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Electronic Reserve Text: Robert Scholes, "Canonicity and Textuality." From Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi
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Carlyle, lecturing in 1840, the greatest poets were heroic figures, canonized
saints of literature, whose names could readily sustain such adjectives
as "royal" and such nouns as "transcendentalism,"
"glory," and "perfection" (85). Indeed,
his lecture itself was called "The Hero as Poet." But for Barthes,
writing in the early 1970s, the pleasure of the text emerges only when
the writer's impulse toward heroism is in abeyance, when valor and courage
are overcome.
A text is, he says, or should be, like a "flippant person who shows his bottom to the Political Father" (84). Nothing saintly or heroic about that. These two statements, I believe, reveal something of the depths beneath our present debate about canonicity and textuality--and something of what is at stake in this debate. The debate itself is the occasion of the present essay. If the concepts of canonicity and textuality were not currently active in our critical discourse, there would have been no reason for a discussion of them to be included in this volume. It is important to note, then, that these concepts are not merely active in our discourse but active in an oppositional way. Despite some shared meanings, and implications in their etymological past, the two terms now stand in opposition (an opposition embodied in my epigraphs), as names (however crude) for [139] two different conceptions of our practice as scholars and teachers: the literary, structured according to the hierarchical concept of canon, and the textual, disseminated around the more egalitarian notion of text. I cannot pretend to impartiality in these debates. I am a textualist. But I shall try, nonetheless, to give a fair idea of what is at stake in this dispute and to avoid excesses of special pleading. Even so, the reader, as always, should be on guard. Let us begin gently,
judiciously, by considering the history of the words canon and text
as they have moved through Western culture from ancient times, when
they first appeared in Greek, to the present. My survey is partial,
of course (perhaps in more than one way),' but I believe that a more
ample and detailed study would produce histories much like those I recount.
In ancient Greek we find the two words from which the modern English
word canon (in its two spellings, canon and cannon) has descended: (kanna)
'reed'; and (kanon) 'straight rod, bar, ruler, reed (of a wind organ),
rule, standard, model, severe critic, metrical scheme, astrological
table, limit, boundary, assessment for taxation' (Liddell and Scott
2). Like canon, our word cane is also clearly a descendant of the ancient
kanna, but its history has been simpler and more straightforward than
that of its cognate. However, the second of the two Greek words, kanan,
has from ancient times been the repository of a complex set of meanings,
mainly acquired by metaphorical extensions of the properties of canes,
which are hollow or tubular grasses'; some of which are regularly jointed
(like bamboo), and some of which have flat outside coverings. The tubular
channel characteristic of reeds or canes leads to the associations of
the word canon with functions that involve forcing liquids or gases
through a channel or pipe, while the regularity and relative rigidity
of canes lead toward those meanings that involve measuring and controlling
(ruling--in both senses of that word). And it is likely that the ready
applicability of canes as a weapon of punishment (as in our verb to
cane, or beat with a stick) supported those dimensions of the meaning
of kanan that connote severity and the imposition of power. In Latin we find the same sort of meanings for the word canon as were attached to the Greek kanan, with two significant additions, both appearing in later Latin. These two additions are due to historical developments that generated a need for new terms. On the one hand, the rise of the Roman Catholic Church as an institution required a Latin term that could distinguish the accepted or sacred writings from all others, so that "works admitted by the rule of canon" came themselves to be called canonical or, in short, the Canon. In this connection we also find a new verb, canonize--are, to canonize. On the other hand, with the importation of gun powder and the development of artillery, the tubular signification of the word led to its becoming the 1;lame, in late Latin, for large guns (Lewis and Short). A common theme, of course, in these extensions is power. It is worth noting here that when the Hebrews became the People of the Book, the word they adopted for their canonical texts was also a word that meant the Law: Torah. As Gerald Bruns argues, the establishment of the Torah as the written Law in Jewish history meant the victory of a priestly establishment [140] over the independent
voices of the Prophets. In particular, once the Law was fixed in written
form, the spoken words of Prophets could not make headway against it,
leading to the replacement of prophecy by commentary on the now canonical
Book in which the Law was embodied. For our purposes,
the significant point is the way that canon in Latin also combined the
meaning of rule or law with the designation of a body of received texts.
