The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [40]
Yet ultimately this may be one reason to cherish the canon, or a canon, especially if we think of it as something like an interconnected reading list, rather than only as a list of Great Books. Mortimer Adler’s rather grandiose phrase “The Great Conversation,” used to advertise and publish his Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Ideas series, may seem to belong to a different era, but perhaps for that very reason the concept of a literary canon conversation across the continents and centuries is more important than ever.
THREE
What Isn’t Literature
There’s no accounting for taste. We might say that whatever we find tedious, banal, sloppy, ill formed, or opaque isn’t literature. Or we could say that literature has to pass some kind of test, like the test of age, or having once been in someone’s canon, or winning a literary prize. Or we could say that it has to be fictive (or creative or imaginative) in order to be called literature. I don’t share any of these views, although I acknowledge their appropriateness in various situations. Instead I think it’s productive to look at the boundaries and limits of literature. If we do this, we see a fairly constant centripetal movement from the edges to the center, from the outside to the inside, incorporating once disparaged genres and authors into respectable, canonical, and even classic status.
What once wasn’t literature (Renaissance stage plays; novels; high-quality pornographic writing) is now at the heart of the canon, as are works previously defined as “women’s literature” or “Afro-American literature.” Does the term literature in the sense of “worthy of rereading, worthy of study” have any agreed-upon meaning today? Who judges this? Who should?
The word literature now seems to have two distinct regions of meaning: one belonging to so-called high culture and print culture, and the other to handouts, throwaways, documents on flimsy paper and in tiny print, among them those providing medical and statistical legalese aiming to shield drug companies from potential lawsuits. (“I’ll see what’s in the literature on that subject …”).
Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other.
We might want to make the (slightly overreaching but nonetheless interesting) claim that this boundary status is part of what enhances the status of the work/text as literature. Here, our authority, if we need one, is again Immanuel Kant, this time on the topic of genius: specifically, his dictum that genius gives the rule to art. The genius—according to Kant—doesn’t follow rules. Indeed, he (for Kant, the masculine pronoun would have been taken for granted) doesn’t often make or ordain rules unless he is, for example, Aristotle. To the contrary: rules are made in imitation of, or in consequence of, the rule-breaking performances of artists (including writers). Innovation—breaking the rules—produces rules for the next generation: Sophocles’ third actor, Petrarch’s love sonnet, Dante’s poetry in the vernacular, and Wordsworth’s decision to write an epic poem about the growth of a poet’s mind—all these innovations changed the course of literature. Brilliant success is often adjacent to failure, as pathos is to bathos. What this means when we come to ask the question “What