Lesson 1:2

Lesson 1.2 Story & Literature

Topics

  • Story and literature
  • The contradiction: imagination and reality
  • Forgetting and un-learning
  • Home / Land

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson students will be able to:

  • Explain the distinctions between story and literature
  • Discuss some of the ways the www appears to be changing story and literature
  • Discuss Chamberlin’s ideas about how the contradiction between imagination and reality impacts our reception of story and literature
  • Demonstrate an understanding of Chamberlin’s challenge to find common ground
  • Demonstrate blogging and hyper-texting skills.

Lesson Description

This lesson will introduce you to some critical ideas about story and ensure a common understanding of our terms. It will also introduce you to J. Edward Chamberlin and his ideas about story and land in his text, If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories:Finding Common Ground. More specifically we will cover three central threads of thought with this lesson. First we are going to conceptualize literature and story as two different paths for making sense of the world; paths that frequently meet and cross each other. Our analytical work begins by envisioning the space where the two meet and examining what happens in the intersection. The second thread of thought requires that we weave together observations on the www and how new media capabilities are impacting literature and story (particularly social media tools that enable widespread publication — without publishers and with hypertext). And finally, this lesson includes instructions for listening and reading strategies that will assist in the process of learning to read for allusions and symbolic knowledge outside of the Western traditions, and to recognize colonizing narratives in literature and story.

Assignment  1:2 /  Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog. For this week you will be reading each other’s blogs for the first time, I would like you to spend some time reading a number of blogs and find a couple of people who inspire a response from you. Use the comment box to introduce yourself and ask your questions. You ARE expected to respond to comments left on your blog.

Assignment 1:3/  Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

At the end of this lesson you will find a list of questions. Read each of the questions and select ONE that you would like to answer for your blog assignment.   Follow the blogging guidelines in lesson 1:1; write a 400- 600-word answer and post on your blog before Fri January 16th.

Required Readings

Required Viewing & Listening

Story

Literature, myth, history; these are big general terms that cover vast territories of how we make sense of ourselves and how we make meaning and meaningfulness. A common ingredient of literature, myth and history is story. As Thomas King might put it, ‘the stories we tell ourselves’ are the beginnings of literature, myth and history. Literature stands apart from myth and history in a distinctive way; while myths and histories may be either written or oral, literature, by definition, is written down, it is textual. Of course, with the continuing innovation of new media tools, literature is also digital, and digital media is textual and aural and visual. While the explosion of social media tools enabling publication without mediation is remarkable, one of the most interesting literary innovations on the www is the hyperlink. What I find so interesting about the hyperlink is that it changes the reader. Hyperlinking enlarges and changes the interactivity and connectivity between reader and text. With this mind, let’s return to the idea that it all begins with a story.

While literature begins with a story to be told, stories are different than literature. Once a story is written down it changes, in generic terms it may become a novel, a poem or a history, or a myth.  Significantly, the listener changes too; the storyteller disappears as the listener becomes a reader.  When students are asked to reflect on the different dynamics of listening and reading, often they observe that the reader of a text has greater interpretative control than does the listener of a story. The reader, students will explain, can apply their own independent thinking to the page, whereas the listener cannot. The listener, students observe, is somehow bound to the storytelling’s interpretation. This observation suggests the reader is free to think what they want and free to make what they want of the text, including taking it out of context. This is because there is little or no possibility of interaction between text and reader. So, if I understand this common student insight correctly, on first reflection students tend to agree that the listener is connected to the storyteller in a way that the reader is not and this connection somehow diminishes intellectual agency on the part of the listener.

