Canonicity Author(S): Wendell V

Canonicity Author(s): Wendell V. Harris Source: PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 110-121 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/462827 Accessed: 13-12-2019 20:18 UTC

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This content downloaded from 12.156.20.2 on Fri, 13 Dec 2019 20:18:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Wendell V. Harris

Canonicity

WENDELL V. HARRIS is HE CANONICAL FACTS about the canons of English and professor of English at Penn American literature are, first, that there are no canons and State University. His most never have been; second, that there have necessarily always been canons; and third, that canons are made up of readings, not of dis- recent books are The Om- embodied texts. What is contradictory in that statement results from nipresent Debate: Empiricism play on different connotations of the word canon-a critical strategy and Transcendentalism in that is constantly, though often more subtly, in use. As with many an- Nineteenth-Century English other critical term, the first step in understanding canon is to unpack Prose (Northern Illinois UP, its meanings. The "canon question" then proves much more complex 1981) and Interpretive Acts: than In contemporary ideological criticism admits. Search of Meaning (Clarendon- Oxford UP, 1988). He is cur- The Inappropriateness of the Biblical Parallel rently completing a dictionary of primary literary concepts. The well-known core meaning of the Greek kanon is "rule" or "mea- sure" and, by extrapolation, "correct" or "authoritative." As Rudolph Pfeiffer has pointed out, the first application of the word to selections of authors-by David Ruhnken in 1768-was catachrestic (207). A more nearly precise word than selection was so much needed that canon quickly became almost indispensable, despite its entanglement with concepts of authority and rule not necessarily relevant to literary canons. Not surprisingly, the normative sense of the term has clung alongside its elective sense: selections suggest norms, and norms suggest an appeal to some sort of authority. However, the criteria for selecting literary texts are derived not from authority but from chosen functions. The normative sense of canon has been strongly reinforced by the application of the term to the accepted books of the Bible, though there is no agreement on the original force of the word even in this application. l The processes by which specific collections of Jewish and Chris- tian writings became closed canons in the first century BC and the fourth century AD, respectively, are not only too complicated for useful summary here but, more important, largely irrelevant to the question of the literary canon. In fact, considerable confusion has resulted from the seductive apparent parallel between the creation and closing of the biblical canons and the formation of lists of literary works that, since

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Ruhnken, have been called "canons." Chapter 14 whose essay on the subject has become an almost of Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and obligatory citation, is among those who use the the Latin Middle Ages, a chapter frequently cited biblical canon as a model: "The desire to have a in discussions of literary canons, considers early canon, more or less unchanging, and to protect it catalogs of authors, aspects of the ever-renewed against the charges of inauthenticity or low value conflict between ancients and moderns, canon (as the Church protected Hebrews, for example, formation in the church, the medieval canon, and against Luther) is an aspect of the necessary con- finally modern canons. The section on the church servatism of a learned institution" (77). The point and the Bible seems to have encouraged Curtius is unarguable, but despite the assumption in "the to use canon for the authorized literary lists, whose profession of English" that some texts are better variations from period to period and country to and some interpretations more reasonable than country he learnedly surveys. But the section on others, admission into the profession hardly re- modern canon formation essentially considers the quires the candidate to accept any list of texts as relations among the works that Italy, France, Ger- uniquely necessary to the academic equivalent of many, and Spain defined as "classical"-an issue salvation.3 The most conservative of our col- that, for Curtius, depends not on degrees of leagues do not demand that a candidate take, say, authoritative sponsorship but largely on the degree Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot as "articles of romanticism in the literature of each country. of faith" and abjure Wharton, Dallas, Gosse, and It has not been sufficiently noted that this chap- Fish. Nor have universities wielded full authority ter is titled "Classicism," not "The Canon," and over the canon since they separated themselves that it primarily concerns the question of how from the medieval church. Until then, of course, works somehow come to be regarded as "classic." the following excerpt from a bishop's condemna- Though there have been many lists of approved tion of heresy in the records of the University of authors through the centuries and across Europe, Paris was not untypical: they have differed widely; not even Aristotle has been canonical in the sense of the biblical texts. Let the body of master Amaury be removed from This is not to deny that there were traditions- the cemetery and cast into unconsecrated ground, and usefully traced by Bruce Kimball-in which the same be excommunicated by all the churches of authors were regarded as "standard" because they the entire province.... The writings of David of seemed to inculcate the right moral and intellec- Dinant are to be brought to the bishop of Paris be- tual principles or to demonstrate a mastery of fore the Nativity and burned. accurate thinking.2 But the catalogs identifying es- Neither the books of Aristotle on natural philos- pecially valuable works not only varied consider- ophy nor their commentaries are to be read at Paris ably, they did not fence others out. The texts that in public or secret, and this we forbid under penalty one ought to have read differed from others in de- of excommunication. He in whose possession the gree; they were not absolutely distinct like the writings of David of Dinant are found after Nativity shall be considered a heretic. (Thorndike 26-27) biblical books, which very quickly came to be regarded as different in kind. Obviously the very entelechy of the process of biblical canonizing was The most cogent portion of Kermode's essay is toward closure, whereas literary canons have al- his suggestion that certain texts somehow become ways implicitly allowed for at least the possibility "licensed" for exegesis and are thereafter subject of adding new or revalued works. to "interminable" explication (83). What Kermode Though the sense of "unquestionably and so aptly describes, however, is canon formation uniquely authoritative" that belongs to the bibli- not through a work's acceptance into a severely cal canon (and to the theologically derived en- limited set of authoritative texts but through its in- dorsements and prohibitions churches enforce on troduction into an ongoing critical colloquy. The members of their faith) continually colors the de- analogy with a colloquy or conversation functions bate over the modern literary canon, the analogy in several ways. In a given time and place there are is more dramatic than helpful. Frank Kermode, events and topics that everyone presumably knows

