Hildegarde

I knew, when I wrote that post yesterday, or the day before, whatever it is I’ve been doing, that I was going to end up having to write this one or something like it today.

But I also think I may have come up with a slightly different approach.

So let me start on the usual first, and then I’ll try to branch out from there.

First, let me say that I wouldn’t take Michel Foucalt’s advice on where to get lunch, never mind on what constituted the best that had been thought or said in the history of Western Civilization.

The entire deconstructionist movement as it arose and existed in France is a swamp of former Nazi collaborators, sexually deviant (necrophilia, sadistic, etc) obsessives, and guilty consciences desperate to find a loophole to their own best good sense.

Whatever was going on in French literary circles in the long period from the end of the war to Vietnam, it had little or nothing to do with literature.  The fact that it was largely carried out in the literature departments of French universities–and then imported to literature departments here–was largely opportunistic. 

Literature departments both in Europe and the United States were uniquely vulnerable to corruption, because they were among the youngest of academic disciplines and as a discipline they had been distinctly undefined.

When the first English departments were established in American universities in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, nobody was really sure what they were for or what they were supposed to be doing.

Matthew Arnold had suggested that education should consist of acquainting students with “the best that has been thought and said” in Western civilization, but nobody was entirely sure what that was or how we ought to pick it. 

American “English” departments spent some time trying to figure out what constitued a distinctly “American”  (as opposed to English) literature.  If you read Hawthorne and Melville now, that’s largely why.  And as an experiment in national identity-building, it’s worth a look for its own sake.

And for a while there was even some sort of consensus on the bare bones basics of what constituted literature in English:  Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen. 

What consensus there was, however, fell apart in the late Fifties and totally self-destructed in the Sixties.  If you’d told me you were an English major in 1954, I’d have been able to know without asking that you’d read that list up there, and all of it–all the plays of Shakespeare, all the novels of Jane Austen.

I would have known that no matter where you went to school or who your teachers were.  If you’d gone to a “good” school, I’d also know that you’d been required to learn to read either French (more likely) or German and to have suffered your way through at least a couple of courses in literature in that language.

These days, if you tell me you’re an English major, I have no idea what you’re doing.  I know at least five colleges where you can graduate with an English major without ever having read a word of Chaucer, and with having ready at most half a dozen Shakespeare plays and those in “translation” to “modern English.”

The English major died long before the deconstructionists came to wreak havoc on the “literary” world.  And because it had already died, it was ripe for invection by politicized idiocy. 

And infected it did get.

But I wouldn’t blame that on something intrinsic in literature, any more than I’d blame chemistry if an entire generation of chemists decided that alchemy was the real deal and ditched their traditional discipline for that instead.

That said, a few things about canons, in the plural.

It has to be in the plural, because we actually use the word in a lot of different ways.

There is “canon” in referring to specific subsets of literature.  I don’t mean, here, things like American literature or even Southern Gothic, but things like the Star Trek “universe.”   Readers will talk about how Smith’s story presented Kirk’s past in this way, which is interesting, but it’s not “canonical.”  “Canon” requires Kirk to be born to a famous but now dead Starfleet captain.

Readers of many different series and viewers of many different movie and television series have developed rather complex systems of analysis and interpretation in which the word “canon” is used in this sense, and the sense isn’t all that different from at least one of the professional uses of the word.

But in this case, “canon” is used to define those parts of the story that are felt to be “officially” true, and those entries–published books, released movies, whatever–that are themselves assumed to be “official” (as opposed to fan fiction, for instance).

The way the rest of the world uses the word “canon” comes in two parts, and with two different but possibly intersecting meanings.

The first is “those works that have so influenced the society you live in that not to be acquainted with them makes you only semi-literate, and that your life will be influenced by whether you know about them or not.”

This is a constantly shifting list, obviously, and the item on it do not necessarily constitute “the best that has been thought and said.” 

In the America of the twenty-first century, I’d include Superman on that list, but I wouldn’t include Ethan Frome or even James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

I don’t know if I’d include either Steinbeck or Hemingway–my guess is that there would be a stronger case for at least some Steinbeck, if only because he represents Depression era attitudes of a very specific kind, still having some impact on how we view policy questions about poverty and the welfare state.

But the inclusion would be iffy. 

There would be nothing iffy about the inclusion of Ayn Rand on such a list, however, because her ideas have had a huge impact on American social and political life in one way or another.

The second sense in which we use the word “canon” is in the sense of “the best that has been thought and said,” and for this there are also two subdivisions.

The first is entirely technical.  We could mean, by this definition, those works that are the most technically accomplished in their areas, the literary equivalent, say, of Michaelangelo’s Pieta or Beethoven’s Eroica. 

When we do this, we are setting a standard for performance, justifying that standard, and then trying to determine if any particular work meets it. 

Literary forms, just like anything else coherent, have an internal logic.  We have at least as good a chance of figuring out if a particular work satisfies the rules for its form as we do of figuring out if a basketball player has just committed a foul or not. 

Think of literature in this sense as a game.  Games have rules, and the rules can never be 100% arbitrary.   Basketball will require a basket and a ball, and it will not work if you try to play it with squares of melting cheese.

On this definition, I have no way of knowing if Sade constitutes part of “the best that has been thought or said” or not.  Like I said, my French was never that good, and it’s far less good know than it was a couple of decades ago.

It’s worth noting, however, that although a few people have made the argument for Sade as great literature on the basis of formal excellence, they are few and far between, and none of them were part of the original Sade rehabilitation movement in France. 

Most of the people hell bent (so to speak) on “rehabilitating” Sade wanted to do so on the basis of the second of the two subsets here:  that of the “best that has been thought and said” as indicating those thing we as a civilization should be most proud of, examples of what in means to be human in the highest sense.

People like Foucalt did not want to say that Sade wrote well, which he might have, for all I know.  Hitler wrote well.

They wanted instead–and still want–to present Sade as an example for our emulation. 

Because that is what this second sense of “canon” means.  If these are the examples of being human in the highest sense, then they are by necessity the role models for the rest of us.  They define our aspirations and, in the end, our goal.

It was against including Sade in the “canon” in this sense that Shattuck was protesting, and equally protesting  what he saw as an overanalytical, hyperconceptual concept of art that was divorced from its actual function in the real world.

Personally, I think he gave Foucalt and company too much credit.  I think they, and the people who followed them, were completely aware that what they were trying to do was “normalize” behavior that was, in fact, objectively evil.

And I’m fairly sure they were doing it for the reason I think deconstruction was invented to begin with–because only by doing it, and by obscuring all straightforward understanding of what words mean in the process, could they get out from under how they had behaved during the Nazi occupation of France.

I’ve got Gustav and tea.