Stories all gone

Something very sad has happened to storytelling.
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Television has replaced traditional tales as well as family stories and community stories.
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The old-fashioned storyteller, someone who can spin a good yarn, is a rarity these days.
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Rare too are the types of venues and occasions where her stories might be heard.
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Instead, through our consumption of television and movies and games, we pay remote specialists to produce our stories for us.
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Significantly, the producers of these stories now own them, an unprecedented development.
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For most of human history, no one imagined that you could own a story.
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Stories were simply not conceivable objects of property, but constituted in each culture a vast commonwealth.
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Today, corporations such as Disney mine that commonwealth, wall off parts of it for themselves, and convert it into money.
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Whenever someone gets an "idea for a story," is it really original?
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Perhaps all stories are only variations on a handful of archetypal plots.

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And certainly all stories draw from the storyteller's experience with real people and real events.

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Certainly she may put them together in a unique way.
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But can she in all modesty lay claim to ownership of that story?

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Reading academic review of literary works it is impossible to avoid the feeling that the original authors could not possibly have intended all that.

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Such intent is unnecessary if they are but channels, and not creators, of their stories.

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One would agree with Lewis Hyde that any creative work comes from a source greater than ourselves.

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Through us, the Muse delivers great archetypes and universal themes.

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To claim ownership of them is to subordinate a greater to a lesser.
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Charles Eisenstein