast this with the philosophy of editing texts in which one is trained as a graduate student, and which is embodied in something like the Library of America, which claims, or used to claim, to offer definitively edited texts of American classics. Many if not most literary texts exist in more than one manuscript and print version, so there are rules for choosing the version that supposedly comes closest to representing the author’s final intention, then more rules for incorporating authorial revisions and correcting what are judged to be authorial errors. It is gratifying that someone cares enough to want to provide readers with editions that are better than the sloppy, mutilated, sometimes arbitrarily altered texts so often thrown upon the market by commercial publishers. But the ideal of a definitive edition is often unachievable, and the attempt has resulted in scholarly feuds of startling intensity. There is still, in the centenary year of its publication, no consensus about a definitive text of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which many would nominate as the most important English-language novel of the 20th century, and the critical controversy surrounding it has reached Hatfield-McCoy levels of animosity.
Elizabethan England was of course literate, but the popular theatre in which Shakespeare got his start retained many elements of oral culture. Since oral materials were often anonymous, and, in the absence of intellectual property laws, basically unowned even when an author’s name was affixed to them, everything was basically up for grabs. There are no more than a handful of Shakespeare’s plays that are original and not a recreation of some source or sources. Something of the same creative borrowing went on with the Arthurian stories. As we move backward behind literature proper into mythology and folk tale, the sense of an “original” almost always disappears. Not only is there no one inspired poet who first created the Orpheus myth, but there was no ur-text, no first edition, in a manner of speaking. And if no alpha, there is also no omega: the Orpheus myth continues to generate new recitations, up to and including Samuel R. Delany’s brilliant science fictional version in A Fabulous, Formless Darkness (which the publisher insisted on titling The Einstein Intersection, a good example of the arbitrary practices of commercial publishers) to Anais Mitchell’s hit Broadway musical Hadestown. Folk tales migrate all over the world, mutating as they go like a benign version of Covid. It is a fun exercise in composition classes to have students read a half dozen versions of, say, “Cinderella” from around the world and analyze the cultural differences. Which can be drastic: in the Vietnamese version, the Cinderella character kills her wicked sister and cooks her into a jar of relish which she gives to her stepmother, who dies of trauma when she learns what she’s eaten. So much for the feminist complaint about the passive female characters in fairy tales. The point is that when a traditional story is recreated by a later writer or tradition, usually the attempt is not to replace the original but precisely to be faithful to it. That remains true when, for example, Shakespeare drastically alters his sources: he is trying to liberate what he feels is the real story buried in excrescence and ineptitude as Michelangelo tried to liberate the sculpture buried in the block of marble.
It would be clearer that the same thing is true of the Bible if the Biblical materials were not so heavily redacted, which means edited for consistency into a single, supposedly definitive text. The Bible was summoned into being by individuals and groups who were trying to be faithful to a vision they felt to be latent within a heterogeneous body of texts. The first step was that of canonicity: decisions were made about which books, out of the many books aspiring to become scripture, were truly a part of the Biblical text. After this winnowing, there was a lengthy process of editing and redacting. Finally, there is the question of translation—for Christians especially, for whom there is no pressure to read scripture in the original as there is for Muslims to read the Qu’ran in the original Arabic, for Jewish people to read their scripture in the original Hebrew. A translator creates the translated text in the most direct way imaginable. I warn students that reading two different translations, even two good ones, can be like reading two different books. I choose translations for teaching where there seems to me to be a good match between the translator’s sensibility and the text: thus, I like Robert Fagle’s Iliad for its rugged power, Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey for its lyricism and wit. I have those translations for so long that for me they have become the Iliad and Odyssey. Reading another translation would be strange, like visiting a foreign country.
Churches and theological traditions summon a scripture into being by the way they read it. Again, theologians and churches do not usually feel they are attaching extraneous meanings to a document but are reading accurately what is truly “in” the document. But a reading of the Bible influenced by neo-Platonism is radically different from one influenced by fundamentalism. Fundamentalists would reply that their Bible is not a “version” but what scripture literally says. Nonetheless, fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible do not agree with one another. Differences of translation, differences in temperament and values, inform interpretations, even down the level of the meaning of a Greek or Hebrew word. It is not as if objectivity is impossible: objectivity means recognizing the existence and authority of other readings. But objectivity does not, and cannot, mean a kind of scientific impersonality that subtracts all bias and eccentricity until it arrives at the “real” text. According to Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge (1958), that kind of totally logical, totally factual objectivity cannot happen even in science. Scientists bring into being a universe by the power of their theories and interpretations. A history of Darwinian theories of evolution is instructive, from the visionary mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin to the fundamentalist anti-fundamentalism of Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, like the fundamentalists he opposes, argues according to the letter, the letter to him being mechanistic materialism. An understanding of evolution according to the spirit, like Chardin’s, is to him a betrayal of the reality principle. The two theorists read the text of nature antithetically, and thereby live in different realities.
