The Flâneur: The Canonization

Author(s): Sven Birkerts

Source: Harvard Review, No. 2 (Fall, 1992), pp. 23-24
Published by: Harvard Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27559489
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 THE FL?NEUR

THE CANONIZATION
by Sven Birkerts

I've always believed that debates and controversies remain live in

our culture until the moment when the first popularized "topic" anthologies
appear, at which point the free-market contest of ideas becomes embalmed as
product. My belief was most recently confirmed for me when I saw that the
so-called "storm" over the canon and political correctness ("P.C.") was
dressed in glossy cover stock and sported the usual array of promotional
blurbs. Indeed, the near-simultaneous publication of "readers" on the
subject, one edited by Paul Berman and another by Patricia Aufderheide, let
me know that these matters were officially exhausted as provocations and
were ready to begin their afterlife as the stuff of cultural history.
As it happened, however, part of my labors on a literature textbook
required that I actually familiarize myself with the ins and outs of the debate.
I took a deep breath and worked my way through the bulk of what had been
gathered between covers. And my reaction, apart from the usual miming of
nods and grimaces, was a genuine surprise. The more I read, the more it
struck me that the whole issue of the canon was from both sides being mis
perceived and mis-argued.
The canon controversy, as everyone by now doubtless knows, has to
do with the question of what texts shall form the basis of the university
curriculum. Conservatives, citing the documented erosion of literacy and an
imperiled sense of tradition among the young, argue that the curriculum
must now more than ever be stabilized around the approved touchstones of
theWestern tradition?around the best that has been thought and written (or
so they say). Their more liberal adversaries charge that such designations?
"best," "enduring," etc.?are but a thin cover for what is the ongoing
hegemony of the ideology of dead white males. To remain relevant, they
assert, the curriculum must be pried open to admit new voices and new
cultural perspectives, including those of feminist, gay, and ethnically
constituencies. Eliot must sidle over to make room for Alice
marginalized
Walker, and so on.
What I realized as I tried to follow the ping-pong of the debate was
how nearly all of the disputants, never mind their political orientation,
insisted upon treating the issue as yet another engagement between em
battled on a continuum with abortion rights and artistic free
ideologies,
Which it is to an extent, of course. But to see the canon controversy
speech.
in strictly these terms is to trivialize and deadlock a discussion which carries
a far greater range of implication.
The canon debate is in fact the first symptom of what may prove to

23
be amalaise of untold larger consequences. The partisanship actually serves
to distract us from a recognition of the underlying crisis, which is that we, as
a culture, are our are
taking leave of the book and the printed page and
entering upon a whole new set of understandings and ways of processing
information about the world. I am referring, of course, to the full-scale
electronification that is happening all around us?via the chip, the video, the
interactive software programs_The outcry against the modification of the
canon is really a cry on behalf of the old reflexes and routines. And the cry for
multicultural inclusiveness is a last ditch bid for connection to the fading
legacy of print. The logic is simple. When a resource is threatened?made
or
scarce?then people fight. In this case the struggle is not over oil, water,
land, but over textual power in an increasingly non-textual age. The future
of books and reading iswhat is at stake, and it is a dim intuition of this by the
contending factions that drives the controversy.
As Katha Pollitt argued so shrewdly in her much-cited article in the
Nation (the piece is anthologized in Berman's Debating P.C.): if we were a
nation of readers, there would be no issue. No one would be arguing about
whether to put Toni Morrison on the college syllabus because Toni Morrison
would be a staple of the reader's regular diet anyway. The reason why these
lists are suddenly so important is because they represent, very often, the only
serious works that the student is every likely to be exposed to. Whoever
controls the lists comes out ahead in the struggle for the hearts and minds of
the young.
One can readily see where the pro-canon folks are coming from. And
one feels for them. must advocate for a set of texts that seem, with every
They
passing year, less accessible and less relevant to the student reader.
Conrad, Austen, Mill. . . .Works these writers are often
Shakespeare, by
linguistically and syntactically complex, and demanding in their thematic
presentations. They are, as any teacher will tell you, ever harder to sell to the
student audience?an audience conditioned by the quick fluidity of the
electronic media. The contested works, by contrast, the works by the
intruders?the feminists, gays, and ethnic minorities?at least carry the
cultural cachet of topicality. They carry a strong dissenting energy and are
often stylistically more or me
accessible. Laurence Sterne, Amy Tan? You tell
to which text the 19-year-old?and, in time, her beleaguered teacher?will
gravitate.
But here is the crux, the paradox. What the pro-canonists do not see
is that if the debate is re-framed?is viewed, that is, not as a political onslaught
waged by bearded liberals, but rather as one of the symptoms of the death of
reading?then the works that are bent upon fencing out may in fact be
they
their last and best hope. If they are to have any hope of getting the children
of the video age to their approved masterworks, those children will have to
be seduced?led back slowly via a series of provisional bridges. And some
of those bridges, like it or not, will have funny names?like Oscar Hijuelos,
Leslie Maim?n Silko, Paule Marshall, David Leavitt, Richard Rodriguez,
John Edgar Wideman_

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