Assignment

For our latest assignment, we were asked to retell Thomas King’s story about how evil came into the world. As a bit of a disclaimer, I told this story several times. As you guys know, a story changes each time it’s told, and I’m not a very eloquent person in real life so the first time was pretty rough.

First of all, I apologize for not being as creative about it as I could’ve been. I think I misunderstood the assignment a bit and I didn’t realize it until I was looking at other people’s awesome stories. In a way, I think this story is like an expanded version of King’s retelling. I hope the little details make up for it!

The Story

A long time ago, before the lands were divided up, there was a magical race. They had no name, but I guess their closest modern cousins are our fairytale witches. They wielded powerful magic and brewed amazing potions. They lived in total peace and harmony with the animals across the land. With their magic, they built their homes among the treetops, in the caves, where-ever they liked, and they flew across all corners of the globe to visit their friends and family, fast enough to be in time for dinner. There were no rules yet everyone knew their place. Everyone was happy because everyone was content. And that’s all they knew. 

One day, an ancient bear floundered about the woods, clutching its mouth in pain. Perhaps it was too much honey, or perhaps it ate something sharp by accident. Whatever it was, the toothache was too much for the bear. Fortunately, it saw a witch strolling through the forest, and just as he kneeled down to pick some berries, the bear pounced on him and opened its mouth wide. The witch found himself, back to the ground, eyes wide at the site of the bear’s long fangs, mere centimeters from his face. With a puff of air magic, he threw the bear off him and ran, and sprint, and flew until he got home. 

At home, his wife looked at his sweaty face and red cheeks. Before she could speak, he hugged his wife and said, “That was amazing!” And, with what little words they had to aid his explanation, he tried to explain the way his blood pulsed and his heart beat. This new feeling was so exhilarating that he wanted everyone to experience it too. 

He called this new emotion “fear.”

The next day, he got his friends together and proposed a contest to see who was clever enough to reproduce this strange feeling. Naturally, his friends were very confused. They made potions and did little tricks with their magic. Some even conjured up a bear with a toothache, but nobody was moved. 

Finally, an old witch was walking by and she saw this group of witches doing strange things, so she asked what was happening. They all tried to explain this newly discovered emotion and she nodded. “Let me tell you a story,” she said, “about the future of this young man’s curiosity.”

And her story spoke about witches who became obsessed with fear and emotions like it. They learned to use and manipulate it, until they discovered power. They began to use their magic to stand above all other beings on earth, until they no longer remembered the true purpose of magic, which was their heart and soul. They forgot who they were and the magic disappeared. Then, without magic, the witches grew desperate. 

And the story teller went on to make up words like violence, war, starvation, suffering, and she called them evils. 

When the story teller came to an end, all the other witches looked at her in horror. The witch who encountered the bear shook her hand, and congratulated her on winning his silly contest. But this story stuck with the witches for a very long time. They didn’t know how to feel about it. They flew around the earth and told their friends and families, and it passed on and on throughout the generations.

---

Commentary

I originally had this story written out on my phone. I thought it would be easier since I’m not a very good speaker. I tend to mumble a bit sometimes and when people ask me to repeat things, I often end up changing my thoughts entirely. In that sense, I guess the real first time was me telling my story to myself. I thought it was great!

Unfortunately, there is great difficulty in getting people to just sit down and listen to me for ten minutes or so. There is something very sad in our fast-paced society where people are reluctant to let go of their phones for ten minutes to just sit and listen. I tried this with my sister first. She was on Tumblr as I told it, so that frustrated me a lot and I ended up not saying everything I wanted to say.

Still, I asked for her commentary at the end of it and she said, “So what’s the big metaphor behind all this? I feel like there has to be some really deep shit here.” And I said there wasn’t. Just take it on the surface. Sometimes you can learn a lot when you don’t overthink it. She compared it to Genesis, but I didn’t really like that.

I attempted to try telling this story with one of my students, but I felt like there was no good time to segue a creation story into a lesson about sentences. I also attempted to share this with my parents, but I couldn’t translate it properly. They speak a rather minimal amount of English, and even though I’m relatively fluent in Cantonese, I struggled to capture their attention, especially when I found myself switching back to English more often than I wanted to. So I gave up.

Finally, I tried to tell this story to a group of friends over Facebook. I asked them to make real-time comments as much as possible to simulate a conversation as best we can. I suspect none of them stood by and waited for me to type. There were only a few comments so, despite my efforts, it really wasn’t the same. However, I must say that this telling of the story is where I included most of the fine details that made the story much more logical in its progression.

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.

Yesterday morning, my Milton studies professor told us not to use audiobooks if we wanted to understand Paradise Lost. When someone reads Paradise Lost to you, they tend to put their own spin to it. My professor went further: every time he listened to a reading of the book, he would think, “That’s not how I would’ve read it.” A reading is simply that: a reading. An interpretation. The written epic is the truth. The important thing is: the written and oral forms do not exist on the same level as equals.

In a similar way, Chamberlain says, “It has become almost a truism that writing…marked an evolutionary advance…while oral cultures are imprisoned in the present” (19). The written form is often believed to be superior to the oral form, and MacNeil takes a critical tone when the ideas put forward by the Toronto School prevents “mutual independency between the two media” from being a “recognized possibility.”

MacNeil argues that we should be rethinking the literacy/orality model because these two worlds are blurring together with “the techonlogical advances of recent years.” Complicated social media conundrums aside, even my example of Paradise Lost presents difficulty in dividing literacy and orality. As many may know, Milton was blind, thus Paradise Lost was entirely dictated by speech. Paradise Lost had an oral form! In other words, there is a level of interdependency between the two media, which is what allows for different interpretations and no universal truth.

