| Edward Jayne 16 Eurocentric Functions Toward a Qualitative Asessment of Literature |
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By Edward Jayne The extraordinary literary achievement of our so-called Eurocentric tradition is difficult to explain on a qualitative basis within the compass of a short article. Western civilization's presumably unsurpassed literary genius since ancient times seems too elusive, too Protean and fraught with exceptions, to be accounted for by anything less than a wide acquaintance with the tradition itself as well as the enormous output of books and articles interpreting it. However, many critics loosely identified as multiculturalists now challenge the importance of this tradition and call into question both its elitest pretensions and the relatively limited canon of texts which are taught and revered as examples of its remarkable attainment. These critics declare that such a canon should either be discarded or vastly expanded, and, sad to tell, a significant number of our teachers, administrators, and educational anthologists have answered their call by displacing as many received "classics" as possible with multicultural texts many of which seem to lack intrinsic worth by even the most generous qualitative standards. It therefore seems useful at this time to recapitulate a few of the aesthetic criteria that help to differentiate canonical works of literature from others that necessarily fall short of this designation. Toward this end I want to propose here a short list of sixteen binary categories relevant to the explication of literature. My list begins with obvious intrinsic aesthetic criteria. Later categories become increasingly extrinsic, but their application is only valid in my opinion to the extent that they bear intrinsic relevance. Each of the sixteen categories designates a pair of antithetical functions situated on a linear spectrum upon which literary texts can be grouped between two extremes. By function I suggest Tynjanov's concept of interrelated units within a work of fiction as well as Propp's concept of units that remain constant, if in varying combinations, among separate works of fiction. However, I want to enlarge these definitions to embrace a more inclusive variety of features that seem obvious but not specifically definable. These include, for example, irony, contemporary intellectual relevance, and traditional awareness (respectively, categories 13, 15, and 16), all of which may be considered important despite the absence of any clear-cut data that can be quantified on a presumably consistent empirical basis. My justification is that Tynjanov and Propp's methodologies--in fact, all the formalist methodologies I have encountered--entail similar liberties. They might seem quantifiable, but close scrutiny of their use in explicating texts quickly discloses relatively loose standards of verification. I designate the absence or denial of each of these sixteen functions not as a void, but as an antithetical locus that gives complementary status to its omission, for example by contrasting irony with naive truth assumptions, intellectual relevance with plain-minded innocence etc. As Derrida complained about binarisms of this sort, each first term is "privileged" in the sense that it usually (but not always) characterizes texts of "high" culture identified as being canonical. I accept Derrida's insight but reject its pejorative implications on the assumption that "privilege" more often than not entails genuine qualitative superiority. In this sense any function listed in the left column tends to characterize the generally recognized classics of our Eurocentric canon, inclusive of the literary output of the usual suspects--Sophocles, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Faulkner, etc.--but also of such less celebrated authors as Trollope, Maupassant, Pynchon, and Durrenmatt. On the other hand, each second term listed under Non-Canonical in the right-hand column identifies the presumably "marginalized" countervailing function that tends to characterize the folk tales, children's stories, westerns, romances, detective stories, comic books, and movies and television programs we take for granted today. It may be conceded here that the linear gradient between these antithetical functions varies from one category to the next, that a full range of intermediate performance levels exists, and that the specific location of a text between the extremes is always debatable. Moreover, the classics often possess a surprisingly large assortment of non-canonical functions, while individual works of popular fiction can possess at least a couple of the canonical functions. Nevertheless, I want to argue that a cumulative profile of functions may be at least tentatively suggested to help differentiate canonical texts from more popular works of literature. In my opinion, non-canonical texts bear negligible value for classroom teaching unless they possess an adequate assortment of functions identified with the left column--not all its categories, of course, but, say, at least four or five of them. I do not oppose the use of these texts in classes devoted to particular themes, genres, or historical epochs, but they should not be confused with canonical texts which meet much more challenging standards of judgment. For, contrary to multiculturalist arguments, I want to insist that there is a major difference