Contemplating the Canon

My department has been talking a great deal about the "Canon" (big 'c' and one 'n'--so not the kind that goes "boom, boom"), while at the same time I've been reviewing C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image. I've often toyed with the idea of requiring students to read DI before they begin reading early British literature, because Lewis explains the rhetorical and cultural foundations that underlie much of British lit--he explains the Ptolemaic universe, the neo-Platonic personifications that we find sprinkled through Renaissance literature, and foregrounds the role that world-view plays in the construction of art.

But Lewis also uses the term "canon" slightly differently.

We have therefore had to supplement the canon of saving the phenomena by another canon--first, perhaps, formulated with full clarity by Occam. According to this second canon we must accept (provisionally) not any theory which saves the phenomena but that theory which does so with the fewest possible assumptions. (15)

Lewis uses "canon" in the sense that derives from its ecclesiastical and legal sense; the OED defines "canon" as "A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or scientific treatment of a subject." Yet this meaning also extends into the literary realm and, thus, become "canons of criticism, taste, art."

So all this has got me wondering about the "literary canon." When we speak of the literary canon, "The body of literary works traditionally regarded as most important," can we really now think in terms of a "body," a physically constrained set of texts, with a physical terminus? If we think of a literary canon as a physical entity, a body, it must be a corpse, not a living thing. We should note the tense and mood of each of the verbs in the OED's citations:

1929 Amer. Lit. 1 95 Those who read bits of Mather with pleasure will continue to feel that those bits cannot be excluded from the canon of literature until much excellent English ‘utilitarian’ prose is similarly excluded.

1953 W. R. TRASK tr. E. R. Curtius European Lit. & Lat. Middle Ages xiv. 264 Of the modern literatures, the Italian was the first to develop a canon. 1989 Times Lit. Suppl. 7 July 739 My Secret History..alludes to half the modernist canon, from Eliot to Hemingway to Henry Miller. 1999 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 4 Nov. 29/2 The canon was under attack from feminists and social historians who saw it as the preserve of male and bourgeois dominance.

The canon, the body of literature, is acted upon in each of these citations--it's the result of assemblage; it's the development of a national "Genius"; it's a source for allusion; or it's a refuge under siege.

Would we better off to think of the word "canon," for literary purposes, as a set of rules for interpretation rather than a body of texts? If we have "canons for interpretation," we can apply those rules wherever we please and our technique becomes more important than the object upon which we act. Perhaps my concerns are merely semantic--but what is literature without words/