ABSTRACT
I don’t want to become part of the canon. The canon is sick. You know? One thing you will notice is that all this redefining of the canon still leaves the canon firmly in place. Because in liberal democracies, the status quo is maintained by incorporating dissent. You co-opt whatever you can. If you can’t incorporate it, you annihilate it, or ignore it, which amounts to the same thing. That’s what I see happening now, with us, in relation to the literary canon. We may put different people in there, but they end up representing the same values. The fact that brown-skinned writers or black-skinned writers make it into the canon doesn’t mean a thing. It’s the canon itself that’s got to go.