The Christian Bible was not handed down: it was brought forth out of a chaos of conflicting texts and interpretations, but so long ago that the average person has no idea that scripture was ever in the process of being created, created by being passionately edited and read. The average person knows even less of other traditions. I teach an essay called “The Storyteller’s Daughter” by Saira Shah, the daughter of the famous Sufi writer, translator, and storyteller Idris Shah. She says that “Islam, as I absorbed it, was a tolerant philosophy, which encouraged one to adopt a certain attitude to life. The Qu’ran we studied taught: ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’ The Prophet we followed said: ‘The holy warrior is he who struggles with himself’” (123). And also: “One hour’s teaching is better than a whole night of prayer”; “The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr”; “You ask me to curse unbelievers, but I was not sent to curse”; “Women are the twin halves of men” (124). She explains that there are in fact two compilations of the sayings of the Prophet, compiled by two different figures: “The distinction between these two great Islamic figures is a matter of emphasis: the literal or the spiritual” (123). The more popular, literalizing collection was followed by her tutor, who went on to join the revolutionary movement of the Ayatollah Khomeini. But the collection followed by her family “was revered by the classical Persian poets, and is widely used in dervish mystical communities to this day” (124). It has been only a few weeks since a belated, benighted follower of the Khomeini revolution stabbed Salman Rushdie in, of all places, Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, a site of liberal culture since the 19th century. According to the story, the Qu’ran was dictated to Mohammed directly by Allah, and therefore came into the world perfect down to the very letters of the text. God does not make typos. Saira Shah tells a very different story, of a Qu’ran paradoxically created by its readers, which included its editors. But all texts are created by the same paradoxical process, according to the “reader response” theory of interpretation.
What has been said thus far is likely to be roughly familiar to those with a literary education. But the idea that works of art are brought into being by performers and audiences has implications that are not always considered. To return to Crowley’s Engine Summer, the volunteers into which the memories of Rush that Speaks have been “downloaded” are responding to it as readers who are not in a science fiction novel respond to a real story. Especially if it is a text that engages us, we do not need fancy literary theory to tell us how much we are creating the story: it comes alive in our minds and hearts—and in our mind’s eye, as often we can see the characters, so vividly that the way they look in our imagination becomes definitive, and we are upset by TV or movie versions of the story in which the characters look different from how we imagined them. Though I too find them irritating, I can understand the outraged reaction of some fans to any kind of revisionism in the movie versions of famous superheroes. Sometimes the motivation is sexist or just plain trolling, but sometimes it is the distraught reaction of those who have invested so much of themselves in a fictional character. To them, faithfulness to the character deeply matters. In the second of his Cantos, in a passage quoted in a recent newsletter, Ezra Pound humorously yells at Robert Browning for having written a poem about the actual medieval troubadour Sordello: “Damn it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one Sordello. / But Sordello, and my Sordello?”
A more mature and flexible reaction, on the other hand, could produce a new kind of enjoyment. Seeing the three versions of Spiderman together in the multiverse movie drives home how these are three ways of imagining an iconic, virtually an archetypal figure. They all work, or at least I think so, but note that it isn’t just the features and style of the actors playing the lead: Spiderman’s whole world is different. The idea that Spiderman or any other superhero exists in only one fixed, canonical version is simply wrong. The same is true of the dark/darker/darkest versions of Batman over the years. The characters’ past history and plotline are also re-imagined by new creators. The idea that this is just commercialism shamelessly thinking of ways to make us spend money all over again on the same product is unconvincing after a point. The limits to revisionism, for there are limits, are defined by the difference between the letter and the spirit. Fans will accept some fairly drastic changes to a character’s looks, back story, and world if they do not violate the spirit of the character. Radical changes to the Hulk have not been too incredible for fans to accept, even though his comic-book personality over the years has ranged from that of a two-year-old throwing a perpetual temper tantrum (with a two-year-old’s vocabulary: “Hulk smash”) to a version that retains the erudite personality of his alter ego Bruce Banner to a version that is smart and capable of basic English but sneering and obnoxious like a bad college roommate. Even his color has changed, from grey to green. The only thing that never changes are those perpetually ripped pants.