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about. Some of these have been of continuous in- A Multiplicity of Canons and the Pressures terest, or at least have had a place in a society's cul- on Them tural discourse from generation to generation; others have recently gained attention and will quickly fade. What proves interesting in general Alastair Fowler's discrimination of six kinds of conversation will depend on what the conversa- canons has met with general acceptance. The tionalists are at that time accustomed to discuss- potential canon "comprises the entire written ing. There are topics that sustain no more than a corpus, together with all surviving oral literature." few moments' talk, but the cleverness with which The accessible canon is that portion of the poten- a subject is introduced has a great deal to do with tial canon available at a given time. Lists of whether it is taken up. While there are conversa- authors and texts-as in anthologies, syllabi, and tional unfortunates who wrap everything they say reviewers' choices-are selective canons. What in dullness, others do the opposite, using wit, an Fowler calls the official canon is, I take it, a blend- ability to see unexpected significances, and in- ing of such lists. What individual readers "know triguing modes of argument to lend at least mo- and value" are personal canons. And, finally, the mentary interest to whatever topic they initiate. critical canon is made up of those works or parts Precisely the same distinctions operate within the of works that are repeatedly treated in critical ar- critical colloquy. ticles and books (98-99). As useful as these dis- On this analogy, the historical resonance of atinctions are, it is equally useful to recognize the text (the degree to which it explicitly relates to variety of the principles defining them, the loose- other texts), the possible multiplication of its sig- ness of the resulting definitions, and the need for nificances (the degree to which it is multivalent),4 additional classifications. Fowler's potential the skill with which it is brought into the critical canon, for instance, is defined by total inclusivity, colloquy (the degree to which it finds fortunate but the degree to which what it includes goes be- sponsorship), and the congruence between its pos- yond traditional definitions of literature will de- sible significances and critics' current preoccupa- pend on one's critical allegiances. The accessible tions (the degree to which it proves malleable)-all canon is also inclusive, but only for a single loca- these interact to determine how much interest the tion; perhaps further, it varies with the sophisti- text can sustain over how long a period. Instead cation of each reader. Personal canons seem made of stamping works with authority, literary canons up of an indeterminate interaction between all the propose entries into a culture's critical colloquy. works individuals have read and those they prefer This colloquy is nothing but a corner of that "un- to some degree or other. Since official and criti- ending conversation" Kenneth Burke so memora- cal canons are precipitated out of the mass of se- bly describes: lective canons, the only canons produced by systematic choice are the innumerable and heter- ogeneous selective ones. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When Additional distinctions suggest themselves as you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they useful, though like Fowler's they rest on no sys- are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too tematic taxonomic principle and therefore over- heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it lap at various points. The term canon as applied is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun to a closed, uniquely authoritative body of texts, long before any of them got there, so that no one such as the Bible, fits nowhere in his six present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that classifications; it represents a seventh kind had gone before. You listen for a while, until you de- (canon7). If we take Fowler's official canon to cide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you an- mean something like all the authors and titles in swer him. . . However, the discussion is intermina- whatever reasonably comprehensive literary ble. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you histories are standard at a given time and if we ac- do depart, with the discussion vigorously in progress. cept his definition of the critical canon as the texts (94-96) most written about at that time, the list of works

