Introduction to Focus: American Canon

It seems impossible to think about the idea of the THE American canon right now, yet here we are. If ever there was a time to explode the canon, this is it! Before we reconfigure that canon though, we need to understand its creation. So, we look to Harold Bloom, who for the last sixty years, carefully curated and extolled the American canon. It is important to remember that in Bloom’s estimation, the American canon will always be the homely younger sister of the British canon, but nonetheless, Bloom worked tirelessly to codify those authors of American literature who he deemed worthy of study. Mikics’s editing of The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon gives contemporary readers a neat compendium of those in Bloom’s canon. More than a cursory glance, it reveals not only the authors Bloom canonizes, but the genres as well. Clearly, he values poetry above all, followed by the novel with drama a distant third.

At the pinnacle of Bloom’s canon is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is held as the most saintly incarnation of the American ideal. Bloom puts Emerson in the position of the patriarchal head of the literary state. It is with Bloom’s commentary on Emerson that Mikics’s edition begins:

Emerson is an experimental critic and essayist, and not a Transcendental philosopher. He is the mind of our climate, the principal source of the American difference in poetry, criticism and pragmatic post-philosophy. That is a less obvious truth, and it also needs restating, now and always. Emerson, my no means the greatest American writer, perhaps more an interior orator than a writer, is the inescapable theorist of all subsequent American writing.

Emerson inspires the anxiety of influence in Bloom himself and in Bloom’s estimation of others in his canon. Perhaps that anxiety is not such a negative pressure. Certainly, Bloom’s own anxiety kept him writing, right up to his death in 2019.

His enormous body of work itself is central to the canon of American literary theory, specifically and Western theory in general, more broadly. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and The Map of Misreading (1975) have attained nearly iconic status in Western literary theory. Definitely, The Anxiety of Influence has entered the sphere of public intellectual debate. Here not only has Bloom worked to codify the canon of American life, he has also, in part created the canon of American theory, setting himself against Emerson, who he canonizes as the quintessential theorist of American literature. By naming his own progenitor, Bloom names his own father. He chooses and fixes his own point of anxiety. He names Emerson as the American theorist, par excellance, and then develops a theory to explain his indebtedness and perceived inferiority. One is reminded of Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West;” “For she was the maker of the song she sang.” Just as the female figure, the sole artificer of her own world, as Stevens describes, creates her own solipsistic world, so does Bloom himself. He fancies himself the single arbiter of literary worth in America. He longs to harness the power that evades Steven’s narrator in that poem’s last stanza,

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Bloom’s drive to order, to stave off the anxiety he creates for himself, is his process of canon building. In many ways, it is as artful and melodious as Steven’s muse, but sometimes, the world needs to hear the clanging of discord.

That canon now, like all canons, is in question. The debate over whether or not theory is dead is in part, related to the very notion that theory has become a canonical mechanism for reading and all ideas of canon should be called into question. Calling to question is important here, though, as it is imperative that we interrogate the American canon and the notion of canonization...