I’ve Looked at Creation From Both Sides Now…

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?

Thomas King is the first to acknowledge the different approaches he takes when telling the stories “The Earth Diver” and “Genesis”.  He describes his telling of “The Earth Diver” as using a “conversational voice [that] tends to highlight the exuberance of the story but diminishes its authority”. Meanwhile, the “sober voice in the Christian story makes for a formal recitation but creates a sense of veracity”.

King’s different takes on the telling of the two stories are representative of the culture from which each of these creation stories come. King tells the Genesis story in an authoritative voice; this makes sense, since this story is a product of Western Judeo-Christianity, a belief system that is monotheistic and hierarchal. In this system, information and knowledge is generally possessed by one authoritative voice- such as a priest or rabbi- who has the power to share this “wisdom” with his “herd”. The Genesis story contains a creator who knows everything, and it is a story that claims to explain everything- an idea that is reflective in Western culture, where objectivity, order, and the written word (or “facts”) are prized. In many Western belief systems, there is little room for interpretation, as many of their stories are meant to be taken literally; consider Catholicism, where followers are asked to believe that they are are truly drinking the blood of Christ.

King’s telling of “The Earth Diver”, on the other hand, demonstrates a more pluralistic view, and it is a story that is clearly meant to be told orally- King even explains how the story might change when he tells it to little children.  

Both King and Chamberlin warn us to be careful with binary thinking, yet the analysis he provides requires “pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies”. Why? I believe there are a few reasons for this approach.

1. We Live in a World of Opposites: “Genesis” and “The Earth Diver” are two very different approaches to the world’s creation but they both are filled with dichotomies. Genesis speaks of night and day, sun and moon, man and woman. “The Earth Diver” includes light and dark twins who create plains and forests, winter and summer, sunshine and shadow. It is interesting that while both stories reflect very different human behaviors, they both highlight contrast in the world. While there may be spectrums and intersections, our world is ultimately one that contains many opposites. The danger with binary thinking is that it can lead to a separation between “them” and “us”. However, King’s stories- told in very different ways- highlights that fact that dichotomies are actually a shared value in Aboriginal and Western belief systems.        
2. Incongruity Theory: King’s writing is one that I find to be quite tongue-in-cheek in style. The Incongruity Theory suggests that “one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create an expectation in the audience and then violate it” (Morreall). I feel that by pairing up these two stories in “a tidy row of dichotomies”, he is (albeit subtly) speaking to the rather extreme approach to creation stories that Western culture has adopted. By keeping “Genesis” so short and tight (versus the long, flowing style of “The Earth Diver”), King highlights the absurd rigidity of Western culture’s approach to rules and order.                                           
3. The Audience: Traditional Western academia is a fond of binary thinking. As Edward Chamberlin puts it, “a lot of our contemporary literature seems to be in the business of confirming this theatre of Them and Us, with its chronicles of difference and historical distress” (49). Despite King’s own background, and his own approach to binary thinking, a large part of his audience could very well be “traditional” academics- individuals who studied and were raised in a system where binary thinking is widely used. Could it be that King’s approach was selected in order to make his arguments more “accessible” to a wider audience?

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are the Stories? Vintage Canada, 2004.

Hans, Mike. “The False Audience-Content Dichotomy.” 7 Aug. 2018. Admonsters. Web Image. 6 Feb. 2019.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Marsden, A.J. & Nesbitt, William. “Myths of Light and Dark”. Psychology Today. 8 May 2018. Web. 4 Feb. 2019.

Morreall, John, “Philosophy of Humor”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Web. 5 Feb. 2019.