Month: March 2021

What are the major differences or similarities between the ethos of the creation story or stories you are familiar with and the story King tells in The Truth About Stories ?

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“Personally, I’d like to hear a creation story, a story that recounts how the world was formed, how things came to be, for contained within creation stories are relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist.”

(King, 10)

I chose here to discuss the story of Charm alongside the greek myths, and a condensed version of the biblical account. This is because I have already discussed the Biblical story of creation in another post, so I felt that it would add little to the discussion. In addendum, I have analyzed a bonus creation story in addition to these two, which I think blends the philosophies found within the Biblical and Greek accounts very nicely.

There was Chaos.

 

There are different accounts and different interpretations of the early days of Greek myth and theogony. But the most well known and highest regarded is the works of Hesiod, specifically The Theogony, which details the genealogy of the Greek Gods, all descendants of six gods, the most powerful of which are Chaos, Gaia, and Eros. (II 116-138)

For most of the Homeric mythology that we are most accustomed to, these three gods have largely left the story, as have most of the others before the arrival of the Titans on mount Olympus. However, in the early days of the myths, they were responsible for the birth and creation of the world, and the many gods and creatures who would later rule it. Gaia created Uranus (the sky), Ourea (the mountains), and Pontus (the sea); as well as the many Gods and Goddess that would form the Titans. (Hesiod, II 116-138)

The Titans, no longer bound to Gaia, began taming the world, and adding more gods to it. These gods were in charge of their own domains: Epimetheus and Prometheus respectively created animals and humans, and gave them each different qualities distinct from each other; Athena was the goddess of wisdom and reason; Hades was the God of the underworld, and his “wife,” Persephone, was the goddess of spring.

As such, the creation story of Greek mythology is an explainer for how the gods that look after all that we know in the world came to be, which is not entirely different form the creation of the world, itself.

God Created the heavens and the earth.

Around the same time in region of Mesopotamia, another group of gods were being worshipped. One god, particularly holy to the Canaanites was the god who would come to be known as Yahweh. (Held) The exact origin of this god is contested, but the general understanding is that Yahweh was one god among many within the region, with stories and artifacts that have since been lost to time and conflict and the changing politics of history.

In the Judeo-christian tradition, the world started without form, and void. It was God, Yahweh, who brought the world into being, and through a symbolic passage of 7 days, Yahweh on his own created everything as it is. Through his will, Yahweh created light, the sky, the sea and dry land, vegetation, plants, fruits, and trees, the sun and the moon, birds and fish, and land animals and humans all within that week.

Adam and Eve, the first humans were in charge of the garden of Eden, and all the animals that lived within it. The two gave each of the animals names, following gods will. However, when God asked the two not to eat from the fruit of one of the trees in the garden, as it would give them knowledge of good and evil, the curiosity got the better of them and they denied gods will. As punishment for eating this fruit, Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden to fend for themselves in the wilderness.

The world we know as earth was nothing but water.

“In the beginning of imagination, the world that we know as earth was nothing but water, while above the earth, somewhere in space, was an older more ancient earth.

(King, 10)

In this older world, a curious, pregnant woman named Charm was going for a walk. While on her walk she encountered a hole in the base of a tree that she became curious about, wondering if it had something for her to eat. So she stuck her head in, and fell through. Because this older world sat above the newer world of water, she was surprised to suddenly find herself in the sky, falling towards a vast, endless ocean.

The flying animals of this world flew up and caught her, and rested her on the back of a sea turtle. Immediately all the animals started to look for a solution, because they knew that she couldn’t live on the sea turtle forever. So, Charm asked the swimming animals to get her some dirt that she could use for magic. Many animals dove down as far as they could, but only the otter managed to go down far enough to bring back a clump of dirt.

Charm thanked the animals, and used her magic and this dirt to create land, just in time to give birth to a pair of twins. These twins started shaping the land, making it flat, and building up hills and mountains, digging trenches to make rivers, made trees and flowers, the seasons, and the sun.

Analysis of Greek and Judeo-Christian Gods

The Ancient Greek Mythology paints a picture of a world that is ruled by character, where the attributes of the world are anthropomorphized. It shows how the world is made by people. People who are seemingly all-powerful, undying, and who have dominion in a way that we cannot understand. But still, people, with human emotions, and human flaws, and interact with each other as humans.

