I have a great story to tell you.
In a far corner of the land there stands a village in supernova. The stories the townsfolk tell burst with celebration and unworry: the storytellers weave words of good content, and these words rise across the sky to shape the trees and the wide fields and the little homes and farmsteads across the deep soil. The words form the world. Letters flow downstream like ripples in their making, carried down on a wind of song. Truths and symbols to fertilize the earth.
And yet a gospel daily planted with not a change to its words yields few fresh flowers on its hundredth budding, and the townsfolk grow restless. They feel a monotony lingering in the leaves and the tall grass, nothing more than the autumnal aftertaste of those recurring tales. An aftertaste of ennui. Summer sputters towards its lethargic death.
It is at this precipice the bard arrives. He has no face – no word has been said of it so it remains in darkness. His job requires only a mouth, and the tapestries it weaves are shadow incarnate. Its palette is a history still yet to be spoken and its paints are songs and stories.
He arrives at a place when that place seeks new truths. He is raw and exciting, bearing syllables and scribbles still yet to be planted. The villagers are curious, and so they gather and ask him:
Give us something new.
And so the bard stands amongst them like some monument freshly-excavated, and he begins to whisper. They listen close and claw at every word for they are starved for story. At first, he whispers, and his words are small. They scatter through the empty air and the villagers watch with awe. What secrets are these?
The darkness grows insidiously. The villagers are so hungry they only begin to taste that darkness post-digestion. By then the words have fed the world and altered it irrevocably. These stories are at once familiar and unfamiliar. the bard takes old words and makes them new, melting and reshaping until the words are unrecognizable. Through hushed song and crooked script these new tales trace a path of evil and violence. The wind cuts through the villagers until their bodies are shivering under the weight of these new tales. They watch as the bard paints the village grey and black like he has done to village after village, letting his voice puncture the land and drain it of all colour. The soils remain fertile, yes, but the villagers watch as plants already dead in their birth rise from the ground and spill horror to the sky.
The villagers beg the bard to untell his tell. They wish for the world as it was before, with all its familiar colours. Oh, to return to mundanity! But it is too late, for a story told cannot be recalled. Once departed from a teller’s lips it is the world’s story – the world’s history. The bard’s job is irreversible. He leaves the village tarnished through his stories of evil. In the end, you always have to be careful of the stories you tell, and perhaps more importantly – the stories you listen to.
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I wanted to write a story where words left physical changes in the world, symbolizing the effects of storytelling on perception and truth, literalizing the common saying of how stories “shape” the world. This is J. Edward Chamberlin’s musings on the “bear and the word ‘bear,'” of tracking and the significance of words (132). Through the bard “reshaping” old words, I wished to touch on issues of adaptation and narrative recontextualization; one need only examine the plethora of adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood, ranging from the childish to the most adult in Charles Perrault as adapted by Andrew Lang, to understand how we adapt and readapt the same stories time and again. In fact, LRRH has been so widely adapted in fact that its dark origins are news-worthy and treated as “unknown.”
I also found it difficult to transpose my story to speech. I’m used to writing narrative prose fiction, with meandering sentences and attempts at creative syntax, but orality is a whole different beast. Through my characterization of the storyteller as a “bard” and the faintly “medieval” setting, I wished to touch upon medieval bardic traditions, recall such ancient tales of wonderous musings and authorial anonymity as The Wanderer, and nod towards (though perhaps only in my mind) the truthtelling wisdom of Shakespeare’s nameless fools, particular Lear’s, who “speaks bitter truth to his master the King” (Rasmussen and DeJong 2016). The differences between orality and literacy bring to mind Thomas King and his “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” where he writes of the common complaint of the loss of “the voice of the storyteller…and the interaction between storyteller and audience” in the transposition of an oral narrative to text. It was difficult to present my story through voice, as it was written first for the page rather than for the voice – in contrast to, say, the orality of Homer, and, as according to Homerist David Bouvier in his examination of Greek storytelling, the predominance of speech and oral transmission of culture and history in Ancient Greece (59). We can examine the works of Harry Robinson, whom professor Renate Eigenbrod examines in detail in her examination of the melting-together of orality and literacy, to find “the oral” as signifying a “creative process, a stylistic feature as well as a culturally based way of thinking” (94). Robinson’s works are highly interfusional – to use Thomas King’s term – blending orality and literacy. My story? Not so much. I struggled with the oral half, even though I had written it alongside voicing it aloud, simply because I am not accustomed to orality.
It was a fascinating exercise to “take the story out of the text” and recontextualize a narrative and moral framework. Stories often “share” endings, and thus share morals; there are only so many that are as universal as the idea of evil and humanity’s reckoning of why it exists. King’s story explains evil as a product of competition; mine, as a product of boredom, curiosity, and adaptation.
Works Cited
“35 Little Red Riding Hood Stories, Retellings and Fractured Fairy Tales.” Bookroo, https://bookroo.com/books/topics/little-red-riding-hood-stories.
Bouvier, David. “The Homeric Question: An Issue for the Ancients?” Oral Tradition, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 59-61. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51578/pdf.
Chamberlin, Edward J. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Davies, Sioned. “Storytelling in Medieval Wales.” Oral Tradition, vol. 7, no. 2, 1992, pp. 231-257, https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/7ii/4_davies.pdf.
Eigenbrod, Renate. “The Oral in the Written: A Literature Between Two Cultures.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 15, No. 1, 1995, pp. 89-102, http://www3.brandonu.ca/cjns/15.1/Eigenbrod.pdf.
King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, edited by Cynthia Sugars, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 183-190.
Puchner, Martin. “How stories have shaped the world.” BBC Culture, 23 Apr. 2018, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180423-how-stories-have-shaped-the-world.
