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The Western Literary Canon and Contemporary Revaluation

One of the enduring cultural artifacts of the period of Liberal Humanist dominance as a cultural paradigm is the Western Literary Canon, a group of works considered by Liberal Humanist writers to be the most valuable and significant works created in the Western world. In the latter half of the 20th century, elements of the new cultural paradigm began to criticize and devalue the Canon on the basis that it was too homogenous a group of works; a common criticism being that it was mainly composed of the writings of the male aristocracy, the “dead white males”. The postmodernist viewpoint sees the canon as elitist and outdated. The poststructuralist viewpoint sees the entire concept of a canon as ridiculous, holding rather that as there is no objective value in anything, the “most valuable works” can only be the most valuable works from the subjective viewpoint of a particular viewer. And the postcolonialists feel that a truly representative canon should value works by nonwestern and indigenous peoples as equal to those created by the DWMs, even in situations where one work is a cave painting by an anonymous artist and the other is a volume of influential poetry.

As a group, the contemporary theorists have achieved partial success in devaluing the Canon in the popular mind. But many critics and a large number of lecturers and teachers still feel that it is of value; even with Postmodernism at its peak of influence, students are still taught Shakespeare and the classical poets.

Evidently, then, there are a number of people with opinions residing between the two viewpoints, choosing to subscribe entirely to neither viewpoint. However, no middle ground is understood to exist; there are discrepancies that has not effectively been resolved, and the centrist majority are thus denied methods of expressing what they believe. It, then, is the intent of this essay to determine to what extent the two viewpoints can be reconciled. In particular, many of the elements of the contemporary platform contradict other elements, though it will become clear that an immutable traditionalist canon is not a defensible position. 

The term postmodern has been being used since the late 19th century and, due to the poor popular understanding but extraordinary popular influence of the movement it is most often used to describe, it has a multitude of different meanings attached to it in the public imagination; therefore, we find it necessary to specify exactly who and what we are referring to. During the 1960s, significant counterculture and antiestablishment movements gained traction within American and global universities, arising out of radical feminism, the civil rights movement and Vietnam War opposition. Cultural movements including postcolonialism, poststructuralism, anti-foundationalist philosophy et cetera influenced these movements. These cultural movements, while different in many ways, shared the common nature of being revolutionary movements and thus shared a common interest in defeating and overturning the status quo. The new wave of radicals fought the status quo wherever they found it; they fought the draft, they fought sexism, they fought racial segregation; and when they came to the lecture hall in colleges and universities across the world, the most visible literary symbol of the status quo was the Western Literary Canon. The incarnation, so to speak, of tradition and the establishment. They therefore gave it their automatic condemnation. Postmodernism, in the context of this essay, began very much as a product of the Baby Boom. However, since this first instinctive backlash against the Canon, serious and reasoned criticisms of it have been made; whether they are of value in themselves or whether they merely exist to justify an irrational dislike is irrelevant, and we will consider them as they are presented to us.

The nature of the criticisms leveled against the Western Canon is that they tend to claim to be irrefutable - that the inability of defenders of the Canon to demonstrate any objective superiority of included texts validates the arguments of the attackers. However, the notion that the Canon has no objective demonstrable value has its genesis in the postmodern relativism, heralded by Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, of a lack of absolute truth and a world of relative and subjective values. However, we can observe that, if indeed there is no objective value (or “Capital-T Truth”), it is largely meaningless to criticise any work based on its lack of said objective value. One might as well criticise a man for his lack of magic powers, an obviously useless criticism in a contemporary society where magic is widely understood to be primitive superstition.

In a sense, all objective concepts of value must inherit the value from a higher authority. Ancient Greek philosophers believed that any characteristic that could be observed in an object was inherited from some ultimate incarnation of that characteristic; this was expressed again in the way that the Christianised West held all objective Truth and all objective Value to be inherited from God, His teachings and His Word, codified in The Holy Bible. Indeed, the Bible may be considered to rival even Shakespeare in its primacy as a canon text. However, this expectation of objective value persisted for some considerable time after Christianity lost its stranglehold on thought, continuing until the very concept of universal truth and objective value was trampled underneath Postmodernism’s advance.

