There is much talk of what to do about the canon these days, but literary critics say oddly little about the nature of canonicity. Asked if there are indispensable books in the study of literature, they prefer to remark that teachers create indispensability by selecting books for study. Or if, as J. Hillis Miller once did, they believe "it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the truth, to read Virginia Woolf," they feel a public endorsement of "the established canon of English and American literature" is in order. No one feels at liberty to dispense with the whole idea of the canon. It is a parti pris, a means of declaring one’s allegiance. As Jerry Herron observes in Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline, the question of the canon, whether for or against, "usually defines our notion of ourselves as professionals, and understandably so, since it re mains the basis of both syllabi and professional writing."

In this essay I wish to contest the notion that there is any such thing as "the established canon," and I shall do so by looking closely at the campaign to disestablish it—what J. Hillis Miller has elsewhere called "the shaking of the canon." I intend to argue that the canon is a bogey, an invention of critics’ overfevered imaginations, and that the entire debate over this canon has been misconceived. The real problem, it seems to me, is not how one is to respond to the shaking of the canon, whether to make a liberal accommodation of new works (which the British critic Patrick Parrinder describes as "no more than a holding tactic") or to offer conservative resistance; the real problem is whether one is going to study literature at all. Before proceeding to consider the shaking of the canon, however, I should like to say how it came about and what place it occupies in current literary thought.

I

And so on through Crabbe (65). The rankings have shifted since Potter wrote on the eve of the Second World War. But the need for examination lists and ranked orders has remained constant and apparently abides forever.

What is new is the use of the term canon. Breaking the story of the rising clamor over the canon, the New York Times reported that the term is "derived from the biblical canon of accepted texts." Such is the account of it given by those who are engaged in shaking the canon, but it is only partly correct. In its ecclesiastical sense the term canon was first used in the third century. No such term was used in classical antiquity to describe the "accepted texts" of literature. In ancient Greek the words for singling out the best writers, as well as for the writers thus singled out, are cognates of the modern word criticism. But "canon," like "criticism," is a modern invention. It dates from the eighteenth century. Originally it was a misapplication of the ecclesiastical term to a literary context. In its modern usage it is not good Greek. In Greek it means rule or norm, and this explains why the church adopted the word for the biblical canon of accepted texts: as a juridical institution, the church invested legal authority in the scriptures. But the misunderstanding caused by wrenching the term from its proper context—the plain abuse of it—has led to entire syllabi of errors.

Scholarly interest in the process now known as "canon formation" is only of recent occurrence. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), may have been the first to describe the process and give it a name. But for more than twenty years after Curtius the topic was left unregarded by scholars—perhaps because, as the late J. V. Cunningham used to tell his classes in the history of criticism, "The transmission of the tradition has almost been an accident." And there is no scholarly paper in that.

It took a political awakening to bring the problem of canons to the attention of a new generation of literary scholars. From the start this renewed interest has taken the shape of an angry, damning critique of canon formation from frankly Marxist, feminist, and Third World perspectives. Its outbreak can be dated from the early seventies. Sheila Delany’s freshman English anthology Counter-Tradition (1971) was one of the first attempts to establish a reverse or anticanon: Delany offered a selection of radical political documents from the prophet Amos to R. D. Laing as examples of "alternate opinions and styles." Her introduction was one of the first statements of the case against the "official culture" that was said to be represented by the official canon. Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter’s Politics of Literature (1972), a volume of "dissenting essays" with denunciations of traditional scholarship, the university, and white male authors by Richard Ohmann, H. Bruce Franklin, Martha Vicinus, and Katherine Ellis, among others, first brought together many of the leading figures and concerns that were to challenge the academic establishment in literary studies over the next several years. The event of its publication was something like a meeting to plot strategy. These two books were perhaps less directly influential than they were symptomatic of a growing impatience with the way things were done in English departments. They are historically significant, though, for being among the first to draw connections between radical politics, academic reform, and the shaking of the canon.

