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Canon Fire
(Page 2 of 2)
Trying to match the predictive power and ever-rising institutional prestige of the hard sciences, and taking methodological lessons from people such as Marx and Freud, some literary critics feel a need to create the aesthetic equivalent of a unified field theory, a single system by which every work ever written (or yet to come!) can be perfectly and fully explicated.
Like many a nascent scientific theory, literary "theories" often start off as promising explanations for a particular set of phenomena, only to become increasingly tortured as they try to make sense of more and more disparate data. But like their counterparts in the social sciences, literary theories are notoriously difficult to disprove. The supply of data--or texts--is essentially infinite and infinitely manipulable. The result is often that a provisional hypothesis intended to guide observation and analysis becomes instead an ironclad conclusion that weeds out or ignores contravening evidence. Once that point is reached, literature--the purported object of study--becomes dispensable to the whole operation. Texts only become "interesting," or "great," or "exemplary" to the extent they confirm a foregone conclusion.
Of course, that's not to say literary theories can't be "disproved." They may fail to excite interest among other readers, they may become outdated as new information about an author or historical period becomes available, or they may collapse under internal contradictions. Bloom, for instance, acknowledges his failure in passing in his first chapter. The "Western Canon," he writes, "is anything but a unity or a stable structure. No one has the authority to tell us what the Western Canon is....It is not, cannot be, precisely the list I give, or that anyone else might give."
There are, in other words, as many canons as there are readers. This is as it should be--individuals negotiating with the past and present and, by their choices, laying the groundwork of the future. And, to the degree we collectively recognize a common list of texts, a canon, we should understand it to be a fluctuating, provisional, evolving affair, with no endpoint in sight.
And what of the more difficult question: Why read literature in the first place? Bloom dismisses out of hand right- and left-wing notions that reading certain texts under certain circumstances will inculcate "the seven deadly moral virtues" or hasten progressive "social change." "Reading the very best writers--let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy--is not going to make us better citizens," says Bloom.
Bloom denies a social purpose to literature (he endorses Oscar Wilde's maxim, "Art is perfectly useless") and insists instead on reading as a "solitary" act. "I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuous but persistent, is for some version of survival," writes Bloom.
In a sense, Bloom is absolutely correct: Reading the Divine Comedy or War and Peace will not necessarily make us more or less likely to help old ladies across the street, more or less likely to vote or pay our bills on time. But literature can certainly have a great effect on the social sphere. A quick example: In The Western Canon, Bloom makes several dismissive remarks about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel that did so much to define and galvanize northern opposition to slavery.
Perhaps the social and the individual are not truly separate categories, as Bloom holds. In fact, even in the passage quoted above, he implies they are complementary, shifting as he does from the first-person singular (I think) to the first-person plural (Our common fate, our common hope).
Indeed, it strikes me that we read by design as individuals, but not in pursuit of freedom or solitude. To the contrary, we read to become absolutely engaged with our world and its history. We read to connect to other people, places, and times, and to realize that our hopes, pains, and aspirations are not entirely original to ourselves. Literature, which has remained accessible and intelligible over the ages, provides such a bridge.
As F.A. Hayek pointed out in The Counter-Revolution of Science, it is "only" through the study of literature and languages (Hayek included history, as well) that one gains "knowledge of society, its life, growth, problems and its values." Literature, says Hayek, opens up "the great storehouse of social wisdom, the only form indeed in which an understanding of the social processes achieved by the greatest minds is transmitted."
We read, then, not to confront "greatness," however defined, but to learn from it. We read not to transcend our limits, but to better understand them.
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