What's the Topic? The canon

We have seen how, in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold proposed that culture (with a capital C) was his solution to the problem of how humankind could be saved, the best defence against the barbarians. Arnold’s work is pretty much the best, and most often quoted, case for the defence of high culture, a deliberately divisive notion of what is and is not Culture. This division between high and low culture (discussed by Raymond Williams in Extract 57 and by Melvyn Bragg in Extract 58) materialises itself in all manner of ways but one of the most obvious ways is how hierarchies of taste are constructed and reproduced. Certain painters and certain paintings, certain composers and certain compositions, certain writers and certain books, certain film-makers and certain films are taken to represent truth, beauty, strength, civilisation. These hierarchies, or top ten or top twenty lists of cultural artefacts, have been characterised as ‘the canon’. Derived from religious practices the word simply means a general rule or principle and in cultural contexts has come to mean works which constitute the standard by which all other works are judged. In another useful section from Doing English Robert Eaglestone provides a concise history of the origins of the canon in literature and the implications of this for us all. Given that the canon is invariably built from the works of dead, white, European men and given that the world is anything but dead, white, European and male, we can see how particular, vested interests are represented and reproduced by any kind of canon in any field of cultural work. As before, whatever Eaglestone has to say about the world of English Literature is equally applicable to the world of Communication Studies. T. S. Eliot, the Leavises and the Canon

…

What we recognise as the canon today grew up hand in hand with the discipline of English in the 1920s. It is here that the assumptions of value, authenticity and authority come clearly into focus and become ever more closely linked with nationalism. Major figures in this development were the poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and the critics F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) and Q. D. Leavis (1906–1981).

Although T. S. Eliot is now thought of principally as a poet, his essays of literary criticism in the 1920s were extremely influential; indeed, E. M. W. Tillyard, a critic of the time, described them as ‘revolutionary’. One of his most important essays was ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published in two parts in 1919, in which Eliot argues that each artist writes in relation to a tradition,

not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

For Eliot, a tradition isn’t just the past but a living thing, organised, structured and present in the mind – or even in the bones – of a great writer (always a ‘he’ for Eliot). This ‘living tradition’ of great literature makes up what Eliot later calls an ‘ideal order’, which ranks the great and valuable works. This is clearly a canon. In order to write a great poem, novel or play, or to appreciate a great work of literary art fully, Eliot argues that it is necessary that ‘we’ have these works in their ‘ideal order’ in our ‘bones’. If this order is in our bones, it is part of who we are, not something we have to think about. ‘We’ must have internalised and accepted not only the list of works that people like Palgrave decided were great but, more importantly, the criteria that guided their judgement.

Eliot’s idea has two consequences. The first concerns what these authoritative texts are authoritatively telling you. An authoritative list of Classical texts tells you that certain texts are authentically ancient Greek or Roman and not forgeries or inventions; the authority of books of scripture lies in the fact that they are thought to reveal the authentic word of God. But what authenticity does an authoritative list of works of literature reveal? For Eliot and those influenced by him, what underlies a great literary work and therefore makes it ‘authentic’ are the values of Western European (and within that English) culture and life. The canon is the ‘storehouse of Western values’. These Western European values are unquestioningly assumed to be universal human values, the most important values that apply to all people at all times and in all places.

This leads to the second consequence: if a text doesn’t seem to demonstrate these ‘universal’ values or expresses different ones, it is not considered valuable, and so is excluded from the canon. Eliot’s seemingly innocent metaphor of ‘bones’ in fact reveals a rather frightening idea. It is not enough just to study the tradition – it must be in your bones, in your body. If you don’t ‘genetically’ share the idea of the canon and the ‘universal’ Western European values underlying it, you can neither properly appreciate nor write great books. In their book The Decolonization of African Literature, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, a trio of African writers and critics, sum this up from their perspective:

most of the objections to … the African novel sound like admonitions from imperialist mother hens to their wayward or outright rebellious captive chickens. They cluck: ‘Be Universal!’ And what they don’t consider universal they denounce as anthropological, atavistic (i.e. reverting to an earlier, primitive state), autobiographical, sociological, journalistic, topical ephemera, as not literary.

Again, what doesn’t reveal Western values (masquerading as universal values) simply isn’t authentic literature, is not worth reading and couldn’t be part of the canon.

