Response to "Storyteller"

Samuel Levesque

20th Century Native American Literature

Response #1: Storyteller

My response to this reading is very mixed. While I enjoyed many of the individual tales and poems, and found the pictures appealing, the structure of the book (or perhaps it’s willful un-structure) simply confused me. Most of the response questions dealing with Silko’s oral-to-literate strategies have been well discussed in class, but on the issue of authorship, I think there’s a lot more to say.

The question of authorship was perhaps the most interesting to me. In an oral culture, stories are rarely properties. Although a culture might have a taboo against men telling “women’s stories” or telling “winter stories” in the summer, there is rarely if ever the notion that an individual owns the tale. Anyone can retell a good story, adapt it to their own style, change plot elements to make a different point, and not be judged to be “debasing” or even “stealing” a story. What matters is the story-teller’s talent, his or her performance. Story is not a commodity, but rather a common store of knowledge and lore that serves as a communal bond. Story, by incorporating education (cautionary tales, like “Storyteller”, or histories like “A Geronimo Story”) and entertainment, linked with it’s participatory nature, is a sort of cultural glue that binds a community together.

This contrasts starkly with modern Western notions of authorship and literature. In the Western tradition, the person who first writes the story down owns the story, and anyone else using it, or parts of it, must pay the author (either in money or, in the case of citation, homage). Further, due to the fact that the story has a material existence as a written book, one is forbidden to change the story from it’s original form. One would be hard pressed in literary circles, or in the courts for that matter, to get away with writing a story called Jane Eyre, a romping sex-comedy set in pre-industrial England, which mirrors the “original” but takes the plot off on a different tangent for a different audience. Stories, being a form of property in Western thought, must be “original” (which is in and of itself a fiction) and should be kept in their “original” form.

The nature of the experience is also different. Western works are generally read alone, neither performed nor shared. After the reader has finished the book, with it open to the appropriate page, they might discuss it. But they must always be ready to cite the author’s text with a fetishistic zeal to “stick to the story”.

This ownership of story, and even of ideas (witness the hullabaloo that would result from anyone claiming to have “discovered” the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even if said person had never read a physics book...) is utterly foreign to a non-literate oral tradition. Idea’s and stories simply are. They exist to be told, and the telling is what matters.

Silko confronts the reader with this contradiction by telling many different versions of what are in essence the same story. Rather than being inviolate things to be repeated by rote, stories are adapted to audience, teller, and lesson to be imparted. This turns the western idea on its head. Imagine someone telling you the story of The Catcher in the Rye, but altered to be a cautionary tale on the importance of obeying your elders.

There is a distinct contradiction, however, when one looks outside of the stories and at the book itself. While Silko consistently confronts and batters the idea of story as a fixed and permanent thing, in direct opposition to the western ideal of “literature”, the book itself bears a copyright stamp, and anyone using the stories or ideas put forward in it is hereafter required to cite the author as the “owner” of this information. I find myself disappointed that Silko shied away from the truly revolutionary step of refusing to copyright the book and publishing it anyways, making the stories free and adaptable to anyone who wished to use them.

In some ways one could say that in the very act of publishing this book, Silko, rather than using an oral tradition to challenge the “linear, individualistic, Eurocentric, literary tradition” simply converts one to the other. All her other stratagems; her purposeful avoidance of chronological order, the multi-medial aspect of including family photographs, the italic asides in almost every poem, and the formulation of the book as a whole to imply that maybe the stories authored Leslie Marmon Silko and not the other way around, all these fail in the light of the fact that she, and of course her publishing company, now own these stories. Rather than liberating the white man’s language and using it against the oppressor, she has done to her stories what was done to so many reservation plots, namely lost them to the legalities of the white world, whether she wanted to or not.

Perhaps I am taking this to far. But an ongoing theme in Silko’s work is the importance of story as a real thing, an aspect of existence that does not exist only in the airy realms of myth or the ivory towers of academia, but something that continually creates both our dreamscapes and our everyday lives. This is where that tiny little copyright stamp brings the whole thing down. If her aim is to use story, written or unwritten, to break the bonds of Western thought, that little witch-stamp has undone her work in a fundamental way. You can be as revolutionary, break as many “rules” of literature, decency, common-sense**, or whatnot as you like. As long as that stamp is there, you have not broken free. To wed the physical reality of the book with the ideas expressed therein would, to my sideways thinking mind, be a much more powerful statement on what really matters when it comes to stories.

*See what I mean about whoever writes it down first?

** Neither all that common nor sensible, if examined closely. ©Samuel Levesque, 2005