elimae

Bang!: The Notion of a Literary Canon
Deron Bauman

If I understand the terms of the argument correctly, the literary canon does not exist because certain documents are excluded from it. In fact, the literary canon does not exist to such an extent that it should be replaced with one consisting of the documents that are not included within it. As well, the notion of a literary canon is fundamentally an elitist, and harmful, notion, one propagated mainly by institutions of higher learning. Once these institutions are purged of imperialist literary notions by, one assumes, the removal of faculty who promote the notion of a body of literary quality that extends in various permutations from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to this present moment, space will be made for the teaching of neglected, as it were "marginalized", pieces of literary history of an equal footing with that expelled, except for the racial, ethnic, gender, political, etc. make-up of the writers who created it.

While I am sympathetic, and, I would hope, inclined toward the acceptance of cultural traditions and expressions across a wide variety of possibilities (I was, to make it known, born and raised for the first fourth of my life to this point in Middle Eastern and Oriental countries) I in no way accept the notion that aesthetic concerns, and the body of work that contains them, make allowance for inclusion into that body of work on grounds other than the aesthetic.

Another of the notions inherent in the argument is the position that the non-existent canon is comprised of people of privilege and created by an enthusiastic, culture-defendant public who relish nothing more than the notion of literary achievement created by white European men who, anointed at birth, came into the world with nothing other to do than create culturally sanctioned, publicly recognizable, and critically acclaimed bodies of work. The facts of their Jewishness, or their Russianness, or their Colombianness, and, in many cases, their gender, or sexual orientation, somehow vanishing in the terms of the argument; the notion that toil, ridicule, poverty, rejection, and invisibility equally apply themselves in the stories of the efforts of the writers that constitute this non-existent canon somehow overlooked. One might argue that education and access have been denied to a large majority of the world's population, disallowing them from the culture and tradition and background that is necessary to create or participate in a literature of a quality that might find itself included in a canon. But this argument, in its own terms, supports the notion that an enviable literary history exists, and peoples from a variety of traditions and cultures and backgrounds have participated in it. The only barrier to admission in an age of broad public education and libraries then being an unwillingness to accept the burden of devotion required to begin the process toward the creation of literary quality, or, if other barriers exist--which they certainly always have and certainly currently do: acceptance of mediocrity in the market place, a lack of aesthetic intelligence by publishers and readers, a willingness to accept the terms of popular culture as a guideline by which quality is evaluated--then, as Melville did, as Dickinson did, as Whitman did, as Kafka did, the writer must continue in the hope that future generations will repeal the blindness of the past and usher a space adequate for the acceptance of their visionary work, or, as is possible with the advent of the internet and home publishing, do it themselves, by damn, and be done with it.

Professors and students made the following arguments in my time at the University of Texas as an undergraduate in the English department in the late eighties and early nineties:

1. Yeats should not be studied, as he did not write from the perspective of an end of the twentieth century Japanese American.

2. Chaucer should be evaluated through an end of the twentieth century post-feminist lens that reveals him to have created his Canterbury Tales solely for the purpose of the denigration of women.

3. All intercourse is rape. (Taught, incidentally, in the Chaucer class mentioned above.)

While my sense of the value of the presence and study of a succession of qualitatively excellent literature is not purely a reaction to these suppositions, it certainly is in response to them.

To my mind an investigation of the canon of qualitatively excellent musical work in the twentieth century underlines the bankruptcy of an argument against a history of literary quality in the twentieth century, for, the same people who argue that the literary version doesn't exist would be hard pressed to relinquish the inclusion of Robert Johnson, say, or any number of the brilliantly inclined Jazz musicians American music is so populated with. If the literary canon does not exist, does the musical one? If the musical canon does exist, and it is populated by such a large number of the socially and economically hindered, what then does this have to say about the possibility of the existence of a literary canon? Or the arguments made against its validity or existence? (Perhaps the notion of a scientific canon should be reevaluated, as well, and the inclusion of proofs based on the scientific method should be discarded and replaced with...?)

Finally, a body of art, no matter the medium or genre, must hold nothing else before aesthetics as a guide to its creation. Otherwise, we will be left with a literary history comprised of period pieces steeped in the politics of their time: a possibility I do not cherish, and leave to future generations to evaluate the merits and endurance of.