It was no accident that the shaking should have begun in the early 70s. These were the years when the Vietnam war had spilled over into Laos and Cambodia, the antiwar movement was at its peak, Richard Nixon won reelection over a darling of the left; and in the university distaste for the actions of middle-aged men was nearly unanimous. As Orwell said of the years following the First World War, "[T]he dominance of ‘old men’ was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution from Scott’s novels to the House of Lords was derided merely because ‘old men’ were in favor of it." Something similar happened in the American university during the early 70s. Antiwar fury soured into disgust for every institution of the "war state." One institution that was held responsible for the evils done to humanity was (of all things) the canon—the novels, poems, and plays, predominantly by middle-aged men, which prior to the war had been generally accepted as great literature.

Within a decade this manner of thinking had entered the academic mainstream. Leslie Fiedler and Houston Baker’s volume of papers from the English Institute, subtitled "Opening Up the Canon," appeared in 1981 and added a slogan to the vocabulary of literary studies. "Canonicity" showed up as a subject entry in the MLA Bibliography for 1982, and "canon" made its appearance the next year. Since then the stream of essays and polemics has been steady. The assumption that the canon is the doing of old men—a sort of literary House of Lords, or the embodiment of a "great man" theory of literature—stands behind many of the efforts to reconstruct the study of literature in our time.

II

The shaking of the canon sometimes appears to be little more than a renewal of the ancient complaint that education has grown distant from life and is failing to make use of the latest knowledge. And the latest knowledge, in this connection, is the radical critique of canon formation. But what is the critique?

The shakers maintain that the canon is repressive. J. Hillis Miller explains:

To illustrate this argument the shakers turn to the history of liberal education. Since antiquity, they claim, education has been the prerogative of the few, and thus an agency of political power. As the classicist M. I. Finley points out, this literary education "was designed for members of the ruling elite, a socially and culturally homogeneous group, whose common values were formed and repeatedly reinforced by their continuous association and shared experience." And the social consequence of this education was inequality. For it divided society, says the critic Lionel Gossman, "into an illiterate folk reared in its traditional folkways, and a literate upper class trained in the classical and contemporary languages and literatures, and attuned to the texts which were the constant point of reference of its own writers."

Thus possession of literary culture came to be seen as a badge of entry into the inner circles of society. Literature might be described on this argument as a prerequisite to power. Women and minorities were excluded from power by being excluded from a literary education. And it is hardly surprising, then, to find that the authors who were studied as a basis of this education—a "restricted, canonical list," in Finley’s phrase—mirrored the exclusions of the school: there was "not a woman among them," Miller observes. The unavoidable conclusion is that the canon of school authors was merely an instrument of repression, a substantive affirmation of the political power and class interests that were promoted by liberal education.

This argument is founded upon three postulates. First there is the belief that the canon (in Gossman’s words) "consecrates the cultural inequalities which in our society correspond to social divisions and inequalities." Second is the principle that the cultural inequalities that are consecrated in the canon take shape as literary standards. And third is the doctrine that standards are a ruse, an ideological mystification, for the will of a ruling (or "canon-making") elite to dominate.

The shakers propound the view that the canon is a consecration of social inequality because it is the handiwork of a tight-knit and homogeneous elite. But is the canon a representation of this elite? If what is being stated is that all the literature which has ever been considered "canonical" is the product of a homogeneous class of white males, it follows that only those authors belonging to this class will have been canonized. And is this the case? What of Juliana of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aphra Behn, the Countess of Winchilsea, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Lady Gregory, Mary Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Dame Edith Sitwell, Katherine Mansfield, V. Sackville-West, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kathleen Raine? All of these writers are listed in the second edition (1965) of The Concise Cambridge Bibliography, certainly as near an approximation to a fixed and restrictive "canon" of native English writers as we are ever going to get. The roll of their names should be sufficient to bury the accusations that critics have treated English literature as if it were the exclusive province of men. If some works in the canon are demonstrably not the products of this homogeneous class, and if class interests are consecrated in the canon, it follows that the interests consecrated in the canon must be those of some other class than that of white males. (Perhaps the class of English writers?) The same would hold true if the argument were shifted to the ground of economic class. If writers such as Shakespeare (who never went up to university), Kyd (a scrivener by trade), Marlowe (a shoemaker’s son), Jonson (a onetime bricklayer), Bunyan (a tinsmith and the son of a tinsmith), Defoe (a butcher’s son and a seller of hosiery), Blake (an unschooled engraver), John Clare (herder, militiaman, tramp), Dickens (of the blacking factory), and Gissing (a laborer in Grub Street and an intimate of poverty) have been admitted into the canon alongside Sidney and Rochester and Byron, in what sense does this canon express the interests of a coherent and homogeneous economic class?

