For this question we were asked to first read Lee Maracle’s “Toward a National Literature.” Specifically, to try to understand what was meant when the author said, “In order for criticism to arise naturally from within our culture, discourse must serve the same function it has always served. In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon. What will its function be in our societies?” (Maracle 88). She gives an answer in the following lines, and to the best of my understanding it’s something like this: stories, and the literature that forms around them, function in society as a kind of blueprint for ideal behavior, relationships, organizations, etc. Through criticism of this literature, a society can parse out the meaning and assimilate those “blueprints” into itself, while leaving out that which the society doesn’t find useful. Through this process the society can grow and transform into something more ideal.
Maracle says something along these lines further down in the paragraph, saying, “The purpose of examining an old story is first to understand it; second, to see oneself in the story; and then to see the nation, the community, and our common humanity through the story and to assess its value to continued growth and transformation of the community and the nation.” (88). This is what I feel to be the core of Maracle’s view on literary criticism, at least in the specific Salish sense. She speaks at other times about the European tradition of criticism, seeing in it nothing more than a “competition between writers.” (88). Whether or not this is the case is not for me to say, though my instinct is that the purpose of this kind of criticism does not differ all that much between different cultures and nations.
In comparing the views of Maracle and Fry on the topic of literary criticism and myth as it relates to nation-building, one difference stood out to me. There seemed to me to be not so much a difference in opinion on the subject, but rather a difference in the order of operations. We’ve already seen that Maracle believes story and literature to come first, followed by the criticism that allows society to assimilate what it feels to be beneficial and discard what it does not. My sense is that Frye sees this process as being exactly the reverse. On page 234 he writes, “Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought.” (Frye 234). Later he writes, “At the heart of all social mythology lies what may be called, because it usually is called, a pastoral myth, the vision of the social ideal.” (240). Frye, in my opinion, seems to feel that literature reflects the mythology of society, acting as a kind of mirror – as opposed to Maracle’s interlocutor. Criticism helps us to understand these social ideals, these mythologies, but I don’t get the sense from Frye that he believes it to be possible to just take what you like and plug it into wider society and discard the rest. This may be an oversimplification of Maracle’s view, and indeed the only real difference might be the kind of societies we’re talking about: Maracle’s being small and local, a tight-knit community wherein small actions can have resonating consequences; Frye, rather, speaking about Canada at large, a broad and disjointed collection of communities. It seems to me that the kind of active interlocution Maracle suggests is far more tenable in a local community vs a nation of millions, but again I may be misunderstanding one or both authors.
Works Cited
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.
Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: A Body of Writing.” Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures by Paul Warren Depasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma Larocque (z-lib.org), Broadview, 2010. Print.
Hi Cooper,
Great insights. Since the nature of literary criticism is that new literature has a hard time jumping into the canon without being critical of what already exists, how do you feel outlying works by fringe storytellers can be recognized? How do you feel stories segregated into genres such as “Indigenous Literature” can be better recognized as “Canadian Literature?” Or perhaps the differing genres is important to maintain an Indigenous identity? Should Indigenous writing be apart of an inherently colonialist canon, or is it important that it is not assimilated? That’s a lot of questions, but as a minority person myself it is something that I struggle with deciding where I stand on the inclusion stories of minorities into the mainstream.
Hi Jacob,
I’m really not knowledgeable enough to even approach answering those questions. My sense is that, in this age we live in where everyone has access to anything and everything, that the concept of a “national literature” is entirely obsolete. How can there be an “American literature,” for example, when there is no longer such a thing as the “American experience?” Likewise with Canada, there is no longer anything that binds the disparate communities that constitute the country together. The common threads that bound every American or Canadian together, those of shared history and culture, have been cut. How, then, could there be something like a “national literature” in this new landscape of many individual “nations” and cultures living, admittedly, in close geographical proximity to each other, yet often worlds away in terms of history and culture? I don’t see how it can be done
Hi Cooper,
Interesting distinction of viewpoints in how literary critiques impact culture. Before this class, I never realized how much literature influenced our worldviews and belief systems as a culture, but it’s very valuable to see that and illustrated so clearly in your post. I think Maracle and Frye’s outlook are both accurate in that regardless of whether literature or mythology, beliefs, and culture influenced the other first, they both create a self-reinforcing system that continues to build on each other. I’m wondering though, how do societies completely shift from one canon to another without something like residential schools, burning of a society’s books, or methods or cultural destruction? What do you think?
Hi Gabrielle,
That’s an interesting question. We know it can happen without the methods you’ve listed, because it has. There have been many examples throughout history of those kinds of shifts and they happen relatively naturally. For example, the spreading of Hellenistic culture pre- and post- Alexander, wherein Greek culture came to dominate the entirety of the Mediterranean coast and much of the Levant. In many areas this came about due to the conquests of Alexander and the influx of Greek peoples, but in many more areas it came about simply through trade and a kind of pragmatism on the part of the non-Greek peoples. Greek culture contained many developments that neighboring cultures simply did not have.
However, that’s not to say that the kind of cultural destruction that you mention didn’t happen as well. As much as Hellenistic culture spread peacefully throughout the Mediterranean, it spread violently through Persia. Then you have more blatant examples, such as the Turkish invasions of Anatolia, or the Russian colonization of Siberia – or, more obviously, Western Europe’s colonization of the Americas. I’m not sure that in any of these examples that the canons *completely* shifted, but there was certainly a lot lost in the assimilation of the foreign culture, whether it was done willingly or not.