13. Who's Telling This Story, Anyway? My father likes to tell stories and my mother likes to research family history and write memories down. Sometimes he gets to telling a story one way, but she remembers it another way. Recently my father was telling me a tale about their youth, something about a night of dining and dancing at Billy Mearns’s Casa Mafiana in Albuquerque years ago. He was warming to his tale, eyes focused on that middle distance where stories un reel beforea storyteller’s eyes. He had hit his stride, pauses taut with drama, gestures, expression, posture all bespeaking their share of the tale. During a rush of words, my mother interrupted —“Wasn’t it Billy Mearns who came over to the table just then? Billy, not Max, wasn’t it?” she interjected. “No,” he said, irritation creeping into his voice. “No. It was Max.” “Well, I thought it was Billy,” she said. “It was Max,” he replied. “Who's telling this story, anyway, you or me?” he demanded. “Well, you, of course,” she admitted. But I would have liked to hear her story, too. Hers and his together on simulcast. And Billy Mearns’s story, and Max’s as well. [like Casa Majiana stories and was delighted to read some in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Stal- lion Gate. Reading about the old supper club in a mega-seller book made the club real, more real than my own excursions to the place after it was sold and became the Sunset Inn, after Billy Mearns and Max had goneto the twi- light land where all our cronies finally go. So many stories; so many voices telling one huge, complex, multitudi- nous story, a story so long no single novel can encompass it, a story so vast only the concept of cycle begins to hint at its dimension, a story so complex that only the greatest variety of devices, techniques, points of view, styles, and stances can justly reflect its infinite glittering facets, plumb its mysteri- Who's Telling This Story, Anyway? ss 145‘ous multitude of tunnels and hidden corridors —so many, stories a teacher of American Literature is hard put to know where to begin or how to proceed in the face of such vastness. But, as the oracle advises, one must enter vast- ness —so let us begin. But where? Perhaps at this juncture we should recognize that critical discourse is de- fined by boundaries set not by writers but by critics, and not by crities sim- ply, but by elite white men in positions powerful enough to make them culture-brokers(We heed to realize that we are not usually discussing litera- ture when we engage in literary discourse, but rather critical standards set by predecessors whose thought may have been pertinent at one time or to one conversation, but which are manifestly inadequate given the nature of the task we are faced with as the twentieth century moves to its close, That task is discovering the nature of American Literature, and it is a datinting one. In “The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms” (Gender & Theory, Dialogues on Feminist Criticism), Ellen Messer-Davidow argues that feminist criticism cannot become useful until feminist critics recognize that using the tools of criticism bequeathed us by traditional literary schol- ars necessarily results in pointless arguments about irrelevancies, among other things. She suggests a way of “reconstituting knowledge that evolves from feminist perspectives” through the method of devising “a framework that places traditional and feminist literary criticisms on a single plane of analysis.” Her framework is inclusive of a variety of theories and practices because it seeks their philosophical bases, “their subject, subject matters, methods of reasoning, and epistemology” (Messer-Davidow, pp. 64-65). She continues: Explicitly, then, discussions of literature, whether theoretical or practical, are determined by the subject matter selected and the methods of reasoning exerted uponit.... ‘The subject matters and methods are constitutive elements of the predomi- nant research tradition in Western literary study. A research tradition binds the- “retical and practical work by specifying an epistemology, which, to quote the philosopher Larry Laudan, provides “a set of general assumptions about the en- tities and processes in a domain of study, and about the appropriate methods to be used for investigating the problems and constructing the theories in that domain.” 146 sss Off the ReservationThe beginning issue, then, is not one of whether we can adequately dis- cuss all the literature written in the United States since the beginning of the century (or the beginning of the nation), because, given our existing critical tools and the epistemology that gave rise to those tools, we cannot, The is- sue is rather to discover a critically sound apparatus that will let our studies be inclusive rather than exclusive while still providing us with a means for distinguishing aesthetically profound works from paler imitations, What we must devise, then, are critical strategies that do not descend only from Anglo-European criticism, for example, the Western Masculinist Aristo- cratic Tradition, for that tradition of necessity speaks only to and from it- self, excluding many American works that are not based within it. To para- Phrase Messer-Davidow, “when we adopt traditional perspectives, the | consequences to us are the marginalization, negation, objectification, and alienation” of our American selves in the service of a far more narrow criti | calself. ‘ ~~ She suggests that since it is we who are delineating the boundaries, it is we whocan reset them, and I heartily concur, though I would do so beyond the somewhat restricted parameters of feminist theory, which is so intent on its relationship to the male tradition it usually overlooks the otherwise noticeable fact that the male tradition is more white than male and more elitist than masculinist. Their argument is more about whether women who differ from the established norms get to play literature, than whether or not all perspectives and experience-bases get to be part of the literary game. Personally, I would prefer a literary participatory democracy, a new vi- sion and practice that would enable us as critics and teachers to illuminate the great panoply of literature that American writers produce yearly. With me, it’s congenital. What would be of use tous as we begin to builda criticism that will work for the whole of American Literature would be to devise a relevant episte- mology, one that articulates a set of assumptions about the entities and pro- cesses in our domain of study that does not marginalize American writers because they seem to occupy a subset of a set of constricted assumptions; we need a critical system sufficiently broad and accurate to allow the devel- opment of investigative and theoretical tools that will centralize the diverse communities and multiple voices presently marginalized. As June Jordan wrote in her 1981 essay “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Who's Telling This Story, Anyway? ss 147