Following Carlson’s discussions on literacy as “part of a broader genre of transformation” (61), try to explain what he means when he says that transformation is an “act of literacy.” This can be confusing at first, but if you follow his discussion beginning with “how Salish people understand the process or act of transformation in relation to literacy itself” and pay attention to how he uses etymology to shape his insights, you should be able to extract an explanation for conceptualizing transformations as writing and as readable. —Dr. Erika Paterson, ENGL470
To further understand this concept of orality-to-literacy transformation as a non-Native new to the idea, I will attempt to see it analogously to my own experience in writing fiction. (Note that the main difference between my experience and the Native conceptualization is that I am working with fictitious material; I will address this difference as well).
Through my experience writing fiction, I’ve realized that writing first begins in the head: imaginations, if you will. A writer imagines the setting, characters, plot lines, and usually has a general idea of what their story feels like before committing it to paper. When a writer starts writing down his or her story, the “world” in their head gets transformed into text. What readers see is only the text—an evolved form, a “second-hand” form, if you will—and not the world inside the writer.
During the process of converting ideas into writing itself, ideas also often evolve and transform, as this help article reminds: “It’s often in the act of writing itself that we discover something new” (Luke).
I remember taking a second-year creative writing class with Maggie DeVries in which she warned us during workshopping to be sensitive in critiquing other writers (and to take our own received critique critically) because stories exist in a completely different “context” in our heads. What readers see is not really what we see, because by the time our stories have been transformed onto paper, it is a different thing.
Of course, most writers want their written work to reflect what’s in their heads as accurately as possible—in fact, one can argue that’s the whole point in writing, to transfer what’s in my head into your head.
Let’s go back to Native stories now. In contrast to my example above, Native stories shouldn’t be disregarded as fictitious and plucked from thin air by the storyteller. Carlson reminds us that Native storytellers will try their best to preserve the accuracy of memory in their stories because doing so is “sacrosanct” (59). This is similar in the sense to my desire, as a writer, to preserve the accuracy of what’s in my head. I would argue, however, that the Native desire is stronger because whereas I am free to change ideas upon writing as I see fit, the Native storyteller’s obligations to authenticity prevent him or her from a similar freedom.
Yet, transformation is inevitable, and I think both I as a writer and these Native storytellers recognize this. Here I will draw on Carlson’s reference to the incident of naming an interpretive centre: Sto:lo elders “explain[ed] that they ‘could not make up a name’ for something that had been made by Xa:ls” (61). For these elders, this was something that had already been created, and thus could not be re-created, only built upon. Or transformed.
Furthermore, citing Carlson’s finding that the Native word for writing is not an English or French derivative (61-62), perhaps we can interpret the act of writing as not a “new” type of transformation. Rather, transformation has been taking place since pre-colonial times, perhaps through oral tradition. Writing is just one more step in the process.
What I think Carlson means about this Native idea of oral-to-literacy transformation is the conversion of a story from one form to another, and it is by this conversion that the original meaning of the story is changed or transformed. On one hand, this transformation makes stories more permanent. However, this transformation onto writing also destroys the fluidity and “growth” of oral stories. This reflects Carlson’s hypothesis that Peters’ prophetic stories are actually the result of multiple generations’ accounts (Carlson 60). Carlson writes that “transformation stories [for the Salish] are as much, if not more, about creating permanency or stability as they are about documenting the change form one state to another” (61).
Works Cited
Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. 43-72. Print.
Hanagarne, Josh. “Do We Remember the Event or the Story?” World’s Strongest Librarian. World’s Strongest Librarian, 22 Apr. 2009. Web. 18 June 2015.
Luke, Ali. “How to Get Out of Your Head and Write Already.” Nathalie Lussier: Digital Strategy to Math Your Ambition. Nathalie Lussier Media, n.d. Web. 18 June 2015.
Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:3.” ENGL 470 A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres may 2015. The University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 15 June 2015.
This concept is fascinating to me. The etymological connection between writing and the “marking” of spirits suggests the incorporation of writing into the Sto:lo world, even into the spirit world. In every retelling, ancient traditions shift and adapt to present realities.
I’ve been reading a collection of Orwell’s essays, and this quote sprang to mind as I was thinking about your comments on fluidity: “an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same”(http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14, “The Lion and the Unicorn”). Of course he’s talking about England, but I think it applies more broadly. A similar kind of transformation can be seen in Robinson’s storytelling: Coyote is called upon to address colonial persecution, and a story of Creation addresses paper.
There’s something deep as well in the comment of the Sto:lo elders that they cannot “make up” names for sacred things. In words as much as stories, all storytellers are drawing on the past, on tradition. Shakespeare is responsible for a vast swath of English vocabulary, but he did it almost entirely by permuting words that already existed – hacking them to bits, mushing them together, and placing them in new roles.
There’s a persistent myth in Western literature about “inspiration” – the need for a great work to spring fully formed from the mind of a great writer. I think they’re hiding from something of which these elders are keenly aware: that every retelling is new, but that the stories being told are as old as time.
In other words, writers are engaging in a parallel art to the storytellers that Carlson discusses – but there is added gravity to the work of the storytellers, because they are protecting the cultural wealth of a people, keeping it alive while interpreting it onward. A writer in search of greatness is trying to preserve their own memory, but a storyteller wants to preserve and foster the collective memory of an entire culture – hence the heightened importance of “getting the story straight.”
Great work! Thank you for being so thought provoking. 🙂
Thanks for the comment, Mattias! I think authors are re-telling old stories as well. Yes we can make up new characters and settings, but throughout human history we’ve come to love the same old storylines: the misfit goes on a quest, the star-crossed lovers elope, etc.
Authors just don’t realize it 😛
🙂
Wow, this was a really interesting way to explain the transformation of orality. I really enjoyed how you took your own experiences and explained a broader concept. I would be interested to hear if you thought that the oral tradition has any tools that would be of use to you as a writer. Do you feel like you could perhaps explain your novels better if you were performing them? Why or why not?
Thanks, James! I like to focus on where human experience converges, rather than the differences that make us diverge. I’m an idealist in that way 😉
Good question. I think it depends on your personality and the form you’re writing. Something like poetry can be really cool when performed, because the sounds of the words play a big role. And of course plays. However, for novels, I’d rather write those, as they’re more of an…introspective, individual journey?
I myself am more os a shy recluse hiding in my room than a stealer of the stage, though, so I had actually had a difficult time telling the how-evil-came-to-be story!
🙂
Hi Charmaine,
I enjoyed reading your take on the intersections between the writing process and orality to literacy. You make a great observation: workshopping an essay or a story and going through that process of having someone edit your work is a lot like transforming an oral story into a written work. Storytelling allows us to add so many more quirks and adages and tends to really bring a story to life. But writing also has its perks. The number one perk for me, since my memory is basically useless, is list-making and note taking. I’d make a terrible oral historian.
To speak to your comments on transformation — I mention an apt line from McLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy” in my blog post from last week. He says, “language is a metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode to another”. If we see language as a metaphor, we can also see how we can interpret thoughts and ideas differently. Our stories can shift and ideas can become convoluted because of the varying ways people interpret them. This is a long way of saying that I agree with you — what reader’s see sometimes is not what authors see, and transformation is inevitable.
Thanks for dropping by, Melissa! Is that by any chance a quote from Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan? 🙂
🙂