does the literary canon encourage (or rather discourage) creativity?

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© Byron Taylor ‘Literary Canonicity in the 21st Century’ University of Amsterdam, October 2015

Does the Literary Canon encourage

(or rather discourage) creativity?

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by Byron Taylor

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Our line of inquiry may not be original, but I think the striking image with which Nietzsche frames it is. He claims our chances of fully evaluating, appreciating, and ourselves even creating great art is hindered, when:

‘zealous idolaters dance around the shrine of some half-understood monument of a great past, as if they wanted to say: “Look, this is the only true and real art; of what concern to you is art that is just coming into being or has not yet been realized!” Apparently this dancing mob even has the privilege of determining what “good taste” is…’ i

Would one commit Bloom to this ‘dancing mob’? In ‘The Western Canon,’ he designates the success of various writers in relation to their proximity to (or distance from) Shakespeare. The shadow of his influence is inescapable. But how well will such a critical structure work in what David Damrosch calls ‘A Post-Canonical world’ ii of increasingly globalised frontiers, and a wider literary community? More worryingly still, does the stagnant elitism of such viewpoints bear the risk of discouraging great writers from competing, let alone entering, such an antiquated position? Does the contemporary overabundance of arts, of writing itself, the accessibility of various levels of media, render the Canon redundant – or is it more precious for its endurance, despite all of this?

In asking such questions, my purpose is to explore the complicated relationship between the creation of art and the designation of art into the Canon over time. Does the prospect of the Canon encourage the ambition of the artist, or could it even be argued as an obstacle? Nietzsche insists this jury ‘are connoisseurs of art because they want to do away with art altogether,’ who wish to persuade us: “Look, great art already exists!”’ iii Is the canonical indeed a destructive force on creativity? What is the solution: as a Canon of liberal membership somewhat defeats the whole point of a Canon – but then, as Nietzsche argues, is ‘the canon’ itself defeating art?

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Scientists at Bristol University have recently created a ‘Hit Potential Equation,’ that is capable of listening to and absorbing any given musical piece, recording a series of algorithms. Using a series of metrics (tempo, length, volume, duration), it will predict where in the top music charts the artist is destined to land. The accuracy so far has impressed many. iv

For better and worse, such devices for measuring literature’s success are not yet available. There is no fixed chemical formula for creating, far less evaluating the power of the written word. In substitution for the Equation, time itself appears to be the only true thermometer of quality: not only in affording the writer’s enduring interest for one generation to the next, but in proving their worth under the scrutiny of Bloom’s iron rule for Canonical entry: ‘unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify.’ v

All of this seems reasonable enough. Yet in opposition with the measured patience of the literary critic, the act of creativity is a frenetic, inconsistent and unpredictable process. Like Scheherazade in ‘1001 Arabian Nights’, desperately creating story after story in the hope of surviving her captor, so the act of creative writing is always imbued with a degree of urgency – to recompose the memory and distil one’s vision in the face of mortality and time. Even the seemingly effortless, dreamlike prose of Marcel Proust or Gustav Flaubert is revealed, through their personal letters and notebooks, vi as a matter of stress, of anxiety and concerns of one’s own inadequacy. Not that the literary critic is exempt from such emotions; far from it – but a privilege the critic can have over the author is in having a more stable perception of one’s role. As for the artist, in whatever field, our expectations are muddled and contradictory.

What do we want in an artist? What is it we hope to ascertain when we open the biographies of the canonical? Admiration? Recognition? Pity? We seem to desire a certain balance in their character that is hard to define: we don’t want them to be, like Coleridge or Rimbaud, hedonistic to the point where they are happier to lie back intoxicated with pleasure, rather than writing for our own. And yet, at the same time, would we honestly prefer to read about a stable, mild individual, void of quirks, complexes or drama, who merrily made their way to their desk each morning and lived without incident? We seem to want something in-between; and from this often stems our disappointment.

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So much for the individual: but of course, despite Barthes claims to the contrary, every writer is a consequence of their context. In ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ Milan Kundera claims that ‘Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic’ vii when certain conditions come into play, and lists these conditions as the following:

1. A high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;

2. An advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the atomization of the individual;

3. A radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel) viii

He then goes on to predict, from 1982, the world we now inhabit: one of widespread graphomania. In the climate of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and Youtube, Kundera could not be more prophetic of our condition, before being prescriptive of its ailment:

‘But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.’ ix

Subjectivity is thus deafened by its own textual echo. In Kundera’s eyes, the crisis of literature is not its absence in our everyday lives, but its abundance in mediums that dilute its potential merit. The solipsism derived from all such media is apparent all around us: as Spivak dryly puts it, 'The globe is on a computer. No one lives there.' x My inclusion of Kundera in this discussion is not as arbitrary as it may seem, as I later wish to demonstrate. For now, though, this ‘wall of mirrors,’ is as fitting a description as any, for what Bloom deems ‘The Age of Chaos.’

