A Mongrel Canon Joel Whitney
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THE GL•BAL CAN•N Joel Whitney is founding editor of Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, and a member of the board of the Overseas Press Club of America. His writing and commentary have appeared in The New Republic, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Paris Review, The Nation, Agni, New York and on NPR. In 2003, he was awarded a “Discovery” prize by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation for his poetry. A Mongrel Canon Joel Whitney In 1994, the critic Harold Bloom mounted ran. But all too rarely does Tehran get to a vigorous public defense of the western lit- Stratford-upon-Avon. erary canon, which was then under siege. In Indeed, all writers who came after his volume, “The Western Canon,” Bloom Shakespeare have stood in the shadow of lauded the tradition of great western books, his influence. And all, willfully or almost portraying himself as a singular reader in a willfully, misread him—as a result of their one on one reverie with each of twenty-six “anxiety of influence” and as a way to cast canonical authors. No aspect beyond aes- him off and find their entry point into thetics, or influence, should count. Or so he the Canon that Bloom and his school of argued from one side of his mouth. thought would hold. In Shakespeare’s case, But the Bloom-related buzz came you can only work around him. He con- from the very theme he pretended his tains all of us. He invented us, anticipating readers should ignore—the political all the scholarly breakthroughs in philoso- context surrounding the book, a context phy and psychology that would follow. which, sadly, belatedly, persists. For the This argument risks being buried main problem with Bloom’s stance is that, under the multiculturalists’ program—a as many writers with origins outside or veritable “School of Resentment,” popu- partly outside the West can tell us, the lated by Marxists, feminists and other Canon is universal in ways Bloom simul- fellow travelers. The anxious defenders of taneously grasps and discounts. Bloom’s the long-standing Western Canon come to is a one-way universality found when rest on the notion that opening the Canon productions of Shakespeare travel to Teh- dilutes it. There simply isn’t enough time © 2010 World Policy Institute 19 to read key parts of the Canon—even less global age—how to be at odds with your- after we include works merely for their self as you toggle between cultures. multicultural values. Bloom, that pied In today’s atmosphere of an all but piper of the Western Canon, was clearly moribund publishing industry, immigrant wrong to see fidelity to the tradition of fiction is one of the steady pulses. Espe- great writers as fundamentally incompat- cially in the United States, foreignness ible with multiculturalism. It shows a deep or otherness is both familiar and strange, misunderstanding (by this icon of western almost at once—valued in the arts, scape- culture) of multiculturalism’s corrective goated in populist politics. A foreign or impulses. It shows how much he misdiag- bicultural writer’s strangeness—that is, nosed the true threat. our collective estranged-ness from the world—will continue to drive us toward discovering it in our books, with a nudge Who Rules? from publishers who need something to In 2010, the Berlin Wall is still down. market. This happens for better and worse: Markets rule, though tentatively. The better when a culture or subculture is il- world’s straight-jacketed superpower has luminated brilliantly from within; worse its first black president, with roots in when it leads to tokenism. Kenya and a youth spent in Indonesia. But even given this scale, the principle Suddenly, the great agenda of multicul- that has always held—and that ought to turalism holds sway, despite the strains have heartened rather than agitated those imposed by large-scale immigration in who plump for the Western Canon—re- Europe and the United States, and the mains intact. An author’s greatness comes backdrop of the war on terror, with its from his or her relationship with prior latest “ground-zero mosque” frenzies. greats, western or not. These are the Multiculturalism will overwhelm these individuals who keep our attention in the threats, too, because it has already found long run. The multiculturalist mantle, consensus. The United States, Europe, despite how the paranoid have seen it, has Africa (notably Nigeria), India and other not ignored the past. It has merely spread parts of Asia, notably the Philippines, are the past around. It has found authors all flush with brilliant writers who may whose relationship with a great—if not the write in English but whose parents or great—tradition is healthy, vibrant and grandparents spoke the language only sec- sufficiently