First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?
While King does read the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, he does so in an ironic way. This is made clear when he says, in the same ironic way, that “none of [us] would make the mistake of confusing storytelling strategies with the value or sophistication of a story” (23). He is thus not emphasizing the believability of one story over the other; rather, he is emphasizing the narrative technique that (mis)leads readers to thinking that one story is more believable than the other: “These strategies colour the stories and suggest values that may be neither inherent nor warranted” (22). He heavily implies that narrative techniques which makes stories seem more believable (e.g. the authoritative voice) do not justify judgments that one story is more valuable or sacred than another, especially in the cross-cultural context where different techniques are valued.
King’s irony extends to his discussion of dichotomies. The long list of them that he gives emphasizes Western society’s obsession with what are ultimately superficial oppositions that possess unjustified and discriminatory connotations (25). This irony is then briefly discarded for a more genuine appeal:
So am I such an ass as to . . . suggest that the stories contained within the matrix of Christianity and the complex of nationalism are responsible for the social, political, and economic problems we face? Am I really arguing that the martial and hierarchical nature of Western religion and Western privilege has fostered stories that encourage egotism and self-interest? Am I suggesting that, if we hope to create a truly civil society, we must first burn all the flags and kill all the gods, because in such a world we could no longer tolerate such weapons of mass destruction?
No, I woudn’t do that. (27)
The irony may return with that last line, but he’s already said what he means. His viewpoint is evidently inclined towards the Native narrative, and so I think that King gives us this dichotomy-laden analysis to criticize those very dichotomies and make us examine not only their validity but the consequences that they have already wrought on our world. I think he is trying to show us that there is a way out, even if he knows no one is going to take it.
Now, to backtrack to the prompt’s first question (which I am backtracking to because it requires a personal answer), I do not believe in any creation story. To be more precise, I do not believe in the possibility of rendering the world’s origin (assuming that such an origin happened) in a communicable format. That’s it. So, the quality of sacredness that the prompt refers to is frankly lost on me. However, I do perceive and am affected by the world structures that the “Genesis” and “The Earth Diver” stories posit; were I to be exposed to one story and not the other, I would likely lean towards the structure that the story I’m exposed to portrays. That structure would be cooperation or competition in the case of these two stories, but it could be a lot more.
As someone who does not really understand the concept of sacredness, I view sacredness as an attribution that has the effect of prioritizing a story’s portrayed structure over that of every other story. This prioritization over other stories is what causes all of the resulting problems as people with different world views try to convert each other, through any means. I think then that in cautioning us against binary thinking, King and others are trying to get us to accept a world of true stories that contradict each other–one in which we acknowledge that sacredness is in the eye of the beholder.
Works Cited
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2003. Print.