Canonesis

Maurice Lee’s survey of syllabi in nineteenth-century American literature not only confirms a professional consensus among our colleagues’ choices of texts that “matter” but also discloses an overlooked element of repetition underlying those choices, one that suggests a compulsion to read, return to, and reread the same relatively small number of authors and books in the college classroom. Perhaps the long durée of interpretability, relevance, and cultural capital that confers canonical status upon certain texts is more a case of the persistence, and value, of this compulsive reading. The urge to re-engage with the discursive intricacies that such a familiar repertoire of linguistic worlds appears to offer may supersede any collective acquiescence to institutional objectives, learning outcomes, community expectations, traditional values, political agendas, departmental requirements, or cultural hand-wringing as the formative criteria of canonicity.

In the limited time faculty have to acclimate students to the beautiful perversities of American writing, it seems practical they would choose to teach “familiar” canonical texts of the kind Lee’s reading lists feature; but Emerson’s “Nature,” Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and Dickinson’s poetry, to name a few, have an opaqueness that belies their familiarity. They yield an evolving array of linguistic, historical, contemporary, ideological, and imaginative meanings—a capacity they don’t share with other texts. If this sounds like hard reading, it is only so because such works simulate an experience akin to psychological trauma, on the level of both linguistic complexity and narration. One might invoke, as an analogy in the first case, the quality of estrangement the Russian formalist critics of the 1920s invoked to differentiate literary discourse from other discourses.¹ What I’m describing, however, is more deeply woven into texts we call canonical: a transformative unmooring of readerly identity, one encoded in the wrought language of the text, but also powerfully present in the narratives and conditions of trauma those texts often recount. While this claim may sound like a conservative plea for teaching the “great books,” it is not. The evolution of particular kinds of writing that enables them to accede to canonicity implies a genesis of some duration, as well as an uncertain future that holds the possibility of their own irrelevance. The constructedness and fluidity of the canon of American literature is not news, but the psycho-social processes of readerly investment in certain kinds of books may be worth investigating as a possible candidate for the generative foundation of that canon. The books I have in mind are those that offer simultaneously disorienting and sustaining experiences of language.

As academics entrusted with determining the content of the canon, we may find ourselves asking, with Emerson, “Where do we find ourselves?” We would do well, I think, to take account of what constitutes canonicity. If theoretical questions about canonicity seem inconclusive in their dissensus, certain historical approaches have proven more fruitful. John Guillory, for example, has suggested that we “reconstruct a historical picture of how literary works are produced, disseminated, reproduced, reread and retaught over successive generations and eras.”² This approach redirects attention to the institutional and social circumstances of canon formation, bringing into view interacting agents including writers, publishers, teachers, and readers. The empirical data made possible by this approach can describe the mechanisms of canonicity over time, but to the degree such quantitative data can be accumulated, the more likely it is that a firm understanding of any distinctive component of canonical texts—as well as some identifiable predisposition on the part of those who value reading and teaching them—tends to dissolve into statistical abstractions. This is especially the case with readers in whom the earliest acts of reading may already contain within them the compulsive tendencies, repetitive habits, and psycho-social conditions that go into the making of literary canons—the generative impulses, as it were, that underwrite the institutional and historical processes of canonicity.

Guillory offers a way to describe this finely grained account of canonicity. Before the moment when teaching literature and writing become subject to the institutional control and social organization of the school, there is a more...