In its Christian signification, however, canon came to mean not only
a body of received texts, essentially fixed by institutional fiat, but
also a body of individuals raised to heaven by the perfection of their
lives. In the latter signification, the canon referred to an open, not
closed, system, with new saints always admissible by approved institutional
procedures. This distinction is important because in current literary
disputes over the canon, both models are invoked, one on behalf of a
relatively fixed canon and the other on behalf of a relatively open
one. In any case, our current thinking about canonicity cannot afford
to ignore the grounding of the modern term in a history explicitly influenced
by Christian institutions. As the epigraph from Carlyle indicates, the
conscious use of religious terminology in literary matters is at least
a century and a half old. We must now backtrack
a bit to note that the word canon also has a more purely secular pedigree
going back to Alexandrian Greek, in which the word kanon was used by
rhetoricians to refer to a body of superior texts: (hoi kanones) "were
the works which the Alexandrian critics considered as the most perfect
models of style and composition, equivalent to our modern term 'The
Classics'" (Donnegan). Exactly how the interplay between the rhetorical
and the religious uses of the notion of canon functioned two millennia
ago is a matter well beyond the scope of this inquiry. What we most
need to learn from the ancient significations of canon, however, is
that they ranged in meaning all the way from a text possessing stylistic
virtues that make it a proper model to a text that is a repository of
the Law and the Truth, being the word of God. We should also remember
that the word, as a transitive verb, referred to a process of inclusion
among the saints. In the vernacular
languages, the meanings of canon found in late Latin are simply extended.
In French, for instance, we can find the following in a modem dictionary:
canon 'gun, barrel of a gun, cannon; cylinder, pipe, tube; leg (of trousers)';
and canon 'canon. Canon des ecritures, the sacred canon; école
de droit canon, school of canon law' (Baker). The French is especially
useful in reminding us that the word for gun and the word for the law
and the sacred texts are simply branches of a single root rather than
two totally different words. That in English we regularized separate
spellings (cannon and canon) for the guns and the laws in the later
eighteenth century has tended to obscure the common heritage of both
these spellings in the ancient extensions of a word for reed or cane.
In English the most relevant meanings of the word canon for our purposes
are these:
The nature of the connection between the Christian canon and the literary canon is crucial to our understanding of the present disputes about canonization. This connection was made most forcibly and enduringly in English letters by Mathew Arnold, as Northrop Frye pointed out more than thirty years ago in an exemplary discussion of Arnold's touchstones that laid bare Arnold's motivation: When we examine
the touchstone technique in Arnold, however, certain doubts arise about
his motivation. The line from The Tempest, "In the dark
backward and abysm of time,'; would do very well as a touchstone line.
One feels that the line "Yet a tailor might scratch her where'er
she did itch" somehow would not do, though it is equally Shakespearean
and equally essential to the same play. (An extreme form of the same
kind of criticism would, of course, deny this and insist that the line
had been interpolated by a vulgar hack.) Some principle is clearly at
work here which is much more highly selective than a purely critical
experience of the play would be. Here we should pause to notice that Frye's notion of a "purely critical experience" conserves much of the Arnoldian project--which remains at the 'center of our present critical debates. We shall return to this point. But: first, let us continue with Frye's next paragraph:
Like so much in that extraordinary book of Frye's, these crucial paragraphs opened the way to all our subsequent discussions and disputes about the literary canon. In particular, Frye made literary scholars and critics aware of two things that had been overlooked or concealed during the academic hegemony of the New Criticism. First, that' "literary value judgments are projections of social ones" (though he tried to reserve for himself a field of "purely critical experi-
ence"). And,
second, that the Arnoldian tradition in criticism involved "trying
to create a new scriptural canon out of poetry." The way we currently
use the word canon in literary studies is very much the way we learned
to use it from Northrop Frye. And it was also Frye who-when very few
students of literature thought of calling their enterprise "literary
theory"-told us that "the theory of literature is as primary
a humanistic and liberal pursuit as its practice" (20). When Frye
wrote, the word canon was used in literary studies mainly to refer to
the body of texts that could be properly attributed to this or that
author (a significance that is acknowledged in the Supplement to the
OED). The MLA annual bibliographies are full of articles with titles
like "The Shakespeare Canon" or "The Defoe Canon."
