James Como
We are wired for stories, to make them, to know them, and to be formed by them. Story is everywhere, and is always the way out for meaning, especially the Ultimate Meaning, so that we may, though dimly, know Him who composes the tale, its main Character, and the One who continues to tell it.
“Once Upon a Time.” “What happens next?” “How does it end?” “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and…? J.R.R. Tolkien has told us that story-writing is sub-creation; that is, that we are imitating the original Creator when we make up stories and so must be very careful indeed. (Tolkien was on to something bigger than he knew, I think. We shall see.) When one searches the Web for ‘story’ a carload of stories comes up, but that’s not the case with ‘narrative’. With that… theory, including the grotesque ‘narratology’, appears.
In the beginning—now, here comes a story, even if not the story—I read them and wanted to write them. Everyone else wants them, too, no exceptions. I bathed in them: movies, print, television (including news ‘stories’, as any reporter will avow), and before that on the radio: Inner Sanctum, the Shadow, Straight Arrow (though never those hamster wheels known as soap operas, except for the fifteen-minute ones that came on at noon, like Stella Dallas, listening with my grandmother, who would never miss “her stories”).
I traveled from Chuck Berry’s Maybeline motorvatin’ over the hill in her Coup deVille to Homer. Of course, composing stories, too, is inevitable. We all do it, making up narratives for ourselves. (But we must take care to make good ones. Bad ones often lead to ruin.) Then, when I learned the concept ‘teleology’, the penny dropped, though slowly.
I saw an astonishing spectrum of stories. At the two ends are myths and fabliaux. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/brief-meditation-story-james-como.html