Profiles in Literature: Debating the Canon!

Greetings, literature-loving dharmiacs!  Last week we discussed the bizarre and wonderful Oulipo, who helped free us from notions of rules and rule-breaking by refocusing our attentions on structure and organization.  This week we’re going to take a step back and throw ourselves into one of the largest debates around literature: the canon.

What is the canon?  It’s that generally accepted corpus of books that we consider “great”, even if there’s a bit of variation about the specifics.  It’s why our high school reading lists are similar without being identical – Homer, Shakespeare, Twain – and why certain books get the deluxe leather-bound treatment centuries after they’ve been written.  But the canon is also a  problematic concept, and today we’re going to talk about why.

History of the Canon:

I’ll touch on a few major points, and I apologize for the sweeping generalizations – but we have a debate to get to!

The word “canon” comes from the ancient Greek kanon, meaning “rule” or “model” – this was itself a likely derivative from the Hebrew word for “reed”.  If that sounds unlikely, consider that reeds were used for measuring, and the slow drift of the term from literal “rule” to metaphorical becomes clearer. 

The notion of a literary “canon” – the word was first used in this context around the 18th century – was specifically Christian: the accepted religious texts of a particular sect.  Because the different Christian sects differed in aspects of dogma, each had a core set of Biblical and non-Biblical works that reflected their beliefs – which is why we today have different “versions” of the Bible. This isn’t to say other religious groups didn’t have core texts (like the Jewish Tanak), but the application of the word “rule” to fundamental texts was a Christian phenomenon.

As European society secularized, so did the notion of fundamental texts.  Building on Renaissance trends, secular humanism and the Enlightenment brought a renewed interest in non-religious philosophy and ancient culture, and by the 19th century a “well-educated” person was expected to be conversant in everyone from Homer to Marcus Aurelius (notice the class issue here: “well-educated” already implies a certain degree of wealth and leisure).  These texts had already been mainstays in monasteries for centuries – the Dark Ages were hardly so Dark as usually portrayed – but that the non-religious were also reading, studying, and building on these texts was the most significant development in post-Renaissance Europe.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the canon came under some serious scrutiny for its narrow focus.  A renewed interest in Eastern culture, a challenge to the primacy of classical literature, and a new focus on power and historically underrepresented groups all led to a powerful challenge to the canon: an overturning and critical reevaluation of the hierarchy of literary texts.  Two major questions arose: 1. Why is one text ‘better’ or ‘more necessary’ than another? and 2. Who gets to make that decision?

With that grossly oversimplified history in the background, let’s discuss the place of the canon in contemporary culture and education.

Criticisms of the Canon:

When we talk about the narrow focus of the canon, we’re really talking about three phenomena: geography, social dominance, and cultural dominance.

1. Geography: the Western canon is, after all, a collection of texts that have been fundamental in the Western world.  We can argue about whether our schools should start with or primarily focus on Western texts, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that Asia (especially) is massively understudied in this country.  One of the broader canons, by professor Harold Bloom, admits African and near Eastern literature into the fold by virtue of their origins in the same ancient texts – but even that is a lot broader than what is taught at most schools.  In the meantime, the canonical work of, say, China and Japan goes almost completely unnoticed in this country.  The obsessively Western focus of the canon prevents even the more popular and vital texts of Asian literature – anything from Genji to the I Ching – from gaining a foothold in American culture. 

2. Social dominance: this is the arena in which the canon has been most successfully fought, since the bias is so obvious.  Texts by female, gay, or minority authors have a much more difficult time gaining acceptance into the canon, which is made up predominantly by the exclusive Dead White Male club.  Over time, certain authors have managed to overcome that hurdle and become part of the “accepted” literature: Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Ellison, etc.  But even then their “acceptance” (I can’t use the word without quotation marks, since it’s practically pejorative when viewed from this angle) treats them as exceptions rather than acknowledge the consistent blind spot towards literature created outside of the dominant culture.  The uncritical Stamp of Approval on these authors also robs their literature of its anti-authoritarian bent: if it’s been granted access into the ivory tower, it’s no longer a threat to the ivory tower.  This is closely connected with…

3. Cultural dominance: the notion of what constitutes “good” literature also leads to a partially-artificial gap between what’s popular and what’s quality.  Sometimes this gap is ludicrous: the debate over whether comic books make acceptable reading material at schools should have finally been put to rest with the critical drooling over Maus, but the notion that graphic novels cannot be “great” art smacks of elite narrow-mindedness.  Lovers of science fiction know this all too well, as do enthusiasts of pulp fiction, erotica, fantasy, or anything that makes the Bestseller list.

These are three basic areas for criticism, but 2 and 3 carry an even stronger implication that I want to highlight here: no matter what the canon includes, it is by nature an exclusionary process.  The attempts to add certain authors or representatives of certain genres are tiny band-aids on a much bigger issue.  The canon is authoritarian by nature.  Even though it changes with time and context, it nonetheless creates a notion of what is at the center of discourse and what lies on the periphery.  Articulating a canon means defining a culture according to a narrow set of criteria, leaving everyone else out in the cold. 

Competing notions of canon also have strange results.  What inspired me to write this essay was an acknowledgment of the shaky canonical status of Japan’s bestselling novelist Haruki Murakami.  In his own country, Murakami comes under enormous criticism for his Western-leaning literature; in the West, he’s lauded for the Japanese-ness of his literature.  When the West incorporates him into the canon (as he’ll likely be, in the company of people like Borges and García Márquez), will it be as a “representative” of Japanese literature?  What does it mean to give an author that “official” Stamp of Approval in a way that runs dissonant to his appreciation in his own context?