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In ‘The Western Canon,’ Bloom makes the unabashed admission that ‘literary criticism, as an art, always was and always will be an elite phenomenon.’xi For such reasons, he views ‘the apostles’ and ‘cheerleaders’ of Marxism, Feminism et al as enacting a redundant task that, with a tactical conservatism, he renders as nothing more than the intellectual offspring of ‘Platonism and the equally archaic Aristotelian’ forms of ‘social medicine,’ xii Even in regards to Shakespeare who he explicitly, and repeatedly, designates as the penultimate source around which all Western literature since is doomed to orbit, the biographical tendency seems to hold little attraction for him. Even ‘after two decades of teaching little else, I find the enigma’ of the writer ‘insoluble,’xiii he admits.

What does this leave the critic with, if all political, psychological and biographical information is rendered secondary? The aesthetic experience of reading itself, coupled with the uncanny strangeness that comes with each new reading: a strangeness he says we ‘never assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.’xiv On this point, Nietzsche shares the view that the artwork must enlighten it’s audience gradually, step by step, writing that ‘The most noble kind of beauty’ is identifiable in that it ‘infiltrates slowly’, leaving us impressions ‘which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams.’xv It is this dynamic function that admits writers to the Canon, not the political utility or ideological purpose to which the text can contribute. Our question is: does such vague requirements make the creative artist want to follow suit? Can one construct a canonical masterpiece knowingly?

As far as Bloom is concerned, it would be impossible to enter the Canon without assimilating it. Milton, he suggests, ‘overwhelmed the tradition and consumed it.’ xvi Joyce, likewise, had the supreme belief in his abilities to convert his prolific reading into arguably the 20th century’s richest novel. Where the Canon becomes useful (and even necessary), however, is in the creative reading, interpretation and even conflict with one’s past competitors: like every person, I know that which no one else knows, that is why I write; but others did what I am doing; only with, against, in spite of and through the fuel of their language can I express my own. Writing is the stimulation of the incomplete, xvii or, as Butler puts it, ‘a synthesis of movement and alterity.’ xviii One's audience is not only invisible, but is a competitive invisible arena into which each author must set foot. Bloom cannot understand why the School of Resentment, particularly its Marxist factions, ‘are perceptive in finding competition everywhere else, yet fail to see that it is intrinsic to the high arts.’ xix What is even more ironic, however, is that in our recent modern history it is one of the very political persuasions that Bloom attacks - namely Marxism - which once succeeded in institutionalizing the systematic destruction of creativity.

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And it is on this point that Kundera reappears - as his text concedes that (just like Nietzsche’s ‘idolaters’), ‘I too once danced in a ring. It was in the spring of 1948. The Communists had just taken power in my country… and I took other Communist students by the hand, I put my arms around their shoulders… Then one day I said something I would better have left unsaid. I was expelled from the Party and had to leave the circle.’ xx One day, later, the circle resumes in the city centre, ‘And knowing full well that the day before in their fair city one woman and one surrealist had been hanged by the neck, the young Czechs went on dancing and dancing.’xxi

Is it not noticeable that the philosopher, the critic and the author all share the image of the ambivalent individual set apart from the majority (in their lives and their writing): be they the ‘dancing mob’, the School of Resentment, or the Communist Party? Kundera continues how ‘as I walked through the streets of Prague passing rings of laughing, dancing Czechs, I knew I belonged to Kalandra,’ who had been hanged, ‘not to them, to Kalandra who had also broken away from the circular trajectory and fallen.’ xxii

Kundera’s brilliant novel, by an unexpected inversion, reminds us what happens when Bloom’s School of Resentment is socially institutionalized; what all of these thinkers emphasize is the danger of following the many, especially when led by those ‘masquerading as physicians’xxiii of social and institutional ills. Not that this is to dismiss all progressive institutions; but to bear in mind their frailty in the face of human endeavour.

To travel from an occupied Prague to the Amsterdam of 2015, we should survey how relevant each of these thinker’s enemies really are today. The School of Resentment may indeed maintain some resonance in academic discourse today – but ‘since the early nineties,’ claims Hans Gumbrecht, ‘no new theory of literature has posed a real intellectual or institutional challenge.’xxiv As a result, ‘it is no coincidence,’ he continues, that ‘we have witnessed a return to the most canonical and classical literary works.’ xxv

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One can certainly detect in this Stanford professor a similar attitude to that of Bloom’s, and a palpable relief with the wane of theory and what has been dubbed ‘a return to texts.’ xxvi Macdonald likewise declares ‘the first step in reviving’ the critic is to bring ‘the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism,' that if it hopes to be ‘valued’ and ‘reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative.’ xxvii Their conservative premise is complicated by the inexorable rise of World Literature, which seeks to expand the Canon towards a more global circumference. Its popularity would no doubt discourage Harold Bloom, but to many (myself included), it seems an inevitable and fair development in a globalizing world. 'It's too simple to say that the old canon has vanished. Rather, the canon of world literature has morphed from a two-tiered system into a three-tiered one.' xxviii Graphomania has indeed taken the world by storm.