The idea was further developed by F. R. Leavis. Following Eliot’s lead, he drew up a list of ‘great writers’. Then, rather than saying that these were his ‘favourites’, he asserted that they were quite simply the best. For example, he begins his very influential work of 1948, The Great Tradition, by stating that the ‘great English Novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad’. Although he admits that other novelists have merits, the best – the ones who most authentically reveal the values he cherishes – are these four at the heart of the canon. The reasons he chooses these four are hard to pin down exactly. He writes that ‘they are significant in terms of that human awareness they promote: awareness of the possibilities of life’, and that they are ‘creative geniuses whose distinction is manifested in their being alive in their time’. This manages to sound both convincing and authoritative and also rather vague. Of course, it is interesting to find out which books acute and well-read critics like the Leavises think are good. But their stamp of authority establishes this not just as a list, but as the list we should all share. As discussed earlier, they rely upon a personal sensibility to make judgements they claim to be objective, again because they assume that everyone shares or should share the same English and European values. One of the reasons the Leavises fostered the study of English was to cultivate a sense of national community, and it is clear that it also lay behind the choice of books in their canon.

How does the Canon Affect you? The canon today

The canon is still with us today. It is deeply woven into the fabric not just of English as a subject but into all forms of culture. TV and film adaptations tend to be of ‘canonical’ novels; publishers print ‘classics’; to count as educated you are supposed to have read a smattering of ‘canonical novels’. Why is the canon such a powerful idea?

First, the canon is a reflection that English always has a social context and could never be done in a vacuum. The canon represents the meeting point between (1) judgements of the artistic (or aesthetic) value of a text, and (2) the presupposition and interests, either implicit or explicit, of those who make those judgements and have the power to enforce them. What makes the issue difficult is that, despite claims to be ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’, it is simply impossible to separate out the artistic judgement from the judgement based on position and interests. These two are absolutely interwoven.

Second, the canon is self-perpetuating. In English at all levels, the same canonical texts come up again and again, year after year. A person who studied English and has become a teacher often teaches the texts she or he was taught, in part because she or he was taught that these texts were the most important. As students, you expect to study texts you have heard of and assume are worthwhile. Many textbooks for English and books on literature in general assume a familiarity with the canon, which also stresses its importance. In fact, textbooks from earlier in the twentieth century were often made up literally of lists and descriptions of great books. A more recent version of this is The Western Canon from 1994, by the American critic Harold Bloom. This book is a long defence of the idea of the canon, and ends with a list of the thousand books (he thinks) everyone ‘cultured’ should have read. The canon, then, is the list of books you expect to study when you do English, and reading the canon is doing English. The subject and the canon in part define each other.

However, even those who make and publish actual lists of ‘great books’ admit that sometimes the lists can change, as certain books come into and out of favour. But the third reason the canon is so powerful is that it creates the criteria by which texts are judged. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority says, for example, that the texts you study must be of ‘sufficient substance and quality to merit serious consideration’, but gives no sort of yardstick to measure this; the values that make a work ‘substantial’ and give it ‘quality’ are not revealed. New or rediscovered texts are judged by the canon’s standards. This means that even when, for example, A-level exam boards choose books from a wider selection of texts than normal, they first ask if the books have ‘universal significance’, ‘positive values’ or ‘human significance’. Saying that a new novel fits the canon because it ‘has’ these, reaffirms the idea that an older novel ‘had’ them too. Paradoxically, the canon is not broken up, but reaffirmed.

The fourth reason the canon remains powerful is that it is involved with the senses of identity to which countries and groups aspire, and with the struggle to define identities. As the history of the canon suggested, its development was tied in with the development of ideas about nationality. It is for this reason that Toni Morrison (b. 1931), the Nobel prize-winning American author, wrote in 1989 that:

Canon building is empire building. Canon defence is national defence. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanist imagination) is the clash of cultures. And all the interests are vested.

Because it is the texts on the canon that are taught, studied and examined (and published, sold, bought, performed, made into TV mini-series …), the canon plays a significant role in creating a sense of shared culture and of collective national identity. Deciding which texts are in the canon is all part of deciding who we are and how we want to see ourselves, and a threat to the canon is a threat to national identity. But does the person setting the syllabus ask how you want to see yourself? As Toni Morrison says, all the interests are vested.

(Eaglestone 2000: 53–8)