Can Minor Discourses Produce a Classic?

Can Minor Discourses Produce a Classic? Peter Bien My topic, "Can Minor Discourses Produce a Classic?" is part of the larger topic addressed in this issue, "Empowering the Minor." If minor discourses do produce classics, then presumably those discourses are empowered in relation to so-called major discourses, perhaps deriving their power just as much from their minority status as from the actual classics produced. All this needs to be examined—but not yet, since what I have just said is itself problematical because it assumes too much. It is too uncritical in its use of the terms "classic" and "minor." If, without questioning those terms, we proceeded directly to an examination of the minor in its relation to the so-called major discourses, we would be undermining our own objective since we would be tacitly reinforcing the assumptions behind the very canonicity that produces the marginalization which we bemoan. On the other hand, I doubt whether we can ever escape some degree of complicity. So long as we speak as professors of literature, with the implicit underpinning of our universities and the Modern Language Association, we will find it difficult to achieve a truly noncanonical perspective. The reasons are manifold. First, there is our power relation to modern Greek literature, that is, our own role in forming that marginalized subcanon. Secondly, there is our envy (whether conscious or unconscious) of the major discourses—for, as that ogre Allan Bloom has angrily said of us, sometimes we treat the canonized classics "like an old-style exclusive country club," spending all of our time "running it down while trying to get in" (1988: 51). Thirdly, there is our complicity in fashioning a canonical audience, namely, "a ¿!¿¿»population [who] 'appreciate the value' of works of art," an audience for whom the texts labeled as canonical "do indeed perform the function thus privileged" (Smith 1988: 44). Whether we like it or not, "the canon is established primarily by the professoriate. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 65 66 Peter Bien ... As Leslie Fielder has remarked, 'Literature is effectively what we teach ... ; or, conversely, what we teach ... is literature.' Roland Barthes has offered a similar observation: 'The "teaching of literature" ... is for me almost tautological. Literature is what is taught, that's all' " (Krupat 1983: 146 citing Fielder 1981: 73 and Barthes 1971: 170). So we should recognize that our efforts to undermine canonicity and transcend marginality are themselves problematical. But that does not matter. We need to examine the terms in question even if we cannot discard them. What, then, do we mean when we label something "classical"? We mean many things, some of which are irrelevant to this discussion . Let us discard these irrelevant meanings straightway. In its narrowest sense, the term "classic" is restricted to works by the great authors of ancient Greece and Rome. In 1694 the first dictionary of the French Academy defined a classic author as "an ancient [that is, Latin or Greek] author, highly approved, who is an authority in the subject he treats of" (Saint-Beuve, in Adams 1971: 557). This narrowest of definitions is passé owing to the successful campaign by Dante and others to legitimatize vernacular literatures. Dante viewed classical Latin as a compound of the vernaculars of its day and hence not essentially different from his own Italian. Thus in the Purgatorio (vii. 16—17) he is able to make Sordello, a vernacular poet, exclaim to Virgil: O gloria de' Latin, . . . per cui mostró ciö che potea la lingua nostra O glory of the Latins, ... by whom owr tongue showed forth all its power (emphasis added). I need not remind neohellenists that George Seferis alludes to this in "Πάνω σ'εναν ξÎ-νο στίχο" when he makes his Odysseus whisper "λόγια τηςγλώσσαςμας,όπωςτημιλοϕ σανπϕ ιντϕ ειςχιλιάδεςχϕ όνια"(words of our language, as it was spoken three thousand years ago). What Seferis wanted, just like Dante, was a vernacular idiom that would serve the same purposes for him, and for his nation, as Latin and ancient Greek had served their poets and their nations (see Kermode 1975: 36—37). In any case, we now grant vernacular authors the possibility of writing classics. Thus the revised definition of classic authors in the 1835 dictionary of the...