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By Root 851 0

the case of “God Bless America.” We seldom if ever acknowledge that this song, which has become an informal but universal favorite, sung now at ballparks (especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) as well as in classrooms, was originally written in 1918 for an army revue called Yip Yip Yaphank and was popularized in 1938 by Irving Berlin and the singer Kate Smith as part of the home front resistance to Hitler. There is a tendency to think that it has always been part of the national spirit. We worry so much about performers hitting the high notes in the national anthem, and about their remembering the words, that we don’t ordinarily discuss questions like voice and address (who is speaking when we sing “O say can you see?,” and to whom?) or the fact that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is based on a particular historical event (the defense of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812).

In other words, memorization can either replace analysis and context or be combined with them. Without some sense of what the words mean, have meant, and might come to mean (Irving Berlin changed a key phrase in “God Bless America” from “to the right” to “through the night,” to avoid the sense that “right” meant the political right wing, not “impartial justice”), these are formulas, not texts. The same is true of works we consider part of a literary canon rather than a national (or religious) canon.

Here I want to stress a point I’ve made before about literary analysis—that it does not damage but tends to strengthen the status of the texts being analyzed. Their greatness, however we want to define that term, is enhanced rather than undercut by the discussion, interpretation, and examination of historical context. The works of Chaucer do not need to be protected from feminist analysis—just to give one example—any more than the Pledge of Allegiance needs to be protected from its origins in advertising tie-ins and marketing. The more we know, the more we discuss, the more we interpret, the more familiar we become with the language, nuance, history, and meanings (in the plural) of these texts, the better. And this is especially the case, I’d contend, with works that have achieved canonical status. They should be alive to us, which means that they grow and change as the times change and readers change. If they are immobile, marmoreal, and untouchable, venerated rather than read and interpreted, then they are no longer literary and no longer living.

Recognizing Literature

Re-cognition is cognition. You never go anywhere for the first time—you have always somehow imagined or “experienced” it before, in dreams, in images, in novels, in travel documentaries, in fantasy. Hamlet is often described in just this way—as a web of quotations, a play that cannot be read for the first time because it has so permeated cultures around the world. The indubitable and indisputable pleasures of the canon are pleasures of rereading, and pleasures of recognition, and pleasures of shape-shifting, as “literary allusions” and “literary influence” and “swerving from strong predecessors” and “the burden of the past” have all made—as, again, is often said—the Western tradition into a single gigantic work of literature.13

The invocation of the phrase “Western tradition” raises a few central questions. First, is there a literary canon anymore? Was there ever? With fewer and fewer readers commanding the classical languages, and fewer studying French and German (instead of, for example, Spanish, the language of much of the Western Hemisphere, or various languages deemed politically or commercially important, like Mandarin, Japanese, or Arabic), has the idea of a literary canon lost its meaning or its cachet? The moves toward what was called “opening up the canon” (to women, to ethnic writers, to the token text from India or China) now look like a medial step—as doomsayers warned—toward discarding the notion altogether, since an inclusive canon cannot also be exclusive.14

It’s been remarked that any Web search under canon produces dozens of sites about photographical