How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Interlude: One Story Summary & Analysis

In this second interlude, Foster returns to the argument that “there is only one story.” He imagines the reader asking what this story is about, but admits that it’s not about anything, at least in the way individual works of literature can be reduced to a subject matter or theme. Rather, it is about everything.

While not all writers might think of this “one story” in the way that Foster does, pretty much every author will know that it is impossible to write a completely original work of literature. (Indeed, a piece of literature with which readers had no familiarity at all would probably strike them as strange and off-putting.) On the other hand, writers need to employ a level of willful “amnesia” in order to not simply regurgitate all the literature they have already read when they write.

For the first time, Foster explicitly introduces the concept of intertextuality. This was an idea invented by the Russian formalist scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, which highlights the way that all works of literature are inherently connected, like a giant network or web. Some writers (such as Mark Twain or Jack Kerouac) downplay the influence of other literature on their work, but the evidence—both within texts and in the lives of authors—tends to expose this as false posturing.

Foster then introduces another analytical term: archetype. An archetype is an image, gesture, figure, or idea that is repeated and modified and can be identified through pattern recognition. There is no use going back and trying to search for the “original” upon which an archetype is based, as this would be basically impossible (and not particularly useful). Similarly, there is no one story upon which all other stories are based; rather, it is better to think of the one big story as all around us, all the time.