“No Man is an Island” ½¾—— National Literary Canons, Writers, and Readers
LYN INNES
ENEDICT ANDERSON HAS ARGUED FOR the importance of literature in the creation of an imagined national community through the B stories we tell about ourselves.1 However, it is not only the stories we tell about ourselves but the story we tell about the stories that becomes significant in the formation of national identity or, in other words, the creation of a national literary canon with its inclusions and exclusions. That narrative also entails the ways and contexts in which we are encouraged to read those texts – the questions we ask of them, the themes we emphasize, the frame- works and structures we set up to establish continuity, a story of a developing and grounded national literature. The resulting national literary history is, more often than not, a remarkably insular one. As Joe Cleary has remarked in his excellent book Outrageous Fortune,2 the literary historiography of the Irish novel is itself seen as a kind of Bildungsroman, tracing it from its infant ‘origins’ towards a kind of maturity, often along the lines of Ian Watt’s “rise of the novel.”3 Moreover, specific texts are selected to act as ‘milestones’ or, in T.S. Eliot’s term, “monuments,”
1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflecting on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 2 Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007). 3 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957; Berkeley: U of California P, 2001). 190 LYN INNES ½¾ to mark significant developments.4 In a national literary history, a chosen people is defined through a series of chosen texts. Thus, Australian literary histories may begin with Marcus Clarke or Charles Harpur and continue through Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Patrick White, Judith Wright, and Les Murray. These milestone texts may be contested within certain limits – for example, with regard to their preoccupation with the rural as opposed to the city, or male as opposed to female – but the core issue has to do with the ‘Australianness’ of the writer (a core issue which, of course, merely begs the question). Similarly, Irish literary histories and anthologies may begin with Jonathan Swift or Brian Merriman (or earlier Irish-language writing), and continue via Maria Edgeworth, James Clarence Mangan, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney. The narrative may be contested in terms of language or cultural tradition (urban or peasant, Anglo-Irish or native Irish), but the issue and the parameters remain a definition of Irishness and a claim to ownership of that identity. In short, whether Australian or Irish, the literary canon is defined as contained within the limits of the island (or island continent), and is restricted to those who can be said to belong physically within the confines of that island-nation. Similar boundaries are drawn to describe and define the trajectories of other national (or continental) litera- tures, whether Indian, Canadian, Sri Lankan, Nigerian, Kenyan – or, perhaps more widely, African – so that here, too, the ethnic or cultural boundaries are perceived as self-contained islands. Such deliberate or chosen insularity can be seen as a response to colonialist denials of native worth and culture, the claim that the colonizer represents and brings from outside civilization to the uncivilized native. It is, to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, a kind of “strategic essentialism.”5 In consequence, postcolo- nial national literary histories are often constructed in dialogue with the domi- nant colonial tradition. To quote Joe Cleary again:
The history of the Irish novel is examined almost exclusively within a self-contained national frame or with reference to one single domi- nant tradition, in this case the English one [...]. Were they to look further afield, Irish literary historians might find that they have as much to learn from Scottish, American, or Canadian, as from Eng-
4 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975): 38. 5 Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Lon- don: Routledge, 1988): 205.