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commonly taught in high school and undergradu- Further perspective comes from recognizing ate classes will be not only much shorter than the that, until the Renaissance, selective canons in lit- official canon but also unlikely to correspond ex- erature were generally of little importance, that actly to the critical. Thus there is theoretical space selective canons of European vernacular literature for a pedagogical canon (canon8). blossomed only in the eighteenth century (see Cur- What of the numerous authors who are given tius 264-72), and that selective canons of English special recognition in selection after selection over and American literature are more recent still. The centuries or at least decades? Or those contem- only nonecclesiastical canons that have carried porary authors who have high visibility? In a hap- even local authority have been the lists of required hazard way these tend to be grouped together-in readings for specific educational endeavors. In the the 1990s a person interested in literature presum- medieval period, given the aleatory availability of ably knows not only Ovid, Milton, and Arnold but Greek and Latin texts and the practice of study- Ozick, Morrison, and Ashbery. But the glacially ing the ancient poets largely as part of the process changing core is a kind of diachronic canon of learning the classical languages and acquiring (canon9), to be distinguished from a rapidly rhetorical skills, the literary works prescribed vary changing periphery that could be called the nonce considerably. Knowledge of literature was in any canon (canon,0), only a minuscule part of which case wholly ancillary for centuries, having little will eventually become part of the diachronic directly to do with the requirements for the canon.5 I leave open the question whether thebachelor-of-arts degree, which from the twelfth academy's hegemony is such that there are nocentury to the sixteenth were almost wholly in longer truly popular canons rivaling the diachron- logic.7 ic and nonce canons of the literary professoriat.6 In contrast, the breadth of learning that a What makes it easy to think of a continuing Renaissance humanist like Erasmus expected of monolithic canon, to confuse the diachronic and teachers was less a canon than a summons to something of the nonce canon with the biblical universal knowledge: at one point or another, De analogue, is the smoothness with which certain Ratione Studii mentions Pliny, Macrobius, Gel- new writers enter the diachronic canon and certain lius, Athenaeus, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, texts and authors move within it from the accepted Plotinus, Origen, Chrysostom, Basil, Jerome, center to the doubtful periphery (and occasionally Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Boccaccio, Pomponius back again). That smoothness is born of an inter- Mela, Ptolemy, Strabo, Lucian, Demosthenes, woven set of processes. What a generation is Herodotus, Cicero, Quintilian, Horace, Caesar, taught depends on the tastes and interests of the Sallust, Aristophanes, Euripides, Terence, and previous generation and on the anthologies and Donatus. The formalization of curricula after the texts created in response to the demands that is- Renaissance, of course, tended to produce a selec- sue from those tastes and interests. To the selective canon in each university. At least in the United tion that it has inherited, each generation adds States and England, the prescribed literary and hu- those works given visibility by either fortunate manistic texts remained wholly classical until at sponsorship or malleability to current interests. least the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thus What one generation transmits to the next, how- the Dartmouth "Course of Study" for 1852-53 ever, can hardly be the sum of these two-there is lists the following more or less literary readings only so much time in any degree curriculum, only over the four years: Livy, Homer's Iliad, so much time for anyone to read. Something has Coleridge's Introductions to the Greek Classic to give. Still, as has frequently been noticed, Poets, Ovid, Horace, Felton's Selections from the authors once a part of the diachronic canon gener- Greek Historians, Aeschylus's Prometheus, Taci- ally retain at least a minimal cachet; they may be tus, Sophocles's Ajax, Demosthenes, Cicero, relegated to a canonical attic but rarely to the trash Plato's Gorgias, Juvenal, and Terence's Andria. can. Perhaps, therefore, the diachronic canon is Vernacular literature did not enter the university actually divided into two subcanons, a canonical curriculum until the nineteenth century. English haven and a canonical limbo. became a school at Oxford only in 1893, a tripos

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at Cambridge only in 1917, and a major at most omits about seventy-five of Stedman's poets, while American universities still later; thus academic adding a few American writers. Christopher canons of English literature developed at about the Ricks's New OxfordBook of Victorian Verse, pub- same time as those of American literature and lished seventy-five years after Quiller-Couch's, have gone through parallel twentieth-century offers only 113 poets. Granted that neither the edi- revisions. tors' intentions nor the publishing exigencies can Comparison of anthologies-a popular aca- have been quite the same for these volumes, a two- demic pastime at present-is informative in several thirds reduction in the number of poets is nonethe- ways. Alan C. Golding's "History of American less a dramatic winnowing. Poetry Anthologies" surveys the range of criteria Editors of classroom texts have found the pres- used in anthologies from Elihu Hubbard Smith's sures for reduction of the number of authors even 1793 American Poems, Selected and Original togreater. Assigning three hundred, two hundred, or the 1975 Norton Anthology of American Litera- even fifty poets to an undergraduate class would ture. As Golding points out, an anthologist like be a daunting and probably an unfruitful under- Smith, gathering poems from periodicals and taking. Thus a true textbook like George Benja- newspapers,8 seeks to preserve, to increase the min Woods's Victorian Poetry (1930) offers only Fowlerian accessible canon. But what an editor sixty-nine poets for instructors to choose from. deems worthy of preservation is already a selec- That number was cut to fifty-four in the 1955 edition. The criteria Golding finds in the earlier tionan- of Victorian Poetry and to forty-seven for the thologies are the promotion of political values, the1965 edition. (The three editions do not greatly dif- celebration of an American sense of nationhood, fer in the number of lines of poetry they contain; and the provision of moral inspiration; after theadditional poems by the poets who have been re- middle of the nineteenth century the primary con-tained take up the space.) Bowyer and Brooks's sideration is the maintenance of a formal and con- Victorian Age: Prose, Poetry, and Drama (1954) servative tradition; this is followed by the urge offers to poems by forty-nine writers; Bloom and undermine genteel values, and today the most im-Trilling's Victorian Prose and Poetry (1973) by just portant challengers are feminist, ethnic, and po-twenty-one (including only one poet, John David- litical (primarily Marxist) concerns. son, who does not appear in Bowyer and Brooks). A glance at Victorian poetry collections is par- Among the forces driving textbook anthologists ticularly useful, since the selection processes are to restrict their selections is what can be called "the recent. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Anthology principle of academic recirculation." Academics (1895), apparently intended for the general reader tend to teach what they have been taught, what is as well as the student, offers poems by 329 poets, easily available in print, what others are writing including George Darley, Barry Cornwall (Bryan interestingly about, and what they themselves are Procter), C. J. Wells, William Maginn, William writing about; what is easily available in print James Linton, Sara Coleridge, Mary Howitt, Eliza tends to be what is being taught and written about; Cook, Roden Noel, Cosmo Monkhouse, Dinah what is written about tends to be what one is teach- Craik, Gerald Griffin, Robert Gilfillan, and Eu- ing or others are writing about. gene Lee-Hamilton. Given the volume's date and anticipated readership, Stedman was altogether Selective Canons: Criteria and Functions reasonable in casting a broad net "to make a truth- ful exhibit of the course of song during the last Sorting the criteria used in drawing up selective sixty years, as shown by the poets of Great Brit- canons requires as much attention as sorting the ain in the best of their shorter productions" (ix).definitions of the term canon itself. The criteria Who could know which poets of the preceding also tend to overlap, and it is difficult to imagine sixty years would maintain readers' interest? a selection truly being made on one alone. Any Seventeen years later another anthology not in-editor of a collection titled "Writing by American tended specifically for the classroom, Arthur Women, 1990" would clearly have to apply criteria Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, beyond those stated in the title. Moreover, un-

