history and the canon: the case of doctor faustus

7/30/2019 History and the Canon: the case of Doctor Faustus

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MICHAEL H. KEEFERHistory and the Canon: The Case of

Doctor Faustus

The relationship between the two key words of my title is a curiouslyintricate one. Since the notion of canonicity implies a controlled transmission of the past into the future, to talk about literary canons is also,unavoidably, to invoke one or another view of history. Yet, paradoxically,some of the recently and currently most influential critical positions haveencouraged understandings of canonicity that are thoroughly anti-historical. I shall be concerned in the first part of this essay with some ofthe implications of this paradox. In the second part, turning to Marlowe'sDoctor Faustus, a play that is by common consent of some importance inour literary canon, I will consider certain practical consequences, bothtextual and interpretive, of attempts to lift the canon out of history.

Another less stolid title, that of a recent academic conference, mayserve to introduce the issues I wish to discuss. 'Beyond the Canon:Literary Innovation and Integration' - these words, from one point ofview, are no more than an elliptical summary of the inescapable process ofcanon revision. Any new text is 'beyond the canon' in the banal sense ofbeing not yet canonical - and sometimes also in the more interestingsense of being genuinely innovative, of embodying moves that extendbeyond the limits implied by the current literary canon. Critical commentary, where it is not simply dismissive, serves to integrate the new textinto the canon by discovering some degree of 'conformity between the oldand the new/ which also implies making adjustments to the 'ideal order'formed by the 'existing monuments' of literature.1 This is a familiarperspective, as the tags from T.S. Eliofs Tradition and the IndividualTalenf will already have signalled. And it is one that within certain limitscan accommodate historically oriented canon revisions as well: witnessEliofs revisionary insistence that 'the main current... does not at all flowinvariably through the most distinguished reputations.'1 But perhaps'Beyond the Canon' is meant to evoke something a little more exciting.Taken in another sense, the words suggest, indeed invite, a kind ofdeliberate transgression. Since in other contexts a prepositional phrase ofthis kind might as easily be hortatory as descriptive, can one be blind inthis case to its hidden persuasive force? 'Down to the river! into the street!'cried Allen Ginsberg in the second part of Howl.3 Why not then 'Beyondthe Canon!'? Yet as we surge forward, arm in arm, two doubts may assailus.

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1987


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history and the canon: the case of doctor faustus

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