4] In the last lesson I ask some of you, “what is your first response to Robinson’s story about the white and black twins in context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet.” I asked, what do you make of this “stolen piece of paper”? Now that we have contextualized that story with some historical narratives and explored ideas about questions of authenticity and the necessity to “get the story right” – how have your insights into that story changed?

———————————————————————————————————————-

Seeing that I had chosen to write about my first response to Robinson’s story last week, I decided to tackle this question of answering how my response has changed. I invite you to read my previous post to observe the evolution of my thoughts.

It was striking to me that Robinson was fastidiously obsessed in recounting the story accurately especially towards the second half, when he was trying to pinpoint the year that the document was sent overseas, or when he was trying to recall the name of the Indian man who had seen the document, but in many other aspects it seems like he takes much liberty and allocates space for invention. That is why I am a little confused about what it means to “get the story right,” because other parts in the story seem to be the product of the imagination.

The part of the story where Britain’s monarch was selected by letting a flying thing land on the chosen head was, quite frankly, ludicrous, and I have reason to suspect that its inclusion by Robinson was not accidental. Why would he choose to take this farcical turn in his story, and perhaps risk losing the audience’s faith in the authenticity of his story?. I then realize that within the Bible there are many ludicrous stories of miracles and divine intervention that, if told alone, nobody would believe them, except such stories are bounded up in a book with other ludicrous tales and somehow that makes them all equally legitimate. The difficulty in believing Aboriginal stories, I would argue, is not primarily due to the fact that the stories do not exist in a written form, but because we cannot consume it in a systematic manner that allows us to create a solid mental framework, accommodating all the experiences in the life of not just yourself, but of all humans.

Why is it that many within the Western culture can easily believe in the Bible despite its awkward divergence from reality, or at least in comparison to 21st century consciousness? Why do we readily believe our politicians, preachers, and professors, who do most of their communication by speaking to us and are convincing insofar as we believe that they speak the truth? Western civilization too has high regard for the spoken word, even though it is mutable and (until recent history) impossible to capture. Many cases heard in our courts rely on witnesses testifying under oath to build arguments. The greatest orators and speechmakers in society are most likely to scale the ladder to the apex of our democratic hierarchy because they know how to stir the hearts of people from all walks of life. The Christian God, before having laid down the Ten Commandments in stone tablets, first and foremost created the world simply through speaking (“Let there be light”). In pursuing this connection, I am reminded of the  first part of John 1, which declares: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” The Christian God can be summed up not with words, but with the Word, which is approximated within the physical world through letters and sounds but properly exists through interpretation with our minds, where it exists as meaning and significance . All of this is so distant from our experience of the world, where reality is defined more by material than what we hear and think. So why is one of the most respected texts in Western literature so persuasive when it is so remote?  I think what makes the Bible convincing is that there is a cyclical veracity that legitimizes the entirety, which in turn legitimizes the individual parts themselves. Story A corroborates story B, while story B corroborates story A. Except in the case of the Bible, we are talking about thousands of stories, each one in some way linked to another that ultimately results in a disorderly web of sensation and images dependent upon one another for confirmation. The more that I think about this, the more I am convinced our reality is really constructed by the great repository of stories we call the mind, at times gently tugging and other times violently impelling us to truth.

Alas, so many ideas, yet so little space and time! I think the best way to distill that rhapsodic episode of thoughts and turn our thoughts back to Robinson’s story is to conclude that Robinson is indeed aware of the incredulous nature of his stories. The selection of the queen is a reminder that our capacity to believe what we cannot observe is not contingent upon empirical facts, but rather in the active association to other narratives. By urging the publication within bound volumes, he knows that the stories he tells will work together to create a believable whole, in the same way that the Bible acquires authority, and in turn lend authority back to the individual stories themselves. If authenticity is but an illusion, then we are captured prey in the web of that great magician who can conjure it: the storyteller.

Works Cited

Choi, Timothy. “Victoria Statue.” 2014. JPEG file.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.

New International Version. Bible Gateway. Web. 25 Oct.2012. <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+1>