The shakers of the canon appear to have arrived at their conclusion not by a careful scrutiny of the evidence but by faulty reasoning. Starting from the assertion that some products of any homogeneous social group will be "great" works of literature, they falsely conclude that all the so-called great works—in short, the canon—are products of this group. But such a conclusion is no different from saying that because some professors are leftists, all leftists are professors. It would be highly damaging to leftists’ aspirations for social change if they were. The assertion that the canon is the preserve of a homogeneous elite of white males is demonstrably false. And the charge that the canon is thus a shrine to cultural domination—a charge that rests upon this assertion— remains unproven. The interests consecrated in the canon are something other than social inequalities.

The name that is usually given to these interests is "standards." The shakers of the canon are committed to exposing these standards, and removing them from the scene. "I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards," Houston Baker, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a newspaper interview. From this perspective the mere factual observation that the canon is predominantly white and male serves as the basis of a plea to abandon literary standards. The poet Toi Derricotte summarizes this argument adroitly. Going over a certain critic’s "list of alltime greats," Derricotte notes that it is "100% white and 99% male." And since "aesthetics cannot be separated from the values of the prevailing culture," it follows that it is "standards which perpetuate elitism—racism, classism, sexism in our literature." Derricotte’s argument may be restated to lay bare its logic. Thus a particular set of cultural values—that is, a canon—is racist and sexist ("100% white," etc.). Aesthetic standards are one portion of ("cannot be separated from") the values of the prevailing culture. Therefore those standards are racist and sexist. They must be allowed to pass out of existence.

New syllabi will be drafted on the basis of gender, race, and class. And this would appear to substitute a horizontal classification of source and subject for the vertical classification of literary merit. But such an approach does not really solve the problem of standards so much as it tries to conceal it. Within the horizontal categories of gender, race, and class, vertical judgments of merit remain to be made. As W. C. Brownell long ago observed, even to insist that a book must be capable of being understood—or, in this connection, of being taught—is to impose standards. They are merely reintroduced under an alias.

The repudiation of elitist standards does not follow from the apparent fact of an elitist canon. What is being argued is that some cultural values are elitist and that some of these values are aesthetic standards. But there is no way to infer from this state of affairs (even if we accept it as fact) that the values which are "aesthetic" are the same ones which are "elitist." There is no way to prove on this argument that the standards embodied in any selection of literature—including a selection that is 100 percent white and 99 percent male—are ipso facto racist and sexist. To reach this conclusion the reasoning would need to be elaborated:

It will be seen immediately, however, that this argument redefines cultural values as a subset of aesthetic standards, contradicting the principle that standards are merely part of the ruling elite’s larger effort to dominate a culture through its own values. As Richard Ohmann says, "[C]anon formation . . . is inseparable from the broader struggle for position and power in our society." But if aesthetic standards are not subordinate to cultural values—and on this argument they are not—such an assertion is absurd.

Occasionally it is argued, however, that standards are actions of a special kind: they are political actions. The canon was designed for members of the ruling elite; it was intended for white middle-class males. Thus the standards by which the canon was selected are merely a subterfuge, an ideological disguise, for an essentially political act. Conservatives, by reacting angrily to the shaking of the canon, have only appeared to confirm this case. But is it really true that literary standards are merely political actions dissembling a thirst for power? Those who would make this argument run into immediate difficulty: they cannot explain how the ruling elite’s political intentions were translated into aesthetic standards—or when. Their argument is an infinite regress into preparations for the act.