Since Frye, however, and especially in the last decade, literary scholars
have come to use the word as the name for a set of texts that constitute
our cultural heritage and, as such, are the sources from which the academic
curriculum in literature should be drawn. This situation is full of
complexities and perplexities. We shall return to the problems of literary
canonicity after further complicating matters by considering the cultural
history of the word text. (tik, tikos) Of or for childbirth, a medicine used for women lying in, a KOV (pharmakon). TIKTOO (tikto)
bring into the world, engender; of the father: beget; of the mother:
bring forth; of the earth: bear, produce; metaphorical: generate, engender,
produce. |
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(tekton) worker in wood, carpenter, joiner; generally: any craftsman or
workman; metaphorically: maker, author.
TEXVll (techne) art, skill, cunning of hand; cunning in the bad sense: arts, wiles; an art or craft; a method, set of rules, or system of making or doing, whether in the useful arts or the fine arts; work of art, handiwork; treatise (on grammar or rhetoric). (adapted from
Liddell and Scott) The single theme that runs through all these words and their meanings is that of creation. In this, the word tikto appears central, with its fundamental meaning of physical or natural production (of children and the fruits of the earth) and its metaphorical extension to cover all kinds of production. Around this central core of meaning some curious and interesting extensions play. First, tik, the pharmakon, or drug, used to make childbearing easier for women. And here, perhaps, we should note that the two opposed meanings of pharmakon are very similar to those of our modem English word drug, which refers to both harmful and beneficial kinds of ingestible substances. Jacques Derrida has made much of this in "Plato's Pharmacy," but the double meaning of the word was fully noted [143] regularly in Greek
lexicons before Derrida' s influential essay. 'For our purposes it is
important to note another play in the meanings of tik and tikto: on
the one hand, the natural--begetting, engendering, and bringing forth--and,
on the other hand, the artificial: the drug that must mitigate the "unnatural"
pains of the natural process, or come to the aid of nature in this instance. The word tekton
extends the meanings of tikto in the direction of artifice or craft,
by pointing first toward carpentry and other physical (though not natural)
acts of making and .finally to mental creation, production, or authorship.
One facet of this extension is that it tends to obliterate female production
as it moves away from nature and toward art, craft, and authorship.
In the earliest formulations the role of woman as child .bearer and
the earth as feminine bearer of fruits (regularly portrayed as a goddess
rather than a god) were dominant. But gradually the gender emphasis
shifted. In Greek culture, carpentry-a male occupation-assumed a central
position in the paradigmatic structure of this word and its meanings.
In the word that named the maker's skill, techne, there was some room
for female handicraft, but the general pattern of thought embodied in
this language seems to have aligned women with nature as primitive producers
and men with culture as producers of consciously constructed objects
of daily use and art. The word techne itself was frequently used to
refer to metal work, ship building and other trades associated with
male workers. This word, like pharmakon, has its pejorative sense, too,
referring to guile or cunning. Finally, and this is especially relevant
to our concerns, the meanings of the word were extended to refer to
the methods or systems of the developing verbal disciplines of grammar
and rhetoric. When we pick up the history of these terms as they appear in Latin, we find that the notion of joining as in carpentry, or constructing as in metalwork, has been replaced by weaving, as the guiding concept of textual fabrication. We can see also that the extension from material handicraft to verbal construction is reinstated and extended, taking on specific references to verbal composition or style (as opposed- to weaving). In Latin we find texo, texere 'weave; to join or fit together any thing; to plait, braid, interweave, interlace, intertwine; to construct, make, fabricate, build; to compose' and textum 'that which is woven, a web; that which is plaited, braided, fitted together, a plait, texture, fabric'; figurative: 'of literary composition, tissue, texture, style' (Lewis and Short). The meanings related to weaving. and woven fabric were to remain with these words and with many of their descendants (texture, textile, etc.), but the verbal extensions of meaning toward literary style and composition became more and more important in the history of the word textum itself. In particular, the masculine textus, which appears first in poetry and in post-Augustan prose, seems to have become the favored form for the verbal and stylistic meanings of the word; and in medieval Latin, in particular, we find the masculine textus carrying specific adaptations for Christian verbal functions, including, finally, specific reference to the New Testament as the Text: textus 'text, wording, contents of speech or writing; charter; Gospel book' ("Dedit rex Serenissimus Augustus quattuor [144]
We should be attentive
to a number of things about this word that has been so important to
the enterprise of the Modern Language Association and to the individuals
and institutions connected with it. First, we should note that in Samuel
Johnson's Dictionary and as late as Henry John Todd's version