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recognized assumptions underlie both explicit question by looking for hallmarks rather than criteria and unacknowledged intentions. Thus the functions; perhaps he intuitively knew that if he New Critical argument that poems cannot be looked for functions he would find all too many paraphrased was developed into the claim that po- for his purposes. etry has no propositional meaning; the ultimate The personal and literary-historical estimates implication of that position is the futility of criti- are but two among countless others. While an ex- cal discussion. Similarly, as R. S. Crane points haustive list of the functions of selective canons out, the tension valued in New Criticism all too would probably not be either possible or useful, easily passed over into the automatic ascription of it is easy to suggest a sufficient range of examples universal oppositions to any text the critic valued.9 to caution against reductive generalizations. In explicitly seeking "the best that is known and Providing Models, Ideals, and Inspiration. thought," Arnold intended either to impose the Though the furnishing of examples is one of the uniform moral and social values of his own class oldest functions of selection, there are evidently (a common interpretation today) or (as it is pos- models of many different kinds. The Alexandrians sible to argue) to set in motion a constant process chose texts demonstrating the best grammatical of revaluation, behind which lay assumptions usage, while the Ciceronian and Quintilian con- grounded in a belief in the necessity of a hierar- cepts of the orator-leader required texts embody- chical society (now the usual view) or (as it is also ing various social virtues. Models of belief and possible to argue) the necessity of breaking conduct are of course constantly shifting. What through the class structure. 0 serves as a model of morality for most readers in To some extent one can avoid the problem of one period may at another time be regarded as a differentiating specific criteria and basic assump- model of self-righteousness; one person's inspira- tions in a critic's or theorist's work by investigating tional clarion is another's intolerable cant. Gol- the functions a particular selection was apparently ding describes Rufus Griswold's Poets and Poetry intended to perform. Barbara Herrnstein Smith of America as based on "the conviction that argues that all evaluations of literary texts are ac- American poetry should be represented by speci- tually judgments of how well the texts in question mens of the utmost moral purity, that poetry's satisfy the changing needs of individuals and so- function is inspirational" (288), but the challenge cieties, that is, how well they fulfill particular func- to the poetry that Griswold assumed filled that tions. To analyze the criteria on which a selection function-and the rather similar poetry antholo- appears to have been made, critics must seek such gized by Bryant, Emerson, and Whittier-came functions, always keeping in mind that they recog- primarily from Whitman, whose champions could nize these through processes that reflect their own equally describe him as moral and inspirational. changing needs. Moralizing and inspiring are currently rather out Arnold having been mentioned, it is appropri- of fashion as honorific adjectives for literature, ate to begin with his influential effort to dis- but the functions they designate are still fully oper- entangle the evaluative criteria-the kinds of ative. Marxist and feminist arguments are no less "estimates," in his terms-on which selections are appeals to assumed moral values than are Pope's, made. The two against which Arnold warns can Wordsworth's, or Holmes's; the working-class easily be defined by their functions. The "per- writers sponsored by Paul Lauter in "Caste, Class, sonal" estimate attempts to achieve congruence and Canon" offer no less a commentary on how with individual needs and experiences (an aim that the world should be than do the writers honored presumably represents the evaluative component by the New Critics. of Fowler's personal canon). The "historical" es- Transmitting the Heritage of Thought. Another timate, by which Arnold means the literary- canonical function is the provision of what is historical, seeks to provide signposts to mark forks regarded as the basic cultural knowledge necessary and turns in the historical development of genres, to interpret past texts, see current issues in histor- new subject matter, and formal features. In urg- ical perspective, and orient oneself to the aesthetic ing the "real" estimate, however, Arnold begs the achievements, social and political changes, and

