.jpg "Coyote")
I read Robinson’s story, Coyote Meets the King of England, aloud to my little brother, and I had him read it to me. I found that the process of reading aloud changed the nature of my attention to it. In particular, reading aloud fosters one’s attention to small details.
Robinson’s storytelling is full of descriptions that add vividness to the narrative, but are easy to miss on a first reading. When the angel dispatches Coyote on his mission to England, he includes this in his instructions: “you can drag your boat out on the dry ground so they wouldn’t float.” And upon his arrival, Coyote does this. When I read it silently, I did not consider it a consequential detail; but more significantly, I did not realize I considered it inconsequential. I did not consider it at all.
Storytellers, of course, add all sorts of such details simply as part of the process of filling in the mental landscape on which their stories unfold. (On Dickens, Orwell writes about his talent for invention: a detail that is only “a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created.”) To a more outdoorsy person, the inclusion of this special precaution might evoke tactile connections to the act of securing a boat on a riverbank, and through that the feeling of aloneness with nature. In me, in spite of a few childhood boat trips, the connection is not very strong.
When my little brother took his turn, something that struck me was the necessity of reading Robinson in a conversational way. I did not find much in King’s claim that the stories “force” you to read them aloud, but the voice Robinson creates, literal or no, is palpable.
I struggled to recreate the cadence I imagined for him using my own voice. At first I felt ridiculous, then I settled into it with a more solemn, steady intonation. But my little brother seemed to pick it up immediately – his reading was casual, conversational, and serious. Neither he nor Robinson imitated the style of “drama,” which hinges on hiding things from the listener until the moment when their effect will be maximized.
There is more candour to Robinson’s style; it is not the voice of a weaver of fiction but of someone charged with relating simple truths. When it occurs to him to fill in a detail, like Coyote’s necessitated journey through the Panama Canal, or the date that the book of Black and White arrived in Canada, he does so. It is harder to analyze the details critically when one reads aloud: one must invest one’s own breath, and in so doing invest oneself in the story. It becomes a more personal interaction. Of course, there is another step again to reciting the work aloud without the benefit of text, as storytelling cultures like that of the Okanagan have done.
Orwell, George. (1940). “Charles Dickens.” C. Choat (Ed.) Fifty Orwell Essays. Project Gutenberg Australia. August 2003. Web. June 18, 2015.
Robinson, Harry. (2005). Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. W. Wickwire (Ed.) Vancouver: Talonbooks.
I really enjoyed reading your reflection Mattias!
The Orwell piece is great! Your thoughts on Robinson’s writing style and the relation of truths vs fiction are really interesting. Do you think you could have a similar experience reading any piece written in dialect aloud? Or do you think there is something particularly compelling about Robinson’s writing that is only rarely conjured up in other literary pieces-written in a dialect or in standard English?
I don’t know for sure but I think I have had a similar experience-that of feeling like the author/speaker/creator was relating truths rather than telling stories-with every Hemingway book and short story I read.
Interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for the great read!
Gretta
Thanks Gretta! I think Hemingway is indeed a useful analog. There was an article recently about that author’s low reading difficulty which I think is quire relevant (http://contently.com/strategist/2015/01/28/this-surprising-reading-level-analysis-will-change-the-way-you-write/). Hemingway does have that quality of a storyteller: he speaks plainly; he doesn’t make you guess.
I’m not sure if I would have a different experience or not; I haven’t done any reading-aloud of nonstandard English apart from this that I can think of. But the connection of his stories to a cultural realm that I know little about in spite of its proximity does raise my interest in them, particularly in the symbols he uses. I’m fascinated by Coyote in particular and the multifaceted nature of his mythical role.
🙂
Hey Mattias!
I really enjoyed reading about your experience of reading Robinson aloud. As I did not select this question for my blog this week, your post gave me lots to think about concerning the nature of orality, performance in story telling, and the ways in which we engage with texts differently when we read aloud. After reading your post, I went back and read part of Robinson’s story silently to myself. While I agree that the story may not “force” you to read it aloud, I nonetheless do agree with King’s statement that its “oral syntax defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves” (King 186). I read the text silently, but I found that I read it in a very different way than I would another work of fiction that wasn’t orally based. I found that I couldn’t escape imagining Robinson’s voice in my head. If I didn’t construct the voice of a story teller in my head it was almost as though I wasn’t able to make sense of the passages, and I would continuously get tripped up on the phrasing. I think there is something interesting in the way in which Robinson’s text disrupts standardized reading regimes. He disrupts our syntactical expectations as readers, and in doing so, arguably challenges our relationship to language itself.
Hi Laura, thanks for your comment! I completely agree. Robinson’s manner of speaking is informative in itself; it tells you something about the storyteller that you couldn’t discern if the English was standardized. At the same time, it presents a bridge that one must cross to engage with it, requiring a certain commitment to Robinson’s world before one begins.
🙂