However, as Frederich Nietzche points out in Thus Spake Zarathustra, to leave things at that juncture is to leave one’s journey only half completed. We start off with concepts of higher value; the Word of God, the Grand Narratives, the Universal Truths - and by comparison to these higher value-structures, subjective truth and subjective value are minor and not valuable. Thus, when the constructs of objective value are shown to be artificial and false, it is tempting to conclude that no significant value remains and that all is relative, or that all is meaningless; but that is nihilistic, leads us to despair, and is simply not useful. Not only is it not useful, but it is additionally shortsighted, failing to see the following: it is not the case that there were higher values but they are gone. Rather, it is the case that there never were higher values; that when we thought there were we were deceived by illusions; and that to see subjective value as inferior is to perform the self-contradictory feat of accepting these illusory objective values for the purpose of comparison with the subjective ones, while simultaneously denying them their own existence. Rather, we should simply accept that subjective values form the highest values in existence, and that they are (or should be) privileged as such. So, according to this line of thought, valuation of the Canon is subjective, but this can be valid. 

In order to perform a meaningful valuation of anything in a world of subjective values, we turn to influence. We consider how works have been received by critics and the public, and we consider the influence that said works have had on later authors. And this is an arena in which the true value of the Canon can be appreciated; whatever one’s personal subjective opinion on the Canon, it is undeniable that these works have greatly influenced not only authors but simply people, all over the West. The works of the Canon have shaped how Western people see the world and how they interpret their own lives to an extent not seen outside this list of “privileged” works. Undeniably sexism and racism are a part of the history of the Canon - nonwhite or female authors faced discrimination and difficulty in being published, not to mention that members of these groups were much less likely to have the ability to write well; this not being due to any inferiority in intellect, as thought at the time, but rather being the simple result of the fact that being a skilled author required and to an extent still requires an above-average level of wealth; said wealth being sufficient to acquire a good education (meaning that one cannot simply make money oneself; one’s parents must have been wealthy) as well as the possession of sufficient funds that one does not have to worry about supporting one’s family through professional work. Due to this, most of the Canon was written by male members of the aristocracy, who were exclusively white. Females and ethnic minorities were largely denied the opportunity to contribute, and that is unfortunate - but it does not mean that we should try now to deny this and retrospectively revalue texts to try to appease our artificial notions of equality.

Language exists exclusively for the purpose of communication. Even the most profound words are meaningless and useless to the responder who does not understand the language used by the creator. Yet understanding the language is far from being adequate, in terms of ensuring that two people can communicate efficently with one another. It has been understood since time immemorial (indeed, it is seen in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) that shared experience is vital to understanding. We manufacture reality and shared understanding is required for knowledge to be effectively transferred between individuals.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            As argued by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct, humans have a genetically programmed predisposition to attempt to learn to communicate. This is a concept which is repugnant to much contemporary thought, and to postcolonialists in particular - nevertheless, the scientific consensus, which is based on evidence rather than rhetoric, shows that in several fields at least humans are naturally predisposed to act in certain ways and that these ways can vary depending on the gender and heritage of the individual. This is contrary to the contemporary belief, unsubstantiated by evidence, that all behavior is defined by cultural context and that there are no natural behaviors. Mr. Pinker’s specific point is that the nature of humans as social animals requires us to interact and communicate with one another in order to survive and prosper. Yet any skilled translator can tell us that some concepts cannot be properly translated from one language to another, that there is no simple way to express the connotations of a word in one language with the tools of another. The nature of connotation as communicating meaning outside of what is obvious demonstrates to us how the complexities of language and linguistic context rely on shared understandings, mutual similarities in worldview. Perfect understanding is not possible between different individuals, as perfect uncorrupted translation from thought to word to thought again is impossible; in a sort of constantly recurring “death of the author” (Barthes, 1967) situation, everything we think, write or understand is shaped by ourselves as dynamic individuals and by our own constantly changing context. This constantly changing context means that we cannot communicate even with our future selves with perfect understanding; though we are more likely to understand what we meant, since such great shared understanding is held in common.

Though Sigmund Freud believed that our mutual understandings were the product of fundamental similarities in our childhoods, perhaps a more accepted viewpoint is presented by C. G. Jung, who in his theory of collective unconsciousness points out that myths are “spontaneous presentations from the unconscious of psychological and spiritual truths” (Johnson, 1977). From this viewpoint, myths are universally meaningful and represent universally valid patterns of life, what he called “archetypes”. According to Jung, a myth is a sort of collective dream, applicable to mankind as a whole; a person who understands a myth is in touch with the universal questions which all of us subconsciously ask ourselves. This would, then, allow the understander-of-myths not only to fit into society better, but also enable him to better communicate with his peers. Postmodernism, of course, is fundamentally opposed to such concepts. Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as being characterised by “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1984), but this has often been considered to be, as a “universal skepticism” towards metanarratives, a metanarrative in itself; and thus, self-refuting. Regardless of the philosophical intricacies of the matter, sociologists continue to find that, like it or not, some stories (or “myths”) do seem to have widespread meaning.

