Canons

I
It is now considered a truism that the study of the humanities within the university is in a state of foment. The English faculty at the University of Sydney, where I studied form 1989-92, provides a not unusual case study. For years the department had insisted on a core of study made up of traditional literary classics, from Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Pope to Keats, Austen and Dickens. The Twentieth Century was represented by Woolf, Joyce, Yeats and Eliot; and we even studied the writings of such latter-day stars as Helen Garner and Thomas Pynchon. The core was supplemented by a smorgasbord of optional courses which tended to reflect the predilections of the faculty. The reading was at times a chore - I would not have chosen to read several of the authors. Often I was pleasantly suprised, or challenged - but not always. Yet, as one of my favourite teachers said: “If you are going to study literature, you’ve got to rub your nose in this stuff.”

The year after I left, however, the faculty controversially voted to revamp its syllabus in a way which reflected a philosophical change in the way literature was to be understood. A core syllabus was no longer required: students could choose their entire course of study. An undergraduate student, then, could avoid studying Shakespeare or Austen if she wanted to. It was no longer deemed necessary to a literary education to receive instruction in classic or “Canonical” works. The focus of what had been “literary” study was now more broadly “cultural”. Works by minority groups or by women were given a space under the new umbrella.
That the stakes were high was revealed by the arresting acrimony under which the whole syllabus review was undertaken. For example, Andrew Riemer, now chief literary reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, and one of Australia’s foremost writers and critics, resigned in protest after more than two decades at the University. He made no secret of his disgust at what he saw as the erosion of important standards. What occurred at the University of Sydney happened not in isolation, but as one of the results of a debate about culture that has affected the teaching of literature everywhere, a debate that has focussed on the issue of the Canon.

The Greek word kanon originally signified a measuring rod. However, its subsequent uses have been with reference to collections of books: first, to the list of books that comprised the Old and New Testaments; and second, in a literary context to refer to the set of works (of which the Bible is one), which, by a cumulative consensus in the past, have come to be considered “major” and to serve as the persistent subjects of literary history, criticism, and scholarship.” It is common to speak of the Canon as being that of the Western cultural tradition. The Canon is meant to include those works that are called “Literature”; indeed, the two terms are coterminus. In current practice, “Canon” is also used to signify the key authors in a literary subgrouping. For example, a recent (well, 10 years ago now!) edition of Southerly was devoted to the “Australian Canon”.

The notion of the Canon has been one of the most keenly contested areas of literary study in the last two decades. It would be difficult to find a University whose faculty of English has not been rent asunder over the issue of the Canon, because it directly affects what is taught. In fact, the Canon is what is taught, pretty much. Yet the Western Canon as commonly conceived has come under intense pressure from the ideological interests that now permeate English faculties; and even the idea of Canonicity itself has been called into question.

What we might call “Western” culture - the heritage of those societies having origin in the west of Europe - is a culture which Christianity has shaped profoundly. Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian tradition must be counted as one of the two pillars on which the entire Western tradition of intellectual and cultural endeavour, from biology to poetry, is founded (the Graeco-Roman being the other). Western culture and Christianity are yoked together, historically speaking. The spread of Western power and influence roughly coincides with the spread of Christianity. Western political, economic and military thinking has theological roots. In many painful passages of history the “Western” and the “Christian” have been indistinguishable. Until comparitively recently the term “Christendom” was used to indicate what is now meant by “the Western world”.

However, we live in a time of a thorough reconsideration of the Western cultural heritage. In the post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-colonial age the Western past is no longer something of which simply to be proud. The unprecedented power of this culture has come at the cost of tremendous human suffering. The utopia of Western technological progess is for everyone else an apocalypse. Political post-millenialism of the kind seen even now in the USA has been manifestly dishonest. The success of the West has, it seems, less to do with the blessing of God and more to do with simple theft and murder.

In recent years the literary academy has been the site of a new self-loathing towards the cultural heritage of the West; and it is the “great” books of Western literature - the Western Canon - that are the focus of the discussion. Is the Western notion of what is aesthetically pleasing tainted with the bloodguilt of that culture? Do the works that comprise the Canon represent the tools of centuries of oppression? Can we ever extricate Christianity from Western culture, or are the two joined at the hip? In the discussion that follows I hope to shed some light on these difficult questions.....