If superheroes are regarded as just too shallow and superficial to take seriously as examples, we may observe that exactly the same thing is true of various actors’ versions of Shakespearean characters, and various productions’ recreations of the story. We never tire of going to productions of Hamlet, partly because it is Hamlet, but partly because every good actor’s version is different, being based on that actor’s personality and conception of the character. There are limits, but not many: Hamlet can be a noble Dane or a manic-depressive, a punk or a woman. The same is true of settings, which can range from “authentic” medieval to contemporary to abstract (Peter Brooks) to various historical settings that usually function allegorically as commentary on the action, such as a Nazi-fascist setting for Richard III. The successful productions remain faithful to the spirit of the play, however roughly and unscientifically defined, and are not just attempts at novelty: they give us new insights about the play and the lead character. Whether revisionist versions bring out something latent “in” the play or are imposed from outside it by a contemporary imagination seeking to coerce the play into being trendy turns out to be a pseudo-question. Northrop Frye said that a myth means all the things it has been successfully made to mean up to the present time, and the same is true of Hamlet. Limits to creative revisionism are more often social and ideological than artistic. Milton got away with what is actually a boldly original re-imagining and reinterpreting of the Bible mostly by convincing superficial readers that he was faithfully retelling it. Martin Scorsese was not so lucky: in 1988, conservative Christians, most of whom had not actually seen the film, picketed outside theatres showing The Last Temptation of Christ. We can be infinitely thankful that Scorsese did not suffer the tragic fate of Salman Rushdie. The present limits to revisionism are not of a conservative but of a “woke” variety. It looks at the moment as if no white actor will ever again be able to play Othello, and there is a great ruckus over whether straight actors should be allowed to play gay and lesbian characters, whether non-Jewish actors can play Shylock, whether only actors with disabilities can play Richard III, and so on.
Classical music is supposed to be interpretive, not “creative.” Unlike in popular music, there is a fixed version in a printed text, and definite limits to the liberties an interpreter may take in performing that text. Yet performing artists, particularly soloists, are still in the position of the volunteers who can “perform” the story that is Rush that Speaks only by possessing and being possessed by it, which means that their performance is colored by their personalities, usually on a scale ranging from emotional and neo-romantic to precise, controlled, and neo-classicist. If you collect classical music, you learn which performers you prefer, and also which orchestra directors, who also have their styles based on temperament.
The visual arts, when they are devoted to illustrating a story, help to create that story. In the heyday of adult book illustration in the 19th century, a few illustrators became virtual collaborators with certain writers, helping readers visualize the story. For many readers, it was impossible to imagine Lewis Carroll’s books without John Tenniel’s illustrations: they are really part of the story, not addenda. The same was true of the illustrations of Dickens’ novels by Hablot Knight Browne, known as Phiz. In comic books, the role of the artist often overshadows that of the writer, and the artist’s personal style is all-important and has to be properly matched to the nature of the comic. Jack Kirby was an artistic nuclear power plant capable of charging any number of action-oriented titles with his unlimited dynamism, but Dr. Strange needed the quirky, surreal mysticism of Steve Ditko.