Thus, if the application of standards in a selection of literature is the carrying out of a political design, which is itself the carrying out of a prior design, there is no logical starting point to the process. When does the plotting cease and the activism (in the form of an application of standards) commence? If "canon makers" can be said to harbor political motives, there must be occasions when they act upon these motives. But to characterize a critic’s selection of masterpieces as one occasion when he has acted from political motives, and then to produce the selection as sole evidence for the existence of these motives, is to assert without further proof that all selections of literature are an effect of an unseen cause. The argument that the canon enshrines a political scheme can be sustained only by duplicity, not by valid reasoning. For while it is statistically true that white males preponderate in the history of English literature, the conclusion which is normally drawn from this—namely that the preponderance reveals an intention to dominate—cannot be logically defended.

The shakers of the canon will reply that any case for purely aesthetic judgments is itself an exercise in circular logic. There is no point outside a person’s political entanglements, they like to say, from which to choose between excellence and mediocrity. But this sleight of hand will not redeem the shaking of the canon. Those who loudly hold that all literary selections are made on political grounds are merely stating as a self-evident truth the highly contestable proposition that human actions are never anything more than the premeditated discharge of political ideologies. On the basis of this shrunk-to-fit definition, this general law of human nature, they assume that anyone who describes a human action is describing it exactly as they would. They assume the very thing they are trying to prove.

There is a sense in which literary selections are circular. But it is not the sense of those who would shake the canon. As the literary theorist Charles Altieri explains,

In other words, it is only within the circle of literature that selections of literary masterpieces may be made. Nothing to which literary value can be ascribed stands outside this circle: it is the locus and horizon of all literary judgments.

In large measure, then, literature is constituted by the act of judgment in the making of selections. What is called "literature" is both a sorting of materials and a way of thinking about them which sets them apart as a distinct and concrete sort. Marxist critics intuitively perceive as much in arguing that literature, science, history, and other forms of thought serve to reinforce the dominant ideology of a culture. As Patrick Parrinder points out, "[I]t is precisely their formal independence which makes them such potentially valuable sources of ideological support." Works of literature are not merely the raw materials of an ideology: they are also works of literature. And they take on their character as literature by taking their place in a system of texts and judgments. They depend on their place in this system for their literary character. That is what is meant by their formal independence. They must arise within a circle described by the observance of their own conditions if they are to be submerged within the larger circle of ideology. But within the smaller circle the only concern is with the character of literature: the only "interests" are literary. And the name for these interests is standards. This is the term by which we indicate our concern for the unbrokenness of the circle.

So far I have made three points: (1) the canon of English literature consecrates the interests of a class that is not a homogeneous ruling elite; (2) these interests in actuality are literary standards; and (3) standards are not the mystification of a will to dominate. It follows, therefore, that the canon is not political power in literary guise. And the case against it collapses.

III

Is there an established canon?

"The canon of American literature refuses to stay fixed," Carl Van Doren observed in 1932. This was the era of the rediscovery of American literature: Billy Budd was published in 1924, the centenary edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson in 1930. Howells was being challenged by Dreiser, Washington Irving by H. L. Mencken. And Van Doren did not expect the challenges to stop. Once the canon has been revised, he prophesied, sponsors of the new literature "will hold on to the revised canon with stubborn opposition to any further changes which some later age may have to insist upon."

In our day Van Doren’s prophecy would seem to have come to pass. The shaking of the canon has met with stubborn opposition from conservative commentators like Gertrude Himmelfarb ("it is a perversion of the traditional idea of democracy"), Thomas Sowell ("it is fraudulent," mere "camouflage for choosing [books] on the basis of [radical] ideology"), Charles Krauthammer ("it guarantees intellectual disorientation"), and Jonathan Yardley (it "is balderdash to the core, but then so too, these days, are the English departments"). But the fact of this stubborn opposition may be read another way: it suggests that the canon is no more fixed now than it was in 1932. Revision and resistance are not new but recurrent. The shakers and the hold-tighters are merely acting out well-rehearsed roles.