of it (1818), literature referred to a learning or culture possessed
by an individual rather than to a set of lettered objects or written
texts. That is, it was customary to say that a person had literature
rather than that a person read literature. Second, the word also came
to name whatever texts were produced by a person (clearly thought of
as male) who possessed "literature" or book learning. Third,
the word, when it did refer to the written or printed texts themselves,
included everything, the whole body of writings of a time or place--or
of the "world." Fourth, in a process that emerges fully only
at the end of the eighteenth century, literature came to mean belles
lettres, as opposed to other kinds of writing. In 1762, in what
became an enormously influential textbook in American colleges, Lord
Kames proposed a science of criticism. His Elements of Criticism
was meant to apply to all of what he called the "fine arts"
but was focused mainly on the arts of language as they are displayed
in poetry, drama, and some prose. So far as I can tell, in over a thousand
pages, he found no occasion to use the word literature. It is also true,
of course, that for him the whole art of language lay in finding the
proper means for the expression of human sentiments and passions. For
him, the imagination was no more than one human faculty, and by no means
was it the most important faculty with respect to the fine arts:
What Kames meant by imagination was simply the "singular power of fabricating images independent of real objects" (3: 386). He has neither our notion of [146]
By the end of the nineteenth century two simultaneous processes (or two facets of the same process) had led to the establishment of a literary caQon. One of these was the separate, superior status claimed for works of verbal imagination, which, thus empowered, constituted a literary canon. The other was the professionaliz-ation of teaching in the newly established (and in particular the American) universities and graduate schools. As the study of the modem literatures, especially English, replaced the classics and oratory at the center of the humanist curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century, authors such as John Locke and Francis Bacon, who had loomed large in our early college curricula, gave way to writers who were literary in the now accepted sense of that word. For a time, criticism struggled against philology for power within the new English departments, each with its own canon of proper texts for study. In this struggle philology, which was really an attempt to carry on classical studies without classical texts, was doomed because its canon was based on antiquity, privileging [147] texts in Old and
Middle English, while criticism could select its canon on the basis
of "pure literary merit." Actually, of course,
this selection required an institution to debate and ratify canonical
choices, and, at the proper moment, the institution came into being.
It was called the Modem Language Association. In the professionalization
of literary studies, the canon supported the profession and the profession
supported the canon. Likewise, the canon supported the literary, curriculum
and the curriculum supported the canon. The curriculum, in literary
studies, represented the point of application, where canonical choices
were tested in the crucible of student response.. Works that proved
highly teachable (like Shakespeare) remained central in the canon as
well as in the curriculum. The revival of John Donne may have been begun
by Herbert Grierson and T. S. Eliot, but it continued with such notable
success because the New Critics found Donne perfectly suited to their
pedagogy, their curriculum, and, hence, their canon. Authors who proved
less amenable to critical exegesis (Oliver Goldsmith, for instance,
who once bulked large in the American curriculum) were quietly allowed
to drift out of that curriculum and, hence, out of the canon. The most important
thing about these processes is not that they went on but that they went
on unnoticed. Until the last few decades they were seen as "natural"-or
even as not occurring at all. What has happened to literary studies
in those decades is a part of larger cultural happenings that can be
described (and deplored, if you like) as the politicization of American
life. Once upon a time we believed that if the best men (yes) were appointed
'to the bench, we would get the best judicial decisions. Now, we know
that one set of appointments to the Supreme Court will give us one set
of laws and another set of appointments will give us others. What is
happening is part of the evolution of a democratic society. With respect
to the literary canon, Frye's statement about Arnold's touchstones was
a political bombshell: "We begin to suspect that the literary judgments
are projections of social ones." Which is to say that the literary
canon is a social, and therefore a political, object, the result of
a political process, like so much else in our world. Thus the battle lines were drawn, and the battle is still in progress. On the one hand are those who defend a universal standard of literary quality (among whom we may find Frye himself), and on the other are those who argue that standards are always relative, local, and political. There are militant universalists and there are laissez faire or pragmatic universalists, which complicates matters. And the relativists
are divided, also, into champions of different excluded groups, seeking
canonical status for their own class of texts, and. anarchists or absolute,
relativists, who would undo all canons and standards if they could.