in quality, historic importance, and what might be described as teachable sophistication among works of fiction as measured by the sixteen binary categories listed below. Quality and popularity seem to converge in the so-called classics over a period of time such that these classics imbed themselves in the public imagination because of their superior intrinsic worth. On the other hand, the great majority of texts identified as literary classics at one time or another--as exemplified by the fate of Holmes, Whittier, and Longfellow's poetry--sooner or later fall into obscurity from which they almost never recover. Likewise, texts with broad popularity when first published more often than not lose their audience when their topical referentiality no longer offsets their literary shortcomings. Many of the multiculturalist texts promoted in the classroom today can be expected to be particularly vulnerable to such a fate, unable to meet Samuel Johnson's simple but devastating pragmatic standard that canonical status be withheld for at least a century of readership and critical judgment--time enough to differentiate Shakespeare from Fletcher, Wordsworth from Crabbe, and Conrad from Galsworthy. Moreover, the literary success of non-western authors such as Borges, Marquez, Rushdie, Naipaul and possibly Achebe--all of whom still remain viable candidates for canonical inclusion within the requisite century's duration--can be at least partially attributed to their effective appropriation of western influence through what might be described as high cultural diffusion. Whatever remains, the Je ne sais quoi that lends them non-Eurocentric value more often than not derives from local coloring and accidental analogy with western literature. I must add as my final concession that many of the literary functions I list here are now considered the esoteric (and snobbish) residue of an elitist aesthetic bias that was abandoned from twenty to thirty years ago by literary critics at the proverbial cutting edge. Respectfully, I must disagree with most of the assumptions of this particular vanguard. Too much is lost in the bargain if the current assault on the canon is intended to make literature more accessible to college-level underachievers by teaching fiction as a simple-minded group excursion into cultural victimization. If a choice must be made, deprived students should be exposed to western civilization, not the other way around. If the intellectual demands imposed by our Eurocentric classics strain the attention span of these students, we should not simply jettison these texts for which the left-column functions I list below might have any valid application. Instead, we should treat this discrepancy as a major challenge to bring these students to a level of sophistication that lets them benefit from the encounter. A double strategy becomes necessary: first to deliver them to the very best and most challenging texts, then to help these texts to catapult them even further. But to the list of functions:
A canonical text contains form as a reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities as argued by Coleridge, I.A. Richards, and Cleanth Brooks. This is of crucial importance in the thematic organization of a text, but it is no less important, at perhaps a more abstract level, in the effective balance between the principles of repetition as emphasized by Roman Jakobson and defamiliarization and foregrounding as respectively emphasized by Shklovsky, Mukarovsky, and Riffaterre. In its narrative organization of experience, as E.M. Forster has explained, the potentially endless linear advancement of story (and then, and then, etc.) should be subsumed to a more complex intrareferential plot whose unity of action obtains an outcome (terminus ad quem) qualitatively different from its beginning (terminus a quo) through both reversal and discovery as explained by Aristotle. For even the most avant-garde works of literature bring into play these closure dynamics despite the best effort to disguise them. The "and then, and then" somehow adds up to something beyond itself. In contrast, non-canonic fiction merely tell interesting stories with a lively thrown-togetherness (Heidegger's Geworfenheit) that takes one nowhere.
In non-canonical works of fiction everything is almost entirely predictable based on conventional expectations: boy gets girl, the good prevails against the bad, etc. In the Eurocentric classics, there is better interplay between literary conventions and their apparent violation, keeping the reader perpetually surprised, yet finally gratified through acceptable closure. This is even true of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, in which all the rules of formal integrity (category 1) are broken until and including the very end.
What might be described as zoom-lense versatility manifests itself in canonical works of literature, for example Madame Bovary, in which three paragraphs can be devoted to a panoramic summary of one's entire first marriage followed by ten pages or more to describe in exquisite scenic detail one's first impression of one's second wife. In contrast, non-canonical works of literature are limited to a much more constrictive homogeneity in the narrative allocation of words to events proportional to the "real" time these events might have occupied: five pages account for ten days, ten pages for from fifteen to thirty days, etc.
