Contact: Land and Stories, The One “True” Version

Unit 2.2, Assignment 2.4 – Origin stories

Q1) …Why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?

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In The Truth About Stories, King tells of the two creation stories of the pregnant Charm falling through the sky, and of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis. He distinguishes the two stories by describing how he tells them differently and pitches the two against each other as representations of two separate ideologies of religion or thought processes inherent in the natives versus the Europeans. I think King presents this dichotomy in an effort to have his readers consider the ideas beyond––a way of saying that the dichotomies exist, I have shown them to you, now what is underneath that?

King talks about the authoritative voice he uses in his retelling of the Genesis creation myth, and how that is the basis of the European thinking related to hierarchies and power dynamics evident in the culture associated with royals and nobles versus peasants and slaves. On the topic of authority, there has been psychological studies which have identified individuals feeling powerful when in an authoritative position. Studies such as Milgram’s Shock Study and Zimbardo’s Standford Prison Study presents authority as being an idea which could cause people to act wildly out of the norm. In Patros et. al’s report of the “Underlying Effects of Authority: Past to Present”, they state that “[a]n unequal balance of power in a group setting can lead otherwise normal human beings to behaving tyrannically”. If, in such extreme cases, authority has been proven to have such adverse effects on people, then the effect of the “authoritative voice” used by King to tell the story of Adam and Eve is one which establishes power and dominance over the more peaceful and balanced Charm creation story. As Lutz writes in “Myth Understandings: First Contact, Over and Over Again”, “stories function to redress power relations between the native and newcomer” (13), and this is made apparent in King’s address of the difference in style of the telling of the creation stories.

The dichotomy between the two is not so much as a dichotomy but rather, perhaps, a pyramid, because there always needs to be one “true” story, and the one with the most authority, the one which seems to hold more power and command sits at the pinnacle whilst the plethora of other tales are spread underneath and creates a base of which the authoritative story has power over. In short, because of the nature in which the Adam and Eve story is told, it is unconsciously being labeled as a “true” story for containing authority.

King uses this distinction to highlight the inherent differences in the stories and therefore the opposing ideologies of a power driven culture versus a balance driven culture. Through the dichotomies he presents to readers, he is able to also emphasize the parts which do not fit so tidily into the row of dichotomies, of the influences and interplay of histories and stories of natives and Europeans outside of the obvious contrasts. By doing so, King paints the larger picture of the dynamics of the relationships between the two different peoples and the complexity of maintaining and managing such relations when the other is presented as otherworldly.

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Works Cited

Cherry, Kendra. “The Milgram Obedience Experiment.” About Psychology. about.com, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.

     19 Feb. 2016. <http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm>.

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indignenous- European

      Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 1-15. PDF.

Patros, Jennifer, et al. “Underlying Effects of Authority: Past to Present.” URC. Undergraduate

     Research Community, 5 Nov. 2006. Web. 19 Feb. 2016. <https://www.kon.org/urc/v6/

     patros.html>.

“The Stanford Prison Experiment.” The BBC Prison Study. N.p., 2008. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.

     <http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/bbc-prison-study.php?p=17>.

zombie apocalypses are already happening… and have been for quite awhile apparently

I, unfortunately, am also included in the “zombies” because I completely blanked out and just remembered I have a blog post due today. Well technically yesterday. Whoops.

Northanger Abbey is interesting, and I got into it right at the beginning with Austen’s intriguing style of narration. Her way of describing Catherine Morland was very interesting, and I especially loved how Austen described her childhood as that of someone who would not be seen as a “heroine” and then gradually becoming one. In my reading of this, or how I interpreted it (which may be completely and utterly wrong) was how critical this was of woman during the time period of the early nineteenth century.

The tomboy Catherine was not seen as a heroine because of what she liked/disliked to do, and because all “proper” girls were to be well read (generally artistically, including music, drawing, etc.), well bred and well behaved she did not fit into the category. I think this is a great example of how the society molds people into what they should or should not be. Catherine, in my opinion, was cool when she was younger because she did what she wanted and did not seem to care much about the requirements of becoming a proper lady. But then to become a “heroine” or to be able to be classified as one when she became older, she began reading and being proper and putting herself through all the activities which would make her a conventional lady of the time. This was really interesting to me because at first I thought she would be the type of heroine to take action on her own and save herself instead of having a hero come along and drag her out of her misery, but then I think I’ve been mistaken because we are told that Catherine was waiting for a hero. And that hero turns out to be well… less heroic and more narcissistic.

Now linking that to zombies: Catherine becomes a zombie by abiding to the social norms of the “proper lady” and doing what she previously did not have interest in. Albeit this could have been due to her young age and shifting appeals of various hobbies, it nonetheless describes the conformity one goes through within society in order to “fit in”, in this case for the benefit of finding a husband. Zombies of society, living without consciousness of the effects of hegemony and social norms which pretty much also describes Shaun of the Dead. 

Now if only some special individual’s blood can cure us of this kind of zombification, that’d be great.

Magic is real — The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

I forgot I had to do a blog post… Sorry!

The Kingdom of This World is an interesting novel, and I’m still in the midst of digesting it and trying to get into the “magical realism” of the story. I read The Chronicles of A Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in high school and loved it, though the magical realism element still confuses me somehow.

I guess this blog post is more of what magical realism is, since it’s sort of difficult to explain and even though my english teacher tried his best to explain it, I have no clue what he’s talking about. What is magical realism? Magic into reality, reality into magic, but it’s subtle and because everything is blended into each other so well there isn’t a way to discern between the two at some point, but then when you think back on certain ideas, it seems ridiculous. This is my grasp on what magical realism is, though I still have trouble trying to figure out what elements are magical realism within the novel… Perhaps I read it too quickly.

Time to reread the novel.

Cherie