Perrault, Charles. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Blue Fairy Book. Translated by Andrew Lang, London, 1889, https://archive.org/details/bluefairybook00langiala/page/n11/mode/2up.
Rasmussen, Eric, and Ian DeJong. “Shakespeare’s Fools.” British Library, 15 Mar 2016, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/shakespeares-fools#.
“The Wanderer.” Old English Poetry Project, https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-wanderer/.
Happy Friday Leo!
I really enjoyed your version of the story. It was an excellent ‘recontextualization’ of dissatisfaction and the evils of idleness. Your words flowed in a fun way; I could almost feel the words they were weaving myself.
In particular, the line “[g]ive us something new” gave me chills. It reminded me of Edmond’s need for turkish delight within ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’.
Not only did your story take me down a path, but your hyperlinks did as well. It was fun to see where your writing this week took you in making connections.
Your link to “How Stories Have Shaped The World” is a particularly great one! It wonderfully demonstrates what King was referencing with each chapter introduction, and Chamberlin’s notion of finding the common ground between cultures through story: story is a part of everything – they have shaped each and every one of us in one way or another. This is completely evident in children’s stories (as you mentioned), which are usually filled with morals. Could you foresee telling your story to children or youth?
Your comment of “reshaping old words” made me think of “Braiding Histories” by Susan Dion. The book talks about the project she undertook in collecting narratives, and presenting them in a way that they would honour the source of the story and be adaptable for middle and secondary education. She also stresses that some of the stories she will be sharing may cause the reader to have grief, and face a potentially intense experience. Once a story is out in the world, we can’t hide from it; we can’t hide from out collective history.
These are only some of the thoughts that your blog led me to. Thank you for the words!
Thank you for this comment! I like your reference to Narnia and Edmund’s childish curiosity leading him down that dark path. Makes me think of the villagers in my story as children themselves – always curious, always hungry for something “new,” perhaps unaware of the consequences. Perhaps this story would work for kids!
That commonality or “common ground” you talk about is a fascinating subject – that morals so universal are shared across cultures, histories, and societies through story after story. We have to understand this universality of narrative while being careful to not ignore the unique features of our world’s vast stories. I’m thinking of one of your own hyperlinks that you posted to your story – Adichie’s “the danger of a single story” ted talk – about the importance of valuing difference and specifity as well as commonality.
And thanks for the Susan Dion reference, I’ll be sure to check her out.
Hey Leo! I really enjoyed reading your story–it definitely gave me a “fairytale” feeling, what with the fantastic setting and the villagers getting more than they asked for… Having the Bard’s words physically change the world is such a neat way to manifest the way that stories “shape” the world–there are lots of different directions you could take this is, I think! For instance, what jumped out at me when I first read this story was how the Bard took “old” words and changed them, co-opting their purpose for his own dark deeds.
For me, this recalled the subject of cultural appropriation–just to be clear, I understand “cultural appropriation” to be the practice of adopting certain elements of a culture by those extent to that culture, which is particularly problematic when a power differential exists between those “inside” and “outside” of the relevant culture(s). I think this interpretation fits your story because the Bard is someone unknown to the villagers who takes and uses their words outside of their appropriate context, which leads to the eventual degradation of the villagers’ world. This can be linked to many occurrences in the real world; I can’t help but think about the ways in which Indigenous stories/cultures are “borrowed from” and used, stripped of their original context, in popular culture (for example: the use of the “wendigo,” a creature from Algonquin folklore, as a generic “scary monster” in horror media). This may not have been what you were originally thinking of when writing this story, but I thought it was an interesting connection to make!
Thank you! Your point about cultural appropriation is one that hadn’t even crossed my mind at all but makes complete sense. It’s such an important and fascinating topic – the theft of the stories of an oppressed group by the dominant superstructure. A counter-narrative transformed into a master narriatve, perhaps – and the theft of Canadian Indigenous culture, language, story, and history is a great (and horrific) example. The dominant power strips the culture of their tales and truths, removing them of context and thereby erasing the members of that culture from their own stories. In this way the colonizer can employ the words and narratives of the colonized to continue their colonisation – to continue to erase and subsume Indigenous communities. It’s interesting how an insight I hadn’t even thought of can be illuminated by a fresh pair of eyes, thank you!
Hi Leo,
Thanks for sharing this story. I so enjoyed your poetic language and the imagery of the words themselves creating the world. (Letters flowing down the stream – beautiful!) I thought it was an excellent creative choice to make The Story physical, as opposed to intangible. It speaks to Chamberlin’s ever-present struggle between imagination and reality. Silko’s story seeks to demonstrate the real effects of this intangible thing – a story. And your story just makes it tangible. Very interesting!
I appreciated your thoughts on the challenge of translating your story from written to spoken. I did something that was new to me for this project, just as a little experiment. I have a theatre background and lots of experience memorizing text, so initially I had planned to just memorize it. Thinking about our focus on oral storytelling, I sort of did the opposite and actually worked to avoid word-for-word memorization. Instead I wrote down my story and then I just started speaking it. I spoke it to myself in the car driving to work a few times. And the great thing was that it was a bit different each time. And it kind of grew and developed more nuance than I think the original text held.
How did your story change upon speaking it? Or how do you think it would change if you had never written it down?
Thank you for the reply! When I tried telling my story orally it was really difficult – I’m used to prose, particularly fantasy prose, so I’m prone to writing longer sentences and using that more fantasy-esque style of fanciful writing (to a fault, maybe.) Trying to tell my story out loud definitely emphasized this disparity between literacy and orality. Finding a rhythm is hard – I found myself stumbling through some of my longer sentences.