At this point I suppose I should run up my own flag, since I cannot
pretend to neutrality on these matters. I do not see how anyone can
teach without standards, but I cannot find any single standard for determining
the worth of a text. I do not, that is, believe in literature either
as a body of spiritually informed texts or as a |
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universal standard
of textual value. I have lost my faith (and, yes, I once had it) in
literature as an institution. It is not my intention here, however,
to preach literary atheism or to make my position central to this discussion.
I mention it merely as a bias the reader may wish to discount, as I
move on to what I take to be the best single focus of current canonical
disputes, Robert von Hallberg's collection of essays, made under the
auspices of Critical Inquiry in 1984. We have already
had occasion to note Barbara Herrnstein Smith's rich and complex argument,
in von Hallberg's volume, against the transcendental or universal valorizing
of 'our canonical texts-an argument I must summarize rather brutally
here as suggesting that what supports canonical texts is not so much
their own merits or relevance to our purposes as it is the way they
have already been inscribed into an intertextual network of reference.
That is, they are culturally important because they have been culturally
important, a situation from which both the inevitability of change and
its equally inevitable slowness may be inferred. Smith's essay has been
positioned first in the volume, with the result that many of the others
can be read as amplifications, qualifications, or counterstatements
to it, though most of them were written quite independently. The most
direct counterstatement is that made by Charles Altieri in an essay
called "An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon." Altieri argues that only an appeal to "a general high canon" can provide the "authority" we need to resist local and specific abuses of power. In making this case, he suggests that "if we want to measure up to a certain kind of judgment" we must turn to "those models from the past that have survived such judgments" (57, 55, 56). Drastically simplified, the argument is that we cannot have ideals such as justice unless we ground them in texts that have been judged ideal. Whether literary judgments and ethical or political justice have enough in common to support this necessary connection is a problem that the essay never quite resolves. Altieri argues
that works in the high literary canon are there because they have three
qualities: the forceful and complex presentation of moral categories,
semantic scope and intensity, and either technical innovation or wisdom
and ethical significance. He further argues that the submissive study
of such texts is necessary for us to develop our ability as readers
and judges of our own culture. He does not quite complete the argument
by concluding that study of the canonical texts is the only path to
an ethical and effective life, but he certainly implies this. It would be possible to criticize this essay by probing into its internal contradictions and terminological slippages, as exemplified by the lumping together of technical innovation and wisdom in the same category. I prefer, however, to make two, more general observations. One is that it leaves us wondering how writers and thinkers who had a very limited canon themselves ever became canonical. How did Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato, for instance, acquire the qualities that Altieri would attribute to them, since they had scarcely any access to the canon now held to be so indispensable. Socrates apparently knew his Homer but most of what he had learned he seems to have learned from [149] the Sophists. My
second point is that I see little evidence that prolonged study of canonical
literary texts has made professors of literature either wiser or more
virtuous than anthropologists, say, or carpenters. A more complex counterposition
to Altieri's, however, is to be found within the volume of Canons itself.
I refer to John Guillory's discussion "The Ideology of Canon...Formation:
T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks." Just as Altieri
is not responding directly to Smith,' Guillory is responding not directly
to Altieri but to the general position that Altieri represents. His
discussion traces the path from Eliot's reconstruction of the canon
of English literature in his early essays to the institutional underwriting
of that very canon by the New Critics through such books as Cleanth
Brooks's Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well-
Wrought Urn (1947). Guillory shows how this process functioned as
a subtle and more attractive alternative to Mathew Arnold's attempt
to replace dogma with literature. He does this by reminding us that
what Eliot's essays suggested and the New Critics instituted was the
replacement of doxa with paradox. Under this regime, canonical texts
were seen not as repositories of truth and beauty but as embodiments
of a discourse so ambiguous that it could not be debased and applied
to any practical or dogmatic end. The study and teaching of the new
canon of specifically noncognitive texts would of necessity fall to
those trained to show that they are canonical precisely because they
resist reduction to doxa or dogma. Those who understood this, either
as teachers or students, became members of what Guillory calls a "marginal
elite," an elite based on a canon of texts that aspired neither
to scientific nor didactic status but to a literary purity defined explicitly
as the absence of such ambitions: Nevertheless, literary culture has aspired to canonical consensus, an illusion reinforced by the cognitive silence of the literary work, the silencing of difference. Very simply, canonical authors are made to agree with one another; the ambiguity of literary language means nothing less than the univocity of the canon. I now want to examine this rule of canonical self, identity as it governs the institutional dissemination of literature.. Eliot's fantasy of orthodoxy passes into the university (both as an ideology of the marginal elite and as an instruction in the marginal relation of the poem to truth. (350) To document his
case, Guillory looks at Brooks's crucial treatment of Donne's poem "The
Canonization"-a truly overdetermined choice by all con... cerned,
including myself. Guillory sees Brooks as basing the poem's canonical
status as poetry on its ability to offer and to inhabit a realm removed
from and "above" the world of power and cognitive assertion:
[150]
As he has observed
earlier in the essay, "in teaching the canon, we are not only investing
a set of texts with authority; we are equally instituting the authority
of the teaching profession" (351). Guillory's point is 'partly
that we should strive for a certain critical distance in determining
our own stake in maintaining a canon, but he also means to suggest a
possible direction out of New Critical orthodoxy into a "state
of heterodoxy where the doxa of literature is not a paralyzed allusion
to a hidden god but a teaching that will enact discursively the struggle
of difference" (359-60). This is a brave
conclusion to an elegant essay, but it seems to me dangerously close
to simply replacing the New Critical canon with a new set of texts privileged
by their heterodoxy or their enactment of the "struggle of difference."
