Two articles have got me thinking about the value (and cost) of a consensus literary canon. Yesterday it was a Slate article, "
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Arcade Fire." Today it was a Chasing Mailboxes post "
Coffeeneuring is Truth, Truth Coffeeneuring". I imagine more people "get" the latter (Keats,
Ode on a Grecian Urn) than the former (Stevens,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird), and one could get something out of both articles without catching the allusions, but reading is a richer experience when we catch these inside jokes of reference.
I suspect few of my current students would catch the Keats reference, and I would be surprised if one in ten caught the Stevens reference ... which is a shame, because the whole form of the Slate review is a bit of a play on the form of the poem, with a switch-up from straight numbering of the perspectives to a repeated "one two three four" rhyming with the dance theme in the review. The Keats theme is less woven into the coffeeneuring blog post, but there is an implicit comment there, echoing Keats, about the relation of aesthetic appreciation to practical pursuits. Allusion makes writing denser and more rewarding.
But I miss lots of allusions, and not just in the parts of the canon that I am unfamiliar with. A week ago, a friend who was brought up with traditional Old Testament tales told a story about her work involving building more bricks without more straw. I had some idea that straw was involved in making bricks, but my spotty religious education did not include unreasonable demands on Jewish slaves in Egypt. And I miss a lot of contemporary allusions. I know now that a British telephone box might be a disguised tardis, and that a tardis is not (as I once assumed) a malicious space creature, but I will never fully appreciate a conversation heavy with references to Dr. Who. I know that Breaking Bad is about a high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking meth, but that's as far as my familiarity goes. Is my recognition of 19th and 20th century poetry adequate recompense for being completely oblivious to references to Duck Dynasty or Homeland or The Wire?
To some extent allusions are "in" jokes that we use to distinguish those from our own group, with its shared values and experience, from others. If you make a reference to Monty Python, and I get it, then we know we have that in common. It builds a bond. I was pretty thrilled when I first read extensive references to Chuangzi in LeGuin's
The Lathe of Heaven, because I had read a fair bit of Chaungzi and because I knew that not many readers of
The Lathe of Heaven likely had ... the thrill of getting an in joke is partly knowing that a lot of other people don't. I enjoyed the Wallace Stevens allusion in a Slate review partly for the same reason. It's fun knowing that only a fraction of the readers of that article will be in on the joke.
Which brings us to the cost of a consensus canon. The traditional canon in western education, as others have complained, is a bunch of dead white European men. Chuangzi isn't there. The Bible is there, but the Koran isn't. Keats is there, but Li Bai (Li Po) isn't. I probably can't name a lot of the key texts that have been omitted, because of course my own education was largely built around the traditional western canon. The in jokes that I learned to recognize and appreciate are in jokes told by people who belong to the club of those who share my educational background, and who happen to include the majority of those who have money and power in our society. The in jokes of people brought up in other cultures, or in other subcultures in America, do not necessarily have less intrinsic value than the in jokes I recognize, but they are less useful as entree into the dominant culture.
I'm not saying that knowing Duck Dynasty is equivalent to knowing Keats. I can't make a direct comparison, since I'm familiar with only one of them, but I wouldn't trade my 19th century poets as a group for reality TV. (I might trade Keats for Monte Python and Wordsworth for early Saturday Night Live, if I had to ... neither the dead poets nor contemporary TV are uniform in quality.)
So there is a cost to having a consensus canon: It is necessarily a narrow selection that omits a great deal worth knowing, and it will unavoidably be slanted toward work most relevant to those with power and resources. It marks an in-group, and excludes many out-groups. But there is likewise a cost to not having a canon, or having many, mostly disjoint canons. Our discourse is plainer and poorer if we can't paint on the rich textured background of our shared reading.
I don't have a prescription for addressing this quandary. I know plenty of others have thought about it and argued about it, for decades. It's on my mind partly because I am not part of the community that typically argues about it. I teach computer science, not literature. Still, when I introduce aliasing of variables in my intro class, I really want my students to recognize and get a little thrill when I borrow an explanation:
| O! be some other name: | |
| What’s in a name? that which we call a rose | |
| By any other name would smell as sweet; |
