Question 1: 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.

When I first read Robinsons’ “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, I struggled through it very, very slowly. My first read was, of course, silently done in my head as per the instructions of the assignment. As I was reading, I noticed that I was (almost automatically) putting the fragmented sentences into complete, “proper” sentences. When I say “proper”, I refer to the western and academic categorization of syntax that suggests written literature ought to follow the rules of grammar and linguistics. I fell victim to this framework of thinking and am so conditioned to think this way that I did not even realize I was doing it until I thought about the question again, as I read, and realized I was missing something very important. I started from the top, this time allowing myself to read it in silence as it was on the page and here is what I found: it made no sense to me. I felt no connection to it. I was reading words on a page that were in fragmented sentences and I was irked by the knowledge that I was missing something. Something. But what?

I read the story again, this time out loud and the experience felt different. The fragmentation of sentences made little sense when reading the story in my head. Upon reading it aloud, sentences beginning with “and” or “but” or “then” felt more natural than when seeing them written on a page. I focused less on the grammatical “errors” and focused more, instead, on the meaning behind the words. In terms of shaping the story, I think Robinson uses oral syntax as a means of subverting and contesting colonial narratives. In some sense, the structure being used by Robinson deconstructs the narrative voice we are accustomed to in western academic writing and gives credence, instead, to an overall story. My attention went deeper than the written words on the page, which lost their intrinsic value and, instead, were valuable as a source of communicating a hidden moral.

The way the sentences were written seemed to flow in a way that made me pause in certain places, and emphasize certain parts as I would if I were sharing a personal story. It made sense. It felt natural. It felt comfortable. This sense of comfort was the element that drew me into the story, bridging the distance and unfamiliarity with its form that I felt during my first read. Moreover, this written form gave the story a “dialogic” feel, wherein I felt like a participant as opposed to an observer. This feeling of being a participant as opposed to an observer was especially cemented through the use of sentences like the following:

“They wanted to know who that was.

Looks like a person.” (Robinson, 64)

In the above two sentences, Robinson does something extremely clever (or at least, I feel he did!). When I read this silently, I missed this entirely… I was too focused on the language structure; the grammar. When I read it aloud, however, it felt (as I mentioned above) more natural because in my own experience growing up in a Western academic setting, it is not “horribly inappropriate” to speak this way. What I draw from the overall “unstructured” structure of the story is a conversational aspect. I read the second sentence like an “aside” or a personal insight. I felt as though this was a thought I was having upon observing something myself. In contrast, however, when I read it silently and was putting it into grammatically “correct” sentences the first time, the story read like a monologue. Somebody was telling me something. The author constructs the story just as people would speak with the use of simple words, fragmented sentences, and pauses. Robinson also uses repetition throughout, saying things like:

“God sent the Angel to Coyote

Sent the Angel” (64).

This is not something frequently seen in writing but it is a tool used when speaking to emphasize a point or buy time when thinking.

After reading the story out loud to myself (okay, and also after a way-too-long Pinterest break), I read it to my sister as well. Yesterday, I asked her to read it back to me. The first thing that stuck out to both of us was the conversational feel of telling the story, but I have already mentioned this element of oral syntax. So, to provide you with some new and less redundant information, I did gain some new insights into what exactly gave this style of writing the conversational appeal that I so very much enjoyed. Both of us mentioned that we were paying careful attention to each other’s facial expressions and physical cues as we told each other the stories, which added an additional layer of meaning to each line. I also noticed that at some parts of the story, things are said that do not reflect the finality and certainty you often experience when reading something with a monologue-like style. On page 82, for example, Robinson writes, “and that could be around two o’clock or something like that”, and in many other parts of the story, he reflects this ambiguity when discussing ideas and places and people and time. The combination of this ambiguity with the use of fragmented sentences gives the story so much conversational appeal that it begs to be read out loud. It invites you in. The reflection of this ambiguity is a clever means of making the story transcend the rigid boundaries of places and people stuck in specific “heres” and “nows”.

So, now I’ve discussed my personal engagement and experience with the story and I would like to pose this question to you all:

One of the issues that has come up in our readings throughout this course is how the transcription of oral stories to written literature can often result in a loss of the meaning behind the story. Do you think Robinson’s style of “oral syntax” helps alleviate this problem?

Works Cited

“Converting Literary to Oral Stories.” Converting Literary to Oral Stories. 17 Oct. 2001. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

“The Oral Tradition of Storytelling.” YouTube. YouTube, 25 May 2011. Web. 13 Feb. 2015

 

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