anxious. ond, or not at all. Then there are the great Japanese and Chinese writers who come to us in translation. Hopes and Impediments Many of these writers remain rooted Five years before Bloom’s “Western Canon” in their original birthplace, but have a appeared, Chinua Achebe brought out his relationship with the West via language, book of essays “Hopes and Impediments.” work, schooling, exile or immigration. Achebe shows up on Bloom’s appendix Others reside in the West, and tell stories of writers who aspire, promisingly, to the of double-life, double identity—the here Canon. As a Nigerian, Achebe is eligible before here was here. Largely, it’s the back for canonization apparently not by virtue of and forth, literally and figuratively, that being “Western” per se, but by writing well initiates and drives many of these authors. in English. He was also one of the multi- How to be your own doppelganger, cultur- culturalist resenters. “Hopes and Impedi- ally speaking, is the great subject of the ments” opens with “An Image of Africa,” 20 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2010 which is his critique of another canonical ‘beasts who have no houses’ [John Locke in writer in Bloom’s appendix, Joseph Conrad, 1561] writes, ‘They are also people with- who as a Brit, albeit writing much about out heads, having their mouths and eyes the non-western world, fits the stereotype in their breasts.’…[This] represents the of the western creative genius. In the essay, beginning of a tradition…in the West…of Achebe makes the case that Europeans see sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, Africa as a kind of shadow-Europe, a per- of difference, of darkness, of people who, in petually savage “other.” Conrad, a racist at the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard the height of this tendency, Achebe argues, Kipling, are ‘half-devil, half-child.’” was perhaps at his most explicit in “Heart of Darkness.” Take Conrad’s description of a Stories have been used to black mistress of Kurtz, the ivory dispossess and to malign. But trader turned tyrant and demigod deep in the heart of the Congo stories can also be used to Free State: “She was savage and su- perb, wild-eyed and magnificent... empower and to humanize. She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable But Achebe’s critique starts with blind purpose.” Achebe disputes, convincingly, spots in the language of “Heart of Dark- the apologia that would separate a patently ness,” namely in Conrad’s mystification racist Marlow, Conrad’s protagonist, from of the landscape, how he makes anything the author himself. All it takes is a quote African “inscrutable” and “incomprehen- from Conrad’s account of his first interac- sible.” If Shakespeare invented the hu- tion with a black man: “A certain enormous man, as Bloom asserts, then Europeans of buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my Conrad’s ilk helped invent and perpetu- conception of blind, furious, unreasoning ate the savage. If Shakespeare contains all rage, as manifested in the human animal to humanity, all philosophy and psychology the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to that come before and after him, all of what dream for years afterwards.” any of us may dream or think or be, then Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Achebe and other multiculturalists are Adichie would seem to agree there’s a right to disdain Conrad for the opposite— problem with the Canon’s singularity. In a for removing any trace of humanity from recent TED (Technology, Entertainment, his African characters. The point should be Design) Talk, two decades after Achebe’s clear. Wanting humans to be depicted with “Image of Africa” first surfaced, Adichie humanity is an aesthetic argument. warned of the dangers of what she calls a “single story” about a place or people, and discusses the early effects of reading And Then There’s Art English stories devoid of Africans. Later, Lest we think such fine aesthetics are con- writers like Achebe inspired a “mental fined to the written word, Achebe observes shift” where she found that people like her that “soon after Conrad had written his “could exist in literature.” She continued, book, an event of far greater consequence “This single story of Africa ultimately was taking place in the art world of Eu- comes I think from western literature… rope.” Gaugin had died in Tahiti. Achebe After referring to the black Africans as quotes Frank Willett, British art historian: Mongrel Canon 21 Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the the life that they supply so copiously? most extravagant individual act of No, painting is not made to decorate turning to a non-European culture apartments. It’s an offensive and defen- in the decades immediately before sive weapon against the enemy.