Our main concern here is with the artist themselves, though, and the Canon - as framed by both Nietzsche and Bloom - does not persuade me that notions of the Canonical are debilitating to the production of future creativity. The immanent fighting spirit and the will to both absorb and conflict with one’s literary predecessors, is key here. Each new artist can only enter the Canon with a consciously competitive attitude. The Canon is exclusive, to be sure, conservative, rigid, elitist; but is vital as a source of rejuvenation, of challenge, and of courage to undertake the task of superseding the dead (or the silent) xxix through language. The writer lays claim to a synchronic presence, untethered by the very context that produced them.

We must remember that ‘the Canon’ does not exist in any physical, ontological sense. It is a matter of debate to those who deems themselves experts – but to the wider public (whose responsibility it is for the humanities to engage with more), it is a harmless point of entry, and introduction to many great periods of literature. Both Bloom and Nietzsche seem to insist on a certain aggressiveness in this discussion, but from either sides of the debate. Bloom believes himself something of a guard at the gates of greatness, while Nietzsche howls from outside the Canon’s walls, unable to realize ‘the zealous idolaters’ may dissuade and even intimidate the creative artist, but that does not in itself arrest creativity. They merely represent a challenge for the artist, to recognize, learn from, utilize and contradict.

Criticism (canonical, theoretical, or otherwise) does not, I believe, hold the power to arrest such a process. Only away from the maddening crowd of whatever ideological or social alignment, can the author obtain a solitude and immortality that transcends such transient points of reference. One wonders if Bloom is right, when he says literature is an ‘individual rather than a societal concern.’ xxx

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Notes

i Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Utility and Liability of History for Life”, ‘Unfashionable Observations,’ trans: Richard T. Gray (USA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 101. Nietzsche continues: ‘But if one insists on transporting the custom of popular referendum and majority rule into the realm of art and thereby forcing, as it were, the artists to defend himself before a jury of aesthetic do-nothings, then you can bet that he will be condemned; and this is not despite that, but precisely because, his judges have ceremoniously proclaimed the canon of monumental art…’ (101) for the German thinker, then, the site of a nightmarish hour of judgement is at the hands of ‘aesthetic do-nothings,’ while for Bloom, the judgement would be at the hand of ‘theoretical do-nothings.’ Both elevate ‘good taste’ or ‘artistic merit,’ in its vaguest sense, as being more sensible a criteria than ‘majority rule,’ which is depicted as fickle and tempestuous: the very qualities against which the Canon traditionally distinguishes itself.

ii David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” ‘Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization,’ ed. Haun Saussy, ‘Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization’ (Johns Hopkins U.P., 2006), 43. iii “The Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 102. iv Tijl de Bie, Matt McVicar, Yizhao Ni, Ra’ ul Santos-Rodriguez, “Hit Song Science Once Again a Science,” (University of Bristol: Intelligent Systems Lab; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid: Signal Theory and Communications Department). See also: “Hit song science is not yet a science,” ‘In Proceedings of ISMIR 2008,’ F. Pachet and P. Roy. (Philadelphia, USA, 2008) 355–360. v Harold Bloom, “An Elegy for the Canon,” ‘The Western Canon,’ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), 29. vi See: Gustav Flaubert ‘Letters 1830-57,’ (USA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Marcel Proust ‘Lettres Choisies,’ (Paris: Plon, 2004). vii Milan Kundera, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ trans: Michael Henry Heim (UK: Penguin Books, 1982), 92. viii Kundera here overlooks the discrepancy between the nation’s demographics, then and now: Israel’s population in 1982 was 4.031 million, to France’s 55.82 million. Today those figures stand at 8,296,000 and 64,982,894 respectively; but I think Kundera’s point remains clear, that external stability is more paramount than social trauma. Or, could we even speculate, that in some ways Kundera was attempting to justify his own self-imposed exile?

I included this passage as I think it goes a little further in its analysis of what ‘makes’ or fosters great literature. As opposed to the usual rhetoric that the economic strength of Western Europe and America always equals canonical dominance, Kundera reflects on the matter much more objectively. ix ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ ibid. x Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'The Death of a Discipline,' (New York: Columbia University Press,

2003), 72.

xi ‘The Western Canon,’ 16.

