The practice of storytelling is almost as old as our species. Long before the advent of writing it was an important part of primitive human societies, a crucial instrument for transmitting knowledge and experience from generation to generation. In the oral cultures of the past, storytellers occupied a special place and were revered as a source of wisdom and power. This was partly because they were the official keepers of their tribe's "memory" and guaranteed the continuity of its identity.

As people living in a world of artificial memory devices, from printed books to computers, it is almost impossible for us to imagine a culture whose memory was preserved without the help of writing. How was the storyteller able to remember so much? And how could listeners remember what they had heard? Early stories were more like long poems and had certain characteristics which made them `memorable': formulaic expressions, repetition, familiar themes and situations, a sense of rhythm. Using such devices, storytellers recounted or sometimes even sang the traditional stories that they themselves had heard and memorised. They did not invent or make up stories from their own imagination. Their originality lay in the way they interacted with a particular audience, in the atmosphere they created while telling the story and in the authority they gave to the events they were recounting.

We can therefore say that storytelling had a public and social dimension that it does not have today. Because they were usually rooted in experience, stories contained something useful for their listeners, in the form of a moral or a proverb or simply a piece of advice. In the West the art of oral storytelling continued to flourish until well into the Middle Ages, and persisted even later in places where, for most people, knowledge was still inseparable from their actual experience. There was no longer an official storyteller of the tribe, but village artisans and craftsmen continued the tradition of learning and recounting local tales and legends, while sailors and other travellers returned from their voyages with tales of foreign lands. Indeed, it might be said that these two elements - fascination with the past on the one hand, and with faraway places on the other - together constituted the essence of storytelling.

As we have said before, the earliest stories were told orally, by storytellers, and in this way passed from generation to generation. But with even retelling, a story would be

slightly modified by the teller, until it was finally written down. Gradually, through time, an enormous reserve of myths, stories and fables built up. Writers have always borrowed from this reserve, taking old stories and modifying and updating them for their own purposes and audiences. The greatest writers introduce innovations that add to the tradition, and their work becomes a source for writers of subsequent generations. Among the sources that writers in the West have traditionally borrowed from are the classics of Greek mythology, folk tales and Bible stories. Though their form and meaning may change over time, the oldest stories survive because they continue to tell us something vital about our lives and about the human condition in general. All writers, directly or indirectly, refer to the works that have been written before them. Some try to disguise their influences and make us believe their works are completely original, or based exclusively on real life events. Others openly refer to the texts they have borrowed from as part of a game with the reader. This practice is often regarded as one of the defining innovations of the contemporary novel. But as with everything else, there is nothing new about it. Already in the 18th century Henry Fielding, one of the pioneers of the English novel, had declared his right to `steal' from authors of ancient times.

[Thomson, Maglioni, New Literary Link. Textures, Forms and Styles, vol. 1, CIDEB, p.28]

The French writer and critic Roland Barthes (1915-80), who was one of the key figures in the development of modern literary theory, uses the term intertextuality to describe the way in which all literary texts are inevitably impersonal constructions. They are not the original work of a single author but are instead composed of numerous writings, fragments and "quotations, drawn from the innumerable centres of culture". Some of these may be allusions to other literary texts that the author makes either consciously or unconsciously and which can be seen as signs of influence. Many, however are simply the result of the workings of a collective unconscious of sayings, rumours, myths, fables and stories that each of us to different degrees acquires through the things we read, see, hear and learn about, the elements we absorb from the cultures that surround us.
The implications of Barthes's theories result in what he calls the death of the Author: the meaning of a work of literature cannot be ascribed to its author since all texts are written not by a single voice but by the interaction of numerous different voices, styles, stories etc. for which the writer is simply the vehicle.

As Barthes says