(Excerpt)

Stories remind me of thefts, for they require a whole strategy of breaking into another’s discourse and depriving it of its most valuable signs. To draw from earlier stories, fables, parables, legends, anecdotes, and everyday occurrences is to have already found a more suitable site for the adapt piece. Displaced events make stories memorable: losing a shoe in a busy shopping-centre is a thing to be annoyed about, but losing a shoe in a ball may be the turning point between a miserable and a royal life, as Cinderella finds out. The significance of the event lies not in its intrinsic quality, but in its relation to other fragments brought together from tales, everyday occurrences, history, and other narrative sources. Needless to say, a literary break-in is also an artistic breakthrough: we are often unaware of the value of narrative fragments until they are stolen and become recognizably conspicuous within a new context. Likewise, we only recognize our insignificant routines in another’s tale, where they gain an intensified or crucial function as turning points.

Narrative fragments are already implicit in our everyday lives, where incidents often involve wrong places rather than inherently wrong events. In itself, putting off one’s shoe is part of a daily routine of undressing, and its accidental occurrence in a shopping-centre is not an intrinsic but a contextual change. In Cinderella’s ball, the lost shoe foreshadows the loss of magical support (and attire). However, it also brings about – through the possibility of fitting the right foot – the attainment of true nobility. And this attainment, in turn, ensures the permanent attire of a new status. In Cinderella’s case, the loss of a shoe correlates an impermanent with a permanent attire; it also marks the transient nature of magical support, while becoming instrumental for the permanent fulfilment of a dream. Where do stories come from? They come from fragments deliberately or accidentally stolen from other stories, and combined in such a way as to make them momentous. We perceive a tale only when a consequence becomes consequential, or when an event becomes eventful. In itself, the event does not account for the story, but in the wrong place it brings about an unpredictable or unexpected succession of further events.

History has been a primary site for theft through story-telling. Euhemerus’s claim that mythical gods and episodes were only deified historical figures and events betrays a classical sensibility to such a fact. This is not to say that the historical narrator is the saddest agent of story-telling; he is merely the most perplexed, seeing a mythical value sprout wherever he had planted a historical account. For stories are never merely repeated and never entirely lost; they are significantly formed out of narrative fragments deriving from earlier texts, myths, or legends in new cultural moments. Even when stories are merely repeated, their recognition displays a bewildering scope of versions. More than 500 versions of Cinderella’s tale have been recorded, including a Chinese version of the 9^th century as one of the oldest variants, although Charles Perrault's rendition, with its unique glass slipper, remains the most popular. Perhaps the secret of a successful story is its accepted interplay between previous and new versions.

(continues)

(Inizjamed, Malta)