Students are correct when they identify a special connection between listener and storyteller, but mistaken in their analysis. The connection between listener and story is actually quite different than this explanation. Indeed, as a listener you will have far more power over a story than any text you may read. This is so at the most basic level. Because, once the words are written down, that’s it – they do not change. You may disagree with what you read, you may frown and even stomp about a little, or your reading may move you to tears or laughter; whatever meaningfulness you take away from a reading will have little, if any, impact on the actual text. Your reading will not change that story. If you want to change that story, you must become a writer and find a publisher (actually, with the www you no longer need to find the publisher). Herein lies one of the essential differences between reading and listening; the listener has far greater power to change the story. Stories told are connected to a listener and they are also connected to a time and a place; stories absorb their moment of telling, the space they are told, and the listener’s response. By creating meaningfulness in the moment and place of the telling, stories transform their own context; stories change depending on where and when and to whom they are told.  Story, with its connection of time and place between teller and listeners, is always in process, a process of bringing the past into the present.

Literature and story are on one level symbiotic; literature begins with stories, and many stories, in a strange way, rely on a tradition of literature or a literary canon for their believability. As discussed above, we are going to conceptualize literature and story as two different paths that frequently meet and cross each other and examine the intersections. What you are going to find will be a little surprising and sometimes disturbing. First, you will quickly discover that the idea that there are two types of cultures, ‘oral cultures’ and ‘literate cultures’ is a mistake; all cultures are oral and all cultures are literate — writing comes in many forms and we are all of us story-tellers. We will observe this intersection with a number of lenses beginning with what J. Edward Chamberlin has to say about stories in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories. Chamberlin’s book is situated in the intersection of literature and story (as is much of Thomas King’s writing) because his central concern is the nature and power of stories and because he crafts stories to shape his insights and connections. We are most interested in the connections Chamberlin crafts between stories and land, literature and nation building. Canada, like every nation state, was built upon a story.

Before we move onto our reading of Chamberlin, we need to pause for just a moment and touch once again on the topic of the www and digital literature. This is because we want to connect our conversations about story and literature with our end goal investigations into how we might meet Chamberlin’s challenge to find the common ground. At this beginning juncture, we should take into consideration a recent ‘rethinking’ of an earlier model that understood literacy and orality as distinctive media with literacy, occurring naturally among more ‘advanced’ peoples in a neat chronological progression from ‘primitive/oral’ to ‘civilized/literate’. You need to be aware of the underlying ethnocentricity of such an understanding, and some would even point to this kind of hierarchical binary thinking as grounded in racist assumptions. And, indeed, neat hierarchical divisions like this are reflective of the ‘them and us’ kind of thinking that Chamberlin urges us to re-examine.

I want to leave you with this: What I want to point to is the idea that technological advances in communications tools have been part of the impetus to rethink this divisive categorizing of literature and orality. This, I think, is happening for a number of reasons, but for now keep your focus on how the www appears to creates a new space where the distinctions between literacy and orality are seriously blurred – what happens to the role of the reader? I suggest the reader on the www is also a listener and a writer.

Introduction to Chamberlin:

Speech and writing are so entangled with each other in our various forms and performance of language that we are like Penelope, weaving them together during the day and unweaving them at night. Our current theories and models illustrate none of this, with the result that studying oral and written traditions using existing paradigms is an exercise in pushing a string or herding cats (Chamberlin 2001).

Chamberlin, J. Edward. “A New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading.” For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Braithwaite. Ed. Timothy J. Reiss., 145-164. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2001. 145-164.

J Edward Chamberlin is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His writings range freely across disciplinary and territorial boundaries. His concerns are vast and cover topics as diverse as the life and times of Oscar Wilde to how the horse has shaped civilizations. His travels are extensive and often motivated by his interest in stories and songs; he has traveled between the worlds of  Indigenous peoples of North America and Australia to the hunters of Kalahari and the herders of Mongolia. Crossing the boundary between academia and politics, Chamberlin worked on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline inquiry, the Alaska Native Claims Commission, and he has worked on Native Land claims in Canada, the United States, Africa and Australia. His books include The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Towards Native Americans (1975), Oscar Wilde’s London (1987), Come Back To Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993), If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (2003), and Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (2006).

