1] 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.
For this blog post, I attempted to read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England” in as many ways as I could to get a better appreciation on the oral syntax of the story that this question is concerning. I read it in my head, I read it out loud, I read it to my sister, I read it to my cat (who did not seem overly impressed by the narrative) and I alternated between reading certain passages in my head to outloud. My initial impressions of “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England” were that it does need to be read out loud to gain better understanding of it. Many of the passages just sounded better when they were read out loud, particularly some of the stanzas (I’m going off of an impression that this can be seen as poetry due to the story’s structure) which fluctuated in line length.
So they drive the boat closer but they can never get close.
Just about the same distance at all time.
They follow them around and around.
And they couldn’t get close. (Robinson 64-5)
As I read it in my head, I found myself reading the narrative faster, and not absorbing the content as well as I had when I read it out loud. I also found myself either skipping over, or even correcting, the grammatical layout that Harry Robinson employs in “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England.” However, when reading it out loud, I felt a certain level of frustration towards the text as I kept stumbling over the words as though it was a word puzzle.
Focusing back on the Thomas King article we read for this week, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” I would like to agree with his opinions on “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England.” King speaks of the assumption that key factors of oral storytelling, such as interactions between the listener and the storyteller, are lost when oral stories are translated into written stories. To me, this seems quite obvious, to the point where I had taken this loss for granted. However, King also writes that Robinson is able to work past this “by forcing the reader to read aloud . . . [and] re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance.” (King 186) While I, by no means, felt forced to read the story out loud, I do agree that Robinson is pushing the reader to become the storyteller. I did find that as I read it out loud, particularly for my audience, I did adopt a storyteller’s persona by altering tone and employing gestures.
Blanca Chester also looks at the concept of form in Robinson’s stories in her article, “Storied Dialogues: Exchanges of Meaning Between Storyteller and Anthropologist.” Her article is her own translation of a recording and dialogue between Harry Robinson and his editor, Wendy Wickwire. Before getting to her translation, Chester questions the way these tapes can shift in form when being transplanted from a recording to a written work.
The translation of these recordings into written texts enables one to play with form. Indeed, form manifests itself as an integral component of the dialogue. Meanings change depending on the form and style that is used in framing an oral narrative. Should these stories be presented as prose narratives, or as poetry? Is the prose form more objective than the poetic? What is objectivity? Is the poetic form an imposition on Harry’s text, implying that his speech is, somehow, more natural than Wendy’s? (Chester 14)
I believe that Chester questions what King celebrates in his article. While it is interesting and innovative that Robinson is able to bridge that gap between oral and written stories, Chester questions these choices, as well as if by altering the form, the story loses part of its form.
I would like to direct my attention now to an interesting article I found for this week concerning language and orality in Icelandic sagas. In “In the Refracted Light of the Mirror Phrases sem fyrr var sagt and sem fyrr var ritat: Sagas of Icelanders and the Orality–Literacy Interfaces,” Slavica Ranković discusses the two phrases, “sem fyrr var ritat/ skrifat (as was written before/ as already written), which directly invokes writing, and the appropriated oral-mode mirror phrases sem fyrr var sagt/ getit/ nefnd/ talat/ mælt/ rœtt (as was said/ mentioned/ named /told /spoken of /talked of before)” (299) in Icelandic sagas. While I do not believe that the connection between these referential phrases and our material this week is immediately apparent, it has been making me think about all our material up to this point. Ranković writes that “growing accustomed to the medium had slowly obviated the need of the authors to draw special attention to the fact of writing as such and freed them for a more metaphorical use of language and stylistic exploitation of the immediacy of the spoken word,” (807) which I believe Robinson utilizes in his story by stylistically mimicking oral storytelling.
It also makes me think of our blog posts. Early in the article, Ranković notes that “new communication technologies . . . processes of cultural transition from one dominant mode of interaction to another tend to be evolutionary, as the new media not only never fully supplant the old but also often adopt, adapt, and semantically appropriate some of the existing facets and etiquettes of communication.” (299) Are our blog posts not new technology looking to adopt and evolve the practice of oral tradition? Though our words are written, I do often read our posts as though we are all speaking our words and stories to read other. This translation of the written to the spoken word, again, is what Thomas King believes Harry Robinson is able to accomplish in “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England.”
Works Cited
Chester, Blanca. “Storied Dialogues: Exchanges Of Meaning Between Storyteller And Anthropologist.” Studies In American Indian Literatures: The Journal Of The Association For The Study Of American Indian Literatures 8.3 (1996): 13-35. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.
King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterbough, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.
Ranković, Slavica. “In The Refracted Light Of The Mirror Phrases Sem Fyrr Var Sagt And Sem Fyrr Var Ritat: Sagas Of Icelanders And The Orality-Literacy Interfaces.” Journal Of English And Germanic Philology 115.3 (2016): 299-332. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.