Of course Aristotle emphasized action instead of characterization in classical tragedy, but the most impressive Eurocentric classics since the Renaissance have brought both verisimilitude and the unity of action to bear upon the task of psychological adjustment. As a general rule, the more that emotional growth both generates and derives from what happens, the more challenging the work of fiction. This may be observed in the novels of Austen, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, and numerous others who have written since the mid-nineteenth century. In non-canonical texts, on the other hand, characterization is almost entirely plot-ridden, limited to the identification of recognizable stereotypes: "He exudes villainy, so watch him do villainous things"; "they are trustworthy bumpkins, so watch their rustic simplicity in action," etc.
The basic Manichaean conflict between good guys and bad guys typical of non-canonical fiction is less impressive than the internal conflict within the minds of characters torn between good and bad choices, or, one step further, as Hegel argued, torn between alternative virtuous choices, as for example when undecided whether to pursue unsullied morality or effective politics, or whether to go out into the world or to stay at home to take care of one's family. When Manichaean struggle and sentimental tales of victimhood and retribution predominate without any internal choice whatsoever except whether to join the fray ("Should I remain a coward or help to fight the bad guys?"), the text is very probably a potboiler, no matter how valid the issue might seem.
In Eurocentric classics a thematic content--traditional or otherwise--attains genuine profundity through the narrative (or diegetic) embodiment of issues and ideas important to human experience, and often as disclosed by every aspect of the stories being told--every word, image, and conversational turn. Of course profound themes may also crop up in non-canonical works of fiction, but they are usually spelled out in an obvious fashion and fail to bear a convincing organic relationship to the texts in their entirety.
Description in our Eurocentric classics bears a compelling eidetic immediacy whenever this seems appropriate. One is almost able to see, hear, smell, and touch what is described. In contrast, non-canonical writing can do little more than show and tell ("Sasha the goat girl sat on a knoll, rubbed her eyes, and thought of her unhappy brother.") In similar fashion, the canonic use of metaphor effectively compounds signification--the image signified takes on the role of signifier to express feelings otherwise too elusive to be captured in words. In contrast, non-canonic poetry tends to exclude metaphor and effective imagery and/or to use dead and mixed metaphor indiscriminately.
In non-canonic texts the use of language is so empty and depersonalized that style becomes both a bore and an impediment. Of course syntax and vocabulary should not be flaunted for their own sake, and of course the use of ordinary words is entirely acceptable when quoting or replicating the experience of ordinary people. Nevertheless, when the author's voice predominates a healthy mixed vocabulary and a syntactic "float" that transcends the plain-style subject/predicate nexus from one sentence to the next becomes desirable. The intelligent use of aposiopesis (the lapse into pregnant silence) may be granted its importance, for example in the plays of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet, but its silences should be intended--and controlled--to signify something beyond themselves.
As Frank Kermode has explained in his useful book, The Classic, canonical works are characterized by sufficient indeterminacy to elude absolute definition. Over the centuries, but even from one reading to the next, there is never a single hard and fast final answer in trying to probe the meaning of classics, whereas non-canonical texts very quickly bottom out with an obvious explanation of their meaning. They say exactly what they mean, and there it sits on the page in front of you, and with nowhere to go.
Many of our Eurocentric classics manifest aesthetic control at the surface level of meaning, yet disclose in their words and described events a countervailing unconscious expression that brings aesthetic harmony into an entirely new level of integration. There is likewise an archetypal resonance that stirs one's imagination, and its explanation obliges one to consult one's feelings on a more holistic basis. In non-canonical fiction unconscious motivation may also be detected, but limited to a relatively simplistic symbolism that is mostly irrelevant to the text's final and most inclusive meaning. Otherwise, there are no surprises--everything goes as planned by the author, just as Edgar Allen Poe perversely recommended in his advice for writing poetry (but contrary to his actual achievement in his best works of fiction).