In comparison to the Biblical account where Yahweh alone exercised power and agency, an understanding of creation that incorporates the imperfections and trivialities of human personality within these conflicting sources of power is strikingly different. The world of greek mythology is also inherently political, focusing on the ways that different powers conflict. But because the world of judeo-christian creation does not feature a number of gods with conflicting interests, all the power and will is focused on one, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good creator.

Because of this focusing in power, the idea of morality is thought of largely different as well. the Ancient Greek world is constructed from deities who are just trying to find solutions to their problems — sometimes to the detriment of human kind, sometimes to each other —humanity does not hold the same communal expectations towards the deity of the Canaanites. Instead, humanity is subject to God, and the morality that is taught is that you can be a good person by following Him, alone.

Charm

You may have noticed that the way that I wrote the summary the Biblical creation story and the creation in Greek Myths is significantly different from how I wrote the summary for Charm. Where for the former two I focused on the general state of things, the facts of these particular histories — who had power, what did they do with it, how did they delegate — Charm’s summary focused on the journey that Charm took. This is because Charms story resists compression in a very unique way. Where the former two revolved around the systems at play, who had power, and how do you access it, Charm’s was focused on not on the systems in the world, but on the decisions of a character within it. It was a story!

This may be an artifact of King’s unique style. We can tell from his writing in Green Grass Running water that his work is character-driven, focusing on the intricacies of these interacting characters, the unique qualities of ‘I says’ and Coyote, and the mystery behind the Old Indians throughout. But even with this in mind, there was not a nice and easy way of dissecting this story into its main parts the way that we can in Genesis and the Greco-Roman Pantheon.

Throughout this story, too, is the confusion of time in various ways. In the beginning Charm only has suspicions that she might be pregnant, but by the time she is on the the newly created land, she has given birth to her twins. The passage of time unfolds without the characters or the audience really being aware of it. Perhaps it took the animals a really long time to find the dirt underwater. Perhaps she was just falling for a long time. Perhaps time simply did not behave the same way on an earth without a sun. What is left with the audience is a sense that time is flying.

Further, this mystery of time also alludes to the cyclical nature of time within stories in the indigenous worldview that King is discussing. In the colonized worldview there is an expectation of an absolute beginning to time. This may come from the religious idea of God creating the heavens and the earth, as discussed above, or from the Aristotelian and pre-socratic philosophies of an unmoved mover, but engrained in the European worldview is the idea that not only is the the past is finite, but there also has to be a cause for this finite past. In the modern worldview focused on the capabilities of science, this spiritual understanding of a limited past is embedded in cosmological concepts such as the Big Bang Theory.

However, many cultures around the world have had, and continue to have, an understanding of an infinite or cyclical past without concern. In many indigenous cultures, this past is signified by the cyclical concept of time, where all things have four overlapping phases of life. This is perhaps why King starts the story of creation by having Charm standing and living on a completely different world. In any other kind of story, this would beg the question, of where that world came from, too. But this way of telling the story allows for the audience to understand that this may have happened before, and it may happen again. This philosophy of embracing you curiosity even when it may not give you the answers you are looking for is echoed by Charm’s conversation with the moose at the beginning:

Hello, said the Moose. Aren’t you that nosy woman?

 

Yes, I am, said the woman, and what I want to know is why you are so much larger than me.

 

That’s easy, said the Moose, and he walked into the lake and disappeared.

(King, 11)

This interaction, and the unanswered questions of cosmology fit in with the indigenous ways of knowing and being, and specifically echoes the First Peoples Principles of Learning, specifically, the concept that “learning involves recognizing that some knowledge is sacred and only shared with permission and/or in certain situations.” This story not only teaches us about the concepts of community and cooperation, or the structure of indigenous storytelling, but also about the expectations of what kinds of things can be learned, and what kinds of questions demand answers.

Conclusions?

The worldviews of these three cultures informs and is informed by the stories that they tell. One could imagine the world of Greek myths and the Judeo-christian religion being told early on by people living in an area that was being surrounded by conflicting powers and wars, and trying to make sense of the chaos in various ways. And trying to find meaning in the damage being done around them by seemingly cold and impassive rulers. Where the greek mythology embraced the chaos in order to understand it, the judeo-christian belief attempted to find order within it.

