October 31, 2006
Lawrence Levine and the Canon Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST Josh Zeitz writes, on Lawrence Levine, canon-formation, and canon revision, that he is “persuaded by Levine’s well-documented argument that canonical texts, as well as methodologies, have always been subject to revision,, and concludes that “the point, above all, is that blind worship of ‘the canon’ may lend therapeutic relief to those who, for whatever reason, fear that their world is slipping away. But this sort of jeremiad ignores the canon’s constant reinvention. No text or methodology is sacred. It needs to withstand the test of time and scrutiny.”
Defining a canon as the books every educated person ought to have read at least a century after they were written, canons do change, although rarely quickly, and the test of time is not usually a kind one to newer additions. In political and social theory, the core of the canon I taught at Columbia, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Adam Smith, and Rousseau have been in the canon since they appeared on the scene. Machiavelli and Hobbes were not added when they first appeared, but they seem very unlikely to disappear. Marx and Freud, who were still represented as the culmination of our tradition when I started teaching that course, were probably losing a bit of their canonical status when I stopped. I taught the better part of a thousand pages by each of them, but I don’t think anyone would do that now, in a course for non-specialists, i.e., when teaching the canon in a compulsory two-semester course for undergraduates.
Some people were adding Foucault when I stopped teaching that course, and while I have since taught Foucault, I would not bet a nickel that he will ever be canonical, in the sense that every educated person will have to have read him a century after his death. More remarkably, some people were teaching Edward Said. I have taught Said, but I would not bet a wooden nickel on Said’s chances at canonical status. Unfortunately, reserving the greatest suspicion for the most recent additions to a canon is rarely what people who are proud of their skepticism about canons actually do.
I have never met or read anyone who admits to being in favor of blind worship of a canon of secular texts, although people who are proud of their skepticism about any canon invariably seem to assume that their intellectual antagonists are peculiarly prone to this vice. Among blind worshippers who do not admit their credulity and piety, I find that confident anticanonical types are often more prone to those vices than are people who confess to loving most or all of a canon. Someone who insists that any belief in Shakespeare’s genius is “socially constructed” is almost invariably less likely to say the same thing of Edward Said. People who value the canon, and assume that it has mostly been rightly constructed, are not necessarily seeking therapeutic relief from a fear that their world is slipping away. They may be seeking to defend their world from slipping away, and that is not always an unreasonable thing to do. For example, Schubert’s Winterreise is in the musical canon, few of my students listen to it, this makes me sad on their account, I do what little I can to reverse this trend, and I think I have good reasons.
In terms of the correct attitude toward a canonical text, I agree with Josh’s quotation from Levine: Books that are invaluable because they make us think hard about urgent questions should never be approached without lively intellectual curiosity. People who dislike (secular) canons often seem to assume that canons are far likelier to provoke reverence than thought. I have never been clear on why they are so certain of that.
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