Sentimentality occurs when fiction makes coercive demands upon the reader's feelings beyond what the reader is able or willing to grant based on the intrinsic merit of the story being told. This may be observed in the fiction of Richardson and his many imitators through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also in the defunct socialist realism of the nineteen-thirties as well as today's multiculturalist fiction which has featured stories of cruelty and deprivation to hammer home a relatively simplistic political message. By "Felt Thought" (Eliot's designation), I describe the full control of materials imbedded in a story--shown, not told--that justifies the intended response relevant both to what happens and to the final inclusive impact of the story as a whole.
No matter how elusive the mind of the author, Eurocentric fiction sooner or later discloses an authorial presence both behind and beyond the doing, saying, and thinking of the characters. This is what I.A. Richards meant by tone, and it is no less applicable to fiction than poetry. Just as the feelings and motivation of characters--and their grasp of each others' feelings and motivation--should overshadow the raw action of the story, the more inclusive feelings and motivation of the author's persona as narrator should be of relevance in finally judging the merits of his/her work of fiction. It should be possible to dislike a novel, play, or poem for no other reason than because one dislikes its author in his/her assumed persona as narrator.
As Cleanth Brooks emphasized, Eurocentric classics usually bring into play an ironic detachment that does not make totalitarian claims upon the truth value of what is being said. Alternative viewpoints are somehow implied, giving canonic authors the freedom to complicate and refract their sense of allegiance apropos of whatever issues appeal to them. In contrast, non-canonic potboilers insist upon simplistic truths and thereupon fall into telling blatant lies.
Though many of our Eurocentric classics from Homer to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might seem to have been written to affirm traditional Eurocentric values, most were originally conceived, quite the contrary, to declare a vision of human potential at variance with the orthodox expectations of their contemporaries. This is the great paradox of western civilization nobody quite recognizes: that rather too many of its writers rejected by their contemporaries as bothersome and potentially dangerous rebels and troublemakers have authored its most revered classics. Such authors as Sophocles, Dante, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Bellow have always tested the bounds of respectability, but with balancing acts that could eventually be accepted by a literate cosmopolitan audience. In contrast, non-canonical works of fiction simply reinforce current stereotypes with the same cliches brought into new combinations. At the time they are published they might seem to be potential classics, but they soon lose their audience once their cliches and stereotypes lose their currency.
Our Eurocentric classics join history by actively participating in the twenty-five century philosophical dialogue that has given western civilization its unique cumulative literary tradition. It does not matter whether canonical authors have been "progressive" or "retrogressive" (Arnold the conservative offsetting George Eliot the progressive; Yeats the conservative offsetting Shaw the progressive, etc.) What does matter is that they have either directly or indirectly taken a stance upon current issues in politics, religion, science, and related fields. Arguably, the single most compelling linkage has been with secular philosophy as an intellectual achievement unique to western civilization, for in fact no other civilization has generated a secular philosophy worthy of sustained literary response. The literary impact of secular philosophy has been substantial in Greece (its tragedians pitted against its Sophists), Rome, Renaissance Italy, France, England, Germany, and the United States. In England alone this impact has been of major importance. Not by accident Shakespeare's tragedy was more or less concurrent with Bacon's categories of intellectual fallibility, Milton's Manichaean cosmology with Hobbes's theory of absolute sovereignty, Dryden's fideism with Locke's invention of psychology to isolate true knowledge from the false, Wordsworth's emotion recollected in tranquility with Godwin's uncontrolled private judgment, Dickens's social righteousness with Marx's class exploitation, Shaw's genetic optimism with Bergson's creative evolution, and Lawrence's pursuit of an acceptable secular ethos with Russell's subordination of belief and ethical standards to verifiable empirical knowledge. No less impressive has been the dialectic standoff between contemporary authors and philosophers, Johnson's stout defense of orthodox belief as opposed to Hume's resurrection of pure Academic classical skepticism, Austen's marriage customs as opposed to Wollstonecraft's liberated woman, Coleridge's Kantian imagination as opposed to Bentham's utilitarian common sense, Tennyson and Hardy's unconsolable literary pessimism as opposed to Mill's optimistic pursuit of social reform, and Joyce's invention of a literary stream-of-consciousness to articulate the most inaccessible recesses of privacy as opposed to Whitehead and Russell's invention of a sentential calculus to integrate science and philosophy by subsuming mathematics to logic on a sufficiently inclusive basis. In contrast, non-canonical fiction is almost entirely void of speculative theoretical implications, more often than not because of cultural deprivation the product of a rigid fundamentalist orthodoxy rooted in unexamined ignorance.
