Marie Cardinal’s novel The Words to Say It is one of literature’s starkest expressions of the power of words and stories. Published in France in 1975, The Words to Say It is the story of an ultimately triumphant odyssey through near-death and madness to life. Dedicated to ‘the doctor who helped me to be born’, Cardinal’s autobiographical novel recounts her birth and delivery from her mother—but not as we commonly understand birth and delivery, for the man who delivers her is not an obstetrician but a Freudian analyst, and the psychological birth he oversees is as physically demanding, traumatic and bloody as any physical birth.

In a seamless, spiralling narrative, Cardinal spins out her character’s experience: her psychological collapse so horrendously manifested in physical symptoms; her three years of unexplained haemorrhaging, which no drug nor doctor can cure; her regular thrice weekly visits to her analyst in a poorly lit cul-de-sac in Paris; her growing understanding that he can help her, despite her immense scepticism; and the flow of words that replaces her flow of blood and revives her sun-drenched, jasmine-scented childhood under the blue sky of Algeria.

The Words to Say It is an extraordinary story about a woman born into the constraints of middle-class, twentieth-century Western Europe; about mothers, inheritance and madness—and about the transformative power of words.

The doctor is not interested in her physical symptoms, her bleeding. He is interested only in her stories, her words. ‘Talk,’ he tells her, ‘say whatever comes into your head; try not to choose or reflect, or in any way compose your sentences. Everything is important, every word.’ Miraculously, without drugs, medical instruments or surgery, through words alone this doctor achieves what no other has been able to: her bleeding ceases immediately. And so begins her return to life, through the healing power of words and stories. As the narrator says, ‘Words were boxes, they contained material that was alive.’

As The Words to Say It so forcefully demonstrates, words and stories shape our lives—our individual lives and the life of the collective. Equally, the tales told by literature are themselves part of living traditions that date back to the beginning of recorded time. As I was writing this essay my head was full of bushfires, of burnt-out cars, ruined houses, death and devastation. I found it hard to turn my mind to the seemingly abstract subject of storytelling traditions until I realised the obvious: the Victorian bushfire tragedy and the human suffering it wreaked are directly related to my contention that we need stories—for their ability to give comfort to grieving hearts, to heal shattered lives and to reconnect broken communities. At the very least, stories help us to focus our random emotions and to articulate our feelings of helplessness as survivors or bystanders. They help us to understand.

In the wake of the Victorian fires, survivors began telling their stories. Two days after the inferno, a story was published in the Australian by Gary Hughes, a journalist who had been lucky enough to escape the fires with his life, his family and his story. He gave a graphic account of his encounter with the bushfire, of its speed and molten heat. Trapped by burning branches, from his air-conditioned car Hughes watched his house burn down. Readers wrote that Hughes’ story had made the full enormity of the fires sink in for them, for the first time they had begun to connect emotionally with the tragedy. We continue to tell stories despite—and because of—Victoria’s inferno, global warming, financial mayhem, war and uneasy times.

Stories give meaning to our lives. As Salman Rushdie’s inveterate teller of tales, Saleem Sinai, says in Midnight’s Children: ‘I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something.’ Saleem knows that our lives and our stories are inextricably linked. In a real sense, we are our stories.

And living on in Saleem’s twentieth-century story of modern India is the story of Scheherazade, first recorded by Arab historians in the tenth century AD. Stories propagate stories, living across continents and centuries. This is what I mean by the vital power of storytelling traditions: the remarkable capacity of stories to survive the ravages of time and fashion, the death or evolution of their original languages, cultural revolution, technological change, war and migration. Like living organisms, stories adapt to a changing world and form a continuous interconnected web of story life across the planet.

So many of the stories we tell today in books, on television, in film and online were first told in one form or another centuries ago. The Eastern classic the Arabian Nights has spawned numerous cultural offspring, such as Midnight’s Children, the work of Goethe, Proust and Joyce, and the Hollywood film Sinbad.

In Western literature, one of the richest story sources is Homer. His tales of Troy, the Iliad and Odyssey, date back to the tenth century BC and form the basis of the Western narrative tradition. The American poet Wallace Stevens observed that together the Iliad and the Odyssey demonstrate the cyclic movement of history, ‘war’s miracle begetting that of peace’.

The Iliad tells of the dying moments of the Greek armies’ ten-year siege of Troy, near today’s Gallipoli, and recounts the events that lead inexorably to the brutal fatal clash between Achilles, the mightiest Greek warrior, and Hector, Prince of Troy. The Odyssey takes up the story as the victorious Greek armies flee the burning city of Troy and centres on the Greek warrior Odysseus and his twenty-year voyage home to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. Odysseus is the quintessential voyager and spinner of tales, a wanderer who carries his stories with him and tells them along the way.