But the world of Charm seems to be told from a community who finds their own survival to be determined by cooperation and respect, where people work together to find a shared understanding of how they can make the world better for others. It comes from a culture that embraces a continuance of nature that has existed through time immemorial, and must continue to exist eternally. It comes from a culture that encourages growth and learning and curiosity, but also puts limits within that to ensure the focus is remains on the world before them.

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“Aristotle’s Prime Mover Explained” YouTube, uploaded by Philosophy Vibe, 26 Apr 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE8OPfCh2iY

The Bible. The New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. Hendrickson Publishers, 1993.

D’Aulaire, Ingri. “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths” Random House Children’s Books. 1992. Print.

“First People’s Principles of Learning.” First Nations Educational Steering Committee, http://www.fnesc.ca/first-peoples-principles-of-learning/ Accessed 19 Mar 2021

Held, Shai. “How YHWH Became God.” The Wall Street Journal. 11 Mar. 2016. Web. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-yhwh-became-god-1457732366

Hesiod, “The Works and Days and Theogony,” ReadHowYouWant. 2008. eBook.

Joachim Wtewael. Battle Between the Gods and the Titans. 1613. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/105466/the-battle-between-the-gods-and-the-giants

King, Thomas. “The Truth About Stories.” House of Anansi Press. 2003.

Michelangelo. The Creation of Adam. 1512. The Sistine Chapel, Rome. https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/volta/storie-centrali/creazione-di-adamo.html

 

For this blog assignment I would like you to make some comparisons between Harry Robinson’s writing style in “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England” and King’s style in Green Grass, Running Water. What similarities can you find between the two story-telling voices? Coyote and God are present in both texts, how do they compare in character and voice across the stories?

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I have not had the fortune of reading much of Thomas King’s creative works outside of those in this class so far, so my familiarity with how King’s style has changed to take on some of Robinson’s qualities will be somewhat limited. I have, however, been taking note of how their creative styles differ and overlap as I have been reading.

Both Robinson and King use typical aspects of oral storytelling in the way that they engage with their audiences. In the case of Robinson, as discussed previously, this is a carefully controlled pace, expertly weaved into the elaborations and repetitions he uses to tell his story. In the case of King’s Green Grass, Running Water, however, his pace regularly bounces back and forth between three different styles: (1) a traditional written story we often see in Canada; (2) a familiar oral format happening within Coyote’s scenes with God and the Narrator; and (3) the dialogical manner that characters parse out information for the reader.

This form of dialogue is not unfamiliar in the stories we have read so far. In Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England, most of the important events happen through a form of dialogue. In his story, Coyote’s trickery is unveiled mostly through the dialogue between his characters.  Most other information is relayed to the audience through an implied dialogue of asking questions of the audience that may as well have been asked to a character in the world he has created. “Who? What is it?” Robinson asks as he draws out the trick that Coyote plays on the European explorers. (65) Robinson does this to further engage the audience in his story by giving them what feels like an active role.

However, King uses this dialogue in more ways than just to relay information. He uses dialogue across all three of his styles for use of humour. Throughout the novel, characters are either purposefully, or unintentionally missing the mark in conversations with each other. As Sergeant Cereno interviews Babo, the latter regularly ignores the questions of the former to keep talking about what they want. (50-54) While this shows the attitude that Babo has towards the officer, one that partly disregards his authority, it also creates a very funny comedy of errors, where they regularly misunderstand both questions and answers.

Both King and Robinson use humour throughout their work in a myriad of ways. King suggests, through his reference to Basil Johnston’s essay How do we Learn Language, that “Native peoples have always loved to laugh,” elaborating through Johnston’s work that humour is a common quality among Native stories as it is the means by which understandings about the human experience have been passed on throughout indigenous communities. (23) So this understanding and open use of humour is perhaps not unique to these two authors, so much as it is a favoured means of storytelling among the communities that they both hold dear.

