"The transmission of tradition is explicit and conscious for the mythical writer and his audience: the fabulous writer may seem to be making up his stories out of his own head, but this never happens in literature, even if the illusion of its happening is a necessary illusion for some writers" (Frye 10).
The idea that no new stories are ever created--or perhaps more precisely: the idea that all stories, like the streams of stories described by Rushdie, are the result of the interweaving of other stories and in which one can trace the ideas of more recent stories back to the most ancient of stories even as these too are slowly being reshaped, is by no means a new idea or a startling revelation. What grabbed me most in the above quote was that although no man can pull a new stories from within the depths of his own mind, "the illusion of its happening is a necessary illusion for some writers." Why? Why are we so disparate to feel as though we (and by we I mean those who consider themselves to be creative) are somehow linked to some mythical source of creativity. To take what was already there and arrange it in such a way that it reflects your own minutely unique thought patterns, is this not enough? Perhaps the reason we feel the need to think of ourselves as gods of the imaginary world is due to "man's need to relate to the world around him" (Rothenberg and Hausman, 156). According to their book, The Creativity Question, it is our need for connection to the world that motivates our desire for creativity. One may infer then that it is though stories that we relate to and experience the world around us. Thus, perhaps, a story-telling experience that does not feel entirely original may call into question one's own sense of originality and perhaps what's worse--one's sense of purpose.
Thus, I would argue that not only are there two kinds of stories: the mythical and the fantastic, but there are also two streams of motivation for the creativity behind the stories. People create stories to experience, explore and define their world as well as to experience, explore, and define themselves. These two motivational factors act simultaneously upon the story teller, sometimes oppositionally and sometimes concurrently. Both the story teller and the stories that they weave are constantly in flux as are the streams of the sea of stories.