The problem, I believe, is that "difference" is itself a notion
that has gained its privileged position in recent American theory partly
because it allowed an easy transition from New Critical paradoxes. Believing,
for instance, that the best texts are those "that deconstruct themselves"
is just a step from equating paradox with literary value. It is a useful
step, to be sure, but my own feeling is that something simpler is necessary:
not texts that embody difference but just different texts. Perhaps this
is what Guillory means, but 1 am wary of the tendency of American literary
deconstruction to lead back to a canon more traditional than even that
of the New Critics. Certainly the compatibility of a certain sort of
deconstruction with traditional literary values is writ large in J.
Hillis Miller's much quoted statement, "I believe in the established
canon of English and American literature and in the validity of the
concept of privileged texts. 1 think it is more important to read Spenser,
Shakespeare, or Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even,
to say the truth, to read Virginia Woolf" (qtd. by Froula in von
Hallberg 152). The issue of canonicity
turns finally on the notion of literature itself, as, for instance,
Arnold Krupat suggests in his discussion "Native American literature
and the Canon," in which he makes the following point:
Roland Barthes has offered a similar observation. "The 'teaching of literature,' " Barthes said, "is for me almost tautological. Literature is what is taught, that's all" (Doubrovsky 170). What the pedagogical canon includes from the past and from current production generally [151] and substantially
works to ratify the present and to legitimate an established hegemony.
(310) Krupat's position
is necessary to his argument that by attending to .Native American works
in the curriculum, we will also establish them in the canon. Others
in the volume who would not deny the connection of the curriculum to
the canon would see the mechanisms of canonization as being more complicated.
Alan C. Golding, for instance, brings to our attention the way that
over the past century and a half American poetry anthologies have played
a vital role in shaping the canon, but he, too, notices. that over the
decades curricular needs have become more influential even on the anthologies.
Similarly,' Richard M. Ohmann, examining \ contemporary mechanisms of
canonization, describes a complicated process but suggests that the
greatest power lies with a class that stretches from the marginal elite
of the universities to a less marginal elite group in the magazines
and publishing houses. In another important
essay in Canons ("When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical.