Because of the infinitely complex factors influencing context, which in turn shapes understanding, perfect communication is not possible; yet it is valuable and useful for us to come as close as practicable, and by sharing “myths”, we are able to create an approximation of understanding that is specific to those individuals that share this cultural context with us. Earlier we mentioned Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, Death of the Author. In that essay, Barthes notes disapprovingly that readers (in 1967) tended to try to consider the author’s personal context to extract meaning from his work. By considering the author’s race, upbringing, socioeconomic status and a host of other factors, readers believed that they could attain greater understanding. Barthes tells us that this is not valuable from the context of reading works, simply because any interpretation can be subjectively valid; regardless, it is certainly valuable from the context of recieving communication. It is the prerogative of the reader to choose to accept or not accept the viewpoint of the author, but if communication is to take place the intention of the author is of primary importance. We must allow ourselves to communicate if we are to interact with other individuals as societal creatures, and to communicate shared understanding and shared context must exist. Were a contemporary urbanised youth to attempt to communicate with a youth of similar age, plucked from the 19th century and raised in what might seem to the first youth extreme conditions, they would simply not be able to understand one another on some issues, likely those relating to philosophy, religion and romance. The mutual understandings and similarities in worldview that we share unite us as a social group.

Nowhere in this essay will the reader find the claim that the Western Literary Canon is universally applicable; indeed, it is called Western for a reason. But within the Western ethnic/social grouping, the texts of the Canon are the most influential, most widely acknowledged incarnations of the shared understandings that allow us to communicate complex meanings efficiently, and they, by virtue of their wide influence and huge readership, help us to define what binds us together as a society.

Certainly, there are many valid criticisms that can be made of the Canon as an immutable set of texts, composed by dead white European males. For the Canon to remain relevant at all to society, let alone claim to be the pre-eminent descriptor of the shared understandings of said society, obviously it must evolve as the society does or be consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet it could probably be said that this has taken place and continues to do so. While it is, as we have emphasised before in this work, the Western Literary Canon, as we become more inclusive and multicultural a society people of more widely varied backgrounds become part of our societal history and their works become part of our literary canon. Salman Rushdie and Vladmir Nabokov, for example,  would have to feature in any serious attempt at listing the works and authors of the Canon; though Rushdie is Indian and Nabokov Russian. In any case, the Canon is not a rigidly defined set of works and no universally recognized definition of what is and is not included exists - rather, despite the attempts of some organizations -notably universities- to present an authoritative and definitive opinion on what is included, the Canon is simply generally understood to include some works and not others. It seems appropriate that a body of work which comprises the shared stories and mutual understandings of our culture should itself be defined in terms of mutual understanding.

This, the web of mutual understandings that define the Western Literary Canon, is often poorly understood by the detractors of the Canon, who might rhetorically ask “Who gives these works their value? Who decides what texts are worth studying or reading?” Their point is one of élitism, but few things could be less elitist than a body of works defined merely by influence. Though the question asked is a rhetorical one, an attempt to answer it might read as follows:

I define the Western Literary Canon. As do you, as do all of us. Whenever a text influences a reader in Western culture, it becomes a part of the Canon. Those texts that are generally accepted to be Canon, the most influential texts in the Western world, reached that position not through the deliberations of committees or the arguments of philosophers; not even through critical acclaim. Rather, it is through the individually made choices of countless individuals to read and be influenced by the Canon that these works can claim to be significant parts of the story that binds us together as a society.

No doubt in a social vacuum, a central Canon text and a random pulp novel are of equal value. But Canon texts are incarnations of Myth, the predominant signifiers of the ancient stories of society. Carlo Gozzi claimed “that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations.” (Goethe) in Western culture , and that all stories told are different interpretations or ways of telling them. These thirty-six are the true Canon, represented by their most influential incarnations.