T. S. Eliot's recommendation in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that serious authors should thoroughly acquaint themselves with literary tradition in order to be able to locate themselves in this tradition was vastly exaggerated as late as thirty years ago. But in fact authors should be aware of the accomplishment of their best and most ambitious contemporaries as well as those of their predecessors from whom they might learn something, if only to avoid duplicating or needlessly falling short of these authors' achievement. Mediocrity too easily replicates itself through the ignorance of what has already been done. Obviously, a list like this cannot be used to quantify literary genius, for example by assigning arbitrary scores for all sixteen categories (say, between 0 and 10) and then adding them up to compare the total scores among particular texts. It would be absurd, for example, to assign Hamlet a near perfect total score of 153 as compared to 137 for Madame Bovary, 129 for War and Peace, and less than 10 for Kahlil Gibran's poetry. It would be even more absurd to compile a two-dimensional chart with sixteen columns of scores listed horizontally to apply to any number of texts listed vertically, thus reducing the Eurocentric tradition to a two-dimensional score sheet easier to decipher than a train schedule. Unavoidably, the entire list of sixteen functions is arbitrary and can without much difficulty be expanded or contracted to favor the canonic status of any genre or school of writers one pleases. Moreover, these functions are not weighted equally, and many, if not all of them, overlap in mapping the value of any particular text. One cannot even quantify the differences between texts within any of the particular categories. For example, apropos of imagery (category 7), Wordsworth's nostalgic depiction of nature as emotion recollected in tranquillity bears an impact strikingly different from Chaucer's use of effictio to give pictorial vividness to his characters represented as types and from Conrad's use of chiaroscuro to cast in shadow and light the ethical crisis imposed by European imperialism. On the other hand, apropos of intellectual relevance (category 15), Wordsworth's retreat to nature in order to salvage and justify his Jacobin apostasy was no less different from Chaucer's bold secularization of human behavior at the end of the fourteenth century and from Conrad's misanthropic depiction five centuries later of a disastrous colonial morass in Africa to call into question both European imperialism and the greed and savagery just under the surface of all human behavior. How can one quantify the differences involved here? Obviously, one cannot. Moreover, a work of literature may be judged a Eurocentric classic without excelling in more than a few of the sixteen categories. Fielding's Tom Jones, for example, primarily brings into play theme (category 6), the testing of literary conventions (category 2), authorial participation (category 12), and irony (category 13). The novel's plot might be considered of comparable excellence, as Coleridge has argued, but today Fielding's cumbersome machinery to impose its happy ending seems too contrived and theatrical. It is far less effective, for instance, than Updike's subtler denouement in Rabbit Run that advances from the initial uncertainty whether its hero, Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, is running away from responsibility, toward Christian salvation, or somehow in both directions at once--to the novel's final confirmation that his spiritual quest is simply a flight from responsibility that can be reduced to the naked formula-- [X or Y] or [X and Y]---> X, not Y. The terminus ad quem in Rabbit Run is the achieved existential purity of Harry's irresponsibility that outrages almost everybody else in the novel. Even heaven and earth protest--heaven symbolized by patches of sky seen as a vindictive blue monkey which chases Harry from tree top to tree top as he races through the woods to escape his daughter's funeral, and earth symbolized by the abandoned cellar hole of a forgotten colonial homestead he stumbles upon that confronts him with the primordial family obligation he has forever desecrated. One of the best American novels since World War II, Rabbit Run excels Tom Jones in most of the categories listed above, but this does not necessarily make it a better novel. Tom Jones does less, but what it does, it probably does better, so the overall superiority of either text remains open to question. On the other hand, many works of literature might fall short of canonical status through the inferior use of their materials in a sufficient number of categories. This seems to be the case for Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose remarkable historic relevance (categories 14 and 15) is almost entirely offset by its sentimentality (category 11), its stereotypical characterization (categories 4 and 5), and its relentlessly clumsy style (at least partially invoking categories 7 through 10). It can be argued in defense of