Canons IX

It is important to recognise that Canons are also a way of reading. A Canon exists within a reader’s reading brain, offering a highly specific component of the multi-functional process of reading. This has several ramifications. Firstly, to read a work canonically is to read it in reference to its place in a larger body of writing, and thus to be aware of its relations - by allusion, influence and repudiation - of other works within that body. These works are part of a tradition, as F.R. Leavis termed it, “The Great Tradition”; indeed Bloom sees the tradition, in Freudian terms, as an attempt of one generation to overcome the mastery of the previous. The Canon operates both directions in time: just as it is impossible to read Joyce without noting the influence of Homer, the Canon has the effect of making all reading of Homer post-Joycean. Allusion operates as a powerful coding mechanism, using images, quotes, characters, plot structures and devices, names, places, genres, tropes, types and phrases. By providing helpful footnotes to modern editions, scholarship has made modern readers better readers, but perhaps lazier as well.

Secondly, in including a work in the Canon the intentions of the author may of course be disregarded or superceded. The fantastic history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs is a case in point. Both the Rabbis and the Fathers ignored the appearance of the Song as an erotic poem and interpreted it canonically (as they saw it) - that is, non-erotically. The intentions of the (human) author were not important. Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written as a serious historical work. Today, when it is included as a canonical work it is on the basis of its great literary style and imagination rather than historical insight.
Further, the notion of Canon does imply authority. In the realm of scripture this is a familiar concept, but what of the literary world? As we shall see, canonical writings have been accorded a certain kind of authority over and against other works. The Canon is further given the task of being the repository of cultural value and memory - not in the narrowly historical sense, but as source of the mythology that all cultures need. For example, nineteenth century Australian poets like Patterson and Lawson successfully mythologised the Australian landscape and sense of national self. The task of cultures is to reflect on their heritage rather than accept or reject it out of hand. The Canon may hinder this process of mature cultural reflection by creating out of the past a package which extremists, radical or conservative, can deny or affirm holus bolus.

Lastly, many of these approaches are reductionistic - the literary value that distinguishes the Canon is either a purely aesthetic function, or it is merely ideological. The most prominent left-wing critics reduce all aesthetic value to a matter of politics only; but, on the other hand, it is equally a fallacy to remove all political or moral considerations from the discussion of literature. Beauty is not Truth, but it is part of the Truth. How can the aesthetic be separated from the good? Modern critics want either to relativise the beautiful, or to relativise the good.