Six hundred years later, in the first century BC, the Roman poet Virgil picked up the threads of Homer’s epics and wove them into his own epic poem, the Aeneid. Writing in the first years of the Roman Empire, Virgil celebrated Rome as a new Troy and traced Rome’s mythical origins to the Trojan warrior prince Aeneas. In the twelfth century AD Geoffrey of Monmouth drew on Homer and Virgil in his History of the Kings of Britain. Like Virgil before him, Monmouth sought the origins of his land in the Trojan hero Aeneas. His History tells the story of Britain’s founding around 1100 BC by a group of Trojans led by the warrior Brutus (hence ‘Britain’). And who was this Brutus? None other than the great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy.

Through Monmouth’s History and its French translations, the legends of King Arthur and his knights spread to continental Europe. There they inspired a new literary genre—the chivalric romance—and introduced a new contemporary hero, a Christian hero to replace the pagan heroes of Greece, Troy and Rome: the knight in shining armour.

In turn these chivalric romances gave birth to the book we now call the first modern novel: Don Quixote. For it was the tales of chivalry that provoked Cervantes to write his great book. So appalled was Cervantes by the hackneyed tales of knights that dominated the Spanish popular imagination of his day that in protest he wrote a spoof. As Cervantes says in his introduction, his sole aim in writing Don Quixote was ‘to invalidate, and ridicule the absurdity of those books of chivalry, which have, as it were, fascinated the eyes and judgement of the world, and in particular of the vulgar’.

First published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615, the novel famously tells the story of a deranged, ageing man, Don Quixote, who—inspired by the countless tales of chivalry he’s read—sets out on a scrawny nag for a life of adventure as a knight in shining armour. But he lives in modern times and the age of chivalry has long since vanished. Oblivious to this fact, Don Quixote rides out across the plains of La Mancha, forcing himself on damsels who are not in distress and terrorising the countryside in search of wrongs to right.

Like the Arabian Nights and Homer’s Trojan epics, Don Quixote is so rich and complex that it has survived the ages. It was originally seen as a comedy. Later the German Romantic poets saw Don Quixote as a tragic hero and the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky called it ‘the saddest book of them all’. In revolutionary France, Don Quixote was seen as a doomed visionary and in the Soviet Union as the ideal anti-capitalist rebel. The American modernist William Faulkner reread Don Quixote every year.

So far, unlike Homer and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote has not successfully made the transition to cinema. According to superstition, all attempts to film it are doomed to failure. Orson Welles tried for twenty years and failed. Johnny Depp and Terry Gilliam attempted to film it in 2001 but the set was plagued by military flyovers and wrecked by flash floods and hail, and the actor playing Don Quixote was seriously injured—all in the first five days, so filming was abandoned. But the failure was so spectacular that it became a hit documentary, Lost in La Mancha, and in 2008 Gilliam and Depp resumed production of their film.

So why have these stories survived? Why do we continue to retell a 3000-year-old epic poem about a city that lies in ruins? Why does the Iliad still resonate for us? Because it is the ultimate story of war. In 1939 the French philosopher Simone Weil said of it: ‘Those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the centre of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror.’

What drew the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon to Homer’s epic tales in nineteenth-century South Australia? The superhuman qualities of their warrior heroes, the clash of swords, the rhythmic energy of their verse. When the errant Gordon arrived in Adelaide in 1853 aged nineteen he brought with him a passion for Homer’s heroic tales and an unrivalled skill on horseback. One of Gordon’s greatest poems, ‘The Sick Stockrider’, is testament to these twin passions. The poem is the dying farewell of an Australian bushman but Gordon invests the stockrider with the nobility of the great Greek warrior Achilles bidding his lover farewell on the plains of Troy. Like Achilles, the stockrider recalls past glories and lost comrades—and like Achilles he goes willingly to his fate.

Equally, the Odyssey is the ultimate tale of a voyager, and it inspired Christina Stead when she was writing For Love Alone in New York in the 1940s. Like Odysseus, Stead was a nomad at heart. She left Australia and her home in Sydney’s Watsons Bay as soon as she could, aged twenty-six. But she later wrote about her childhood on the edge of an island continent, gazing out to boats voyaging to other worlds.

In For Love Alone, Stead calls up Odysseus and likens Australia to his island home, Ithaca: both are home to voyaging people, people with the restlessness of all seafarers. She calls Australia: ‘a fruitful island of the sea-world, a great Ithaca … To this race you can put the famous question: “O Australians, have you just come from the harbour? Is your ship in the roadstead? Men of what nation put you down—for I am sure you did not get here on foot.” ’ Here, Stead movingly rephrases the question Telemachus asks his disguised father Odysseus, acknowledging that over the centuries Australia has been settled by countless seafarers and wanderers, connecting the people of this continent to tales of ages past.