A good way learn more about J Edward Chamberlin and some of the central concerns in If This is Your Land Where are Your Stories, is to listen to an interview with Chamberlin on The Writer’s Café website at www.writerscafe.ca.  Go to the home page and click on Aboriginal in the side bar, scroll down alphabetically until you come to a photo of the book cover and click: http://writerscafe.ca/book_blogs/writers/j-edward-chamberlin_if-this-is-your-land-where-are-your-stories.php

 

Story according to Chamberlin

In his first paragraph, Chamberlin describes a moment in the intersection we are examining when government officials and Gitksan Elders meet. Standing on territory that is home to them, the Elders ask the newcomers, “if this is your land, where are your stories?” And so begins Chamberlin’s exploration over a seemingly endless territory of story – from simple family stories to African praise songs and cowboy lyrics, from constitutions and town policies to Western canonical poetry to ancient riddles and everyday ceremonies, from classical myths to national anthems to songs of resistance: Aboriginal and Rastafarian, to nursery rhymes and charms. This range of exploration into the workings of story demonstrates the vastness of what we mean when we say ‘Story.’ So, let’s begin our reading of Chamberlin by hunting down a definition of ‘story’ according to Chamberlin.

Chamberlin begins by telling us what stories do: stories “give meaning and value to the places we call home,” and “they bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words.” As you read on, study carefully all the ways that he describes this ‘world of words’ and reflect on why do words make us feel closer to the world we live in? Stories, he continues, “hold us together and at the same time keep us apart (1).” Stories ‘take hold of us’ and make us believe, indeed it is through story that we find “a way to believe” and they give us “things to believe” (3). Storytelling traditions tell different truths about religions, sciences, histories, and the arts; these truths are the answers to our questions about where we came from and why we are here. And perhaps most significantly, stories “bring imagination and reality together.”

Seeking out a definition for generic features of story, we find that story is inherently strange: “stories always have something strange about them.” This inherent strangeness is a defining element of stories, and it is a complex notion. The idea of strangeness applies to both the content of the story – strange and contradictory things happen in stories, and the strange willingness of the audience to both believe and not believe at the same time. A second generic feature of story according to Chamberlin is ceremony; he describes the varied and different forms of stories and writes, “they are all ceremonies of belief (2).”  I think one way to understand what Chamberlin means when he defines story as ceremony, is to link this element of story with the inherent strangeness of our willingness to believe and not believe at the same time.  The ceremony occurs when we collectively believe and do not believe at the same time. Third, story is powerful; however, take note that the power of stories is not found solely in the tale told or the teller’s skill, but rather most significantly in the shared “practice of believing.”

Home

We all know what it is to be homesick (86).  Even the thought of home can make us feel sick when we are far away, we call this homesickness. Clearly, the idea of a home is close to our hearts, and it makes us feel much like love makes us feel: happy and content when loved ones are close by, fiercely protective when they are threatened, obsessive and even violent when our love is stolen. And of course, it is in our hearts that we feel love, right? Home is where the heart is, right? But that is not very scientific or theoretical; we all know that our hearts pump blood, not emotional chemicals. Lovesickness and homesickness are not real, they are metaphors that shape the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our feelings – and our behavior.  And they are powerful stories, so powerful we actually feel ill. In the intersections between story and literature we will find much literature that is rich with stories about home and stories about the land, in particular this land called home: Canada: “Our home and Native Land”.  The connections between home and land appear clear enough, however — keep in mind that land is real, we stand on it and we build our houses on it, while home is a metaphor. Home is something we imagine. Or as Chamberlin would put it, home is that contradictory place: “here and nowhere,” or perhaps somewhere else (75).  Home, he says, “is caught up in the contradictions between reality and imagination” (74).

Chamberlin consistently focuses on the tensions and connections between imagination and reality, as with the above example: land is real and home is imaginary – and yet we all appear to seek a homeland. And he places this contradictory relationship at the heart of the challenge he asks us to face, a challenge, which he says, is “the most difficult challenge we face these days”(75). One of the things that is going to happen in our future readings for this course, if you grasp the power of this contradiction and keep your eye on how it works in the many examples Chamberlin offers, is you will begin to un-cover contradictions between imagination and reality in your readings where previously you saw only facts, or reality if you will. You will begin to see how one’s reality is dependent on imagination; indeed, this is another kind of symbiotic relationship much like the one I have described between story and literature. This is part of the process of learning to recognize colonizing narratives, which we will examine more closely in Unit 2.

