“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 Chamberlain, 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?”

In King’s description of the two creation stories: Genesis and the story of Charm,  his personal preference is clear, as he tells the story of Charm in a whimsical and playful tone. The characters that appear in this story are silly and humorous, there are talking toes, trees, and  animals. The characters all cooperate to build the world. Charms twins, “ a boy and a girl.  One light, one dark. One right handed, one left-handed”, both cooperated to create the world as it is today (King 18).One smoothed the land while the other built mountains and valleys, the animals made suggestions as to what they wanted on earth. The twins granted the animals’ requests creating waterfalls, trees with nuts and fruits, and more humans. This process was peaceful collaborative and collective.

After the story of Charm, King goes along to tell the “serviceable creation story” (King 21) of Adam and Eve, which often overshadows other creation stories like the story of Charm.  King reiterates this typical story, how God creates “night and day, the sun and the moon, all the creatures of the world, and finally towards the end of his labors he creates humans. Man first and then Woman” (King 21). Then Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and are tossed into a less than perfect world where there is disease hatred, sickness and war.

While both stories are creation stories, there is an obvious dichotomy that exists between them. The story of Charm demonstrates cooperation, and unity while Genesis is based on God individually creating the world. I noticed Genesis to be a little misogynistic as God (most often interpreted as a man) created man first then a woman.  Also, while both Adam and Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge, the blame for this “sin” often lies predominantly on Eve. In contrast, the story of Charm demonstrated egalitarianism as Charm had twins  “a boy and a girl.  One light, one dark. One right handed, one left-handed”(King 18).

King also illustrates how the tone of a story can change the impact it has on the audience as well as how the audience perceives the story. The humour and comical aspects of the story of Charm “diminishes its authority while the Christian story…creates a sense of veracity”(King 23). King goes on to say that “If we believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular” (King 25). In modern society it is obvious which story most people believe to be sacred.

References:

King, Thomas. “”You’ll Never Believe What Happened” Is Always A Great Way To Start.” The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003. 1-29. Print.

Paterson, Erika. ““ENGL 470 Canadian Studies ;Canadian Literary Genres.”University of British Columbia. UBC Blogs. 2014. Web. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl470/unit-1/lesson-12/