History and the Canon: The Case of Doctor Faustus

MICHAEL H. KEEFER History and the Canon: The Case of Doctor Faustus The relationship between the two key words of my title is a curiously intricate 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 oranother view of history.Yet, paradoxically, some of the recently and currently most influential critical positions have encouraged understandings of canonicity that are thoroughly antihistorical . I shall be concerned in the first part of this essay with some of the implications of this paradox. In the second part, turning to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a play that is by common consent of some importance in our literary canon, I will consider certain practical consequences, both textual and interpretive, of attempts to lift the canon out of history. Another less stolid title, that of a recent academic conference, may serve to introduce the issues I wish to discuss. 'Beyond the Canon: Literary Innovation and Integration' - these words, from one point of view, are no more than an elliptical summary of the inescapable processof canon revision. Any new text is 'beyond the canon' in the banal sense of being not yet canonical - and sometimes also in the more interesting sense of being genuinely innovative, of embodying moves that extend beyond the limits implied by the current literary canon. Critical commentary , where it is not simply dismissive, serves to integrate the new text into the canon by discovering some degree of'conformity between the old and the new: which also implies making adjustments to the 'ideal order' formed by the 'existing monuments' of literature.' This is a familiar perspective, as the tags from T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' will already have signalled. And it is one that within certain limits can accommodate historically oriented canon revisions as well: witness Eliot's revisionary insistence that 'the main current ... does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations." 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 of . deliberate transgression. Since in other contexts a prepositional phrase of this kind might as easily be hortatory as descriptive, can one be blind in this case to its hidden persuasive force? 'Down to the river! into the street!' cried Allen Ginsberg in the second part of Howl.) Why not then 'Beyond the Canon!'? Yet as we surge forward, arm in arm, two doubts may assail us. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4 , SUMMER 1987 HISTORY AND THE CANON 499 First, is it any more possible for university teachers of English to go collectively beyond the canon than it is for us to go beyond our own footprints? Barring leaps into the abyss, or the determined deviance of minority groups, the answer would seem to be no. For in so far as the literary canon is constituted by our collective activity as teachers, critics, editors, and reviewers, then so long as we remain within the bounds of what our American colleagues like to call 'the profession: we are rather more securely attached to it than Peter Pan was to his shadow: wherever we may stray as an interpretive community, the canon follows us about. One consequence of this would seem to be that the very notion of canonicity endures, if not a breach, yet an expansion - and this brings on the second doubt. Going beyond the canon can, by definition, only be the act of a minority . But once this kind of transgression has become a regular feature of critical discourse - once it has been consecrated, so to speak, not merely by the annual meetings of the MLA, but by such distinguished organs of opinion as Critical Inquiry and the English Institute4 - does the act not lose much of its original meaning? A radical challenge to the canon might, until recently, have been interpreted as a species of heresy, and have been met with that stony silence which is one of the academic substitutes lor burning people at the stake. Yet if, as has been vigorously asserted, our interpretive act, our...