J. Hillis Miller speaks of an "old consensus" in the humanities which was in force when he attended Oberlin in the 40s. But in plain fact there has never been a consensus over the canon of literature in England or America. The call for canon revision in the service of new social needs is itself something of a locus classicus. About 1920, an English teacher writing in the School Review called upon his colleagues to reexamine their motives in selecting literature to be taught:

With minor alterations this list of ideals could be adopted by the current shakers of the canon. They are not the first to seek a reconstruction of literary study for the sake of "peace and good will" and "respect for . . . womanhood." From at least 1920 to the present, what has been continuous is a shaking of the canon. Each new literary and academic movement has entailed the building of a new five-foot shelf: it is no accident that both the moralist F. R. Leavis and the Marxist critic Granville Hicks wrote books called The Great Tradition. As M. I. Finley says, "[N]o two prophets of the Great Tradition agree on the canon, nor do any two generations." But all agree the canon must be shaken out and made over.

To the revising of canons there is no end. But the canon, the "old canon," the "patriarchal canon," the "restricted, canonical list," the "fixed repertory"—this is a bogey. It has never existed. It has merely changed, from critic to critic and generation to generation; it bears no marks of persistence as well as change. Within the flux of canons the only principle of identity is the name canon. But this is the name for many different selections of many different kinds, Golden Treasuries, Concise Bibliographies, "the best that has been thought and said in the world," Great Books curricula, World’s Classics series, Oprah’s Book Club, examination lists, and a casual enumeration of personal favorites. A "canon" is merely a further distillation of literature, a shaking out of masterpieces, and as such it is always more or less arbitrary; it is a selection without a larger principle; it is based not on a distinction but on convenience. Those who fear canons have seen a pattern where there is only randomness, and have mistaken a selection for a principle. The name they have given to this is "the canon," but there is not enough of an identity among canons for there to be any one canon. It cannot be said to be a substantial entity.

There has never been a consensus over the canon of literary study, for a single canon has never existed. What J. Hillis Miller calls the "old consensus" was really the continuous activity of disagreement over what should be read for what purposes and on what basis. It was a progressive activity, because literary study involves the continual reexamination of texts. The shaking of the canon, by contrast, is a conservative movement without passing as such. Arguing that the canon is the homogeneous product of an old consensus, its makers undertake to rehomogenize the canon in the service of a new consensus. The new greats will be Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Susan Warner, Kate Chopin, Charles Chestnutt, Harriet E. Wilson, Olaudah Equiano, Jamaica Kincaid, Juan Rulfo, Sandra Cisneros, a number of Latin American authors in translation, and so on. As Frank Kermode notes, "[W]hat we have here is not a plan to abolish the canon but one to capture it." The construction of a new canon presupposes the notion of a fixed and restrictive canon.

But the canon is a bogey, and we must rid ourselves of its influence if we are to attain a true understanding of literature. For literature is not a more or less arbitrary selection of masterpieces. It is a way of thinking, a unique manner of experiencing human life, to which a selection of materials to be treated as literature gives rise. It is the activity of reading or writing that seeks to become more fully itself: reading for the sake of reading, writing for the sake of writing. It is the enjoyment of its own conditions of performance and understanding. The trouble with a Great Books program, whether put together by loyalists or insurgents, is that it is grounded in no particular context of thought or method: it is an arbitrary selection. But literature is such a context. It provides for a selection of materials based on a genuine distinction between literary and nonliterary, and it locates this distinction not in the intrinsic properties of the materials—for this is a principle for distinguishing one kind from another, or better from worse—but rather in the very fact of being selected, being judged worthy and suitable, for reading and study. We cannot liberate ourselves from this distinction. The problem of canonicity is really the problem of a coherent view of literature. To avoid the problem is not to open up literature but to remain an outsider to it. We must free ourselves from the bogey of the canon, and begin attending to the acts of judgment which just are literary study.

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