Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006
_______________________________________________________________
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
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).
Said,
Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004.