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philosophical debates that have gone on for cen- enough in the 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads; turies. The Philology of Martianus Capella's fifth- Arnold was creating a place for his own poetry century Marriage of Philology and Mercury is the even in condemning his "Empedocles on Etna." bride who brings this ability to Mercury (elo- Writing about the Victorian canon, G. Robert quence). At one level the goal is "cultural literacy" Stange states that in the specific sense of the ability to read texts written by writers who have assumed such literacy- as most serious writers have. 1 Harry Levin's more the principal agents of canon formation are the poets ambitious description of knowledge as "our most themselves who alter the poetic tradition by disvalu- ing some accepted "classics," giving authority to cer- valued patrimony, our collective memory," ex- tain earlier art that has special meaning for them, or presses the use of such knowledge. redefining in the interests of their own practice . the nature and responsibilities of poetic language. Higher education, across the centuries, has con- (159) stituted a continuous dialogue between the minds of ancestors and contemporaries. If we, the latter, know any more than the former, it is because we have Alan Golding reminds us that "Bryant, Emerson, learned so much from them. As T. S. Eliot remarked, and Whittier all agree that the six most important "They are that which we know." Naturally we may re- poets in America are themselves, Longfellow, act against them, and the reactions would not prove Lowell, and Holmes" (292). Hugh Kenner com- unproductive if they pointed towards a dialectical ments, "The Modernist canon has been made synthesis. (362) . .chiefly . . . by the canonized themselves, who were apt to be aware of a collective enterprise, In fact, what appear and repeatedly to be acknowledged efforts one another" to(374); overthrow the present canon are and,often of course, Eliot'sendeavors championship of Donne to expand it, to enlarge our patrimony was no less strategic and than sincere.enrich the "collective memory," that is, Legitimating communal Theory. The New Critics knowledgeprovide and awareness. a dramatic instance of the influence of critical the- Creating Common Frames of Reference. ory on selection: It iswhile the function of their expli- possible to argue not that any particular cation was canon presumably is to exhibit meaning as fully justified but rather that some canon as ispossible, necessary their selection of works to be expli- to provide common reference points. cated If hadit theis trueimplicit function of exhibiting the that all interpretation of texts depends power on of theira com- approach. Deconstructionists, it munity's sharing interpretive strategies, hardly it needs may to be said, prefer texts with almost equally true that, as Howard Felperin invisible argues, seams "the that can be pried open to suggest institutional study of [literature] is gaping inconceivable contradictions, while neo-Marxists, includ- without a canon. Without a canon, a ingcorpus most of or the cy- new historicists, are partial to texts nosure of exemplary texts, there thatcan can be be noshown in- to reveal unsuspected workings terpretive community, no more than of therepolitical can power. be Practiced New Critics, decon- a faith-community without a gospel" structionists, (46). Thisand Marxists can, of course, read al- conception of the function of the canon most any does text notin a way that supports their own directly offer criteria for text selection, allegiances, but it buttends the texts each group is most likely to favor a limited selection from the to diachronic select are those for which it can provide the canon. fullest, most dramatic, and most convincing Logrolling. Writers have gained entrance readings. into the nonce canon not only by the power Historicizing. of their Literary texts have been so tradi- writing (for "power" one may read tionally"appeal thought to ex-to cast light on the periods in tant societal or critical interests") but which by they their were written-andac- historical and con- tive espousal of texts or criteria congenial temporary toevents their to affect the proper interpre- own aims. Wordsworth does this tationtransparently of texts-that arguments over the relation

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of literature to history have primarily involved of literature into conventional 'periods' and questions of emphasis. How fully are Chaucer's 'themes"' (440). pilgrims representative of fourteenth-century En- At present, pluralization appears to have real, gland? How reductive, how much confined to a if unstated, limits. For instance, there has been no single class, is the "world picture" Tillyard found rush to defend the sentimental description and in- in the Elizabethans? While one of the accepted spirational storytelling that delighted our grand- values of literature, one reason for selecting older parents. The generation educated early in this works, has been to convey a sense of how the world century still happily quoted "Little Orphant was then, recent "historicizing" has shifted this Annie," "Excelsior," "Curfew Must Not Ring emphasis to an analysis of the unconscious as- Tonight," "Casabianca," and "The Good Time sumptions of earlier writers (as revealed by the Coming," but the antielitist impulse has yet to re- conscious psychological or political assumptions habilitate Mrs. Hemans or Charles Mackay. of the critic)12 or-as Annette Kolodny writes, cit- ing Jane Tomkins-to an analysis of "'how and The Selection of Texts as the Selection why specific texts have power in the world' (or do of Readings not attain power, as the case may be) at any given moment" (304). Whatever the functions governing selections, it is Pluralizing. Though the attention given to lit- important to recognize that although a canon is erature written by, or representing the experience nominally made up of texts, it is actually made up of, women and ethnic minorities may seem espe- not of texts in themselves but of texts as read. cially characteristic of the 1970s and 1980s, there When the church found ways of accommodating was a better balance at the turn of the century than pagan authors to Christian belief, what it admit- now. The 1890s in England were a strongly ted to its selection of Greek and Roman philoso- pluralizing time in which writers expressing the phers and poets were particular readings of the points of view of the Irish, the Scots, women, and texts. Augustine thus compares the acceptable the poor were selected precisely because they teachings of the pagans to the "vases and orna- represented perspectives outside the dominant ments of gold and silver and clothing which the one. Stedman's 1895 anthology includes, for in- Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, stance, sections for poets of Australasia and as if to put them to a better use" (75). Canada and, among those who would now be Leaping to the present, one can cite The Catcher called poets of the people, Thomas Cooper, in the Rye, which owes its continuing place in the Ebenezer Elliott, and Ebenezer Jones. A full third nonce canon to its mimetic function as a portrait of the poets included are women. By contrast, in of adolescence but which can be selected, Quiller-Couch's 1912 Oxford Book of Victorian according to Richard Ohmann's reading, as a neo- Verse only a sixth of the poets are women (a frac- Marxist text that intends to reveal the omni- tion maintained in Christopher Ricks's 1987 New presence of capitalist ideology. Again, as Annette Oxford Book of Victorian Verse), Irish poets are Kolodny argues more clearly and explicitly than less frequent, and Indian and Australian poets most other critics seeking to expand the canon, the have largely disappeared. In "Race and Gender in reading of unfamiliar literary texts and unfamiliar the Shaping of the American Literary Canon" types of criticism should not merely make one Paul Lauter notes a similar phenomenon in an- comfortable with new texts but defamiliarize the thologies of American literature, with the percen- texts in the current critical and pedagogical tages of black and women writers declining canons. While her already influential 1985 essay markedly between 1919 and 1950. Though Lauter argues for expansion and pluralization of the offi- elsewhere sees the invisible hand of monopoly cial canon, it implies as well that future selections capitalism in canon selection, he here lists the should include only those works from the present causes as "the eastern male elite's professionaliza- critical and pedagogical canons whose texts as tion of the teaching of literature," the formalist read after defamiliarization meet whatever selec- aesthetic, and the "historiographic organization tion criteria are applied.

