Prompt
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? — Dr. Erika Paterson, English 470
Growing up in Catholic school, I remember one distinct teaching in particular. I don’t remember the particular teacher, but he or she said: there are many religions in the world, but only one of them is true; the truth of one religion automatically makes the other religions not true.
We like to align ourselves and the cultural group we identify in with the truth. We like to believe that we are right. Western values include capitalism, freedom, and the individual. Contrast this with eastern values (ie. cultures like China and Korea) where the communal good is often valued more than individual freedom. Many of us would think it unjust if we were asked to sacrifice our dream job for running the family business, for example, but in an eastern culture, this would be merely respect.
Which civilization is “right”?
As Thomas King notes, the dichotomy is “the elemental structure of Western society” because “we are fearful of enigmas” (25). We can’t believe that there are a multiplicity of truths or a multiplicity of right answers. Instead, we align ourselves with one side of the dichotomy because we believe it to be right side. There is a moral aspect.
However, I’d like to examine Thomas King’s choice of stories more deeply. Notice that both the story of Charm and the Genesis story are supernatural ones. Both of them—at least according to the scientific/atheistic/”rational” perspective—are mythologies (which, interesting, has been summarized by one scholar as “other people’s religion”). Yet, many people in the western world would reject the Charm story and believe in the Genesis story. Both of these stories are supernatural and, depending on your private beliefs, equally believable and equally ludicrous. One is not more ludicrous or believable than the other.
So why choose one mythology over the other?
I think that was King’s point. People choose to believe in the Genesis story not because of some rational, progressive way of thinking. People choose it because it is theirs. The Genesis story has been part of the western narrative for centuries and so ingrained in our culture that we automatically find it more believable, although upon further investigation it is no way superior in “rationality” or “progression” than the Charm story.
In fact, many people in western culture reject the Big Bang theory story, or the evolution story. To our western Judeo-Christian worldview, such things—no matter how much sense they make—are merely stories.
When a new story comes and threatens the older one, we fear the new one. We quickly establish the new story as the evil other and our story as the original good. We attach a morality to it: the Genesis story is simply true because it is right.
So I think King is saying that dichotomies are not rational. They are pushed by our feelings, our assumptions, and our comfort zones. It’s like reading a tragedy in the news. We read it, we know it actually happened, and yet we go through our day normally. Because in our bubble, that news story is just a story.
Works Cited
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2003.
Murphy, Ryan. “Asian culture: collectivism, saving face, and sexuality.” Examiner.com. AXS Digital Group, 23 April 2011. Web. 11 June 2015.
Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470 A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres may 2015. The University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 11 June 2015.
Sevigny, Julie. “What is Mythology? What is Myth?” Business Insider. Business Insider, 23 May 2011. Web. 11 June 2015.
Hi Charmaine!
Wow, we both wrote on the same topic but I just love your take on it. We both used King’s quote on the role of the dichotomy as part of the “elemental structure of the Western society”, which I think is a really important point in our role in analyzing why King used such clear cut dichotomies in his retelling of the two creation stories. I agree with your analysis that dichotomies are not rational and that we stick to the stories we know because we have a deeply ingrained fear to be suspicious and resistant to change in any form. It threatens us at our very core. However, do you think that this analysis would suggest that it is impossible for us to be unaccepting of other stories that are not our own? Are we doomed to always be at a conflict and in arms because we only want what is familiar? Is there any way that creation stories, and people, can coexist and establish true equality even with this inherent fear of what is unlike us?
Hey Freda! Thanks for the comment. I think it’s possible to “un-learn” our unique contexts to a certain degree, but I don’t think we can do it totally 100%. I do think, however, that we can agree that all stories are equally valid even if we don’t understand their validity, and we can learn to totally accept the “unknown.” What I mean is, I think we can learn to accept that we don’t know everything. For example, a lot of people assume that certain demographics in society have problems because of X, Y, Z. As people outside that demographic, I don’t think we’ll ever truly understand the troubles they go through, but we can acknowledge that we don’t truly understand.
I don’t know if that makes sense…but it’s the least I can do when I think something is beyond my understanding 😛
🙂
Hi Charmaine. Could you expand on what you’re getting at when you compare the creation stories with a tragedy in the news? Do you mean that the news story is like the creation story we don’t believe, which we know is out there but choose to ignore, and that our daily lives are like the creation story we do believe? What would it mean if we were to, after reading the tragedy in the news, not go through our day normally?
Good question. That was just an afterthought, so perhaps I can expand on it. What I think I mean is, we live in self-centered bubbles of our own stories, our own world. We don’t like our story getting disrupted. So when we read about something bad in the news, we tend to forget about it later on and carry on with our day. The only time, I think, when we’re really affected by news tragedies, is if the incident had something to do with us. It happened to someone we knew of, or it happened to our country, or it contradicted our personal values.
This is related to the opposing creation stories in the sense that we’re not willing to consider the validity of another story, because in our mindset, we believe that the only story that happened, the one that matters, is ours. Even if most of us don’t believe the world was made in seven days anymore, it’s familiar to us, and it’s the story we’ll remember.
I’d be more than happy to get your thoughts on this as well and expand this idea!
🙂
Hey Charmaine,
I enjoyed reading your thoughts about King’s discussion of dichotomy. I agree with your statement, “So I think King is saying that dichotomies are not rational.” I think King is also speaking to the way in which binary thinking itself is embedded within a certain paradigm of Western philosophic thought. King states: “You’ll recognize this pairing as a dichotomy, the elemental structure of Western society” (25). King is contextualizing dichotomous thinking as bearing the legacy of European Enlightenment philosophy. In this way, King articulates that binary systems of thought are not neutral, but rather deeply embedded within an European worldview. I feel that King is perhaps attempting to de-familiarize binary systems of thought inherent in Western culture, and to reveal them as ideologically weighted structures that reflect a particular understanding of reality.
Great thoughts and thanks for your comment! I also think, by introducing two supernatural creation stories (from two cultures), that are not complete opposites of each other, King is suggesting the idea of a continuum instead of a binary. Like I said in my post: the two creation stories do not oppose, they are simply different.
Charmaine
🙂