Let’s look at Shakespeare: how different is seeing and reading his plays? And how different is each production? Last year, I visited the Globe Theatre in London and I watched two plays: The Lightning Child, a really strange psychedelic version of The Bacchae, and MacBeth.

From text to stage to text to stage, The Lightning Child was one of the weirdest experiences. I was caught between a cycle of amazement and disgust. Macbeth, though it was the second time I’ve seen this play, was exactly how I’d imagined it. It was probably exactly how they figured Shakespeare would’ve staged it. In a word, it was boring. I couldn’t take anything out of it that I haven’t seen or imagined already. Still, a play is the perfect example of harmony between literature and oraliture.

In Chamberlin’s more anthropological point of view, there is no such thing as “written cultures” and “oral cultures.” This categorization doesn’t take into account that “so-called oral cultures are rich in forms of writing, albeit non-syllabic and non-alphabetic ones” and “central institutions of our ‘written cultures’…are in fact arenas of strictly defined and highly formalized oral traditions” (19-20). The crucial part of this is that “our stories and our songs draw on both” (20).

People have always listened to the world around them to find answers (Chamberlin 125). Here’s an experiment:

Watch this video with words in mind:

Now try to imagine what this video would be like if you’ve lived your entire life without words. Would there be meaning? Do we need words to think that the girl is angry/annoyed that her hair dryer died?

Human communication alone is such a multi-sensory experience, yet how much of it is communicated through words? And how much of what we don’t communicate, verbally or in written form, permeates into our culture? The hard part is: each culture communicates a little differently, maybe even on a spectrum of worded language. There may be gestures, subtle things that onlookers can’t catch, that get a message across. There may be festivals to tell us our place in the world.

It’s easy to feel superior when it seems like our culture is sophisticated in its writing roots, but it’s also easy to dismiss a culture because we don’t understand it.

Just like the way we sometimes evaluate someone’s intelligence  based on their knowledge of English.

When a complicated Iroquois oral tradition takes a lifetime to learn, and is so complicated that only less than 30 people understood, what right do we have to say that our culture is more sophisticated, more thoughtful, more anything (Chamberlain 22). The arrogance of the literacy/orality dichotomy diminishes cultures based on differences, rather than sameness. How is the chief of the Cayuga, who spent a lifetime learning the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee, different from the scholars of our institutions?

Cultures can shift and change, but can they be weighed and ranked?

---

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Reimagining Home and Sacred Space. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2004. Print.

Krulwich, Robert, and Jad Abumrad. “Http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/.” Audio blog post.Radiolab. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 9 Aug. 2010. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.  <http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/>.

Macbeth. Digital image. Shakespeare’s Globe. The Shakespeare Globe Trust, 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2015. <http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/education/discovery-space/previous-          productions/macbeth-4>.

Courtney MacNeil, “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.<http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/>

The Lightning Child. Digital image. Shakespeare’s Globe. The Shakespeare Globe Trust, 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2015. <http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/education/discovery-space/previous productions/the-lightning-child>.

Words. Dir. Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante. YouTube. N.p., 9 Aug. 2010. Web. 16 Jan. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0HfwkArpvU>.

 

Welcome! This blog is part of a larger body of discussion in ENGL 470A, officially known as Canadian Literary Genres. Unofficially, the course has the rather skeptical name of Oh Canada! …Our Home and Native Land? In this course, we will be taking a look at a number of ideas and stories about being Canadian. Probably.

My name is Florence Ng, I’m an English Literature major and a first generation Canadian. In other words, I’m that skeptical question mark at the end of the title. I moved to Vancouver when I was 5 years old, and I am one of those kids who know where home is, yet don’t. Being first generation is a very interesting status where your “motherland” shifts according to your mood. In fact, your background is almost like a trophy that you show off to certain people when it makes you feel special, but hide when it doesn’t. Like a trophy for being #1 in grade 5, you might want to hide it when the #1 kid in grade 6 comes over to play. Here is a real world observation:

Last year, when I went on exchange in the UK, my friends and I traveled a lot. Whenever we met new people and they asked us where we’re from or who we are, we would say, “Canadian!” Of course, a number of jerks pushed on: “No, where are you REALLY from?”

“Um, Canada,” we’d reply.

“Where are you PARENTS from?”

“…Canada.”

And that’s when we’d leave, thinking, “Oh my God, that was so rude.” A lot of the times, it seemed like they wanted us to admit that we are not just Canadian, because saying you’re Canadian is a cop-out. Like they wanted us to stop pretending we prefer poutine over dim sum, pizza over sushi, forks over chopsticks, and just ADMIT that we belong in another culture.

To be fair, I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to say, “I’m Chinese.” Let’s face it: I only speak Cantonese to my parents, my family eats Chinese food 90% of the time and Japanese food the other 10%, and our Thanksgiving dinner consists of a Costco rotisserie chicken, despite how many times we’ve asked for a turkey.

Still, I probably should have said, “I’m Chinese-Canadian.”

At the same time, I feel like much of this identity crisis is afforded by Vancouver’s cultural diversity. I’ve heard many times that Vancouver is not “real Canada,” whatever that means. Last semester, I learned a lot of rather exclusively Canadian words (a lot of which are found here). I always thought language is a big part of culture, but weirdly enough I’ve never thought of “Canadian” as a language, or even thought about it much as a dialect. In high school, a teacher told me that the spirit of Canada is encapsulated in one song by the Barenaked Ladies (you probably know the one!). That was kind of the extent of my understanding of Canadian language.

I’m a big fan of language; learning about it, using it, etc. That’s why I’m very excited for this course! I want to get to know Canada, and get to know the way language is used in the stories we don’t talk enough about.

Nice to meet you, everybody! Let’s share and learn a lot from one another 🙂