- First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, 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?
The two creation stories, offered by King in the book, The Truth about Stories, is told in a dichotomy to lead the readers to think more about the delivery of stories rather focusing on the content.
Like King, Lutz points out the examining of Western and Indigenous stories as a dichotomy. He writes, “we are asked to evaluate written versus oral traditions and then even more challenging, to decide between explanations based on different notions of what is real and what is imaginary” (Lutz 2). Although King does set up a similar dichotomy of stories, he is not as concerned about belief. Instead, King is more interested in readers responsiveness of different storytelling strategies that are found in the Indigenous and Western cultures.
King writes that in the Native story, he tries to “recreate an oral storytelling voice and craft in the story in terms of a performance for a general audience” (22), whereas in the Christian story, he tries “to maintain a sense of rhetorical distance and decorum while organizing the story for a knowledgeable gathering” (22). Using these storytelling strategies King is able to emphasize the importance in how a story is told, rather than emphasize what the story is about.
King notes, “In the Native story, the conversational voice tends to highlight the exuberance of the story but diminishes its authority, while the sober voice in the Christian story makes for a formal recitation but creates a sense of veracity” (King 23). This is an important piece of information when thinking about how Western Missionaries asserting religion and its stories over the First Nations peoples during the early stages in colonization in Canada (and in other countries that have colonized Indigenous peoples).
He playfully extends his point by suggesting to his readers, “of course, none you would make the mistake of confusing storytelling strategies with the value or sophistication of a story. And we know enough about the complexities of cultures to avoid the error of imagining animism and polytheism to be no more than primitive versions of monotheism. Don’t we?” (King 23). His sarcasm has an underlying essence of realness. This was a main argument used by the Missionaries to undermine First Nations cultures, oppressing and dispossessing the peoples of their cultures, languages, stories and traditions.
King’s renditions of both stories is not to emphasize the importance and belief of one story over the other in its content? Instead, King is stressing the importance of the storytelling strategies and how they might influence the interpretation and absorption by the people its told to.
What other storytelling strategies might influence readers?
Can you think of any other ways storytelling strategies were used to control, dispossess, or sway peoples do so something or believe in something that they would not normally do?
Bibliography:
“Book of Genesis.” Wikipedia. n.p. 5 February 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis
“Creation Stories: Canadian First Nations.” Native Creation Myths. n.p. 5 February 2015. http://www.sd91.bc.ca/frenchj/Students/Creation%20Stories%20First%20Nations.html
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003.
“Thomas King Quotes.” Meetville.com. n.p. 5 February 2015. http://meetville.com/quotes/author/thomas-king/page1
Hi Laura,
I like what you discussed in this blog post. In fact, I touch on a lot of your points in my blog post response to the other Jessica. Your idea that King does not emphasize the content of the story as much as he emphasizes the way in which he tells the story is something I believe too. More specifically, I think that his ability to create different tones in each story allows us to see how stories can and are defined by whom they are told by. When you point to the Western missionaries in your blog post, I for some reason am reminded of the Residential School System. I think I am reminded of this time in history because it was a point at which many Native peoples believed in something and did things “that they would not normally do.” What I mean by this is that Native peoples were made to think that they were going to be taken care of by the school system and that they were going away to a place to learn how to become “accepted.” Furthermore, the “stories” in which the church told the Native peoples and their children in order to get them to the Residential Schools were probably made to sound authoritarian and therefore, more believable. Another thing I want to point out here is that the Native people were probably more inclined to submit and believe that which the “authoritative” church people were conveying because of the way in which they said their fabricated story of how the Native children would be treated.
While we may not like to think that we, ourselves use storytelling strategies to make our stories sound more believable, I think that we all do. For example, when writing a paper for a class at UBC, a student might take on a more formal way of writing. On the other hand, the way in which someone might convey a story to a classmate might be different than the way they tell a story to a teacher or parent. The different uses of rhetoric are something that I think King’s dichotomies encapsulates. Because of that, I think it is safe to say that the points of his stories aren’t as important as the way he actually does the storytelling. With that being said however, I also think that like you said, the point of his storytelling is to make us think about how these strategies might influence the absorption, understanding, belief and interpretation of their audiences.
Thanks for your comment Jessica, I wanted to comment on your blog as well. Check your page!