Defenses of the Canon:

The canon’s primary defender in contemporary culture is, again, Howard Bloom.  Bloom dispatches with the political, cultural, and social aspects of debate and argues that only a single criterion should be applied to literature when determining its status for canon-hood: aesthetics.  If a work is excellent, it is excellent, regardless of its origins.

I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the aesthetic, but its best defense is the experience of reading King Lear and then seeing the play well performed. King Lear does not derive from a crisis in philosophy, nor can its power be explained away as a mystification somehow promoted by the bourgeois institutions. It is a mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

There’s a naïveté to Bloom’s assertion that aesthetics exist on an objective plane, uninfluenced by politics or social issues, but to his credit this stance has enabled him to create a larger and more inclusive canon than is usually articulated.  Quality knows no national, sexual, racial, or economic boundaries.

I would defend it on a few other grounds:

1. Preservation.  Popular culture is much more fickle than elitist culture, and while we usually deride the latter for its closed-mindedness (and rightly so), we don’t often acknowledge the one benefit of their closed-mindedness: the elites are consistent and they work to preserve works that might otherwise have been lost in the noise of history. 

The canon ensures that something survives, and that something is usually pretty valuable.  Without a notion of canon, it’s highly unlikely that something as ancient and initially difficult as Homer’s Iliad would find its way onto contemporary bestseller lists – how many young people enthusiastically pick up thousand-page epic poetry?  (of course, some do, but I’d argue they do so because the work holds a certain reputation – thanks to its canonical status).  Popular taste shifts rapidly, whereas the canon is slow to move.

This is both a positive and a negative: critics of the canon compare it to a museum, dusty and cold and uninviting.  There’s no active engagement to treating literature like museum pieces, behind glass panels and inaccessible to the public.  It’s a good point, although the reverse may be even worse: popular culture treats literature as a disposable commodity – here today, garbage dump tomorrow.

For example, take a look at the bestselling novels of 1920s.  How many of those titles do you recognize?  Notable among the ones not there: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Proust’s Time Regained, etc.  That’s not to say the canon doesn’t making glaring errors as well, but at least defenders of the canon frequently look backwards to history and sometimes unearth forgotten works: popular culture is all about the present (again, we can reverse these values: popular culture is more vital because it’s in touch with the Now, canonical literature is a cadaver.)

2. The Great Conversation: another major defense of the canon is the recognition that works of literature are not created in an artistic vacuum – they usually refer to other works of literature (either explicitly or implicitly), and the exploration of these relationships creates a complex web of relationships that situate certain texts in the center.  That is, the canon is a natural result of artists referring back to other works with such a frequency that those other works become vital.  Robert Maynard Hutchins coined the term “The Great Conversation” in 1952 to describe this web of relationships, and it was a favorite literary motif of Borges.

Living outside the canon, we would have trouble understanding the dense allusions that Shakespeare makes to the Bible, or that Joyce makes to Shakespeare, or that Pynchon makes to Joyce.  By exploring these relationships, we find that the Bible is one of our most frequent points of research, as is Shakespeare, as is Joyce – the canon forms around us simply by the nature of this web of influence.

The examples I just gave are all themselves canonical, so it’s like an enormous Ouroboros.  Does this hold true in traditionally non-canonical literature?  I’m no expert here, but I’d suggest that it does: either by direct allusion or by reacting against “central” texts.  It is impossible to write anything in the English language that does not have to grapple with the influence of Shakespeare in some form, either directly through allusion or polemic, or indirectly through subconscious appropriation of Shakespeare’s language.  The bard’s got a death-grip on our words. 

3. Quality: this is likely to be the most contentious defense of the canon, but there is something to be said in support of Bloom’s claim that quality matters.  While I’m very open to the notion that quality can appear anywhere (I am, after all, a connoisseur of zombie films), I cannot accept that quality is a purely subjective idea.  That may be conservative – if not reactionary – of me to suggest, and I’m prepared for the criticism.  But when Leo Tolstoy, in one of his hyper-religious fits, argued that he’d found King Lear worthless and substandard art, I cannot agree.  In his take-down of Tolstoy, George Orwell argued the opposite of me: “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.”  I’d counter to Orwell that survival is a mark of quality, since lasting appeal is a often a marker of quality.

But that’s a rabbit-hole we don’t want to descend, at least in so short an essay. 

Summary, Debate Topics, etc.

Notice that my defenses of the canon did not address the criticisms of the canon, and that both these exist alongside each other in a sort of perpetual tension.  We could debate these qualities endlessly, but ultimately we have to address the real-life implications: what is the place of the Western canon in our education system (since that is where the canon becomes a matter not of choice but of cultural inculcation)?

Some specific questions I’d like y’all to address:

* Does teaching canonical literature in our schools give our students a much-needed foundation for further reading, or does it deprive them of the great diversity that exists in literature that has not been granted canonical status? 

* In addition, does teaching the canon (as in the popular Great Books courses that popped up in the university system over the past few decades) foster an authoritarian mindset towards literary history, or does it lend coherence to an understanding of how literature has developed over the centuries?  If “yes” to both, how do we reconcile those opposing tendencies?

* How does one design a course in literature with an eye both to the merits and deficiencies of the canon?  If you believe that either the merits or deficiencies don’t exist (that is, you’re either extremely pro- or anti-canon), what would your ideal literature course look like?

I would love to hear your thoughts, and thank you for reading.