Prompt: In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). 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.
Writing dialogue provides interesting challenges for writers. You obviously don’t want your dialogue to come off stilted and robotic, so we are drawn to finding how to write realistic dialogue. One of the common advice is to go out and listen to people talk, but interestingly enough, if you really listen to people talk in a casual setting, you’d find that it makes for quite awful dialogue written on the page. People pause to say umm-s all the time, utilize useless phrases such as “like” way more often than we’d like to admit, have incorrect grammar, use the wrong word, conversations are cyclical and can take forever to get to the point. In normal conversation, we easily overlook these small mistakes, so easily in fact, that most of the times we don’t even notice them. But written on the page, where every word can be closely inspected, these types of purely realistic dialogues are annoying to read. The solution is to obviously find a middle ground where we can keep each individual’s’ speech patterns, manners, and intent unique while making it a smooth and concise read.
This middle ground is absolutely subjective to the writer themselves. In my last semester’s writing course, our professor Timothy Taylor advised us not to write out the accents as it makes things harder to read—so rather than writing “we gon’ huntin’”, do “we’re going hunting”—and just refer to the character’s accent in the prose, as the readers will imagine the accents themselves. While on the other hand, writers like Charles Dickens (it’s kind of a weird example, but I happened to have just finished Our Mutual Friend) will write out weird speech patterns, confusing or not.
I bring this up because I believe Harry Robinson’s writing really pushes this middle ground to the very edge. Most written stories, even ones told in first person present tense, almost always feels like you are still reading a record of events. However, for Robinson’s stories, I can’t not imagine someone—the narrator—sitting in front of me, telling me this story. There is a raw uneditedness to his stories, not to say they aren’t polished, but purposely full of little mistakes that you wouldn’t find in a normal book.
The first aspect that I identified is that his entire story is a dialogue already (meaning that any dialogue within the story is a dialogue within dialogue). He does this by the narrator opening up a conversation with the reader with frequent reminders of it. At the start of You Going to Get Married to Coyote’s Son, the narrator says this: “The next stories, that’s another Coyote. That’s another young Coyote. Not the same one … goes up to the moon. That’s not him. This is another one.” (47) and at the end of the story, the narrator says, “Now, here’s another story…” (63) as we are led into the next short story. Through including the reader by addressing them directly, they make them a part of the story, as the listener-storyteller relationships are one of the things that make oral storytelling so unique.
Another prominent aspect is the amount of repetition in the story. Look at this section near the start of Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England, “And one time, they see somebody on the water. They could see somebody. Looks like somebody was sitting on the boat. There was smoke. They got a fire. And they wanted to get closer. They wanted to know what that was. Looks like a person.” it’s essentially saying the same couple of ideas in different ways many times over. This is brilliant in a couple of ways, first of all, by keeping the sentences quite distinct every line, it prevents the story from feeling too repetitive. Secondly, by utilizing these repetitions, we create an atmosphere as if we are listening to someone tell a story. The reason why we end up repeating so much is that unlike a book, the listener can’t go back to find the word they missed or misunderstood, so for an oral story, important moments has to be highlighted a few times to make sure there isn’t anyone that missed it.
Robinson also utilizes short sentences (as short as one word), composed entirely of short, conversational words, broken up into its individual lines. The short sentences and conversational words make the story feel like it’s naturally spoken, also it’s another technique that prevents the listeners from getting confused. The line breaks are there to give the story a sort of a rhythm, a pause between lines to slow down the reader, or in an oral situation, give the storyteller a moment to take a breath and for listeners to absorb the recent information.
Finally, speech patterns are pushed hard. There are constant errors like “That boat supposed to go very fast.” (66) and shortened phrases like “see ‘em” (66). These patterns are heavily applied to the point I could hear the narrator in my head when reading silently.
The missing words and awkward sentences can get a bit confusing at times, but—and here’s the best part—they are not a problem when reading it out loud or, especially, listening to it. That speech conditioning that I talked about earlier—about how we easily ignore common errors within speech—kicks right in here. In that way, by utilizing all these techniques (and many more that I haven’t noticed, I’m sure) the writer compels the reader to read the words out loud, and it feels so natural to do so. When I do, I also take on the speech patterns of the narrator as if possessed and they are speaking through me, reminding me of the connection between the words grammar and grimoire. I like to think that this connection implies the ability for writers to create magic through their words and I haven’t seen such a strong example as this.
What do you think about this? Are there any other techniques that you noticed or something you disagree with? Let me know!
Citations
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.
King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterbough, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190. Web. 04 april 2013.
