Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image journal, tells a story about telling stories for his kids. He describes the memorable bedtimes when he attempts to concoct a series of original tales. “My kids are polite enough to raise their hands when they have some penetrating question to ask about plot, character, or setting,” he writes. “If I leave something out of the story, or commit the sin of inconsistency, these fierce critics won’t let me proceed until I’ve revised the narrative. Oddly enough, they never attempt to take over the storytelling. They are convinced that I have the authority to tell the tale, but they insist that I live up to the complete story that they know exists somewhere inside me.”(1) Children seem to detest a deficient story.
There is no doubt that our sense of the guiding authority of story and storyteller often dramatically lessens as we move from childhood to adulthood. And yet, regardless of age, there remains something deeply troubling about a story without a point, or an author not to be trusted.
In an interview with Skeptic magazine, Richard Dawkins was asked if his view of the world was not similar to that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, namely, that life is but “a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.”(2)
“Yes,” Dawkins replied, “at a sort of cosmic level, it is. But what I want to guard against is people therefore getting nihilistic in their personal lives. I don’t see any reason for that at all. You can have a very happy and fulfilled personal life even if you think that the universe at large is a tale told by an idiot.”(3)
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