As our contemporary Western society becomes more tolerant, more accepting of diverse viewpoints and more pluralistic, the canon becomes more wide-ranging and inclusive. Contemporary thinkers often make the mistake of thinking the Western Literary Canon to be the only such body of work in existence; rather, every culturally distinct social group of humans has its own shared body of stories, its own Myths, its own Canon, so to speak. The Western Canon is the most obvious to Western thinkers, because it is widespread due to colonialism in previous centuries, it is entirely written or recorded, and simply put, Western thinkers are used to it. But even in societies which have little written tradition, a shared body of understood stories exists - an example would be Australian Aboriginal groups, who share a Canon of verbally retold myths collectively known as the Dreamtime legends.

With globalisation and the advent of modern communications allowing people separated by continents to communicate instantaneously, we move closer to a single global culture, a worldwide similarity of cultural experience. This occurs because we pick up ideas, Myths, from those we communicate with simply in order to understand them better. Two sub-outcomes are possible as a result of this trend; possibly one culture (likely Western) will dominate the others. This is a monoculture scenario, involving diversity being smothered by the societal dominance of the monoculture and resulting in greater worldwide interpersonal understanding at the cost of a reduction in the availability of unique experience or new conceptuality. However, it is also possible (and more likely) that rather than any one culture exhibiting clear dominance, existing cultures and their defining stories will interact and, to a degree, merge. Canons, then, will likewise merge to the point that we become unable to discern, other than historically, the Western elements from the rest of a Universal Literary Canon, just as languages appropriate words from one another when they are without adequate translations.

The texts of the Western Literary Canon are influential and thus valuable because a large proportion of the people who read them find them to be powerful and moving. While for this to be the case, the authors must have been skilled in the use of language and dextrous in their application of conceptuality, the power of Canon texts comes from the fact that they speak to us at a visceral level, from the way that they deftly articulate stories that were already to a degree present in our subconscious.

The postmodernists claim that the Western Literary Canon is also élitist in that it presents a divide between “high and low culture”, and say that people of lower socioeconomic status are disempowered by the inaccessibility of canon texts. It, however, is no more than an attractive delusion that we live in a classless society; the well-read and literate educated members of society certainly tend to mainly associate with themselves, though they are far from having any sort of monopoly on wealth. However, as we have stated before, the nature of the Canon is simply that it is a collection of texts that interpret and present the great stories of our society. The Canon certainly has no exclusive hold on these stories, and pop-culture presents us constantly with accessible interpretations on the same myths. Jane Austen’s Emma, for example, is a canonical text which presents a mixture of Plots 21 (Self-Sacrifice for Kindred) and 28 (Obstacles to Love) that was deftly reinterpreted into the much more accessible Clueless, a contemporary retelling of the same story that was successful and widely viewed enough to make more than 56 million dollars. Even when following a script line-by-line, a skilled director can make a canonical story accessible and wildly popular with an audience not usually thought to be open to Canon texts; Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet being a seminal example. This work took possibly the most central love-story to the Western Literary Canon, (which is possibly so central because it includes elements from so many of the classic Myths) and transformed it to be more accessible and more obviously relevant to a contemporary audience. The result was spectacularly successful, making close to 150 million dollars in a staggering demonstration of the universal applicability and power of Canon stories. Other examples could include the likewise extraordinarily successful adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, West Side Story, another adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, based on the Christian Bible. In fact William Shakespeare, who is widely understood to be the most central author to the Western Literary Canon, is also the most filmed author of all time; more than 420 feature-length film adaptations of his works have been produced, not to mention countless made-for-tv transformations and uncountable movies, television shows, radio dramas, books and plays which draw heavily on his work. As the most influential author in the history of English literature, Shakespeare is also the most canonical.

Many of the flaws in the Western Literary Canon are in fact flaws in how it is percieved in the popular imagination. Classic, liberal-humanist definitions of it are imperfect, painting the Canon as a set-in-stone collection of Works that are objectively Great and inherently more valuable than other, supposedly inferior texts. As far as that definition is concerned, the Canon is indeed a useless collection of elitist rubbish with little relevance to contemporary methods of reading and responding to texts. But that is not how the Canon should truly be percieved. Rather, it should be seen as a dynamic, alive, continuously evolving grouping of the most influential texts in our culture, as the living symbol of the metanarrative of western society. The Canon brings together the stories that make us a culture, a people, that give us identity and the ability to share understanding. It changes as the society does; it is defined by society; it is moulded by society.

And in that sense, the Canon is and will continue to be of great value to all of us.