But the way that they present this humour is very different. Robinson’s humour is found in the situations that he sets up in his story, showing the playful nature of Coyote, and of the world through his own eyes. In King of England, Robinson describes how the white people came up the west coast and got misdirected by a trapped Coyote, leading them into the fog across the Pacific Ocean. (64-6) Each time the Europeans try to get closer to Coyote, he goes faster across the water; making them build faster boats to try to catch him, but never able to. The playful way that Coyote evades the European explorers across the Pacific shows the kind of humour that Robinson loves. King, also loving this manner of storytelling, lets us see the strings in this playful way that storytellers engage with their audience as he tells his story of Charm:

“Sometimes when I tell this story to children, I slow it down and have Charm stick her head into that hole by degrees. But most of you are adults and have already figured out that Charm is going to stick her head into that hole so far that she’s either going to get stuck or she’s going to fall through.” (Robinson, 13)

Here, both Robinson and King have shown how you can draw the humour out of people by the way that you tell your story. By drawing out the dilemma, and inching slowly towards an obvious solution, they are both making their audience feel engaged in the creation of the story and with the laughter.

King, on the other hand finds a lot of his humour by playing with his audience’s expectations. He does this in the storyteller format, as in the above story of Charm, where he lingers on the part of the story that he knows the audience has already started to figure out. But King also uses an element of absurdity to make his jokes noticed an appreciated. This ranges from the subtlety of the character Dr. Joe Hovaugh representing the vision of Northrop Frye in Green Grass, Running Water (and the many other hidden puns and references within the characters in his story); to the very existence of God within the narrative.

Both Robinson and King have God playing a similar role within the text, which is to say, largely in the background. Where God is a named character within both stories, he is not represented in the same way.

In King of England, Robinson holds God as the figurehead of creation, dominating Coyote and all of humanity. God has such authority that we only know of his position and interests through the Angel that he sends down to speak with Coyote, much like in the biblical tales. Further, it is through Coyote that his will is done, by sending him to England to make arrangements with the King. Despite the chaotic nature that Coyote has, he appears quite subdued in this story, and is clearly subordinate to God.

 However, in King’s story, God is not this grand ruler of all that we see in Robinson’s. In fact the idea of God is played with to the point of ridicule, playing the role of what seems to be a newborn puppy, rather than a dignified authority. Where Coyote answers to God in Robinson’s work, God is created in Green Grass, Running Water by one of Coyote’s particularly silly, and restless dreams. While highlighting King’s playful and imaginative sense of humour, this also clearly shows the relationship between God and Coyote: one where Coyote’s sense of mischief and chaos answers to no one, not even little ol’ GOD.

By presenting God in this way, Robinson is able to portray both characters as ultimately limited. After all, at the end of the day, Coyote is Coyote. He is not the ruler of the universe, he is a trickster that acts impulsively and makes mistakes, escalating to the point within the first 2 pages of the novel, that the narrator has to say to Coyote “Now you’ve done it,” as he accidentally creates God.

This interaction between God and Coyote in either story perhaps draws upon the relationship between the two within the battling spiritualities of Natives and Europeans. Where Robinson portrays God in the manner that we are used to seeing him in this culture — a high, powerful, authority figure — King makes God a comic relief, and ultimately subject to Coyote’s most prominent quality: chaos. Where Robinson is perhaps sympathetic to the idea of a deity, King appears to be able to do without, embracing a world that is not in the control of an authority, but, in some way, responsible for one.

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King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. HarperPerennial Modern Classics. 2007

King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories. House of Anansi Press. 2003.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories. Talonbooks, Feb 2009.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” CanLit. 1999. 140-172. https://canlit.ca/article/reading-notes-for-thomas-kings-green-grass-running-water/

Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to both King’s article and Robinson’s story.

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What I noticed when telling my own story to family and friends a few weeks back, and what I had seen from others’ posts as well, was that writing a story has a very different feeling from telling the story. For myself, my written voice is a lot more elaborate, uses a lot more words, and — having had practice — captures my ideas a lot better. But my oral voice is more direct, and uses more accessible, common words. Our understanding of what words feel good to use, the phrasing, the size and variation of the sentences changes dramatically between putting our stories down on paper, and saying them out loud. The words that we choose for written text may look the way that we want our ideas to be seen, but rarely do they appear as they sound.

If I were to read my ideas out loud the way the would appear on the screen, it might be hard for the average listener to follow, as it just isn’t the way that people tend to talk to each other, even if it is the way that we might read. I would normally assume, too, that this would be the same if I were to switch roles, and transcribe the spoken word into the written. However, in Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England, Harry Robinson demonstrates great skill at doing just that while maintaining the connection between storyteller and (for lack of a better word) listener.