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The Ultimate Function of Canons Is history only as a tawdry melodrama of interests to Compete pursued and ideologies produced" (37). Though ideologically oriented critics frequently If we have not one canon of literature but many, cite the relativity of "truth," they must, of course, no canon formation but, rather, constant pro- assume that their own social and political beliefs cesses of text selection, no selection based on a sin- are, if not absolute, a great deal less relative than gle criterion, and no escape from the necessity others.of In contrast, those of a somewhat more con- selection, to attack The Canon is to misconceive sistent indeterminizing persuasion hold that, since the problem. Similarly, to attribute all selection there are no absolute truths, or at least no way to processes to the influence of power is radically discover them if they do exist, no text is to be pre- simplistic, unless power and influence are defined ferred for its presumed truth-value. Such a posi- so broadly that they include all social motivation. tion is perennially open to the objection that it The dominant conventions in a particular society must accept as absolute the relativity of all truths at a particular time obviously derive their power and values or fall into a version of the liar para- from some source. But the possible sources aredox (all beliefs are relative, including the belief that many-political, economic, moral, aesthetic, all beliefs are relative), but it has a long history, metaphysical, religious, and psychological-and beginning no later than Heraclitus and given sanc- since they appear to be closely intertwined, the tion by Socrates, who is forever seeking, not question of which, if any, underlies all the others promulgating, truth.14 What Bruce Kimball calls remains moot. One can argue that all human the "philosophical" (as opposed to the "oratori- choices are at root political, or economic, orcal") tradition of liberal education is based pre- moral, or aesthetic, or metaphysical, or psycho- cisely on this argument, asserting itself against any logical, but little is illuminated by this tactic. 3standard selection of authors (auctores) on the Whatever the motivation of canon selection, itground that there can be no authorities since there remains important to contest the constrictive ten- can be no final truth. Nevertheless, critics, how- dencies of the critical and pedagogical lists. Given ever relativist, must choose what texts they wish the forces generating the professional recirculation to talk about, just as readers must choose what of texts, we risk intellectual stagnation if we do notones to read. champion new selections based on new criteria. It At the practical level, there will always be com- is something else, however, to read as an ideologi- peting canons: it is impossible to avoid the ques- cal censor. Much contemporary commentary tion on of which texts one wishes to share or discuss the diachronic canon seems intended to discredit in one's anthology, or critical article, or syllabus, any text that arguably supports authority, elitism, or polemic. Recent textbook anthologies have fat- or capitalism. But simply to emphasize the "elitist" tened noticeably in their editors' attempts to rep- and "capitalist" assumptions of older texts seems resent greater cultural diversity, but the length of designed more to invoke magical exorcism than to semesters has unfortunately remained the same. do anything else. As Murray Krieger writes: As teachers of literature we have thus again had to become more consciously selective. This is all to the good to the extent that it makes us recog- To reject our revered masterpieces, then, is really to nize the clarification of a literary text's functions reject the political institutions at work in the cultures as the necessary prolegomenon to the process of that produced them. It is as if, by turning against an selection. Critics continue to agree with Bacon, if aesthetic monument . . . the anti-elitist critics someone can judge from what they write, that two of how can wish out of existence the reactionary political context that may have been thriving when the work the primary activities of criticism are providing was created. (155) "brief censure and judgment of authors; that men may make some election unto themselves what books to read" and setting an order of studies so Charles Altieri similarly "that men mayquestions know in what order "the or pursuit hermeneu-to tics of suspicion": "It read" is (86, a182); mistake the requisite qualification to isread that cultural

