Question #1: “In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.”
I enjoyed thinking about understanding Robinson’s stories in last week’s entry, so I was excited for the opportunity to think about that topic from another angle. It was quite interesting to see how the oral syntax that King describes, as well as different ways of reading, can affect our interpretation of a story.
There are some obvious changes that come from the fact that we don’t include punctuation when reading aloud. For example, early on in the story, there are a series of remarks:
Who?
What is it?
Looks like a person. (65)
Since it’s presented in the printed version without quotation marks, it seems like the storyteller is presenting these questions to the audience, but the lack of punctuation is invisible when read aloud, making it seem more like the voices of the characters.
Or take this example from the first page:
They still there.
And for many years. (64)
The second line doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense when we just read it normally; the obvious question is, “For many years what?” But when read aloud or with a storyteller’s voice, it’s a lot easier to just accept the meaning and move on, since people do talk like this all the time.
For me, the most interesting aspects of the oral syntax were the ways it affected the story on a larger scale. It felt a lot more like storytelling, with all of the connotations that word entails – for me personally, that meant that it seemed more fluid, more informal, and more personal. It also felt very distinctly outside of the European tradition of literature. I could picture sitting around a campfire in a forest somewhere and hearing it, and even when reading silently in my head, it came out in a very distinct voice.
In my previous blog post, I talked about how we need to approach these stories from an Indigenous context in order to truly understand their meaning. There can be a lot of challenges that get in the way of doing that, but perhaps the oral syntax of Robinson’s stories makes it a little easier?
Last week, I also mentioned Robinson’s emphasis on slowing down and taking a lot of time to appreaciate these stories, and one of the things that stood out the most for me about oral syntax and the use of short sentences is the way it forces you to slow down. When we tried reading it aloud, both my friend and I were tempted to read it fairly quickly, but a lot of the story sounds awkward that way.
Perhaps this is another indication of my separation from the context of the story, but it took me a while to find a way to read it aloud that seemed to flow, and I’d need a lot of practice to do it well. Reading aloud let me experience a sort of interaction with my audience, and being read to let me experience it without focusing too much on the written syntax. But as a beginner at this type of storytelling, I actually found that the easiest and most natural thing was to read it silently but slowly, with the voice suggested to me by the syntax. Still, I think even this type of silent reading succeeds at, as King puts it, “re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186).
Works Cited
Cathrae, Martin. “Campfire & Starlight.” Flickr. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/suckamc/2606021092/>
King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.”
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories.
Hey Cecily, great post! One thing that struck me about reading Robinson’s story is the formatting of the verse. I’m assuming it was Wickwire who did the formatting, and I’d like to remind others that the formatting matters and affects how we read the story. Even the fact that she chooses to write it in verse. What I’d like to critique is the tendency, then, for us non-Native western readers to read/tell the stories in a Western poetry/verse context. How does that change our reading of the story? Would the way the words are laid out affect how we pace, breathe, pronounce, and add tone to the words? Honestly, I think the ideal way to hear these stories without actually needing to be there is watch a video or hear a sound file.
Charmaine
🙂
Hi Cecily,
I really enjoyed the style of your blog. Your personal anecdotes were a joy to read.
I picked the same topic. Check out my blog if you have a moment. I agree with Charmaine’s comment about formatting. I mention in my post about how my reading experience was shaped by the format. I found the text to lack coherence. I think it’s interesting that you found reading slower more helpful. I do notice that my original speed of reading was truncated because of the ‘tribal’ language use invoked by Robinson. Do you also think that Robinson’s dialogue alienates a western reader? This was my original experience.
Thanks for a clear and concise post!
-Hannah
🙂
Hi Cecily,
I agree with much of what you’ve said: the interaction with an audience who is not present when read silently, and the meaning of certain lines that are lost during said silent reading.
I experienced a similar awkwardness due to the syntactic structuring, nothing stuck when read silently, and I tripped on certain sentences when I tried to speed through them aloud. It’s interesting that you found silently reading it to be the easiest for you. It seemed to me that the text was made to perform, as its structure is conversational.
Did you find that the meaning within the story changed between listening to, performing, & silently reading it? Or was there a subtlety or nuance that you saw within one of the three that you had missed before?
-Landon
🙂
Hi Cecily,
I find it interesting that you found it easiest to read silently–I found it easiest to read out loud with gesture–but I totally agree that you have to read it slowly. The periods at the end of almost every line kind of makes you do that. For me, gesture helped with lines like They still there, as we always say things that wouldn’t make sense without context, like when we’re pointing. I love that you quoted the Looks like a person part, as I loved the irony of it being Coyote; seems like something that would make me laugh as a child.
I also agree that you don’t need quotations. Ta da! I didn’t use any
🙂