Looking at the text of this book, the first impression that I am given is that it looks like poetry. It is not written in the format that I would normally recognize as a story in the European tradition. It has lots of single lines, one after another. Some larger than others, some just a couple of words. There are many breaks in the writing, where there is an empty line between spaces. If it weren’t for the accurate use of capitals in this book, it would look like a collection of E.E. Cummings’ work.

However, despite appearances, this story is not written like poetry in the traditional sense, either. Reading the story feels like a conversation. Like someone sitting down at the table across from you, and telling you how they see things. It feels honest, and careful. And familiar. This closeness seems to lure you in to the mind of the storyteller as Robinson recounts his tale.

Thomas King describes this as Robinson “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance,” by developing an oral syntax that prevents the reader from just reading in their head. (186) King elaborates that the voice of the storyteller, the gestures, and the interaction are all lost when trying to transcribe a story for use in text. But by laying out his stories in the form of fragmented ideas, told slowly through repetitive, winding journeys, it is somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to skim the text, as so much information about what is going on will be lost. By forcing the reader to read each word like this, Robinson has created a means of guiding the reader to imagine the story the way it is meant to be told — out loud. Included in this is the imaginings of gestures, raising voice, and beyond anything else, a storyteller.

On reading the text, ‘pace’ was one of the first qualities that I noticed. The pace is very controlled and simultaneously rhythmic and arhythmic. I am a very slow reader, and normally tend to read at a speaking pace, finding it very difficult to skim. So reading rate felt unaffected. But despite this, I actually found it quite difficult to put the text down, or take a break from it. This was not just because it was captivating, but almost as if I didn’t want to interrupt the flow, or the conversation.

Each line tells us an idea that we are supposed to hang onto before moving on to the next. But some of these ideas are more important than others. Robinson emphasizes these ideas by telling and retelling them. Sometimes the same way, other times in different ways. When describing Coyote and the Indians waiting for the kings of England to give indigenous people rights to land on a reserve. He lists each King out, one, two, three, four, and eventually comes to a new leader who instead is going to be a Queen. This is how he describes the change to queen Elizabeth II: 

(76)

 

Instead of passing on with new information, King hangs on to the idea of the new crown being a woman. Notice how he cycles through the same ideas throughout this passage: a king, a queen, they don’t have a boy, they have a daughter. Using repetitive connections and sentence starters — maybe, when, they — gives us a sense of a syncopated rhythm as this idea is hashed and rehashed again and again.

Partly, Robinson does this to be absolutely sure that the ‘listener’ understands what he means. Partly, Robinson does this because it is an important piece of history that he remembers being monumental at the time. Having been in his 50s at the time of her coronation, this was likely something that has stuck with him in the 30 years before writing this down. But he also does this because he is a great and practiced storyteller. We know that if something hasn’t happened until Queen Elizabeth II, then the story must continue when she is introduced, and hanging onto that idea lets the listener (or reader, in this case) feel hooked on his telling.

This manner of emphasizing and reclarifying information as the story is being told is a hallmark of the oral tradition, and one that is historically not welcome in the European tradition of the written word. What often seems to be expected from written work is that if it is worth saying, it is worth saying right the first time.

As I read it aloud to my partner, I felt a bit embarrassed at first, as the story was not told through a voice that you could mistake as my own. But I got into the flow of it, and felt quite active in the role of storyteller. My partner was a bit confused with the story as the listener, not prepared, I think, for the jumbling of ideas, but by the time she started to read to me, it was clear that she found the role fun to put on as well.

King is right, I think, to say that Robinson has done something incredible in the way that he has transcribed his stories. Where we might have missed this complex and captivating story if written in plain text, edited down to suit the traditional, European style, instead Robinson has led us into the role of storyteller and given us a chance to slow down and think about what makes a story important, and more significantly, what makes it sound important.

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King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

Roberts, Linzie. “E.E. Cummings: The Power of Structure and Form.” Owlcation, https://owlcation.com/humanities/EE-Cummings-The-Power-of-Structure-and-Form. Accessed 5 March 2021.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

Scott, Tom. “The Hidden Rules of Conversation.” YouTube, uploaded by Tom Scott, 4 May 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJEaMtNN_dM.