Lindsay Johns has a little piece worth reading on the literary canon, arguing for its universal validity. The most striking passage:
The dead white men never had to face the evils of slavery or the physical and emotional oppression of racism. Thus their minds were freer to range over the great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas. In short, they have been allowed to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm.
The last sentence formulates almost precisely what I look for in literature.
I have long thought that this is the single greatest thing about being white and male: on so many days, when the world seems overwhelmingly horrible, disgusting in itself as well as utterly repugnant to me and hostile to all my desires, when the basic conditions of existence seem evil in themselves and the end results not worth the effort, when I see all the good I had hoped for not only in my own life but in others’ blighted by malice or folly, when my thoughts swallow all my actions and poison my whole day, when my memory is filled to the brim with evil and I see nothing better in the future, this at least I know: no one imposed this on me but God, or the Universe, or Existence, or whatever you want to call it, and I do not dream that I might have escaped it somehow by an alteration of my race, or my gender, or anything else, but know that there is no alternative but to face it.
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I find that quotation problematic in so many ways. First, it implies that the world that dead white males pondered about were the macrocosm, that their philosophical questions were the “great” ones. It implies that the writings of oppressed groups are not philosophical, metaphysical, or cosmological. Is this simply because slaves did not write in the same matter of Descartes? The greatest criticism of philosophy is that it is so far removed from the true human experience that it ceases to be of value. A less kind soul might say it is the macrocosm of only privileged class that needs to get a real job. One might say that understanding the true macrocosm of man is not to be found in erudite syllogisms but in the philosophy of a slave.
Second, it implies that the oppressor is not equally distorted by his position. Isn’t the mind of a slaveowner equally warped by slavery? Does it not distort his understanding of the world? Could a privileged minority ever truly understand humanity enough to muse about it if the experience so little of it?
Finally, it implies a free will that just simply does not exist. Fact of the matter, John, your problems were not simply imposed upon you by God or the universe but by the society around you that shaped and pulled you in so many directions. Your race, gender, upbringing pushed you to conform in so many ways, and punished you when you refused. No, you have not been physically enslaved, but we are talking about minds, not bodies. Even those of us who have “escaped” mental captivity still show the behavior of abused creatures. Don’t you still have the scars of the Catholic Church and of Princeton deeply embedded into your mind?
This Johns quote is precisely what is wrong with studying only the “literary canon.” It is the arrogance that these works hold the monopoly on the universal human condition while that the work of the oppressed groups could merely only observe a sliver of humanity tainted by their miserable condition.
As Camus wrote, only two things can be said of man: he fornicated and read the papers.
Mike–
You beat me to it.
I want to add one point. I am sure that in every city in the world, there are artists as good as the best we have ever seen. There is a Beethoven in Bangladesh, who is at this very moment working on music on par with anything we have ever heard. White males have historically had a better chance at being individually recognized.
How much Ugandan music have people listened to? How would we even know whether it was asking/answering big questions or not? How many slave accounts have people read besides Douglass? Zero to two?
–M
Oh. One more thing. I think all great art is universally valid. To argue for the universal “validity” is weird. Unless he means something different, as I suspect he does.
I’m going to give my theory of what we’re talking about first, and get to the details afterwards.
(Matt, I can’t wait for your reply on this one.)
Here’s the way I would explain universality in art. Every dog, seeing another dog, no matter how different that other dog may appear, no matter if he has never seen a dog like that before, knows that he is seeing a dog. But suppose that dogs were able to make artifact images of themselves, whereby they could be seen by future or faraway dogs. But most dogs, depending on how they saw themselves or what they chose to represent, made images that were only recognized as dogs by themselves or their own relatives. Some made images, however, that their entire breed could recognize. And a few made images which a large percentage of the dogs recognized as dogs. But that did not mean that all the dogs celebrated the images that had the greatest common intelligibility: some great Danes said of some of these images, “True dogness is size and grandeur, which only a few of these ‘universal’ images have, while several images that you little dogs don’t even recognize or comprehend as dogs actually do have these qualities.” And several Jack Russells said: “You brutish Danes, dogness is speed and agility, and so an image of a hulking monster can hardly count as a dog.”
Now substitute “human life” for “dog” and you have roughly what I think we are all doing with art. The “canonical” works are the more intelligible images. They are not therefore better – only more broadly intelligible. But people who particularly admire broad intelligibility will of course call them (by a human habit we probably should try to corral) “better.” And the reason why they would come up more often in a course entitled “Dogs” is that the professor, in his limited time, trying to sketch out what exactly a dog was, would probably work within the confines of the things broadly agreed upon as accurate representations of dogs and deal with the more controversial material with his grad students.
