- 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?
As this week’s prompt states, King offers us two distinct, dichotomous styles of storytelling in his retellings of “The Earth Diver” and the Genesis story. King’s retelling of “The Earth Diver” is exciting, giving the story life and making it captivating for readers. His retelling of the Genesis story is a stark contrast to The Earth Diver, told simply and matter-of-factly with few adjectives and very little attention to detail. While the Earth Diver felt like a story, the creation story felt like a dull occurrence that happened a long long time ago. He didn’t even try to make us care about it.
The question, of course, is why did he tell the stories this way? The easy answer is that the creation story is a well known one, while Charm’s narrative is unique. Putting effort into retelling a story we already know is boring and tedious. But Charm’s story is a new one, and that’s what makes it interesting. So, because nearly everyone knows the creation story, it didn’t need to be intricate. On the other hand, Charm’s story, because of its novelty and uniqueness, needed to be told.
I feel that ultimately King is telling the stories in distinct ways to emphasize the way that a story’s believability is based on the way that it’s told. Chamberlain emphasizes the fact that credibility comes from storytelling, saying that “a story’s subject neither guarantees nor compromises its credibility”. Instead, credibility lies in the storyteller, the way the story is told, and the way the listener chooses to interpret it. I believe that this is what King is trying to demonstrate in the drastically different tellings of the two stories. If we’re being pragmatic, we know that neither story is particularly believable. But the way that King chooses to tell the stories allows us to suspend our disbelief, even if just for a moment. Some readers may find that King’s retelling of the creation story in such a mechanic, to-the-point kind of way makes it sound more believable than the highly stylized retelling of Charm’s story. On the other hand, some readers may find Charm’s story to be more believable because the power lies in a tangible hand rather than the hand of an unseen, omnipotent God. Of course, as we discussed in a previous lesson, history plays a huge part in a story’s believability. Religious folks may find Charm’s story entirely unbelievable because the creation story is so engrained in their faith, while agnostic folks may weigh the two equally. To some, the stories don’t matter. To others, the story is the ground on which their world has grown.
As always, it is open to interpretation.
Works cited:
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Reimagining Home and Sacred Space. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2004. Kindle ebook.
King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2005. Kindle ebook.