An Appetite for Rehash : TWICE UPON A TIME, <i> by Daniel Stern (W.W. Norton: $19.95; 239 pp.)</i>

One of the drawbacks to being a writer, I’ve always thought, is that the medium of literature doesn’t lend itself to the making of tributes in the way most other media do.

A musician, after all, can perform a song by a composer he or she particularly likes, can even arrange the song to fit his or her own taste, making the process almost a collaboration; an artist or filmmaker can appropriate an image from another work and integrate it into one of his or her own. Yet if an author wants to acknowledge an influence, what can he or she do? One of the few options available is to write an essay or a book review--which is, at best, a secondhand experience, based on critical, not emotional, responses, and, as such, the product of a certain distance rather than a true meeting of the minds.

That’s why the recent efforts of novelist Daniel Stern to create what he calls “Twice Told Tales”--”a title borrowed, immodestly, from Hawthorne”--are so revolutionary and important, because they’ve enabled him to construct a paradigm from which to respond intuitively to the writers who have excited and compelled him over the years. Stern’s idea is a simple one--”that a text by a writer of the past whom I loved, even a nonfiction work, could be basic to a fiction; as basic as a love affair, a trauma, a house, a mother, a landscape, a lover, a job, or a sexual passion. Literature might actually make its claim; not merely as a subcategory of entertainment, education, or culture, but as a branch of the fullness of life in the act of being lived.” And while appropriation on this level can be a dangerous business--”a high-wire act,” as the author himself freely admits--with 1987’s aptly named “Twice Told Tales,” his first book of recycled material, Stern proved his concept’s validity, avoiding the obvious post-modernist and metafictional traps in favor of stories that were authentic in their own right, written out of an organic need to tell.

“Twice Upon a Time,” Stern’s just published follow-up to “Twice Told Tales,” treats a half-dozen more examples of other peoples’ writing to the peculiar filtering of experience into art that is the fundamental substance of fiction. Working from sources as diverse as “The Man With the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens and “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Stern again convincingly demonstrates that anything can be the subject of a short story, as long as it is handled in a deft and integrated way. Thus, although each piece here has for a title the work that inspired it--”Wakefield by Nathaniel Hawthorne,” for instance, or “Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville”--”Twice Upon A Time” is, like “Twice Told Tales,” not so much a volume of writings about writing as a book about people for whom the written word is a treasured and essential part of their lives.

And that sense of veneration, of illumination, underscores nearly every moment in this remarkable collection. There’s “A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka,” in which a reclusive writer named Brandauer suddenly begins appearing at writers’ conferences all over the country, reading Kafka’s odd and moving tale to classrooms full of spellbound students as if it were the only truly substantial piece of fiction ever written. Or “Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens,” where an English professor at UCLA, “newly transplanted from New York to Los Angeles, and now newly divorced,” becomes obsessed with the specter of his still-distant death only to find himself transfigured, gladdened “to the brink of fear,” by a young woman’s explication of the Stevens poem.

And then there’s “The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,” a novella that, as clearly and directly as anything I’ve ever read, pinpoints the place of communist ideology in the hearts and minds of a generation of young Americans--the postwar, pre-McCarthy Era twentysomethings who studied on the GI Bill and discussed philosophy late into the night, “hellbent on the Unity of Theory and Practice . . . all set on changing the world.”

But perhaps the most emblematic piece of work in “Twice Upon a Time”--and, indeed, the quintessential “Twice Told Tale”--is “Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville,” an account of Roy Graubart, “the king of Hollywood scriveners,” a screenwriter who’s spent his career rewriting other writers’ material. Through a variety of circumstances, Roy ends up discovering Melville’s idiosyncratic mini-masterpiece--which tells of a law clerk who one day announces “I would prefer not to”--and decides to adapt it for his own. In Roy’s transformation from hack to creator, Stern has developed a potent metaphor for his ambitions, one that reveals the redemptive power of literature in a completely unexpected way. And by throwing in a few delightful twists, he demonstrates again how stories can startle us, and, in so doing, teach us something about ourselves.

For good writing is a curative, as capable of stirring our souls as any human experience. The astonishing thing is not that we know this but that we ever considered it an unsuitable subject for fiction, a matter of self-indulgence rather than of revelation. Now that Daniel Stern has opened our eyes, I wonder how it could have possibly taken us so long to see. But as one of his characters points out, “Never examine good luck too closely. Just read.”