Now as to the details. Really what I like and recognize as canonical is the “broad intelligibility” I mentioned before. There are books like The Odyssey and The Count of Monte Cristo or the story of Joseph from Genesis which can literally be read by children with nearly as much benefit as by adults. This is valuable and unusual and is literally the origin of “the canon” – the canon of Greek and Roman literature we have is literally the material which was used to educate children, and still to this day the canon really only exists as an educational instrument (which is what we’re talking about here too).
There are plenty of examples of people sincerely believing that the canonical works are not the best. To give a minor example, Goethe had a teacher who believed that the greatest writer of all time was the Greek satirist and misanthrope Lucian. This teacher was himself – surprise! – sarcastic, witty, and misanthropic. He did not find much to his purpose in Homer. There’s nothing wrong with his aesthetic judgement – I’ll bet that Jonathan Swift, no mean writer himself, loved Lucian too. And if I were tutoring a young Swift, I might give him Lucian rather than Homer as being more suited to him. But if I were teaching English 9, and had to pick a Greek author to read, I’d pick Homer or maybe Sophocles because I’d know that their works are much more suitable for the center of the literary bell curve than an ad extremos figure like Lucian. You can say that we’re depriving students of a proper understanding of Greek culture, but the canon is a zero-sum game: if something comes in, something goes out.
Now the next thing I would say is that I think there are certain conditions which help produce works like this. It is not merely a question of privilege. Some economic conditions do need to be met if you are going to be an artist, there is no doubt about that. But no canonical works have been written by kings – their experience is generally too unique and unusual to be relevant to the commonalty. Now is it possible that a king could use his privilege to try to understand the whole human experience, top to bottom, and use it as the basis for works of art meant to be the possession of all mankind? Of course. But that would imply, I think, a specific kind of outlook, produced by education or inspiration or something of that sort, which led the king to say, “I am not just a king; that is a mere accident of fortune, I am a human being, given by fortune the opportunity to understand humanity as few have understood it” (Marcus Aurelius perhaps may fit this description). Democracy, by the way, I think helps with this – as does commercialism in art. King’s courts and aristocracies do not – although arguably the achievements artistically of aristocratic poets surpass (for sure technically) the more popular canonical works. Many an erudite classicist will tell you that the greatest poet of all time was Pindar. But he won’t show up in English 9 either.
Again, it is not a question of being a slave (bad lit) or having slaves (good lit). The question is how effectively the slave or slaveholder represents the human as opposed to the merely social. Epictetus (a Stoic and a slave) arguably belongs more to the canon than Seneca (a Stoic and a slaveholder) and for sure more than Cato (more or less a Stoic and a particularly brutal slaveholder). Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while on death row. Socrates was a stonemason. Homer was blind and may well have been a slave – he has “slave narratives” in his poems for sure. But he didn’t write merely from the slave perspective nor from the “blind perspective.” The majority of the canon was not written by aristocrats. Vergil, Ovid, Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Defoe, Rousseau, Johnson, Paine, Dickens, Dumas, Melville, Steinbeck – and many many others – knew poverty, many more knew persecution and all knew suffering. In fact, the best literature to come from the slaveholding culture of America came from the slaves – at least, the only canonical literature – and I’m sure it was precisely because of the fact that the underlying message of every slave narrative was “I am human.” It’s really only later that that message is obscured by more limited statements, defining people by race, gender, or whatever.
Note that there are no works of theology in the canon, because a theological perspective is almost always limited. (I mean theology, not narrative taken as religiously important). This despite the fact that the production of theological books has been a major activity of mankind for millennia, and by people of great ability. Can we say that if we are not giving our students a sampling of Anglican tracts that they are not getting the full breadth of perspectives? Of course. But I’m not advocating that, despite the fact that they were written by white males, because, like most of the things written by white males and everybody else, they’re too limited.
The final point: I do think that cultural factors push people in certain directions regarding this. A person who has spent his whole life being just another human being has a better chance of writing from the human perspective than someone who is pegged to a specific identity. Again, it’s not a white males thing. White Christians in the Turkish Empire, forced to wear specific clothes, subject to Christian-only laws, defined as “the other” their whole lives, produced exactly no works in the canon – many of them genetically the same Greeks who contributed so many when they had the opportunity to consider themselves in relation to the macrocosm (their term) rather than to their Lord the Turk. Isn’t that one of the reasons why we as a society are striving not to define people in this way? We recognize that the wilful limitation of a human being’s possibilities is immoral.
