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 the story.
Let me tell you, after reading and rereading “Coyote Makes A Deal with King of England” my mind was blown. I was significantly surprised how I didn’t take note of the way the story was written the first time around when I was skimming the story. After noticing that there was a blog question about Robinson’s story, I had a closer look at the story and I was significantly surprised how much the oral syntax made a difference in the way I interpreted the story. A few questions came to mind while I was doing a close reading. Firstly, who is telling us this story? Is it a child? Is it someone who is learning English as a second language? Secondly, why are there so many spelling mistakes in a professionally published book? Lastly, why is the story formatted the way it is?
At first, when I read the story aloud, I found myself going back to a line I thought I skipped because the line that followed, didn’t make sense. I found myself constantly rereading and correcting what I had said before to make the story make sense. However, when I read the story allowed to myself, I didn’t correct myself as much as I did when I was just reading the story, in my head, to myself. The oral syntax of the story seemed to provoke my thought process when I was reading the story aloud. So as an experiment, I tried to reread the story to myself, quietly without speaking aloud to myself. It didn’t work. I was so inclined to speak out loud when something didn’t read right in my head, that my voice projected itself without me even thinking I wanted to speak aloud. It was as if I trying to keep quiet but something in the story wasn’t letting me.
I think Robinson was clever while writing this because the whole story plays with oral syntax. It is a story that needs to be read aloud and makes sense read aloud. When read aloud, the grammar errors, spelling mistakes, and the tone are all corrected, and make sense in the way that it’s told. Regardless if we read aloud a line such as “And he eat right there”(Robinson 64), it makes sense when said aloud. Grammatically our minds are telling us this is wrong because of what we had learned in school, but our voice as storytellers is telling us that we are correct.
My mom read the story aloud to me and she shook her head a few times and some of the sentences, but they still made sense. However, I was confused as to who the speaker was supposed to be. At first, I thought it was a child telling a story they had heard from one of their parents but then it made sense that this was someone who was a non-native speaker of the English language. That’s the way I read it because of the grammatical issues within the story. However, are these grammatical issues strategically placed for us to recognize the power of oral syntax?
I had a few thoughts regarding how the story was interpreted whether it was read to yourself by yourself aloud or to yourself by someone else aloud. What was more powerful? Were they both interpreted the same? The power of story telling, whether it is perfectly prepared, or put together with simple academic mistakes, somehow it all seems to make perfect sense.
Here’s a really cool TED Talk I found regarding how stories are told and the power of just one story. If you have time, it’s really worth it.
-Jessica
Works Cited
“Chimamanda: The Danger of a Simple Story”. Youtube. 2010. Web. 11 Feb 2015.
McDonnell Harris, Mary. Oral and Written Syntax Attainment of Second Graders. National Council of Teachers of English. 1997. Web. 11 Feb 2015.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.
Hi Jessica,
I think it is rather interesting that you’ve spelled out the process of understanding text because I think I do the same thing too – where if I’m not quite understanding the text, I usually try to read it out loud to make sense of it. This is of course not just of reading texts written by others, but also of oneself too. There is probably a study done somewhere that show the connection between our audio and written faculties when learning and understanding language.
Though, the interesting question that you brought up was asking who the storyteller was? Was it a child or was it a non-native English speaker? Which is interesting because I am wondering how the perception of who the storyteller is, would affect how we come to view and understand the story. Which brings the next question, why is the story’s validity based on the language ability of the storyteller? Does one’s experience diminish because of their inability to communicate the experience? What does that tell us about how we perceive non-native English speakers and their stories?
I think English is such a varied language. There are so many versions of it that encompasses each culture differently. Someone from the Caribbean speaks a much different English, than someone from Australia for example, and not because of their accent, but because of how they describe food, how they tell a story etc. I think language is only a way of communicating, but more often than not, it does not encompass everything that we want to communicate. Language is a skill and so it communicating and storytelling, but not only that, so is listening and comprehending. Listening to the things that are not said. Listening to variances in translations, hoping to find new meaning.
Qihui.
p.s. Loved the link to the TED talk!
Hi Qihui,
Thanks for the reply! Isn’t it a great link?
I agree with you, some of the grammatical mistakes were made on purpose and they do add to the text. Thanks so much for your response!
Jessica
Hi Jessica,
I enjoyed reading your experience with this story! To answer your question, I do think what many of us consider grammatical issues in the story are a strategically placed there.
Although I don’t know if I think of them all as grammatical errors…I feel like a lot of features in the story, such as repetition/redundancy, lack of sentence boundaries, inexplicitness etc, are things we find in everyday speech. For example, one part of the story goes “Do you know what the Angel was? Do you know? The Angel, God’s Angel, you know” (66). Read silently it seems grammatically off, but like you mentioned, when read aloud it makes sense. I feel this line shows the social dimension speech has – the speaker is aware of a listening audience’s reactions and is responding to that.
