The Never Ending Story

I came upon an interesting fact in researching Faulkner the other day.  It provided another unexpected link between Faulkner, Tolkien and Disney.

J.R.R. Tolkien in his design of Middle Earth created a series of creation and ancient narratives that lie in the background of his narrative world.  He collected these into a book he titled The Silmarillion.  While he flirted several times with its publication, it wasn't until after his passing that his son was able to collect all of it into a final form.  In the process, his son found that these stories were far from fixed during Tolkien's lifetime.  Over the years, changes had been made of minor and major importance.  Character's names were changed.  Events were re-ordered, added and dropped.  Middle Earth never reached a final form in Tolkien's life because he was always inventing it.

When Walt Disney completed Disneyland and opened it to the public, he did not view it as a finished product.  He said, "Disneyland will never be completed.  It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."  On another occasion, he shared, "The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It’s something we can keep developing and adding to. A motion picture is different. Once it’s wrapped up and sent out for processing, we’re through with it. If there are things that could be improved, we can’t do anything about them anymore. I’ve always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing. We’ve got that in Disneyland."


This brings us around to William Faulkner.  When late in his life, he decided to continue his stories in Yoknapatawpha County, he realized that some of the later details in his stories did not reconcile with those of his earlier works.  He addressed this by writing, "The author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will--contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then." 


The power of the mythic worlds that these three created was due in some part to their living nature.  Rather than being static creations, the stories developed and changed over time.  Their works were not objects but as Disney suggested living things.


It seems to me that the story of the Church is like that a living story with new chapters still being added.  As Christians we not only celebrate the stories of the past but are making the stories of the present that will be told in the future.  It is a living world and our participation in it makes each one of us a part of the cosmic story that is bending towards redemption.