When I was in college, I had a habit of disagreeing with my English professors. One point of disagreement was the importance of poets and writers traditionally considered part of the Western “canon.” The canon is the body of writers and works considered the best, most important, and obligatory subjects of study for any serious student of letters.
In recent years, literary scholars have taken a hatchet to the canon, shredding many time-honored names and works and replacing them with new ones. They argue that the canon’s writers aren’t relevant to a global population since most of them are European males. Their status, the critics argue, was achieved artificially, through mere convention, much of it founded on narrow-minded social norms.
A Changing Canon
The expansion of the canon in our time might make some sense. But the erasing of names that have long been etched into the canon with love and honor doesn’t. One day, a professor and I were debating this point. He asserted that English Romantic poet John Keats might not deserve the status he holds because he wrote for one particular culture and time. He becomes problematic for our highly multicultural society. For example, John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” which celebrates the seasonal change in rural England, means nothing to a sub-Saharan African, who has never seen that kind of autumn.I knew at the time that something was wrong with his argument, but it wasn’t until later that I identified what it was. My professor focused on only the culturally-specific aspects of Keats’s work while neglecting the elements that apply equally to Englishmen and Africans: things like the exploration of time, death, seasonal change, and the beauty of the natural world, not to mention the beauty of poetic sounds themselves.
The Permanent Things
The debate over the canon has unfortunately involved itself with many irrelevant questions. The most important inquiry is this: What makes a work of literature universal, and therefore worthy of being read and studied by people throughout the world?To be universal, a work of art must engage with things of permanence, things that endure in both time and space. I can’t hope to identify in a brief article all such subject matters of permanence—and to do so would artificially limit the possible expressions of great literature that exist or may exist. But we can identify some of these permanent things: human nature and the transcendentals.
A great work of literature reflects truths of human nature, a nature which is much the same across the centuries and nations, despite varying cultural expressions. The basics of human rationality, passion, joy, love, fear, sorrow, ambition, humor, jealousy, self-sacrifice, remain the same throughout the world and the ages. Works of literature that say something true about human nature will, by definition, possess a degree of universality.
Literary critic Mark Van Doren described a human language common to us all because based on a common human nature. In his essay “The Use of Translation,” he wrote, “There is the English language, but a few who have used it wrote also in the human tongue, and that tongue—witness Shakespeare—can be comprehended anywhere.” The common language of the human soul supersedes any particular national language. Take humor for example. While some cultural influence plays into our perception of humor, most people from a cross-section of cultures laugh at the same type of things.
Van Doren wrote, “Comedy at its deepest and best is not a Spanish thing. It is a human thing, it is an intellectual and emotional thing, and somehow neither Fielding nor Dickens nor the author of “Huckleberry Finn” missed it; not to speak of a million other readers in whose minds the influence of Cervantes will never be traced. The influence of great literature is universal.”
Because of our shared human nature, we can speak of a certain universal human experience. As novelist Willa Cather wrote in “O Pioneers!,” “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Great writers retell those stories—which are always the stories of our own lives—in manifold ways.
As for the transcendentals, these three mysterious realities—truth, beauty, and goodness—attract the human heart, no matter the culture or time. The best, most universal books will capture these transcendentals in some way. Though they manifest in various ways, truth, beauty, and goodness remain unchanging, eternal—humming at the very heart of reality and eternally attracting our nature.
A Contemporary Canon
Should we change the canon of Western literature? The canon can’t be completely fossilized any more than human history can be. To artificially “close” the canon would imply that the final word on human life has been said, that no further strains of wisdom will be spoken. That is, of course, absurd. Our time isn’t the same as John Keats’s. It may happen that some writer or another speaks in a particular way to the issues of our time, which would be something of great value and worthy of study. But this writer won’t deserve a place in the canon unless he or she also speaks to all time.We should welcome new classics to the canon from writers of any and all background, but only if they meet the standard of universality. Any attempt at equal cultural representation in the canon as an end in itself misses the point of the canon. Let excellence be the standard, and the diversity of writers will take care of itself. The admission of new treasures into the vault will never make the old treasures irrelevant.
New writers face the same challenge as past writers: how to speak to humanity as it is now without losing sight of what humanity always has been and should be. Perhaps, one strength of Western culture has been our ability to do that, to acknowledge change without sacrificing the unchangeable.
I conclude with the words of Van Doren: “Our own civilization, that of Greece and Rome and modern Europe and America, still flourishes because it has kept the power to criticize and renew itself. It has changed again and again, but it has never become unrecognizable, and with every alteration it has taken on more life.”