Offering the example of the Rastafarian musical expression in the song The Rivers of Babylon as a story that captures this contradiction in a way that connects the listener to peoples around the world living in forced exile, or in his words, peoples who are homeless, or even”homeless in their homelands” (77). Chamberlin points to the legacy of African enslavement, the exile of the Jews, and closer to home – the genocide and horrors inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by colonizing invaders come settlers, and he suggests that this “extraordinarily” popular reggae song forges “a connection among these three stories of horror” (77). Most significantly, in the lament and melody of this song of remembering, we are reminded of how much we are willing to forget. Forgetting is the job of history. Or, as Chamberlin quotes, “history specializes in forgetting” (77).

For this land that we call Canada there are numerous different histories documented and presented in so many ways: spoken, published, blogged, videotaped, and representing dozens upon dozens of different communities. If you could read, and listen to, and watch all of these histories, you would no doubt find many contradictions as the historians and storytellers work to weave together imagination and reality within their different traditions. Nonetheless, there is one common thread and that is, as Chamberlin puts it, a “sad fact.” That is the fact that “the history of settlement around the world is of displacing other people from their lands, of discounting their livelihoods and destroying their languages” (78). And in Canada, some of the earliest settlers who came to make Canada their home, were themselves being displaced; in exile. Now here is an interesting contradiction to consider — simply put, the peoples who arrived to make this land their home, arrived homeless because they had left their homes behind. The peoples that these “settlers” encountered were at home on their land. The settlers did indeed make their home, and the Indigenous peoples became homeless in their own land. No matter which way you look at this, homelessness could clearly be an appropriate metaphor for talking about what was exchanged between the two groups of peoples. The settlers arrived homeless and the Indigenous peoples ended up homeless.

However, when we look at the stories and literature of the settlers, what we find instead, are metaphors that work to “forget” all about this exchange of homelessness, and indeed metaphors that function to create a very different story of how this land became home for the settlers. Metaphors of “emptiness” and “boundless spaces” abound in early Canadian literature to the effect that what is imagined in the reader’s mind has nothing, or little, to do with the reality of this exchange of homelessness, what Chamberlin calls “the devastating consequences of making Canada their home” (78). An interesting example of how early literature forgets about this reality, is the unquestioned use of the word “settlers” to describe the peoples who are on the move and leaving home, and the word “nomadic” to describe the peoples who are not leaving home, who are at home — a most telling contradiction which we will deal with further in Unit Two.

Before we leave the subject of forgetting, I want to introduce a technique that is a little like forgetting, but different. That is the skill of unlearning or learning to forget what you already know.  Because this course exposes territory that will contradict what “we” already know, a certain willingness to not know is required. I realize it can be very difficult to let yourself  not know, and especially so in a university environment. I can only assure you that this is a valuable skill for approaching our challenge, and according to past students, “not knowing” becomes easier with practice and is quite rewarding in terms of what you might learn. One exercise that will assist you in the challenge of not knowing is to practice listening. You’ll find that when you listen with intent, you stop thinking about what you already know. This too is a reading skill that will assist in one of our main learning objectives: to develop reading strategies for recognizing allusions and symbolic knowledge other than Western. We will discuss this further when we look at creation stories in Unit 2.

A Story:

I have purposely referred to ‘our challenge’ a few times above without really stopping to describe precisely what is the challenge. And, I am still not going to stop and explain now. Instead I am going to end with a story and let you articulate our challenge. My story might help as well.