Sullivan, Kate. “Found Dialogue: Using the Art of Eavesdropping for Better Fiction.” TCK Publishing, www.tckpublishing.com/better-dialogue-through-eavesdropping/.
Quinion, Michael. “Grimoire.” World Wide Words, 15 Mar. 2014, www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-gri2.htm.
Hi Tony,
Thank you for your detailed and insightful analysis. Your observations about repetition are especially interesting to me. The way you describe Robinson’s use of repetition gives me a greater appreciation for that aspect of his writing. Personally, I couldn’t get into the writing style, whether read out loud or not. The grammar, syntax, and speech patterns through me off and even when I read it out loud, the people I read it to said, “What the hell are you reading?” However, even though Robinson’s work didn’t have a positive effect on me or the people I read it to, your analysis helped me appreciate King’s praise for Robinson and Robinson’s work.
My question:
1. Do you think that masterful oratory also presents well on the page? The reason that I bring this up is that I don’t think it is necessary to use awkward sentences to make a text come across well when presented orally. For instance, the “I Have a Dream Speech” is great on paper and when spoken.
*This also makes me think of repetition. Speeches and poems that work well on the page and spoken use repetition in various ways throughout the piece.
Hey Nolan,
I agree with you that it isn’t necessary to use Robinson’s style to encourage the words to be spoken out loud, and as you mentioned there are good examples of it without that technique. I think, at the end of the day, writing a spoken story down is a compromise, and will never be as good as the real thing. Masterful oratory can be presented well on a page, like Shakespeare for instance, but when words are meant to be listened to, there are certain energies and theatrics that goes irreplaceably missing when transcribed. Your experience of not being able to connect with Robinson’s writing might be due to this problem too. As I said, some readers have a hard time enjoying stories without proper grammar and written with accents… I suppose it is a risk that the writer has to choose on whether it is worth it or not.
Hi Tony,
Thank you for your wonderful analysis of Harry Robinson’s syntax and dialogue patterns. I also find written accents very interesting. As for what your teacher said about not writing in accents because it makes the text confusing, I had my experience of that while reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Most of Huck’s dialogue was written in a heavy accent, and the only way I could really understand it was when I read it out loud, which relates to your point of how the issue with grammar and accents is diminished by reading the dialogue out. I also really appreciated your insight about finding the “middle ground” between giving character to a dialogue, and refraining from giving readers a hard time. What other techniques aside from writing in accents, would you say, can give a dialogue character? Thanks again for the interesting read!
Hey Anna,
If you want to try reading something really out there, I recommend “Riddley Walker” by Russell Hoban, the entire story is spoken by a character 2000 years after an apocalypse with an English that has been wildly altered. It’s a really tough read (to the point I found it kind of unpleasant to read), but if you can find it in the library, just read the first few pages, it’s quite interesting.
Great advice I heard when it comes to dialogue is to consider your character in three things. 1: What they want to say, 2: What they can’t say, 3: How that differs from what they actually say. The first point is simple, but it is a good practice to know your character’s intentions, it gives your writing purpose. The second point can be due to many things, they might not be confident enough, they might be keeping a secret, maybe what they want to say is a bit too forward, perhaps they are trying to manipulate the other person, etc. This can create relatable human struggle, mystique to the situation/character, and makes thing much more realistic than characters spouting off exactly what needs to be said. When you consider these two points together, you have to consider how the character actually articulates it. This can be affected by such things as how great of a speaker they are, maybe they forgot to mention an important point because they are too nervous, maybe they don’t know how to express their feelings. When you put all of these three points together, you’ll end up with dialogue which is layered and interesting to read.
Hey! Thanks for your post.
It was interesting to read through, as even reading silently through your post, I could still hear the accents come through when you used shorthand slang as examples. Many people argue that there are vast differences between the written and oral worlds of syntax, but in my opinion, I feel that they overlap and compliment each other well. Do you think that the effects of Robinson’s works would have been similar if he had instead created accents through character descriptions rather than their actual dialogue?
Hey Katrina, thanks for visiting again.
I think as the story format goes, it would be quite difficult to even imagine the story without the accents. This is mostly because of the narrator being such a strong character himself, and the storytelling style relies on minimal description. This isn’t to say it wouldn’t work if he wrote it in prose, it just would take a complete restructuring of the story.
Something I began to feel studying these stories and other people’s responses is that I think it is always a risk to write out accents and grammar mistakes/speech patterns. Anyone can read and enjoy correctly written stories, but it feels like only a certain portion of the population can tolerate speech patterns being written out. So when a writer decides to do that, they risk losing some of their audience. However, I think for those people that enjoy it, the magic is enhanced greatly. For Robinson, I think the choice was obvious.