Considering the Canon, Part I

My senior year of high school, some students put together a “Rebellious Reading” club. I remember the posters and being intrigued by the title—censored titles, right? Catcher in the Rye kind of thing? Wrong.

It turned out that this handful of students felt that the English curriculum was so focused on introducing students to historically excluded writers that it ignored what are often referred to as the “dead white guys.” Their “rebellious” club would read books from authors such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Whitman, Henry James, and so on. By reading women writers and writers of color, we were ignoring the dead white guys, they argued.

I could almost see their point, since in my rather disrupted high school career (three different high schools, one of which was in France), the only authors I remember reading are Joseph Conrad, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich (who, I’ll point out, are all essential writers for any student studying English to read). Then again, I also missed junior year, when I was supposed to study American Lit. And I switched from a private school to a public school, and their curriculums overlapped, especially in the Heart of Darkness and Beloved departments. From what I understand of these particular students’ earlier high school classes, unlike me, they had had the opportunity to read plenty a traditionally canonized writer including: John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Thoreau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. If you ever wanted some dead white guys, there’s a fine collection. Yet, did these white male high school seniors still feel underrepresented? Or did they just want to rebel by not being political correct (or dare I say, morally correct)? I was confused, and, as a woman, rather offended.

There are a lot of things that irk me about the canon. The idea on principle kind of bothers me since it does place certain writing above others, except I also think that’s an inevitable course of things; time will eventually shift through publications and certain ones will rise to the top. These works are studied, and eventually become not just works to study for the sake of literature, but for the sake of history, and of figuring out where our current society—no matter how messed up (read: patriarchal and racist) you may believe it to be—comes from. That said, it also bothers me that the canon is still essentially subjective, that any one of the editors can choose to add someone or take out someone due to personal preference or research projects.

As I continue to study English literature (side note, English meaning originally written in English, therefore British and American) , I’m realizing more and more that I deeply believe in the connection of literature to history. This is obvious in so many ways I won’t even mention. But more than some people, as much as I love the beauty of the written word and the stories found within, I also believe in reading literature in order to learn more about a time period. The tone of this piece is sexist? That tells us something about American culture in the early 1900s. And that, in turn, tells us a bit about American culture now. And although I completely agree that we need the other voices, the female voices, the voices of color, the stories of immigrants, the stories of the abused, we can’t completely ignore those of Hemingway and Faulkner. It’s undeniable that America is still patriarchal and white, and how we got to this point is something literature can help everyone understand.

But the sense of history that literature provides also shows exactly why it is necessary to include these historically excluded voices to the “canon.” Although we are all affected by the still prevalent, though not as horrible, racism and sexism, we have not all had similar life experiences or ancestral histories. And if we want an intelligent, open-minded population, we have to learn about experiences and histories different than our own, simple as that, because these other stories are often right next door—we rub shoulders with them and with what they’ve become today, everyday.

In today’s current educational world, I—and I believe most people of my generation, though I can’t speak for everyone—see a few things related to the canon and the teaching of it that do need to change as time goes on.

I, for one, am slightly disturbed by the continued separation of general “Literature” from “African-American Literature,” “Hispanic Literature,” etc. This is a topic that I am seeing more and more online and in discussions, so it seems like I am not the only one feeling this way lately. Not only do these categories, well, separate, but they also lead to certain stereotypes, expectations, and in some cases even a certain form of censorship.

I remember reading Clotel; Or, the President’s Daughter by Williams Wells Brown, published in 1853 for a class about gender and sex in 19^th century literature. It is generally credited as being the first novel published by an African-American, but my professor explained that it used to not be taught in African-American Literature courses because, although by an African-American, its emphasis on “light-skinned” people being portrayed as better than “darker-skinned,” among other things, was deemed inappropriate and counterproductive to such courses. Today, it’s slowly being reintroduced. This information shocked me, because, although I know it happens, I am very against deliberating changing or hiding history. And isn’t this representation a part of history? Doesn’t that reveal something about the time period, its culture, and beliefs? And not only is this a part of African-American history, but a part of American history? I haven’t taken the earlier half of the required American literature survey so I don’t know what they teach in it, but it brings me to that looming, unanswerable question: where do you draw the line?

Not too long ago, I interviewed a Cherokee poet, and he explained how he does not see his poetry within the category of “Native American” poetics. He didn’t write it as such, and he didn’t want people to necessarily read it as such. Would some consider him a Native American poet anyway, just because he is Native American, and that this desire to separate from such labels simply, well, a change in the path of the label? I can totally picture some innocent English major writing a paper on Native American poetry and how it’s changing today in that Native American poets don’t want to be recognized as such, and this innocent English major wouldn’t even see how that is ironic. It’s potentially powerful and good to separate literature by such distinctions, but also how it can be very damaging. Where do you draw the line—between the individual and the group, the subgroup and the all-encompassing?

On this point, I am also slightly disturbed on how these newer additions to the canon are being taught. Even within an American Literature course in which we’re reading such writings within a larger context, I can’t help but notice that occasional stereotypical readings of certain texts slip in that are completely connected to the fact a woman wrote it, or a black man, or an American Indian. Younger and newer professors are adapting different ways of reading such texts, since they’ve grown up studying them, but it still begs yet another unanswerable question—will certain texts always be defined by the author’s identity? Is it possible to overcome this, even with a future canon that represents a wide array of author backgrounds?

The fact that literature is an archeological dig, a time capsule so to speak, forces these most literary of pieces to become more than just the individual. I don’t think that really good writing, the kind that will stand the test of time, be canonized, and then studied, should ever really be confined to the individual. And that’s where the studying comes in—what does it really tell us about the world, and about us? In my opinion, labels, although definitely helpful at first, are beginning to become clutter, stickers that cling to minds with their preconceived notions and ways of thinking. “Okay, this is an African-American Literature course. These books are written by African-Americans. I must keep that in mind all times. I have to read the book with that slant. I have to analyze this from that understanding.” I don’t read to understand a history or people separate from my own. Okay, I do at times. But as the world becomes smaller and smaller, all these histories are merging. What I’m really doing is reading about these supposed “others” (if you are to believe the label) to understand my history and my people—because, to me, “my people” aren’t just white girls. America isn’t just male and white; it’s also female, and transgender, and queer, and every color of the rainbow. It sounds cheesy, especially with that wording, but it’s become increasingly limiting in this day and age to ignore it.