Do we need a canon?

The idea of the canon, though innocuous enough to begin with, has been reappropriated on the one hand by apocalyptic cultural doom-mongers and on the other by cultural relativists. The debate, among those in academia, seems to be between two opposites, equally extreme: there either must be a canon and it must be defended, or there is no canon at all, and please just let us get on with reading whatever we want to read. The cultural relativists complain about the preponderance of “dead white males”, which litter the canon like one half of Highgate cemetery. Presumably, they think of the canon as something that is defended by those elitists who will soon inevitably also be dead and white and male—as though these defenders have some interest in keeping it that way. This stance is, of course, unsustainable. There is a conspicuous lack of anybody other than dead white males in the history of science, as well. Are we to ask future scientists to stop learning Newton’s laws or Einstein’s theories because they were not women or Brazilian?

If their reasoning is flabby, then the reasoning of the canonists, as embodied by Harold Bloom, is irrational in equal measure. They see (in part, rightly) Western civilization undergoing immense change, and relativism taking over, such that no objective measures of literary or aesthetic eminence are given their due credit anymore; they see a post-cultural landscape in which nobody ever reads Hamlet, The Iliad, or Don Quixote. The aim of setting a canon, while being perfectly commendable, is also perfectly useless.

Ultimately, though, canons cannot be dictated because they form naturally to begin with. All that is being undertaken when someone makes a list and calls it a canon is cultural prophecy, and that, as Harold Bloom readily admits, is always a fool’s game. The Canterbury Tales, when it was first written, was not particularly culturally important, and certainly it was not studied in schools alongside Ovid and Homer. Why should this be? It is, of course, because it hadn’t yet had time to settle into its cultural role. The process by which that happens is purely organic. The Canterbury Tales is so different to the great literature of classical times that it may have been difficult to see how it could fit in amongst them without feeling awkward and being sniffed at. And yet, over time, it became popular with the right people, it was sufficiently widely read that it permeated what we call culture—and before long, it had acquired an importance in the English cultural landscape large enough to have influenced Shakespeare at least as much as did Ovid.

Now you might say, of course, that canons have in the past been dictated, and so it is not necessarily true that they always develop naturally. But the only canons that have been officially insisted upon are religious ones, for reasons which I think are self-evident. Judaism is an odd case, in that it is the only surviving monotheistic religion that came about by natural processes—it wasn’t intended to be a religion, and thus, on the whole, the canon of Judaism formed itself. Many of the stories of the Pentateuch had their origins in Babylonian mythology, and these stories were passed on and altered by many generations. When they were finally written down, it was only a nod to the canonization that had already taken place by, as it were, natural selection. Later, Christianity and Islam learnt from it and skipped the patient aging process, cutting straight to the instructive, theological and eschatological ends. Clearly this was intended to cut out ambiguity of interpretation, but exactly because their religious canons were in contention so early, it led to incessant theological battle and civil war.

And yet, we might still ask, is there a need for religious canons? There are certain books that are unavoidably fundamental (the Gospels and the Qur’an), but most others are fair game. After all, is there any evidence whatever that so-and-so book is truly prophetic or authentic, and another isn’t, assuming they both claim such status for themselves? An expert theologian may have all the justification in the world for labelling one genuine and another heretical, but surely it is the right of future theologians to decide for themselves the relative importance of all relevant books? The recent discovery of the so-called Gospel of Judas, as unlikely as it is to truly influence Christian theology, is an example of just how much light the non-canonical books can shed, and how much they can add to our understanding of religion.

There is only one sense in which canon-making in the past was really necessary: there was a real risk of books being forgotten forever. Indeed, many classical books such as those of Plato and Aristotle might have been permanently lost to European culture if not for Arab scholars. But as book technology evolved, most notably the invention of the printing press, such guardianship became unnecessary: there was now a surplus of books, many of which were unlikely to ever become canonical. In a world in which there are arguably too many books—many more than could ever fit into a canon—why should there ever be a risk that the great ones will be destroyed forever? There are enough Bibles in American hotels to survive the millennia. The internet has cemented the permanence of the great books. The only way in which some Nazi-style book burning dictatorship might completely destroy the canon is with complete control of the world wide web. And if they succeeded, they would also presumably destroy the work of the canon-makers, while creating their own canon in its place.

If the preservation of a canon is to serve as a record of culture’s “great conversation”, then we must not forget that the conversation is more important than the canon. The present debate is itself a conversation, and however barbaric you might think the intentions of the anti-canonists are, in the unlikely event that they win out, it is even more unlikely that their triumph should prevail for all time. If the works of Homer and Shakespeare are as great as we are told (and they are), it is absurd to suggest that there will ever be a time when nobody will appreciate that. Culture, like the economy, is not and should not be dictated by some divine authority, be it Harold Bloom or anyone else. Rather, the conversation should be left to pursue its own course. As hard as it may be to see now, this present debate will surely lead to a renewed appreciation of the classics.