Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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Morrissey, Lee, Debating the Canon. A Reader from Addison to Nafisi, New York, 2005. 314p, 1-4039-6820-9, Hardback: $95, Paperback, $45.

 

Reviewed by

 

Asimina Karavanta

University of Athens

 

Lee Morrissey’s Debating the Canon opens the canon debate to itself instead of merely setting up the debate as a binary of insular arguments. Following a chronological order that allows him to stretch the debate from the 18th century to the present, Morrissey is also attentive to the social, historical, political and cultural networks from which the selected essays and their arguments emanate. His selections hence unconceal the palimpsest of the canon debate not only in a chronological but also, and most importantly, in a genealogical way that enables the reader to trace a path of positions and arguments never entirely closed off, always suspended for revisions, retrievals, re-readings.

 

In agreement with Gerald Graff’s urge to “teach the controversies” and thus “expose the readers to critical debates” (1), Morrissey sets up the canon debate as a controversy to be exposed for philological, teaching and critical purposes. Independently of how necessary or parochial this debate is in the Western academy nowadays, Morrissey’s anthology brings together a number of essays that span from the 18th century to the present day and includes thinkers of different cultural backgrounds and discourses whose common terrain is their strife with the canon and its ideological and representational impetus. The philological value of such an endeavor is constituted by the editor’s effort to make a memory of texts long forgotten and left aside in the wake of the proliferation of positions and voices emerging from the areas of gender, postcolonial and Marxist studies that debate the canon from angles that the canon first rendered marginal and silent. In retrieving texts like Joseph Addison’s excerpts from The Tatler, Matthew Arnold’s excerpts from “The Function of Criticism at the Present time” and Erich Auerbach’s “Odysseus’ Scar” from Mimesis, Morrissey does not simply advocate the need for this history and memory for the sake of the past—Eliot’s concept of a history of the present that can only rely on the best knowledge of the past—but demarcates the literary map of the debate with historical arguments that recur in the current debates while remaining unresolved and charged with political and cultural meaning.

 

Morrissey hence reconstellates these past voices with present and current voices and their positions to reveal how the canon debate was never just a simple debate about which books to read or even about the superiority of the Western canon; instead, the reconstellation of the past with the present canon debates symptomatically reveals the indissoluble relationship between the concept of the canon and the role of the humanities as the institutions of “higher” forms of knowledge that will salvage and promote culture. At first sight, this does not seem to sound different from Matthew Arnold’s position on culture as the only alternative to anarchy through the educational practice of literature and the proper function of criticism. Arnold’s work thus articulates the need for a measure, set by the “sweetness and light” of the classical antiquity of the Greeks and moderated by the maturity and perfection of its spirit by the Romans, that will protect the development of culture from the rise of the uneducated or miseducated masses. The classic, as the canonical text par excellence, is thus propounded as an incontestable measure, a cultural, political and historical paradigm in times of such changes that, to Arnold’s mind, can overturn the progress of the nation and the élan of the empire. This sense of measure is of course enlivened in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis; Morrissey’s selection of “Odysseus’ Scar” hence portrays the use of the classical text as a foundational measure that can literally estimate the growth and development of Western literature and the “whole” of its tradition, to invoke T.S.Eliot, from Homer all the way to Virginia Woolf.

 

As conservative as the arguments of these first selections may sound, they are re-opened for debate when, wrenched, but not cut out, from their contexts, they are placed next to voices like Martin Bernal, Chinua Achebe, Vassilis Lambropoulos and Edward Said. Although radically different from each other, these critiques of the canon recognized as the ideological, political and cultural emblem of Western literature and education turn the canon debate to a self-critical inquiry that lays bare the indissoluble relationship between the formation policies of the canon and the making processes of national identity through of course the mediation of the university as the educational apparatus of knowledge. These sharp voices of critique gesture towards the colonial, postcolonial, capitalist and global attachments of the canon and its debates and the institutionalization of literature and criticism used not only as vehicles of the national agendas of the West in opposition to the West’s “others” (peoples, cultures, languages, religions, regions and histories) but also as commodities regulated and determined by the powers of the global market.

 

Morrissey interferes between the claims of the past and the more contemporary critiques of the canon as they begin to be formulated in the 60’s with another set of texts ranging from Richard Rorty’s “On the Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” to Harold Bloom’s “An Elegy for the Canon”, which attempt the retrieval and restoration of the canon as a measure that will enliven the role of literature and reorient the humanities. This turn to the canon, which envisions literature as the vehicle of culture and civilization that should be the foundational drives of the humanities, is also suggested by Edward Said in his last posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism. In the third chapter of this book entitled “The Return to Philology”, unfortunately not included in this anthology, Said defines this return as the ongoing and painstaking effort of “close reading of a literary text” that “will gradually locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text” (62). For Said, this return is necessitated by what he recognizes as the humanities’ contemporary defiance for the text often analyzed as a cultural product and not carefully attended to as an aesthetic creation. Seeing this neglect as a symptom of the prevalence of a narcissistic and insular practice of theory that forgets the text for the sake of its own discourses, Said proposes a critical praxis of reading and critique that will remember the text and open the canon to a persistent debate.

 

Morrissey’s proposition that “our continual rediscovery of that seeming closure [that the canon represents] is also what keeps it open, always subject to addition and revision” (12) hence places his anthology at the heart of the continuing debate that concerns not only the canon but also and primarily the role and condition of the humanities, the present and future of literature, the need for and presence of texts. In this light, his anthology caters not only to the readers’ interest in establishing a historical understanding of the canon debates but also to their own debating and contemplating the aesthetic, cultural and political aspects of texts. It is a book useful for courses on literary theory and culture and for readers who wish to be introduced to the various threads and angles manifested in the selected texts. In this respect, Lee Morrissey’s anthology extends the ground of this persistent debate by keeping it open thus inciting his readers to “start all over”—the author’s repetition of Derrida’s concept of faith as conceptualized in The Gift of Death also included in his anthology—for the perpetual renewal and repetition of the literary tradition (11).

 

Work Cited

 

Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.