INTERSECTIONS

For some time now I have been frustrated by academic metaphors of borders. I like the spaces in-between places, like the tide line, the place between dawn and dusk, the edge of the forest, the weekends, between lovers — these are places of possibility. In-between spaces lie outside of the categories we create to define space and time; like the tide-line, where currents converge and in that space and time, leave the mainstream. One of the things I like best about storytelling is that space and time are a part of my expression. So, I think about space and time and in-between places a lot. And that is what I was thinking about while I was walking down Commercial Drive on a rainy December night, a few weeks ago. I was also thinking about this course. Huddled under my purple umbrella and walking fast, dodging big puddles all along the wall murals at Commercial and 18th..  I was heading for the #99 B- line at the corner on Broadway. Deep in thought, my running shoes soggy and making splash splash noises and my soaking wet jeans clinging to me, I was almost at 10th — when the pounding of the rain became absurdly loud. And then, strangely rhythmic. For sure I had a bit of a liminal moment before I distinguished the drumming from the sound of rain. It was coming from the intersection. The big intersection at Broadway and Commercial where the sky train stops, and there are always sky train cops hanging about, and of course buses. Ah hah, I realized it must be an Idle no More protest. Cool. Walking toward the intersection, I ducked under a bit of roof by Starbucks. The intersection was over-full with people with posters and drums and thermoses and umbrellas and they were all having a good time in spite of the rain and wind. Outside the intersection, traffic was at a stand still. There were buses on all four roads facing us, and a few cops here and there around the perimeter.  The drummers and singers were mingling in the middle of the intersection and people all around were talking and chanting slogans of resistance and singing songs for revival. A man with a guitar started singing The Times They Are a Changing – and I joined in, I know all the words and love singing that song, especially while occupying an intersection.

The rain kept falling, the wind blew, the cops and buses circled us, and eventually some signal was given and people began to leave the intersection and walk down Commercial toward 1st. Sitting on the #99 B-line on the long drive west across town, I felt good. I felt like I had stood on a piece of common ground.  On the walk home from the bus stop, back on the streets under my purple umbrella, that is when it came to me — intersections. Here is a metaphor that works for this course.  An intersection is a place where different paths meet and merge, for a time, and then go on their way. Intersections are places of possibility and process. Yes, that works.

Lesson 1:2 Blog Questions:

Read each of the following questions and select ONE that you would like to answer for your blog assignment. Follow the blogging guidelines  and instructions in this lesson to write a 400- 600-word answer.

  1. Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either “oral culture” or “written culture” (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil’s article “Orality.
  2. “What the Rastafarians have done is to make up a story – and I say this in high tribute – that will bring them back home while they wait for reality to catch up to their imaginations” (italics mine).  (77).  Chamberlin often points to Rastafari myth and song as exemplary of the power of stories to connect and reconnect peoples, as places to begin to find the common ground. Indeed, he thinks, “Rastafarianism may be the only genuine myth to have emerged from the settlement and slavery in the New World” (187).  Why does Chamberlin think this? Please be sure to include some discussion about language, in particular “Dread Talk.”
  3. Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1).  He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there”  (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1).
  4. Figuring out this place called home is a problem (87).  Why? Why is it so problematic to figure out this place we call home: Canada? Consider this question in context with Chamberlin’s discussion on imagination and reality; belief and truth (use the index).Chamberlin says, “the sad fact is, the history of settlement around the world is the history of displacing other people from their lands, of discounting their livelihoods and destroying their languages” (78).  Chamberlin goes on to “put this differently” (Para. 3). Explain that “different way” of looking at this, and discuss what you think of the differences and possible consequences of these “two ways” of understanding the history of settlement in Canada.
  5. At the heart of the intersection between story and literature we will easily find the meeting of native and newcomer, and as Chamberlin says, “I keep returning to the experience of aboriginal peoples because it seems to me to provide a lesson for us all. And for all its [Canada] much-vaunted reputation as an international mediator and peacemaker, it is in this story of natives and newcomers that Canada really has something to offer the world” (228).  And, then he goes on to propose: “Why not change underlying title back to aboriginal title?” (229). Explain how Chamberlin justifies this proposal.
  6. Write a summary of three significant points that you find most interesting in the final chapter of If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?
  7. At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons.  I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?