Economy") Christine Froula, reminding us of how the canon has functioned
as an instrument of domination, argues that the proper answer is both
to add new textual. voices to our curricula and to read the old texts
in a different way:" (19) Few of us can free
ourselves completely from the power ideologies inscribed in the idea
of the canon and in many of its texts merely by not reading "canonical"
texts, because we have been reading the partriarchal "archetext"
all our lives. But we can, through strategies of rereading that expose
the deeper structures of authority and through interplay with 'texts
of a different stamp, pursue a kind of collective psychoanalysis, transforming
"bogeys" that hide invisible power into investments both visible
and alterable. In doing so, we approach traditional texts not as the
mystifying (and self-limiting) "best" that has been thought
and said in the world but as a visible past against which we can teach
our students to imagine a different future. (171)
as Altieri implies,
our present canonical situation is what it is precisely because of the
passage of literature- through modernism. What Kenner demontstrates,
though it is not his explicit intention, is that Romanticism filtered
through avant-gardism (which is the formula for modernism) yields a
literary canon in which the oppressively absolutist and patriarchal
tendencies of canonization are more visible than ever before. Specifically, the
modernist canon installed by Pound, Eliot and their followers in English
departments in this country called for, on the one hand, an aggressively
innovative approach to literary form and, on the other, a learned appropriation
of mythology and poetical texts drawn from the ancient, medieval, and
Renaissance canons. This modernist notion of literary excellence worked
powerfully (and "naturally") against women who had no easy
access to classical education and for whom the traditional verbal forms
were in themselves experimental, in that they had never before been
used to express the experience of women in a world of possibilities
opening all too slowly-but opening nevertheless at the end of the nineteenth
century. A novel like May Sinclair's Mary Olivier (1919), for
instance, shows us both how painfully difficult and how profoundly radical
it was for a provincial woman to adapt to her situation the bildungsroman
form recently energized by D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. The result
is a novel that is powerful and important but will never match the canonical
works of the modernist masters by their own literary criteria. And this
is just one example of countless texts in which marginal voices have
found expression in forms too humble for canonization or already discarded
in the relentless modernist search for innovation. My point is not
that modernism itself was some sort of error but that it represented
the culmination of a process of literary canonization begun by the Romantics--a
process that is now unworkable because it has become too visible and
because we have at last become aware of its social costs. In response
to this situation I (and it must be obvious that these are not the conclusions
of the MLA itself) would argue that we need to scrutinize critically
and if possible undo the privilege we have so long granted to the notion
of literature itself. This is why the opposition of text to work and
of textuality to literature is so important. As we have seen," the history of the word text and its cognates is not so different from that of canon. Both sets of signifiers passed through alliances with the significations offered by history; both took on Christian significance in the Middle Ages; and both have some specifically verbal significations in our own world. But where canon has persisted in its exclusionary and hierarchical functions, allowing only such qualifications as Alastair Fowler's potential, accessible, and selective canons (all literature, literature currently in print, and approved literature-discussed by Golding, in von Hallberg 279), text has acquired, especially at the hands of French theoreticians like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, some new significations that are programmatically subversive of canonincal distinctions. The new meanings of text are usefully summarized in the introduction to Dominick LaCapra's Rethinking Intellectual History:
This statement is helpful in two ways. It directs our attention to some primary features of current notions of textuality, and it warns us about the abuse of such notions. The important primary features are (1) the way in which textuality insists on the connection or "network" linking any particular bit of language to other bits and to the whole network, and (2) the way that this particular linkage supersedes or forestalls any limitation of the meaning of a particular textual object to some nontextual referent, author, or situation that could entirely regulate the flow of meanings evoked by that object. The warning LaCapra offers is also important. He reminds us that textuality itself is a metaphor that can be used and abused. One abuse is a denial of referentiality so absolute as to become a mere formalism, a problem addressed by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory. Eagelton objects to the way that deconstructive critics of the Yale school have "colonized" history itself, viewing "famines, revolutions, soccer matches, and sherry trifle as yet more undecidable 'text' " (146). Fredric Jameson has tried to mediate between these positions in an important passage of The Political Unconscious, arguing that "history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form" (35). In Jameson's language, textuality refers to a collaboration between language and the human unconscious that always distances us from reality with; out ever replacing that reality. This poststructuralist notion of textuality is based on the semiotic and deconstructive projects of Charles Sanders Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida, in which human interaction with the world is understood as always mediated by signs that can be interpreted only by connecting them to other signs, without ever leading to some final resting place of interpretation that might be called Reality or Truth. This we may think of as the strong sense of the word textuality as it is used in contemporary literary theory. It is this sense to which Derrida referred in his famous statement about there being no outside to textuality: "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (Of Grammatology 158), 'which means that we can "make sense" of things only by establishing our own connections within the network of textuality that enables our thinking and perceiving in the first place--as I have just done by interpreting Derrida's phrase. As LaCapra warns us, however, it is a mistake to take this metaphor of textuality literally a mistake that can only be made by ignoring the way that the idea of the "literal" [154] is ruled out by
