After finishing my first silent reading of the story “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England”, I have noted a few remarks on my notebook. When I further proceed to the different styles of storytelling, which are reading out loud and listening this story from a friend of mine, I realized that the remarks that I had previously made could now be explained in shaping the meaning of the story.
The first remark that I noted was the redundant explanation through out the story. I found that the storyteller tried to describe every part of the story as detailed as possible, which somehow caused confusion during my first reading of the story. However, as I proceed, I find that these little explanations make the story verbally more interesting and attracting. It creates a sense of repetition, which we usually tend to do when performing a story as a storyteller. Furthermore, with the change of intonation associated with these repetitions, meanings illustrated by words could be conveyed to the listeners more explicitly in different varieties. In this way, it makes the story itself into a performance for its listeners, for I felt that verbally interpreting this story would be draw the listeners deep into the story, more attentions would also be drawn to the important details of the story, rather than reading it as a reader. I would consider this as a mindful trick of the storyteller to “[defeat] reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves (King)”.
My next remark is that the story does not seem to be written in a very grammatical way. Though it was highlighted on the question itself that the story was conveyed through an “oral syntax”, my observation would be that it rather looks alike to the form of poetry. Through the ungrammatical conversations between the King of England and the Coyote, as well as the irregular division on sentences within the story, these examples have proven what we have been taught: poetry does not necessarily have to be grammatical.
However, only until I read the story aloud, this oral syntax form of story enables the storyteller a wider flexibility in conveying the story, especially when it comes to the different pauses made by me and my friend. Therefore, I agreed to the view of Shamina Kallu, a former student of this course, that oral syntax has deconstructed the conventional style of academic writing on First Nation stories, and make this story sounded more alike to a personal story. With a personal story, listeners would tend to focus less on the grammatical mistakes of the story, but shift their attention to the meaning of the story. To bring it further, this greater flexibility would allow the storyteller recreating their own interpretations on the story and audiences’ understandings towards the meaning of the story would be altered according to different performers. I believe with different interpretations of the story, meaning of the stories could be conveyed via different perspectives, and would ultimately develop into a thorough understanding towards the story of “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England”.
Works Cited
Kallu, Shamina. 2.3: Oral Syntax: Maintaining the Meaning of Stories. Canada: Muffled Voices and National Narratives. 13 Feb 2015. Web. 1 Jul 2016.
King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190. Web. 1 Jul 2016.
Shaw, Martin. On Repetition in Storytelling. The Stanford Storytelling Project. 2013. Web. 1 Jul 2016.