Stowe's novel, as seems to be done nowadays, that its outstanding success where it excels more than offsets its shortcomings elsewhere. Otherwise, by way of compromise, one may grant Uncle Tom's Cabin marginal canonical status, nevertheless conceding that it deserves to be read regardless of whether it possesses full credentials as a classic. And in fact the overwhelming majority of the texts we encounter are necessarily located in the vast intermediate zone between high and basic culture. Most of these texts were never intended for canonical inclusion, so it seems perverse to submit them to canonical standards of judgment. A good detective story remains a good detective story, for it does well what it is supposed to do, which is all that should be expected of it. The same goes for westerns, romances, children's fiction, etc. On the other hand, we cannot forget that a few of these supposedly non-canonical works of literature have turned out to possess ample canonical value, as happened, for example, with Shakespeare's incessant borrowings from the stories of others, with Blake's crackpot picto-lyrics of innocence and experience, with Mark Twain's broad-humored frontier tellings, and with Dickens's labyrinthine sentimental magazine serials. These particular literary enactments were addressed to contemporary popular audiences, and only later were they brought into the traditional canon as classics with both public and critical acceptance. Eventually they did achieve full canonical status, so we may suppose that other works deserving of belated recognition can likewise be resurrected by future critics and readers. There is no aesthetic edict to prevent this from happening. If the unique achievement of the classics cannot be quantified based on the literary functions I have listed above, what value derives from listing these functions? Little, I guess, beyond pointing out some of the textual qualities worthy of close examination that seem to have been neglected in recent years. Of course many of these functions may be challenged, but perhaps this is their primary value--that they are arguable in exploring the canonical potential of particular works of literature. They permit the text itself to be debated on the assumption that it deserves to be read and studied, compared with other texts, and, yes, exhaustively treated in books and articles from a variety of critical perspectives. This principle of interpretive arguability seems germane both to Gerald Graff's view of canonicity and Stanley Fish's concept of interpretive communities that draw common conclusions from the sharing of divergent viewpoints. But not so for the non-canonical works of literature whose idea and imagery are minimal, whose plot is story, whose irony is plain-forked (handsome for ugly, smart for dumb, etc.), and whose relevance is strictly as message pure and simple. Texts from this category defy sustained constructive debate and primarily seem limited to the affirmative role they play in reinforcing the beliefs and stereotypes of their readers. Not surprisingly, therefore, the typical supportive critical response features their broad ideological justification rather than much of any explication. For there is very little to explicate--only stories to tell. The word diversity has frequently been used to promote multiculturalism, but in fact there is much less diversity among non-canonical texts than there is among texts within the Eurocentric canon as defined by the sixteen functions I have listed here. Compare Aeschylus with Dostoevsky, Proust, or Joyce--or even with Sophocles and Euripedes. Compare Milton with Ovid, Ibsen with Aristophanes, Hopkins with Martial, Kafka with Rabelais, Bellow with Racine, Burroughs with Goldsmith, or Ellison with James (for Ellison also probably belongs to the canon, as do Wright and Morrison). Try out such comparisons within any particular generation, and differences can be almost as stark, for example by comparing Bunyan with Etherege, Goethe with de Sade, Emerson with Poe, Wilde with Strindberg, Mann with Brecht, or Celine with Malraux. The profound differences among these authors defy easy categorization, thus perhaps explaining why Foucault and his multiculturalist epigones have been only too eager to reduce Eurocentric literature to the homogeneous discourse of anonymous patriarchal oppressors. As soon as authors' identities are disclosed and their idiosyncrasies acknowledged, Foucault's myth of authorless cultural hegemony tumbles. The Eurocentric tradition of DWM literary despotism as envisaged by multiculturalists becomes instead a bizarre parade of bold and eccentric iconoclasts whose astonishing aesthetic and intellectual diversity primarily--and perhaps exclusively--obtains cultural unity through their shared qualitative excellence as suggested by the sixteen functions listed above. Why this much diversity within the canon? Because the Eurocentric tradition is anything but monolithic. Instead, to extend Bakhtin's critical approach from individual texts to western literature as a whole, this entire tradition must be