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xii ‘The Western Canon,’ 18. xiii Harold Bloom, “Shakespeare’s Universalism,” ‘Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,’ (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 5. One cannot help but find Bloom’s slightly preposterous claim that Shakespeare ‘invented us’ as humans somewhat quasi-theological. His relationship to the author seeks to elevate the writer above the spheres of socio-ethical discourse to the realm of Supreme Creator. Yet, it is worth mentioning, that in his own texts (as eloquent and engaging as they are) he rarely lets his ‘enemies’ speak for themselves: ‘The School of Resentment’ is essentially a caricaturised institution that is never permitted dialogue in his discussion, and whose presence in the text is never more than the dismiss of his own descriptions: ‘cheerleaders,’ ‘apostles,’ ‘freedom fighters’ etc. xiv ‘The Western Canon’, 4. xv Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Human, All Too Human,’ trans: Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 104 – 105. The philosopher may attack the ‘dancing mob’ elsewhere, but in ‘Human, All Too Human’ he seems to sympathize with Bloom’s ethic: ‘When something is perfect, we tend to neglect to ask about its evolution, delighting rather in what is present, as if it had risen from the ground by magic.’ (103); this appears relevant to the attitudes of Bloom, Gumbrecht and MacDonald. We should ask: is it because of such sentiments that Bloom would rather leave the works of the Canon unspoiled by the dangers and speculations of theoretical discourse? Is it possible to understand art without understanding its evolution? Bloom seems to posit literature as the synchronic experience of the aesthetic; little else holds importance for him. One can foresee the limitations of this ideal as well as its strengths.

xvi ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ 27

xvii In ‘Human, All Too Human,’ it is testified to that ‘one needs precisely a stimulating incompleteness as an irrational element that simulates a sea for the listener’s imagination, and, like fog, hides its opposite shore, that is, the limitation of the subject being praised.’ (122) One could that the representation of the ‘subject being praised’ meets its limitation in the quality of the artwork itself, possessing as it does a posterity beyond the ‘irrational elements’ of a lifetime.

xviii Judith Butler, “Hegel, Desire, Recognition,” ‘Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France,’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 33. xix ‘The Western Canon,’ 27. xx ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’65. xxi ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ 66. xxii ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ 67. xxiii “The Utility and Liability of History for Life”, 101.

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xxiv Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Reading for Stimmung: How to Think about the Reality of Literature Today,” ‘Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature,’ trans: Erik Butler, (California: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1-2. xxv Perhaps nor is it a coincidence those 20th century critics, 'in thrall to the principles of radicalism,' (Macdonald, 22) lost prominence shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the widespread disillusionment with an ideology that had inspired many - in thought if not in action. While not quite what Fukuyama declared ‘the End of History,’ in the pseudo-Hegelian sense, it was arguably the end of critical theory. See: Terry Eagleton ‘After Theory’ (UK: Penguin, 2004).

xxvi As critics, should we feel the same? Does the decline in theoretical discourse represent an opportunity for a more aesthetic approach? There is no straight answer to this. Pragmatically, the contemporary critic can utilise theory (or a variety of theories) without the dogmatic loyalties that 20th century movements compelled. Yet to what extent can Literary Studies survive as a discipline in such an insulated form? I agree with these traditionalist thinkers to the extent that the theory should not come before the text, but I find it hard to foresee a strong discipline in which the two are not in some form of dialogue. Dogmatism within the academy is the problem: neither extremity (aesthetic, theoretical) is sufficient of its own accord, and in strict isolation, but rather the discipline needs to arrive at a compromise between these schools of thought. xxvii Ronan McDonald, “The Rise of Cultural Studies,” 'The Death of the Critic,' (London: Contin-

uum, 2008), 149.

xxviii “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” 45. For other exemplary sources on the topic of World Literature, see: ‘On Literary Worlds’ by Eric Hayot (Modern Language Quarterly 72:2, June 2011), and Mario Siskind’s ‘The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the World: A Critique of World Literature’ (Comparative Literature 62, 2010). xxix By ‘silent’ I am designating those whose voices are yet to be given room within the canon: being those whose nations or national literatures are under-exposed by the Anglo-dominance of the current canon. In ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (New Left Review 1: 2000), Franco Moretti famously claimed that one can compare the body of world literature with a planetary system: with the Anglo-American novel at the centre. See also: ‘Can the Sublatern Speak?’ by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (USA: McGill University Press, 1988) for a critique of more Eurocentric forms of canonization and superiority, and, by extension, Rosalind Morris’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea,’ (USA: Columbia University Press, 2010). xxx ‘The Western Canon,’ 16.

does the literary canon encourage (or rather discourage) creativity?

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