The History of Sound: Stories
59 pages • 1-hour read
Ben ShattuckThe History of Sound: Stories
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Story 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional abuse, physical abuse, graphic violence, and death.
Story 11 Summary: “Introduction to The Dietzens: Searching for Eternity in the North American Wilderness”
In the introduction to his book The Dietzens: Searching for Eternity in the North American Wilderness, Cal Owens describes his interest in Karl Dietzen, using the first-person point of view.
Cal first encountered Dietzen’s Bible in 1989, when he was 11 years old. He and his parents were driving to Deerfield Academy to collect his sister Mary. He didn’t know it yet, but Mary was pregnant, and their parents were taking her out of school. After an awkward dinner, the family checked into their motel.
In the middle of the night, Cal woke to Mary standing over him with a suitcase. She said she was running away, and he couldn’t come with her. Terrified of losing Mary again, Cal followed her outside where her boyfriend Jim was waiting for her. Mary said Cal couldn’t go with them where they were going, but they could spend an hour or so together.
They drove to Memorial Hall Museum where Jim worked. Jim gave Cal a tour, showing him his “favorite artifact,” the Dietzen Bible. This moment launched Cal’s interest in the Dietzens. He’d go on to study the group, discovering that they were all massacred by a group of Frenchmen who thought they were their English rivals.
That night in the museum, Mary and Cal laid together in a big, old bed. Mary told Cal she was pregnant, and she and Jim were moving to Idaho. She begged him not to tell their parents but insisted she wanted him to know.
The next morning at the motel, Cal’s parents demanded that Cal tell them where Mary was. Cal lied, saying he had no idea where she’d gone. Even years later, after Mary made amends with their parents, Cal didn’t tell them about their night in the museum.
A decade has passed since that night, and now Cal has finished his book on the Dietzens. He spent years researching and discovered that Emma, a former member of the Children of New Eden, was arrested for theft in Albany. He learned a lot about Dietzen’s teachings from the court documents surrounding Emma’s trial.
Cal reflects on his reasons for including his and Mary’s story in his book. He holds that history can find its way into our lives unexpectedly. He then closes by encouraging his reader not to disregard the Dietzens’ beliefs. New England life was hard at the time, and Dietzen gave them hope.
Story 11 Analysis
“Introduction to The Dietzens: Searching for Eternity in the North American Wilderness” delves into the narrative conflicts introduced in “The Children of New Eden” and furthers the collection’s explorations of storytelling and history. In the introduction to his new book, Cal Owens details his reasons for being interested in Karl Dietzen by using a personal anecdote. He presents his nonfictional account of the Dietzens within the personal framework of his own life. Cal’s story reveals that his unique attachment to the Dietzen Bible is inextricable from his love for his sister: For Cal, researching Karl Dietzen is a way for him to reclaim that precious night at the museum with Mary. His story reiterates The Clarifying Power of History, in that delving into the Dietzens helps him make sense of his and Mary’s unprecedented bond and the lingering grief he feels over parting with her as a boy. The way that Cal describes his rediscovery of the Dietzen Bible authenticated this notion:
Seeing it again was like striking a match—the memory of that night with Mary and the accompanying bond I’ve described, the thrill and terror of what Jim told me about the fateful night, it all lit a fire in my mind. I needed to know more, to get inside the story and community (264-65).
On its surface, the Dietzens are irrelevant to Cal and Mary’s relationship. At the same time, they are inextricably linked in Cal’s mind, as they both awakened Cal to the world in new ways. That night at the museum marked a turning point in both his and Mary’s lives—leading Mary to her life in Idaho with Jim and her child, and Cal on a decade-long journey into the past. History, the story thus suggests, can grant insight into the individual’s personal life. As long as Cal associates the museum night with his discovery of the Dietzen Bible, he can find peace over this fraught yet pivotal moment in his childhood.
Cal’s investment in the Dietzens also reiterates the complexity of The Ethics of Storytelling. In particular, Cal urges his reader not to disregard the Dietzens for their seemingly “limited […] understanding of the world” (267). Instead, he reminds his reader how difficult the settlers’ lives would have been and how powerfully hopeful Dietzen’s story must have seemed to them as a result. Believing in the seeming fantasy that “the afterlife was real” was a form of deliverance for people like the Dietzens (268). Cal thus implies that stories are a survival mechanism, even if they have darker, more morally dubious undertones.
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