We do not tire of seeing new versions of Hamlet, of hearing a new pianist perform a Beethoven sonata, of reading another work that recreates the myth of Orpheus, or Prometheus, or Faust. Yet it is true that artistic styles seem to be cyclical: a style, a set of conventions and formulas, is born, develops, reaches a peak of development, then passes into a late phase marked by various forms of self-consciousness, including pastiche, satire, and various forms of deliteralization and interiorization, then exhausts its creativity and becomes obsolescent. One wonders why. The formal elements of art are inexhaustible. As I have said elsewhere, declaring a C-major chord obsolete is silly, although there are no doubt plenty of jazz artists who would defend the declaration. But their dismissal makes sense only within the context of the historical evolution of jazz, as it developed from its early, simpler forms like ragtime through the more and more abstruse explorations of bebop to free jazz and then, having exhausted a set of possibilities, returned to the earlier styles in a spirit of knowing, postmodern pastiche. These artistic cycles seem to be part of a larger, cyclical rhythm of historical rise, decline, and fall posited by writers of what has been called “metahistory,” sometimes as a polite euphemism for “a form of pop culture and not real history at all.” But the vision of cultural rise and decline, while it keeps, well, rising and declining, also keeps returning to haunt the modern imagination, from Vico in the 17th century, Gibbon in the 18th, Nietzsche in the 19th, and Spengler and Toynbee in the 20th, along with the writers who have been influenced by them, which includes most of the 20th-century Modernists, from gifted but neurotic ones like Yeats in A Vision to sane ones like Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
The forms of art do not really ever die: the C-major chord is safe, despite bebop and John Cage. So are meter and rhyme, despite the overwhelming rejection of “formalism” by contemporary poetry. But cultural cycles are real, and would-be artists in any artform have to become aware of the history of that artform, what point on the cycle the particular art is exploring now, and situate themselves in relation to that history. That does not necessarily mean giving in, jumping on the bandwagon, and adopting the new trendy, cutting-edge fashion, although plenty of one’s peers will doubtless do exactly that. But it does mean becoming aware of what has been done, and situating what you want to do in relation to it. If you want to be a formalist in poetry, despite current wisdom, you should study how contemporary formalists like James Merrill or Marilyn Hacker write sonnets that are not simply exercises in reactionary nostalgia. You should read Rita Dove’s “The Bistro Styx,” a sonnet sequence with a contemporary voice that is also a recreation of the Orpheus myth in the form of an African-American mother visiting her daughter in Paris. When I have done independent studies with students who wanted to write science fiction, my best advice to them was to read widely in the field, yes, but try to acquire from your reading a historical sense, so that an editor will not have to tell you that the great plot idea you have just come up with is one that John W. Campbell would have been thrilled to publish in Astounding Science Fiction—in 1954.
Cyclical theories are sometimes deemed pessimistic, and it is true that the purely repetitive cycle, Macbeth’s “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” is demonic. In fact, it is the very shape of hell: in Dante’s Inferno, the damned are endlessly trapped repeating symbolic forms of the behavior that damned them. In Yeats’s poetic drama Purgatory, a nasty old man is doomed to repeat the murder of his own son, like a kind of high-toned Twilight Zone episode. Yeats being Protestant, he perhaps was not aware that his drama was mistitled, since the repetitions in Purgatory are progressive and transformational rather than punitive and futile. But true purgatorial repetition is possible, a repetition that does not merely repeat but at the same time moves forward. Art and culture follow the rhythm of the imagination, which is one of decreation and recreation. A civilization or a style rises, possessed by a vision of possibilities to be realized. The “decline” after the exhaustion of those possibilities, however, is not necessarily cause for pessimism. Decreation followed by recreation is the shape of the history of art and culture: it is also the shape of our own lives. It has a cyclic element, but also a progressive one, at least potentially.
We come to the end of a phase of life, and it is painful, possibly involving the end of relationships and marriages, possibly even real deaths, as of parents, possibly the death of careers. But the possibility of a progressive death and rebirth rhythm is not just a pop-psych cliché; and we may find a model in the careers of those artists who followed a kind of phoenix rhythm, dying out of one stylistic phase only to be reborn in another. The cycles do not simply repeat but develop, as the artists—and sometimes the critics—move forward by rereading their own work. Thus, there are two kinds of recreation, novel and progressive. When Homer varied his performance of the Iliad every time he recited it, it was a matter of what Milton’s angels call “change delectable, not need.” Nature is full of change delectable: every rose now blooming on my rose bush is slightly different. The slight but endless variety of all those snowflakes, no two alike, probably serves no evolutionary purpose, but makes life delectable. However: when Homer (if it was the same poet) composed the Odyssey, he was rereading the Iliad and, in a second epic, bringing the same story to life in a new way, a way that travels far beyond the vision of the Iliad, whose heroes are in fact trapped in the changeless repetitions of the Underworld in Book 11. To recreate is to read anew, even if the text you are reading is yourself.
Reference
Shah, Saira. “The Storyteller’s Daughter.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, 8th edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson, 2012. 118-24.
Bravo … I wonder if all great novels possess a secondary level of meditation on their own creation in the text and in their recreation in the reader’s imagination—on, that is to say, the story’s incarnation and resurrection? I can’t think of a great novel I’ve read that does not.