John Guillory’s body of theory articulates an opinion towards the contemporary ‘Canon Debate’ that has been germinating within me throughout the discussions and readings in ENGL3655, but which until now has evaded by capabilities of description. This opinion is that the project of diversifying, overturning or reaffirming canonicity inhibits, rather than enables, theoreticians from solving the true ‘crisis’ facing literature within contemporary society.
I interpreted Guillory’s essay to be a vast open letter to the literary world requesting the cessation of the canon debate by employing two key justifications.
The first pillar of his argument is that the theoretical foundation of the liberal pluralist attack on the canon is flimsy. Guillory convincingly surmises that ‘liberal pluralists’ have miscalculated the project of dehegemonising literature through a fetishization of identity. He posts that liberal pluralist attitudes towards the canon have stemmed from a superimposition of ‘identity politics’ onto the process of canon formation, indicting the History of the canon as a targeted exercise in exclusion.
Hernstein-Smith’s article can be used as a reference point for this liberal-pluralist position. Her repeated maxim of ‘contingencies of value’ is merely an inflected term for ‘identity’ and its supposed pervasion of composing and responding literature. She claims that every assessment of value stems from an interfacing between the subject’s ‘political economy’ (“biological, psychological, material, experiential”) and the characteristics of the text itself (“specific ‘features’, ‘qualities’ or ‘properties.’) She thus dubiously infers that because of their pedagogic and cultural pre-eminence, ruling hegemonies have implicitly entrenched their dominance by proliferating the texts which they derive value from through their own political economy (identity). They then make the evaluation that others will similarly value these works and hence the body of literature (the canon) is proliferated, and received, as an object of value and thus consequentially re-inseminates the hegemony it supposedly embodies.
Guillory destabilises this highly politicized assessment by pointing out that “the historical process” of funnelling literature into an oblique canon “is too complex to be reduced to determination by the single factor of the social identity of the author.” (17). His convincing materialist account of canon formation indicts what I perceive to be the liberal pluralist tendency to Historicise the literary past into an allegorical narrative that suits its present agenda. If canon formation was formed by hegemony and exclusion, it seems noble for the liberal pluralists to project ‘minority voices’ into the literary sphere, even to the extent that they drown out canonical voices.
Not only is the liberal-pluralist position theoretically impoverished, but also the impacts of canon revision are so inconsequential to its supposed benefactors, “minority readers,” as to render the entire project naïve. Supposedly the revolutionising of attitudes toward value should ‘reaffirm subjugated identities,’ but in actuality the results of this endeavour are almost entirely limited to the University, to which many members of ‘voiceless’ groups are excluded due to various social and economic factors.
I think a useful analogy for the impact of liberal pluralism on literary discourse is the impact of reverse discrimination on the field of employment – it is a bandaid solution which deteriorates the quality of the economy, (financial or literary) and ignores underlying structural deficiencies. Theoreticians should focus on the social, economic and pedagogic structures that create the inequality of opportunity for certain disadvantaged groups to achieve representation in literature rather than unfairly deride canonical works and artificially promote what they brand noncanonical works. Even the description, ‘noncanonical’ is fundamentally flawed – how can it be assumed that merely because an author possesses a certain ‘minority’ characteristic that this ‘contingency’ is fundamentally imprinted onto their work and hence the work ‘represents’ this ‘voice’? And isn’t the liberal pluralist urge to extrapolate anti-hegemonic value from these ‘noncanonical’ texts just as draconian in its prescriptiveness as the conservative positions in the defence of the canon?
The hierarchy of value in the contemporary literary world can not be resolved by scapegoating the canon. The crisis facing literature is not a crisis of representation. It is in deed a crisis of access.
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