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"judgment and censure" and the preferable order of "the books publicly read in Christian assemblies," or one of reading depend on criteria that depend on that was canonical in the sense of "excellent as a model," or one that embodied a regulative principle. purposes. 2Kimball's Orators and Philosophers is a masterly survey None of the functions I have outlined is either of the tensions and later confusions between the "oratorical" nefarious or trivial. It is well to have some knowl- (artes liberales) tradition that sought to imbue leaders of so- edge of major literary-historical influences on ciety with the proper virtues and the "philosophical" tradi- texts and some familiarity with the sources of the tion underlain by a skepticism that required an unending literary and philosophical allusions authors have search for ever-elusive truths. Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian are key figures in the first tradition; Plato, Socrates, and Aqui- expected their educated readers to share. It is well nas in the second. to bring some historical perspective to contem- 3By way of comparison, the sixth of the thirty-nine Arti- porary debates: to see the scandals of television cles of Religion of the Anglican Church reads, "Holy Scrip- evangelism against the background of the ture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that Pardoner's Tale, contemporary theological dis- whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, putes against Pope's Essay on Man, questions of is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or neces- the limits of individual freedom against Mill's On sary to salvation. In the name of Holy Scripture we do un- Liberty, and arguments over corporate responsi- derstand those canonical Books of the Old and New bility for the environment against Ruskin's essays Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the on political economy. It is well to recognize that Church." much of our literature assumes male, Anglo- 4I am using significance to contrast with intentional meaning, following the distinction developed by E. D. Hirsch in Saxon, competitively individualistic biases. It is Validity in Interpretation. well to encounter models of prose that persua- 5Older works that had not become part of, or had dropped sively use traditionally effective rhetorical devices out of, the diachronic canon may of course enter it belatedly and well to encounter individualistic, counter- if they are fortunate in their sponsorship-Eliot's sponsor- cultural prose. But no selection of texts that can ship of Donne is the standard example-and sufficiently malleable to be linked to current cultural and critical interests. be fitted into the one literature course, or perhaps 6There seems at least a short-term popular canon in the the two or three, taken by the average under- area of fiction and nonfiction: Harriet Doerr's Stones for graduate-or into the dozen or so literature Ibarra, Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries, Gerald Durrell's courses taken by the baccalaureate major-can autobiographical stories of animal collecting, and Cleveland adequately provide all that background. We need Amory's tale The Cat That Came for Christmas are perhaps more than ever, then, to be honest with ourselves examples of more or less recent books that, though appropri- ately advertised, came to be known primarily through the and with our students about the limited purposes recommendations of one reader to another. both of individual courses and of the requirements 7As stated in 1252 by "the masters of the English nation, for our degrees-to be honest about what our teaching in Paris," the requirements for the bachelor-of-arts selection of texts and our approach to them does degree were attendance in "lectures in arts for five years or not accomplish. If The Canon no longer lives, the four at least at Paris continually or elsewhere in a university of arts," at which the student should have heard lectures on reason is that it never did; there have been and are a large portion of Aristotle-the Praedicamenta, the only selections with purposes. If anything has been Periarmeniae, the Topics, the Divisions, the Elenci, the Prior clarified by the last twenty years of critical alarms Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, and De anima-together and excursions, it is the multiplicity of possible with the Sex Principia, the eighteen books of Priscian's gram- purposes. mar, and the Barbarismus of Donatus (Thorndike 53-54). 8It is worth noting that E. C. Stedman similarly drew on ephemeral publications in compiling his Victorian Anthol- ogy a hundred years later. 9Gerald Graff's chapter "What Was New Criticism" in his Literature against Itself succinctly sums up the contradictions Notes within the New Critical program. Examples of the "all- embracing dichotomies" Crane cites are "good and evil, love and hate, harmony and strife, order and disorder, eternity and 'Under the heading "canon" in the eleventh edition of the time, reality and appearance." Crane comments, "Of such Encyclopaedia Britannica, Samuel Davidson summarizes three universal contraries, not restricted in their applicability to any opinions: in ecclesiastical use canon originally meant a list kind of work, whether lyric, narrative, or dramatic, it will be

