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| "I'm on an adventure!" |
A quick bio: I am a sophomore from San Jose, California. I just declared an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing, thanks to a wonderful experience in a Creative Nonfiction class last quarter. I love to sing, and am an alto in the Stanford University Singers. Some of my favorite pieces that we've performed have been Bach's Mass in B minor and Herbert Howells' Requiem. I also love to talk to people. Talk talk talk. One on one, cara a cara, where you learn so much and more about a person just by the things they say, their kind of humor, their turn of phrase, and really just everything. Eyes are a window to a person's soul? Maybe. But unless someone's making the effort to pretend to be someone they're not, in my opinion these kinds of honest, earnest, and dare-I-say-intimate conversations work just as well as windows to the soul. Speaking up in lecture is kind of different, but I'll do my best.
Now, to answer the question of whether there are such things as new stories. At first thought, my answer is no. There are not. Every story that is born takes inspiration from some predecessor or other. Despite being an English major, I am unfortunately not very well read, and so cannot really conjure up to mind a plethora of examples. But the first idea that comes to mind is the fact that the love story in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is recreated in West Side Story; here is proof that stories are not new, but instead reincarnated. (Up until now, I believe we have confined our discussion to solely novels, but stories can be told in other forms of media besides books, and so I feel justified in including movies, musicals, and such. One of my favorite stories actually comes from the Argentinian film El secreto de sus ojos, but I digress.) The fact that Shakespeare himself supposedly drew inspiration for his tragedy from an Italian tale only adds credence to the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. (See what I did there? Okay.)
I think, though, that there are different stories - and these differences are what cause readers to be continuously enthralled by this or that story that arises. A new twist, a different angle, a fresh perspective. Certainly, none of these makes a story original, and therefore new in that sense of the word. But these differences do make a story that is distinct, and therefore new in this particular sense of the word. I suppose it all depends on how one wishes to define the word "new" - and one can answer the question in that way.
One way to illustrate this idea is to consider the story of the five blind men and the elephant. When asked to describe the elephant, each of the five men reach out to feel the elephant - albeit from different places. One of the men reaches for the elephant's tail, and therefore insists that an elephant is like a snake. Another man feels the elephant's flapping ear, and declares that the elephant is like a fan. Yet another man touches the elephant's side; he compares it to a wall. The other two men feel the elephant's trunk and leg, and are each convinced that the creature is like a thick tree branch, or a pillar, respectively.
As we all know, none of these men's descriptions are entirely correct. They certainly describe different parts of the same body, but none of these descriptions fully encompass all that an elephant is - particularly as they all begin to argue over whose description is the right one. I believe that this story adeptly illustrates the issue at heart. Though there are no new stories - one might say, though there is only one elephant - there are certainly new interpretations, and in that sense new stories. Or, to take the story of the five blind men and the elephant into consideration, there are certainly many different ways of describing an elephant.
(Image source: http://static.nme.com/images/gallery/2012TheHobbit01PR200912.jpg)
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