understood as a vast carnivalesque dialogue of divergent "voices" whose cumulative total may be only tentatively summarized. Since the very beginning, it has been a tradition pitted against itself, and the rejection of antecedent ideas and conventions has been one of its most persistent features, for, as both T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom have suggested, the best way to join the canon has always been to pit oneself against one's predecessors with sufficient talent and originality to be granted eventual membership. The notion promoted by multiculturalists that our canonical texts expound different variations of the same authoritarian dogma sugar-coated by literary convention is thus fatally misguided. Quite the opposite, an extravagant Brownian motion occurs such that every literary achievement bears its own divergent trajectory that eventually merges with the composite total for all the rest. Those poems, plays, and novels that merely recapitulate what has already been told by others almost inevitably fall short of canonical status. Moreover, most of the authors with enough genuine creativity to join the canon have been anything but literary oppressors who ruthlessly inflict cultural hegemony upon an exploited readership. In fact, they have seldom been full-fledged members of the ruling elite. Instead, most of them--entirely in the spirit of such postmodernist prophets as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida--have written as outsiders able and willing to declare their individual viewpoints within a skeptical context unique to the Eurocentric tradition since ancient Greece. Who among them has been an orthodox Catholic, Protestant, or Jew when they authored their texts we can regard as having been canonical? Who among them has been an apparatchik, a kneejerk patriot, Tory, or Whig, or a "good" Democrat and/or Republican? What non-Eurocentric society dominated by an arch-patriarchal elite would have tolerated their dissent verging on blasphemy, their disrespectful struggle against the battered orthodoxy they inherited from predecessors no less at war with it? For in fact their presumably classical literary contribution to the Eurocentric tradition is more often than not the legacy of their intensely controversial roles at the time they were alive and productive as authors. It may be added that many canonical authors--such as Marlowe, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and D. H. Lawrence--were raised in deprived circumstances and endured a modest living at the very edge of society throughout their lives. At the time they wrote, they were considered eccentrics--oddballs--yet they also served as bellwethers whose articulations best described the world they knew. The Marxist economic base may be acknowledged to have always played its role in the history of western civilization, but one should also recognize that these dissident literary voices at the very pinnacle of its superstructure, largely the product of its base, have epitomized the extraordinary social and conceptual mobility typical of western nations. As the ultimate distillation of Eurocentric economic expansionism, the intellectual unrest of these authors has thus entirely differed from the received orthodoxy of traditionalist literature in precapitalist nonwestern societies, many of which are now at the brink of anarchy and economic collapse at least partly resulting from their rigid adherence to non-western social and religious practices. Finally liberated from the excuse of imperialist victimization now that Cold War subsidization has ended, too many of these societies are beset with major economic and social difficulties. Their failure to cope with the twentieth century has been V.S. Naipaul's obsessive theme, and his reportage has exposed their mounting crisis time and again from one end of the nonwestern world to the other. Paul Kennedy supports this judgment in Preparing for the Twenty-first Century, as do such third-world reporters as Keith Richburg and Robert Kaplan, as does the ample statistical data that can be gathered from numerous official sources. Few would venture to deny it: right now nonwestern societies except for those linked with Japan on the Pacific rim confront an unprecedented social and economic catastrophe of poverty, overpopulation, and incessant political upheaval for which there seems to be no attainable resolution. How ironic it seems, then, that exactly when these societies are falling into rapid decline their writings are being substituted for Eurocentric canonical texts in college English classes as if their cry of despair has much of anything to teach us beyond their abysmal failure to cope with the world as we know it today. Might not this be designated the Multiculturalist Fallacy, the coercive assumption that the social decline of these societies does not in any way reflect upon the adequacy of their literature--that they have been totally marginalized, crippled in every endeavor except their ability to generate the authorship of competent fiction? Everything is in shambles