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Do We Need a Literary Canon?
December 10, 2007 in book thoughts, the literary conversation
I.
This weekend, despite hosting some house guests, I managed to find a good amount of time to catch up on some reading. In the recently read pile is a decent article from Prospect Magazine called “Do We Need a Literary Canon?” The article is not as polemical as it sounds. Instead Richard Jenkyns responds to an essay Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote about multiculturalism’s detrimental effects on America’s literary canon. Sacks believes that culture relies on canons to establish communal vocabularies, but that multiculturalism interrupts and/or corrupts this shared history. He defends the unadulterated canon by arguing:
“It is important for us to understand where we have come from, to know the texts which have formed the beliefs and behaviour of the world in which we live. If we know nothing about the past, or even if we know only about the recent past, we are fated to misunderstand the present.”
I say that it is more important to understand where we are now—and that understanding comes from assessing what makes up our culture today. Of course knowing something about the past is important, but living in the past is harmful, especially if the past is so different from our present.
Now I haven’t read Rabbi Sacks’s original statement, but I figure he didn’t become Chief Rabbi by running on a platform of forced assimilation. I’m going to assume that Rabbi Sacks means that we ought to reach out to minority cultures by teaching them our canon, as a way of establishing a common language. But I wonder whether we ought to go one step further and adopt the canons of these other cultures, as a way of creating a new, inclusive culture. However, one could argue that the virtue of multiculturality is its heterogeneity. If that’s the case, maybe we ought to maintain several distinct mini-canons. But how do we avoid positioning one canon from becoming the master canon while the others are relegated to the position of attendant minority canons? The debate boils down to one that’s irked me for some time now: is it more important to highlight those qualities (or works of literature) that various sub-cultures have in common? Or when we teach literature, should we incorporate emblematic works of literature from various sub-cultures as a way of highlighting the differences that make each cultural tradition unique?
Personally, I’m in favor of creating a new inclusive canon, because cultures in a multicultural setting ought to be able to talk to each other, and to do so, we ought to have a communal vocabulary. Therefore, we ought to revise the current canon so that it speaks to all constituent cultures.
Jenkyns offers his take:
“We should indeed assert the importance of historical memory, of ancestry and rootedness. This is something which immigrants do not share, but the answer is not to pretend that it does not matter, but to offer new citizens a kind of historical memory by proxy.”
Rabbi Sacks may have hinted at something like forced assimilation, but Jenkyns doesn’t mince his words. They’re both missing the most obvious compromise: Why not modify our historical lessons to include theirs?
II.
But for the moment, let’s return to Jenkyns’s original question: Do we even need a canon in the first place? This is where I agree with Rabbi Sacks: I think it helps. A canon establishes common ground, and while it’s important to preserve those eccentricities that distinguish cultures from each other, it’s even more important (especially now, when cultures uncomfortably abut one another) to emphasize the literature and vocabulary we have in common. Public school cirricula are moving in a good direction when they seek to incorporate Latino, Asian-American, African-American, Native American, and Jewish (the list goes on) texts into the syllabus by accentuating what these narratives have in common. But college cirricula only serve to underscore the boundaries between cultures when they offer their increasingly tangential canons, including some of my favorite courses from college: Gender and Sexuality in Asian-American Literature, Mixed Race Literature from the Post-Civil War Era. I militantly immersed myself in the clamorous voices of the subaltern, letting them speak so much that I no longer knew what they were speaking against. As someone who’s largely dodged the canon, I regret that I have so few books in common with my peers.
Jenkyns nicely sums up the conundrum when he advises:
“There is a good deal we can do about the way in which we teach literature, though here there is a nice balance to be found between drawing the young in through the works that may most naturally appeal to them and stretching them with works that may seem less attractive. We should also teach the development of a personal taste: the risk in stressing the canon too much is that it can seem to require that we dwell always on the upper slopes of Parnassus, and that we should always like what we have been told to like; yet without personal predilection, there is no true cultivation.”
III.
Let’s agree, for the sake of continuing this discussion, that we accept the need for a canon. Which books of the past 25 years deserve to be inducted into the Canonical Hall of Fame? Jenkyns frets that no such book exists, and that our era exhibits a dismaying lack of canonical heroes. I think that remains to be seen: the canonical texts of our time likely won’t be recognized until well after we’re gone. A canon is never contemporary, never up-to-date. Nevertheless, speculation is fun. I know lists abound on this subject, but I’m curious: any out-of-left-field nominations for the future canon?
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I found this article interesting, if perhaps a bit doomsaying, and I disagree with some of the points he raised.
