Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Mark Hoyer, "Narrative Scholarship"

My scholarly focus over the past several years has been on the portrayal of Native American peoples and their cultures by both Native and Euro-American writers, and on the blending or borrowing of "literary" practices and forms that results from cultural contact. Storytelling in Native cultures combines theory and practice and often serves the function of criticism. The storyteller is at once artist and "literary" (or cultural) critic. Although I am not Native American, I often incorporate storytelling as part of my critical practice, as a way of honoring a Native way of "doing criticism" and of breaking the bonds imposed by the subject/object, expert/audience and critic/artist dualisms inherent in the traditional mode(s) of Western literary practice. Because personal experience directs not only what but also how I read, and ultimately how I interpret the stories that others have told, I use personal narrative not necessarily to put forward my story as "evidence" for any "case," but rather to establish the very basis from which arises the possibility that I could have conceived of such a "case."

By utilizing personal stories as part of my critical practice, I seek to follow the lead of not only contemporary Native American storytellers and critic/writers (e.g. Momaday, Silko, Vizenor, Sarris), but also Euro-American scholars of Native American literatures (e.g. Jahner, and Krupat, who suggests that a Native "critical practice" be seen "as internal to an evolving literary practice" [Ethnocriticism 195]). My personal stories are not meant primarily to justify, glorify, preach, or otherwise establish normative guidelines in either individual lives or scholarly practice. They are, instead, an attempt to place myself critically (though criticism always seems to possess one or more of those secondary characteristics enumerated above). As Stephen Greenblatt has written (in Learning to Curse) about his tendency to use anecdote and personal narrative,

. . . [S]elf-expression is always and inescapably the expression of something else, something different. A recognition and an understanding of the difference does not negate self-expression ... but it does help one see more clearly where in the world one's identity comes from and what kinds of negotiation and conflict it entails. . . [T]he narrative impulse in my writing is yoked to the service of literary and cultural criticism; it pulls out and away from itself. (8)

The justification that Greenblatt offers here might help critics--and particularly those critics dealing with Native cultures and materials--avoid what Greg Sarris (in Keeping Slug Woman Alive) has pointed out as a problem in the practice of Native American literary criticism, a problem he attempts to avoid in his own critical practice by returning to his Native storytelling roots. Though Sarris is here referring to critics dealing with Native American authors, I believe the same concerns are justified in dealing with non-Indian authors (e.g. Mary Austin, John G. Neihardt) who rely heavily on and incorporate Native cultural material in their writing:

Some critics do consider the ways certain Indian writers mediate, or make use of, their respective cultural backgrounds or specific themes considered to be generally "Indian." But those critics do not seriously consider or reflect upon how they are making sense of and putting together the writers' cultural backgrounds and the writers' texts. They attempt to account for the interaction represented in the texts, but not for their own interactions. They might, for example, attempt in their various approaches to locate and account for an "Indian" presence or "Indian" themes in a text, but they do not consider how they discovered or created what they define as Indian. (123)
Personal stories can be part of an attempt, then, to account, at least in part, for how the critic discovers and creates what s/he defines as "Indian."

Mark Hoyer, University of California, Davis