And Mike, you mention the “monopoly on truth.” That really is not what we are talking about. All the white male literature that’s not in the canon has truth claims like anything inside the canon, but it’s excluded anyway. And you’re not engaged in a process of determining truth here. The question is what we as teachers have to offer our students which will be appropriate for them. If other books work better, I really have no objections to accepting them. I like the policy used at Deep Springs College, where the students can vote certain books out of the curriculum, and replace them with others – though, unsurprisingly (to me), this policy has rather kept the canon rather than changed it. Matt, you ask how many slave narratives people read. I think they read more than you might think. The question to me is, how many of them do they remember? I can say that looking back on my education, the books I remember best are the ones which are more traditionally canonical – even if I read them only once, each of the “Classics” has given me at least some permanent addition to my brain – I remember Don Quixote wearing a pot on his head, or Mr. Bumble the Beadle, but I don’t remember anything from Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies. And the books I have returned to again and again since my education have been the more famous and canonical ones. And in my years since, I have read much more widely outside the canon, and in general, I do not disagree with the choices. Would I tweak it? Sure. But in general, I do not disagree.
John,
The students at Deep Springs are not at all representative of the human race, and the fact of the matter is that the canon does not survive because it resonates more than other literature, but because it resonates more with the intellectual elites who are battling to keep it in the curriculum. If the canon truly rose to the top on its own merit, than there would be no need for Lindsay Johns to defend it.
I simply don’t believe that the Odyssey reflects the general human condition more than any other work. My 10th graders are reading it currently and hate it, feeling it doesn’t at all give them much benefit. Your standards are warped I feel by your own positive experience with these books. Using memory as the standard, Harry Potter is far more relevant than the Odyssey because my students have a much better memory of that book.
This is not to deny that there are great books in the canon, but to suggest it is a fair marketplace of ideas is simply not true.
“The students at Deep Springs are not at all representative of the human race.” But they are human beings, who count as much as anyone else (they’re also the only example I happen to know of of a democratically elected full curriculum). And my standards aren’t “warped” by my good experiences, any more than anyone else’s are warped by their bad experiences. I am perfectly willing to cede ground to all those who find these things irrelevant. There’s not that much value in slogging through something you hate, and none in merely pretending to read something.
One thing I will note, though, is that not everything should be judged in the short-term. A person may in the end have the most respect for the things they hated most at the time. I always was amazed to watch the teachers that students came back to visit later on: they were often forbidding, difficult people who demanded a lot – the very teachers the students complained about most while in their classes. The canon is valuable because it represents a very long-term perspective.
I wouldn’t call it an utterly fair marketplace, but it is a marketplace – some people are hawking things, some people tell you not to go to their rivals, some people have better locations than others. But if someone comes up with a design which has continually found buyers for the past 2800 years, it’s probably decently designed. Some people will buy things just because their mom and grandmom bought them, but that’s not wrong in itself, you know. Nor does it explain why things enter the canon but then leave, while others seem to stick around.
it seems somewhat contradictory to me that a devotee of joseph campbell such as yourself can put much so much stock in this quote. the basic premise of much of campbell’s work is that the “great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas” are addressed similarly across many disparate cultures. as for “broad intelligibility”, is anyone in china, africa, south america, or any muslim country (aka 2/3 of the world) reading *any* of the western? perhaps the muslims read aristotle, but beyond that i don’t know what if anything the non-western world is paying any attention to art-wise besides Hollywood movies.
Interesting how this topic has touched so many buttons. Mr. Tween, I cannot see the Campbell contradiction. Yes, I am a fan of Campbell – but who in recent culture was so much of a champion of the messages brought to us by the literature of earlier eras? All over his work are references to the Odyssey, the Greek tragedians, the Bible, etc. And of course, not all of them were Western, but I am not advocating Occidentalism – just the Classics. As you know, I am reading all 16 volumes of the Arabian Nights at present (a classic of which Campbell did an abridgement for Viking), and I think there are plenty of other classics all through the world, like the Tao Te Ching and the Quran and the Vedas and much much more. Nor did Campbell think it was all saying the same thing, by the way. And if it may be the case that the Muslim world, for instance, takes no cognizance of the Odyssey or the Tao Te Ching or what have you (not entirely true, but perhaps true enough), whereas the West is intensely curious about the literature of the Muslims, that sounds more like their loss than anything else. The more universal aspiration is the ideal, no?
I don’t see an inherent contradiction between being a Campbellite and a Classicist. I consider Campbell himself to be as much a Classicist as an Occidentalist. What I do find contradictory though is that Campbell seemed to regard different cultures as having comparable levels of meritoriousness, whereas this quote says that the productions of “dead white men” have the unique ability “to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm.” How can you have just read the Arabian Nights and agree with that statement?