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easy enough for us to acquire an adequate supply, and once Works Cited we have them . . . it will seldom be hard to discover their presence in poems as organizing principles of symbolic con- Altieri, Charles. "An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon." tent" (123-24). Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 37-60. 10For a presentation of the second set of views of Arnold, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. see Harris. D. W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis: Bobbs, 1958. 1 lIt is instructive to note how frequently arguments against Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. Ed. W. A. the possibility of a shared culture nevertheless rely on one. Wright. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1900. Clifford Geertz, for instance, argues that the "enormous mul- Bloom, Harold, and Lionel Trilling. Victorian Prose and tiplicity" and the "radical variousness of the way we think Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. now" make the transmission of a core of shared cultural Bowyer, John Wilson, and John Lee Brooks. The Victorian knowledge impossible (161). What gives his article depth, Age: Prose, Poetry, and Drama. New York: Appleton, however, is the multiplicity of his own allusions to the pre- 1954. sumed knowledge of the educated reader. He appears to Burke, ex- Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. New pect appropriate responses, for instance, when he mentions York: Vintage, 1957. Copernicus, Freud, Bach, Ptolemy, Einstein, Malinowski, Crane, R. S. The Language of Criticism and the Structure Boas, Whorf, the Tewas language, Bertrand Russell, Kant, of Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1953. Berkeley's Esse est percipi, the Pyrenees, William James, Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Henry James, Yeats, C. P. Snow, mandarins, and Eden. Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series 12For instance, Jonathan Dollimore writes in the foreword 36. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953. to Political Shakespeare: "Finally, cultural materialism doesDollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political not pretend to political neutrality. . . . Cultural material- Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Man- ism does not, like much established literary criticism, attempt chester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 1985. to mystify its perspective as the natural, obvious, or right Erasmus, in- Desiderius. De Ratione Studii. Concerning the Aim terpretation of an allegedly given textual fact. On the con- and Method of Education. Ed. and trans. William Har- trary, it registers its commitment to the transformation of arison Woodward. New York: Teachers Coll. P, 1964. social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender Felperin, Howard. Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and and class" (viii). Abuses of Literary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford 13In one sense, whatever exists, including all cultural be- UP, 1985. liefs, conventions, artifacts, and conditions, can be described Fowler, Alastair. "Genre and the Literary Canon." New Liter- as demonstrating the triumph of one force or power over ary History 11 (1979): 97-119. another: the power of tradition, education, religion, politi- Geertz, Clifford. "The Way We Think Now: Toward an Eth- cal structures, science, logic, capitalism, socialism, selfishness, nography of Modern Thought." Local Knowledge: Fur- hatred, ignorance, benevolence, self-interest, advertising, ther Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: propaganda, personal experience, the press, the constitution Basic, 1983. 147-63. of the human mind and body, the knowledge of the brevity Golding, Alan C. "A History of American Poetry Antholo- of life, the need for love and approval-the list is endless. gies." Canons. Ed. Robert von Hallberg. Chicago: U of All the powers or forces influencing human decisions inter- Chicago P, 1984. 279-307. act to produce the total social structure of any given moment. Graff, Gerald. Literature against Itself Chicago: U of Chicago The canonical status of a literary text-like the economic sta- P, 1979. tus of a rock musician, the reputation of a painter, the Harris, pu- Wendell V. "The Continuously Creative Function of rity of the air and water, the desirability of consumer goods, Arnoldian Criticism." Victorian Poetry 26 (Spring- or the majority positions on taxes, abortion, and nuclear Summer 1988): 117-33. power-can only be understood as the result of multiple Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale causes. To attribute any cultural phenomenon to a single UP, 1967. "power"-that of capitalism, or male prejudice, or political Kenner, Hugh. "The Making of the Modernist Canon." corruption, or economic greed, or moral idealism-is as naive Canons. Ed. Robert von Hallberg. Chicago: U of as to think such powers can be ignored. Chicago P, 1984. 363-75. 14See Bruce Kimball's tracing of this "philosophical" orien- Kermode, Frank. "Institutional Control of Interpretation." tation from Plato to the present. The second part of the Salmagundi 43 (1979): 72-86. seventh chapter of Walter Pater's Plato and Platonism Kimball, em- Bruce. Orators and Philosophers: A History of the phasizes (and perhaps magnifies) this aspect of Plato's Idea of Liberal Education. New York: Teachers Coll. P, thought, carefully outlining the "dialectic method, this con- 1986. tinuous discourse with one's self" (185), and the spirit "which Kolodny, Annette. "The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and Literary History of the United States." American Liter- second thoughts" (196). ature 57 (1985): 291-307.

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Krieger, Murray. Words about Words about Words: Theory, Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age. Oxford: Criticism, and the Literary Text. Baltimore: Johns Hop- Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1968. kins UP, 1988. Quiller-Couch, Arthur, ed. The Oxford Book of Victorian Lauter, Paul. "Caste, Class, and Canon." A Gift of Tongues. Verse. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1912. Ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguerro. Athens: U of Ricks, Christopher, ed. The New Oxford Book of Victorian Georgia P, 1987. 51-82. Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. . "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. "Contingencies of Value." Criti- Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties." Fem- cal Inquiry 10 (1983): 1-35. inist Studies 9 (1983): 435-65. Stange, G. Robert. "1887 and the Making of the Victorian Levin, Harry. "Core, Canon, Curriculum." College English 43 Canon." Victorian Studies 25 (1987): 151-68. (1981): 352-62. Stedman, E. C. A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895. Boston: Ohmann, Richard, with Carol Ohmann. "A Case Study in Houghton, 1895. Canon Formation: Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher Thorndike, Lynn. University Records and Life in the Middle in the Rye." Politics or Letters. By Richard Ohmann. Ages. New York: Columbia UP, 1944. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1987. 45-67. Woods, George Benjamin, ed. Poetry of the Victorian Period. Pater, Walter. Plato and Platonism. London: Macmillan, 1910. Chicago: Scott, 1930. 2nd and 3rd eds. with Jerome Pfeiffer, Rudolf. History of Classical Scholarship from the Hamilton Buckley. 1955, 1965.

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