the metaphor itself. The function of this sense of textuality, then,
resituate the reading or interpreting of texts in a more creative or,
as Derrida , "exorbitant" mode. But what is a text? Here, Roland Barthes is our liveliest guide--and within the metaphor of textuality, liveliness contends with reliability (some would say supersedes itnot I) for the most important attribute of guidance. In one of his most influential essays, "From Work to Text," Barthes uses the opposition named in his title as a way of situating his new criticism in opposition to the old. His method of accomplishing this at first seems to align Barthes's nouvelle critique with the American New Criticism as John Guillory described it. Barthes tells us the Text is that which goes. to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some "heroic" effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion-constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications--defined by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical. (Image 157-58) What makes Barthes's formulation quite different and in certain respects opposed to American New Criticism, however, is his specific opposition of the text to work:
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[155]
In American New
Criticism, the boundedness of the literary work, its organic unity,
its status as a "verbal icon" supported the role of the literary
critic (or teacher) as a quasi-priestly exegete, introducing outsiders
into the hermetic mysteries of literature. The notion of textuality
weakens the boundaries of the individual textual object and reduces
the strength of its connection to an individual author or a specific
situation, in order to emphasize the intertextuality of every such object
and the freedom of the reader to establish connections among many texts
at many levels. This notion also changes the critic or teacher from
a figure of automatic authority to one reader among others, whose performance
of the reading act will have to be its own justification. The criteria
for judging such performances may well include (I would say, must include)
such traditional interpretive virtues as learning, attention to detail,
and intensity of thought, but they will now also include range, creativity,
and even exorbitance along with the traditional virtues. With this extension
of the reader's range comes also a new freedom to take with equal seriousness
(and playfulness) texts outside the "selective canon" of literature
and indeed outside "literature" itself. Perhaps the simplest
and most radical implication of the concept of textuality is that it
breaks down the barriers between verbal objects and other kinds of signification.
The word text is useful--and indeed necessary-if we are to discuss the
common semiotic properties of pictures, films, plays, operas, jokes,
graffiti, poems, songs, stories, speeches, advertisements, novels, essays,
and other. ..other what? Well, other texts, of course. A text .is a
cluster of signs or potentially signifying entities that can be connected
by an act of reading to other such clusters. A few years ago
when a consortium of teaching organizations (the English Coalition)
sought foundation support for a conference on the future of English
studies from kindergarten to graduate school, one powerful foundation
refused' to consider supporting the proposal until the word text in
the proposal was replaced everywhere by the word literature. This, my
friends, is a true story, and it suggests that these matters, which
may seem like trivial questions of terminology that concern only scholars
and teachers, really do have political and economic consequences. In
this opposition, text is aligned with the extension of democratic social,
economic, and political processes and canon with the maintenance or
recovery of more hierarchical structures. At their extremes, these two
positions may imply anarchy and absolutism. In the middle, where most
of us work\ and struggle, they may only be Jeffersonianism and Federalism.
In any case, we may be certain that concepts of canonicity and textuality
are themselves imbedded in the larger processes of our social text. One final word. While I still have some control over this collection of words--before, that is, they enter the web of textuality even further--I would
like to make a
disclaimer. The notion of text deployed here is no panacea. It should
be, at best, a stimulus to rethinking our enterprise. There is, I suppose,
a possible curriculum of textuality that many writers on these matters
could specify. And what, you may well ask, prevents that set of authors
and works from becoming a canon just as exclusive and oppressive as
the old one? I have two tentative answers to this very pertinent question.
One is that, insofar as what we are considering is a set of theoretical
writings, they are bound to be largely subsumed (Aufgehoben) by later
theoretical writings. The other. is that to the extent that we have
really made it legitimate to consider-and study in our courses-any kind
of textual object from graffiti to The Making of Americans, we
have gone beyond canonization, because a canon requires that there be
much more outside of it than inside. Without a canon, of course, we
shall have to live our academic lives on an ad hoc basis.- Individually,
we may all be governed by habit and inertia more than we should', but
perhaps we won't think that our hobby horses are cast in the mold of
some Platonic Pegasus.3 Brown University 2 In citing dictionaries
and lexicons, I do not give page numbers because the words serve as
their own locators. I also abridge and omit freely, in the interests
of controlling what still seems like an ungainly amount of philological
matter, though I think it is necessary to the discussion and may be
useful beyond the immediate context. 3 In preparing this essay I have received any amount of useful advice from anonymous rea~ers and some very specific and extremely helpful criticism from John Murchek of the University of Florida. While teaching a course in canonicity, he located and drew my attention to the quotation from Carlyle that serves as the first epigraph. He also pointed to a number of weaknesses in an earlier draft, which I have done my best to remedy. For all this assistance I am extremely grateful.
McGraw, 1966. |
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