James Joyce famously retells the Odyssey in his novel Ulysses. Joyce read the story as schoolboy, probably as The Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb, who used Odysseus’ Latin name, Ulysses, which Joyce adopted. Ulysses was Joyce’s childhood hero. But why did he decide to retell Ulysses’ ancient story and transport it to twentieth-century Dublin, to one day in the life of Leopold Bloom and his spiritual son Stephen Dedalus? Joyce himself asked: ‘Why was I always returning to this theme …? I find the subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature … Observe the beauty of the motifs: the only man in Hellas who is against the war, and the father.’ Odysseus as father is what captured Joyce’s imagination in the Odyssey—and fatherhood is the overarching refrain of his masterpiece Ulysses.

And what is it about the Arabian Nights that so compels Salman Rushdie? He says: ‘I come back to this story over and over again because I find the frame tale of Scheherazade fascinating, because while there’s Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba, I’m most interested in Scheherazade and her frame narrative.’

Rushdie says: ‘It is the story of someone who tells stories to save her life. But I’m really interested in it because at its heart it is a love story … It is a story about how Scheherazade and Shahriyar fall in love. The interesting question is: why does she fall in love with him?’ She’s extraordinary, he’s a mass murderer. ‘That is the luck men sometimes have, that extraordinary women fall in love with them … This is my fascination with the Arabian Nights.’

Scheherazade tells stories to save her life. Stories can also save the life of the collective; they can reconnect broken communities—and in Australia, where the wounds and divisions of our history run deep, they’ve played an important role. In 1962, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then known as Kath Walker) first read her rousing poem ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’ at a political meeting in Adelaide. Written especially for the occasion, ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’ used English to express an indigenous vision of equality for all. Novelist Alexis Wright likens Oodgeroo’s achievement to that of Irish James Joyce, whose alter ego Stephen Dedalus spoke of ‘having to use a borrowed canvas and borrowed words’. Both writers borrowed the language of the coloniser, English, to articulate their creative vision.

When Oodgeroo finished reading her forty-four lines of verse, men and women rose to their feet in thunderous applause, clamouring for a copy. Two years later, her first poetry collection was published: We Are Going was the first book of verse by an Aboriginal writer ever published and it sold out in three days. Oodgeroo deliberately chose to write poetry, an introduced English form, because she felt it was a natural extension of traditional Aboriginal oral storytelling. She said: ‘I felt poetry would be the breakthrough for the Aboriginal people because they were storytellers and song-makers, and I thought poetry would appeal to them more than anything else.’

Oodgeroo’s poetry and her equal-rights activism contributed to the landmark referendum of 1967 which led to the repeal of two sections of the Constitution that had prevented indigenous Australians from enjoying the same rights as other Australians.

Alexis Wright has continued to write in the spirit of Oodgeroo and has extended her vision to embrace the storytelling traditions of the world in stories that are nevertheless deeply rooted in the Australian land and its ancient culture. Her epic novel Carpentaria, which won the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, is a saga set in a fictional mining town in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is a powerfully political novel, inspired by Wright’s experience with her Waanyi people fighting the Century Mine in the 1990s, and an extraordinary telling of indigenous life and lore.

Carpentaria begins with the Dreaming, when the ancestral serpent came down from the stars, and proceeds to tell the contemporary story of fisherman Norm Phantom, his wife Angel Day and their children, especially their rebel son Will Phantom. Like Odysseus and Sinbad, Norm is a voyager and a great teller of tales: ‘Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads. Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories.’

In Carpentaria Wright draws on a multitude of sources. From the Western literary tradition she draws on Homer and James Joyce. From the Middle East, on the Bible and the Arabian Nights. From the Australian literary tradition she calls up Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia. And she weaves them together with her own storytelling heritage and the rhythms of the Australian land, its cycles of flood and drought, and makes something I think is utterly new.

Wright herself says Carpentaria is about ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of mind’. She says: ‘The last frontier we are fighting for is having control of our own imagination and how we define our future.’ She hopes her approach to telling Carpentaria, with its Aboriginal rhythms, panoramic vision and multiple voices, ‘might encourage Aboriginal people to read and understand the possibilities of literature to explain who we are’.

I think Carpentaria heralds a new way of telling stories in Australia, born of all the ancient traditions touched upon here, with the potential to offer some healing—to indigenous Australians—and some understanding of this vast ancient continent of flood and fire to non-indigenous Australians. For as we all learned from Victoria’s inferno, non-indigenous understanding of this land is limited. And if we are to survive the next century of climate change, economic upheaval, flood and drought, fire and famine, we had better listen to the people who know this land best—and I think there is no better place to start than in the stories they tell. Today more than ever, we need to share and interweave our stories, to help us to understand each other and to heal our wounded land.

As Wright so succinctly puts it, stories have the power to explain who we are—and they have done so down the ages in a continuous interweaving of myriad narrative threads across the planet. This is the secret life of stories. We are right to treasure them.

— Jane Gleeson-White