Lee Maracle’s “Toward a National Literature” is stridently polemical, prescriptive, and programmatic; her tone is calculated to rouse and challenge. The complex of terms—literature, oratory, story, myth, criticism—she addresses with respect to nation is of the utmost interest to our project in ENGL 372.

Maracle’s dissatisfaction with Thomas King’s phrase “We are about story and nothing else” gestures toward the role she imagines for stories in recuperating and consolidating an Indigenous, national knowledge base (qtd. in Maracle 82). The power of King’s statement, of course, is its simplicity. Maracle’s concern, however, is that this pithy saying (like many such aphorisms, in which, it’s fair to say, King excels) runs the risk of being reductive and even diminishing: it may suggest a child-like exchange of anecdotes rather than a robust system of cultural knowledge. This knowledge, Maracle would insist, is vitally sustained and mediated by story but also exceeds it (89). (To be fair to King, he would probably agree with J. Edward Chamberlin on defining “story” more expansively than Maracle.) A national (Sto:lo) literature would be involved in the reclamation and redeployment of a primarily oral Indigenous knowledge whose transmission has been critically interrupted by colonialism but whose scope encompasses medicine, natural science, law—in short, every domain of knowledge represented (not to mention monopolized) by a Western episteme.

What does literature have to do with such a social, political, epistemological resurgence? This is the question posed by that difficult and complicated word “criticism.” Here we can, as Dr. Paterson has suggested, bring Maracle into conversation with Northrop Frye. It’s uncertain exactly what Maracle (or indeed anyone) is referring to when she uses the word “criticism,”—whether she is thinking of literary journalism, scholarship, review writing, or all of the above. Her description of its normative activities displays her oppositional stance toward “Euro-society”: “In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon” (88). So, criticism as something evaluative and exclusive.

I believe that the idea and the history of literary criticism can actually help to make some common ground between Maracle and Frye, perhaps in ways that would change what both of them think criticism to be.

I’m in the midst of a seminar in the history of academic English criticism and can’t resist taking a short historical excursion. From its early days with the likes of Cambridge critic I.A. Richards (1893-1979), “modern” English literary criticism was centrally concerned with its social function and that of the literature it dealt with. (Maracle’s comment about the history of criticism back to Aristotle is surely an extraordinary and forceful one, but I think there is still value in not painting the European “critical tradition” (if there is such a thing) in such a broad single brushstroke (84).) In fact, Richards downplays the evaluative commitments Maracle seems to so distrust: “It is less important to like ‘good’ poetry and dislike ‘bad’, than to be able to use them both as a means of ordering our minds” (334). For all his faults, Richards is faithful to the instrumental moral and social efficacy of literary (and critical) experience; this seems not altogether different from Maracle’s desire for new stories “alter our direction or behaviour, clear old obstacles, and point us all in the direction of the good life” (a rather Aristotelian turn of phrase; 84). My main point here is a shared commitment to the social function of some kind of collective practice called “literary criticism.” Frye himself, in 1950, writes an article entitled “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

What social function does Maracle imagine for an Indigenous literary criticism? It seems to be a collaborative process of construction, of “adding rafters to the house” and “learn[ing] as an ensemble” (95). Perhaps most importantly, this process is predicated on an awareness of traditional ways of knowing, of studying the “old story,” understanding one’s (or a community’s) place in it, and assessing its potential for (social, national, subjective) transformation (85). As I understand it, criticism would be a matter of getting inside the old stories, becoming at home in their workings, and so allowing the creation of new myths from them for today.

As Dr. Paterson proposes, we can see a certain kinship between this imperative to write from within the culture and the critic who writes that “as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images” (234-5). Maracle, to my mind, actually supports the systematization or theorization of such “principles” for the purpose of Indigenous self-authorship. Both thinkers support the liberating energy of the mythic imagination: while Frye may imagine the liberation from ideological “social” “mythology” Maracle envisions liberation from colonial structures of power and knowledge (237).

Frye’s particular blindnesses and prejudices are not, in some cases, to be wondered at. His argument that “The forms of literature are autonomous” goes hand in hand with the ascendant (New Critical) aesthetic idealism of the moment (234). We are left with a question: is his position inextricably bound up with colonial power and privilege or does he still have something to offer us? Could dialogues between him and someone like Lee Maracle not still be productive? Perhaps there is no real place for Frye (or me, for that matter) in Maracle’s particular project—that would be something to be accepted and respected—but there may be such a place elsewhere.

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Anansi, 2017.

Hanson, Erin. “Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/oral_traditions/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

—. “The Residential Schools System.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: ‘A Body of Writing’.” Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures, edited by Paul Warren DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma LaRocque, Broadview, 2010.

“New Criticism.” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/art/New-Criticism. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. Edited by John Constable, Routledge, 2001.

Westacott, Emrys. “What Does It Mean to Live the Good Life?” ThoughtCo, 26 February 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-good-life-4038226. Accessed 12 March 2021.