Can one have story without soul?

            “Adventure (bah), excitement (huh)!  A Jedi needs not these things!” or so says Yoda when confronting a wide-eyed Luke Skywalker intent on becoming a renowned warrior.  I do not here wish to discuss the requisites of the Jedi, but instead explore the application of this statement to modern storytelling.  As a little girl I remember watching the “Anne of Green Gables” miniseries on Public Television during their annual fund drive (back before the internet or cable, when we somehow managed to make do with three channels, and yes, dinosaurs were long extinct by then though there was still a mastodon or two around).  I liked the TV show but thought it would make for a boring read, fool that I was, so I never picked up the actual book until my adult years when it has become one of my favorite pieces of literature.  My silly young mind thought as Luke Skywalker did, that there must be adventure and excitement overflowing within something to make it worthwhile.  While Anne has her little adventures, it is far from an epic yet it is still an endearing work of fiction, how can this be?  Contrast this with the latest superhero movie I saw a few weeks back about a guy with a sophisticated metal suit which overflowed with explosions and excitement.  It was an ok movie, but there was so much going on that my brain went into overdrive and I couldn’t sleep that night.  I take that back, it had so much going on except in the area of plot, heart, and character development.

            I read a review of that movie that praised it for having much more plot and character development than the average movie of the comic book genre, and this is true, yet it says very little as having a teaspoon of salt is having infinitely more than the person with only a grain or two, but you still don’t have much to brag about.  I have always been a Star Trek fan, but I doubt I will go see the new movie as it looks to be high on the adventure/explosion scale which I fear will detract from the story, that and the dark undertones of the trailers (and the title) make me leery; Star Trek is never at its best when the theme is so dark (think Nemesis, First Contact, etc.).  I think we have forgotten what a good story is.  The last century or so, people thought it was to find some new viewpoint or underrepresented cause or some weird theory that no one could possibly comprehend or care about and put it on paper and thus came the curse of Modern Literature (you cannot seriously tell me you enjoyed much of the required reading in high school or college).  Before the decline of storytelling (which seems to have occurred about the same time as liberal theology and higher criticism began to creep into the church, a decade or two before World War I), a story was assumed to have characters to love and hate, a moral, a setting, and most important, a plot.  Now we just have explosions, a brooding or manic villain, and a one dimensional guy possessing some odd ability but no personality who will nevertheless save the world.  Yawn, I almost prefer modern lit!

            As far as I know, nothing blows up in any of the Anne books and there isn’t even a good sword fight.  All there is is character and heart, and lots of it.  I think that is why I love Anne so much, she could be me!  The characters come to life, could be people you know or perhaps are deeper than the people you know (sadly) as modern life stifles character development.  I am not saying you cannot have adventure and excitement in a story, many wonderful stories are rife with it, but you must have heart, you must have the human experience.  I always found Modern Lit to be somewhat cold, clinical, heartless, and lacking in soul, though I could not exactly put it into those words when I endured it in my youth, it always left me feeling dead or hopeless after wading in its murky waters.  Anne makes me laugh and cry, and feel all warm inside; she gives me permission to dream, to rejoice, to be.  Modern Lit tells me there is no point in any of that nonsense, modern life is just as dreadful (or worse) than the book.  C. S. Lewis takes on these competing ideas in his book That Hideous Strength.  An interesting read from a sublime storyteller.

            Like everything else in modern life, I suppose literature too has lost its soul.  I suppose that is why books like Harry Potter and Twilight are so popular, they reach back to that old tradition and say, “here is a story indeed!”  That is why the parables of Jesus, the fables of Aesop, the fairy tales, and the Odyssey have never gone out of vogue, and why books like Anne of Green Gables will always have a place in the hearts of those who love good stories.  The modern sciences and humanities all tell us that there is no point, no purpose, no reason for being, no grand scheme in all we see and do.  Men were wiser in vanished times, they knew that every human heart loves a good story because life is a grand story with plot, characters, and an Author.  We are all of us actors on Shakespeare’s stage.  The learned of our day can preach all they want about the meaninglessness of life and even try to convince us that there is no meaning in a story, but they never will, because even little children know that the princess should live happily ever after.  We can grow up and become ’wise’ according to the standard of our day, which is to throw off all sense of hope, wonder, joy, and faith which is to take all the meaning, purpose, and excitement out of life.  But fear not, this 'wisdom’ has only been considered such for the last 150 years or so, and most Kindergartners still know that unicorns exist thus there is hope for the human race, at least until they take Modern Lit in high school.  But like Anne, there will always be dreamers and hopers in the world, and they will write stories, real stories, and we still have countless volumes from the past that are still wonderful today.  In the ‘foolish things’ of the world, therein lies the wisdom of God.