His discussion of architecture as an art form which has endured in its ability to produce works of ‘genius’, for example, I find shortsighted – Gehry and Calatrava are remarkable postmodern stylists, but a lot of their work fails at some of the basic purposes of architecture, which is to function as a response to the environment surrounding it. Gehry’s buildings are near-constantly under repair because of poor engineering, and Calatrava’s airport in Bilbao has proven ill-suited to the necessary tasks of an airport. Their work is ornamental, and it damages the relationship between the pedestrian and his cultural environment by disrupting lines, flows, and patterns. Ultimately, I think we’ll look back at both Calatrava and Gehry and find their work to be somewhat of a folly. (Just to be contrary, I’ll nominate Paolo Soleri, for whom architecture is a pursuit both in design and the better management of space, for canonization in their place, even if he is a total crackpot.) I’m not looking for utiltarian design – that’s the atrocious failure of the other ‘genius’ architect Jenkyns cites, Le Corbusier. But I find his correlation between advances in a society’s material culture and art culture to be insufficient, and overly deterministic. In the case of architecture, I think material advances have actually been to the detriment of architectural culture in recent decades. Given new materials and developmental models, we’ve rejected thousands of years worth of tradition and knowledge about constructing public and private spaces and produced aluminum-sided tract houses and megalomaniacal ‘experiments’ without regard to the experiential quality of architecture.
To me, the reason we’re having such a crisis with the canon isn’t multiculturalism’s emphasis on a greater multiplicity of voices but poststructuralism’s diminishing of the voice as the prevailing quality in how we regard texts. If the author is dead – and given the deemphasis on the authorial and authoritative in postmodern discursive flows (television, the internet), it’s certainly on life support – then we’ve destroyed what Jenkyns observantly identifies as a discrete unit of canonization.
Suffice it to say, on the whole, I find a lot of poststructural criticism rather nihilistic. I too believe we need canons, because a canon preserves the most noteworthy contributions to the historical dialogue/dialectic (ah, Hegel – I’m such a college freshman). It allows us – all of us – access to the ideas and problems that form how we regard our lived experience. That’s invaluable.
As for a literary canon of the last 25 years – I’m not well-read enough in recent literature to even begin, but I do think future generations of readers are going to regard White Teeth, if not as some bellwether work of literature, then certainly as a definitive encapsulation of the political and social mores of an era, so it’ll be canonical in that sense (Austen and Waugh, both of whom Smith borrows from stylistically and spiritually, come to mind as points of comparison).
Poststructuralism and architecture! As annoying as over-arching articles like Jenkyns’s are, I love that they provide so much material to comment upon, and I especially like that we had two divergent (if agreeable) takes on it.
Funny that you should mention Zadie Smith—she hadn’t occurred to me when I first asked the question, but upon reflection you might be right. And if it’s not her who gets canonized, then surely one of her peers. How else will English students 100 years hence understand the fragmented multicultural identity that so defines the past 25 years?
I find Jenkyns’s recommendations about the political guardianship of culture absurd: “The political class should proclaim the value of culture for its own sake. Those of them who have cultural enthusiasms should bring them out of the closet, and the rest might at least pretend… It should be the aim of public policy to change the tone. If we could do that, the canon could perhaps be left to look after itself.”
First he says that “not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality” then he says that there are no cultural heroes or giants left or that we don’t recognize any, then he wants the unexceptional “technocrats” to change the cultural tone for us, presumably kick-starting the canonization process even, it appears, in the absence of artists worthy of canonization. Oh, and then popular canonization apparently factors in somehow too, working together with “clerical” canonization processes run by those ‘unexceptional’ elites.
His argument is incoherent; he can’t decide if a “hero” is born or made, much less a canon, and he has no idea what the relationship between “taste” and canonicity is or might be either.
I suppose these are difficult questions to answer after all, but his scrambling only further disorders them.
The problem is, the questions about canons, their necessity, the factors necessary for literary “greatness,” taste, etc. all boil down to a single question which nobody really likes addressing because of its sheer size–’how should literature be used to structure social relations?’
I think Brendon is right to point to post-structuralism’s de-emphasis on the individual voice of the author as a part of the “problem” of a dearth of “heroes” or canonical writers/artists. But didn’t trumpeting the death of the author or the deconstruction of stable binaries elevate Foucault and Derrida to actual canonicity?
As for suggestions of future canonical authors, I think McEwan will in a hundred years be at least as canonical as Forster is today; I think Derek Walcott is likely to last; Coetzee, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Franzen, Didion.