By keeping these features in the written version, it makes it difficult for us to read it in our minds, as King pointed out in his article. We have to read it out loud. My experience reading it out loud to myself was very powerful – since the story didn’t follow the traditional sentence structure we’ve come to expect, this meant that when I was reading, I couldn’t predict how any given sentence would end, or what would come next. This really created suspense…and I truly felt like a storyteller and listener at the same time!
Cheers,
Tarana
Hi Tarana,
I totally agree with you and I think the features of these errors did add a lot to the story, as well as the experience. But as you mentioned and I mentioned though out the whole interpretation process, I found the errors difficult. It is quite interesting to look at!
Thanks for your response!
Jessica
Hi Jess,
What a great blog post. You’ve made so many interesting comments about things that I recognized too. More importantly, you’ve commented on things that I totally by-passed while reading this same story. To begin, after reading your post, I was struck with questions after you wrote that grammatically our minds are telling us that some of these sentences are wrong, but as storytellers, we see this as correct. After you pointed this out, I read the story aloud to myself again and I completely recognized that these stories still make sense, if and only if we are looking through the lens of a story-teller (rather than students or critics). This made me question whether the story is understood or comprehended differently when looking through different perspectives. Unfortunately, since I see myself as a story-teller, I by-pass the grammatical errors and simply try to make sense of the importance of the story instead of focusing on the problems. I wonder if people, like teachers or yourself (who is an English language major) see the content of the story different based on the grammatical errors. Furthermore, I ask whether readers can turn a switch on and off in their minds in order to see the story in a different light or if they are inhibited by their type of learning or reading.
Another thing I want to address is the question you pose in your second last paragraph. You ask the question: “Are these grammatical issues strategically placed for us to recognize the power of oral syntax?” I believe that the grammatical errors serve two important purposes. For one, I think that they add significance to our understanding of what kind of story this should be perceived as. They add detail to the story and allow our imaginations to gather a better, all-around idea of what the narrator was intended to be like. My second reason answers your question. Yes, I do think that these errors are placed for us to recognize the power of oral syntax. I think that the author did this in order to allow his work to be perceived in different lights. What I mean when I see “different lights” is that the author intended for this work to be understood or seen in multiple ways. Oral syntax can change the way the story is perceived and I think that this author was simply playing with it to perhaps see the different ways in which a story can be manipulated by using something as little as grammatical errors!
Jess P
Hey Jess!
I agree that they do add certain details to the story that add depth, drama, and understanding. After reading all the comments and my blog again, I do agree that the errors are placed for a reason. That being said I still think they are there to make us read the story aloud, instead of to ourselves. I think that’s a smart way to write a story because it makes a story come alive and be passed on throughout or oral telling.
Thanks for your post!
Jessica
Hi Jessica!
Thanks for this post!
Something that you said which jumped out at me was that the way that this piece is written seems to recreate the authority of the storyteller. It demand to be read out loud, and then, when it is, all the grammatical errors cease to matter because the mind engages with the piece in the same way in which one engages with a storyteller who is physically present. My question, then, is: do you think that a story is more powerful if it is written this way? Is it more convincing in its message because there is that sense of first-hand account present by virtue of the necessity of an audible voice? And do you think, then, that oral literature is more powerful than written literature; or that this might be the most powerful way for a story to be presented (written down in order to be read aloud)?
Hi Lauren,
Thanks for your post! Yes I do! I mentioned in a reply above that I think this is a great way to write a story because it forces us to read the story aloud, which then spreads a story on to others whether they are able to read or write or not. To answer your second question, I think its more personable with the grammatical mistakes. We may be able to connect with the writer more because they are more “human-like”, if that makes sense. To answer the third, I go back and forth. I do believe oral literature is very powerful and in my opinion, it spreads a thought or a story more than a written story because the source (the book or article) doesn’t need to be present to tell/understand. However, I think that is definitely a personal response because I believe a lot of people would differ!
Thanks for your post,
Jessica
Hi Jessica,
You have done an excellent job in describing the emotions and thoughts you had connected to the different ways of understanding a story. Assuming that the narrator of the original story knew English as a second language, it would be understandable that listening to the story told out load is easier then quietly reading it on paper. For myself, I enjoy hearing stories told to me out load (partially because I feel that I am an oral learner, but also because I like the dramatic effect of storytelling).
I found your link very interesting and thought provoking. Chimamanda made a great point when she said that the western books she read made her imagine that stories must have characters and situations foreign to the reader, an “unintended consequence that people like [her] could exist in literature”. However, when she started to read books from her Nigerian homeland, she was “saved” from having a single story of what books are. In regards to “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, I can see how the author is trying to sway the readers understanding of a conventional story, or “western storytelling” prototype that we are all very accustomed to.
In regards to telling stories out load, here is another great TED talk video that I watched for another class of mine 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6NCF391SX0
Hi Leana,
Thanks for your post! It took me a while to write down my thought process, so thank you so much for your appreciation.
Also, awesome link!!!!! Loved the TED Talk!
Thanks for sharing,
Jessica