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The trouble with true stories: Thomas King''s, The Truth About Stories.

Article Excerpt
The Massey Lectures began in 1961 under the patronage of the first Canadian-born Governor-General, Vincent Massey. Given by prominent Canadian and foreign intellectuals, the lectures were held at the University of Toronto until 2002. Since then, all of the five lectures comprising each series have been given in different Canadian cities, and these lectures are subsequently broadcast on CBC radio.

If nothing else, the Masseys have a history of portentous titles (Time as History, Beyond Fate, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, The Malaise of Modernity, and so on). With The Truth About Stories, Thomas King, Guelph University English professor and acclaimed author of fiction and children's literature, appears to follow in the same grave train. But with his subtitle, "A Native Narrative," he may be playing the Trickster, for the seeker (and the audience for the Masseys is, after all, supposed to be more public than academic) of truth is bound to be perplexed, at least on first reflection, by King's anecdotal, autobiographical narratives which abruptly intersperse the private with the political.

King contends that stories "control our lives" (p. 9), and, eventually citing Nigerian writer Ban Okri, he asserts and re-asserts that "stories are all we are" (pp. 62, 122, 153). The insistence that we shape our world(s) by the stories we tell (and that, one might extrapolate), we can only progress if we tell new stories that are based on our consideration of other stories, is certainly salutary. But it is also platitudinous and as empty of political meaning as the formal promulgation of a new Chair of First Nations or Postcolonial or Black Studies. Real, structural change, involving, say, facilitating the admission of First Nations or Black (or, much more to the point, poor and/or digitally disenfranchised) students or individuals to universities and public institutions and workplaces is just not within King's ambit. Moreover, beyond King's...