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.
As I started to read Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England silently, I rapidly found myself getting lost in translation. My inner voice was not doing justice to the story, and made it more difficult for me to grasp the meaning of the story. To deal with this problem, I tried to innerly reproduce the colloquial tone I imagined Harry Robinson would have told the text with. Imagining him sitting on his chair counting the story to me, cleared up some of the challenges I was facing, but required much more focus and diligence on my part to keep up it. Halfway through I impulsively started reading out loud, and found that this method significantly improved my grasp of the story’s meaning. I could more clearly hear and reproduce the pauses, intonations and accents on passages such as this one:
“Do you know what the Angel was?
Do you know?
The Angel, God’s Angel, you know.
They sent that to Coyote.” (66)
The more I read out loud, the more I felt like I needed to be reading it to someone as opposed to myself. As King notes, the oral syntax of the story totally defeats the reader’s effort to read the story silently (and I add even orally) to themselves.
While reading the story out loud to my friend, the words came much more naturally to me. Having an interlocutor whose physical and verbal reactions I could perceive helped structure the way I told the story and allowed me to embody the persona of the story teller. The “you know”’s and Robinson’s rhetorical questions felt much more in place compared to when I was reading to myself (both orally and silently). The amount of times I had read it before retelling it out loud to my friend probably also helped in rehearsing the theatrical performance of the story.
The manner in which Wickwire structured the text as a running prose, with short and more extended pauses was crucial in the way I read to myself and to others, but alone, it did not help too much in telling me how to read the story for it to best understood. I don’t think I’ve ever read a text that pushed me so ardently into reading it out loud, with arm gestures, and a less literary, more colloquial tone. Reading it to myself, whether silently or orally, and telling it to an interlocutor made a palpable difference. When reading to my friend, the way I voiced the story was no longer only structured by the text’s set up. In reading it silently, I had trouble understanding, and I think this feeling transferred over as a fear that my interlocutor wouldn’t understand it either once I read it to her. Perhaps I had added motivation to make this story communicable and understandable to my friend, which might have been a factor in how I structured my oral performance.
This story is definitely not one to read to oneself, it seems made to communicate orally, and to be complimented with physical gestures to better convey its meaning.
Robinson, Harry, and Wendy C. Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talon, 2005. Print.