except for their brilliant and aesthetically compelling stories of victimization--is this what we are supposed to believe? What utter nonsense! Where do Marx, Trotsky, or Lukacs suggest such a possibility, the flowering of literature as the fullest realization of a nation's cultural superstructure despite its total lack of an adequate economic base? Nor does the theme of victimization guarantee base-neutral excellence even within western societies. Have we entirely forgotten the artistic failure of socialist realism during the nineteen-thirties? And did not this failure at least partly derive from a simplistic Stalinist theory of class exploitation with rather too obvious parallels to today's fad of cultural oppression? Also, does it not seem, if anything, merely the latest revival of Stowe/Richardsonian sentimentality to be expected to pity and identify with oppressed literary victims and to blame their plight on our own ubiquitous all-purpose culpability as middle-class Americans? Must we cultivate unswerving myopic inspiration in their racial, cultural, and/or gender-specific authenticity and automatically suspend disbelief in stories of their pitiful ordeal based on aesthetic usage for the most part limited to right-column literary functions? Now that American civilization seems to be tilting toward decline, is it our solemn obligation to the future we anticipate to immerse ourselves in the mythology of deprivation? With a more confident sense of destiny, our most talented Eurocentric forbears did not make a fetish of pity and victimization by hegemonic oppressors. Choice and growth predominated, not the self-righteous accusation of others who were presumably responsible for the plight of victims with whom authors and readers could identify. It should thus be no surprise that our tradition's most advanced levels of literary achievement have more often than not occurred during or immediately following the most successful epochs of political and economic achievement: three centuries of Greek hegemony, two centuries of Roman hegemony starting with Cicero, Renaissance Italy and France, Elizabethan England, the reign of Louis XIV followed by the eighteenth century French Enlightenment, Germany's nineteenth century emergence, two centuries of British imperialism that culminated with the two world wars, and of course our own nation's expanding role that has finally prevailed in the twentieth century as a result of these wars. And if successful authorship has given poets and writers their status in affluent societies, it has also taught their readers--both affluent and not--the language, values, and behavioral pursuits by which they too might attain something better in their lives. Its fictive vision of experience has not oppressed these readers, as multiculturalists argue, but, if anything, as I.A. Richards insisted seventy years ago, it has instead refined their thinking and taught them how to make their own successful adjustment to society. At times, as maintained by such "radical" critics as Marcuse and Sartre, it has even encouraged their rejection of the status quo for something better in life--both as individuals and as members of society with aspirations for an improved collective future. Familiarity with the canon has therefore been a source of social mobility
which has benefitted individuals as well as having played an ample supportive
role in the advancement of western civilization. So it should be no surprise
that our intellectual leadership (including critics the most opposed to canonicity)
continues to be well acquainted with the Eurocentric tradition. Nor should
it be any surprise that one's familiarity with this tradition still enhances
rather than diminishes one's access to status and respectability, and that
individuals who take the trouble to acquaint themselves with it can be expected
sooner or later to discover that it is primarily a source of freedom, not
of oppression--at least not for those familiar with it. The most obvious victims
of cultural oppression continue to be the non-readers, the basic readers,
and the pop-culture addicts who are too easily bored and confused by texts
once universally studied and revered. These individuals best illustrate the
losses incurred by the neglect of western literary tradition, and their blatant
cultural deprivation foreshadows the eventual impact of a multiculturalist
curriculum that too readily accommodates basic skills with "basic"
texts. Hence the absolute necessity of retaining Eurocentric literature in
our curriculum so that our next generation can rise to the challenge of western
civilization and share in its unique intellectual freedom. If multiculturalists
want to augment or work around this canon, they are entirely welcome to try.
But those whose busy minds fester with any counterhegemonic agenda--hidden
or otherwise--to dismantle it, or to eliminate it from the college curriculum,
must be stopped. For in their misguided benevolence they know not what they
want, they know not what they do. December 1 1996
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