Milton and Homer: "Written to Aftertimes"

Conclusion

155 Conclusion  Near the end of her comprehensive consideration of the dynamics of canon formation, Barbara Herrnstein Smith summarizes, in very broad strokes, her treatment of the factors that determine a work’s canonical fortunes: “Any object or artifact that performs certain desired/able functions particularly well at a given time for some community of subjects...will have an immediate survival advantage,” for it will be “more frequently read or recited, copied or reprinted, translated, cited, imitated and commented upon—in short, culturally re-produced.” As a result, “it will be more available to perform those or other functions for other subjects at a subsequent time.” She continues by tracing the “two possible trajectories [that] may ensue” for such a literary artifact. It may be that “under the changing and emergent conditions of that subsequent time, the functions for which the text was earlier valued are no longer desired/able,” or that those functions are “better served by...newly produced” works, in which case, the work will be “less well maintained and less frequently cited and recited so that its visibility as well as its interest will fade.” Alternately, if “under changing conditions and in competition with newly produced and re-produced works, it continues to perform some desired/able functions particularly well, even if not the same ones for which it was initially valued...it will continue to be cited and recited, continue to be available to succeeding generations of subjects.”1 156 Conclusion A formulation like this rightly corrects the naïve notion that canonical texts owe their survival to specifiable intrinsic qualities , of universal significance or appeal, that are incorporated into them as a result of their authors’ genius and then simply recognized by successive generations of readers. Instead, it puts the emphasis on cultural work done within the “changing and emergent conditions of...subsequent time,” work that has as its result the perpetuation of particular literary texts. As Smith says elsewhere , “the value of a literary work is continuously produced and re-produced by the very acts of implicit and explicit evaluation that are frequently invoked as ‘reflecting’ its value and therefore as being evidence of it. In other words, what are commonly taken to be the signs of literary value are, in effect, also its springs.”2 As is evident in the quotations above, underlying Smith’s account of canon formation is the same general conception of culture that has enabled the historicist interpretive enterprise prominent within literary studies since the 1980s: namely, that each “community of subjects...at a given time” constitutes a discrete phenomenon available for synchronic cultural analysis, and that history (even the ongoing history of a particular nation) is most fruitfully regarded as a succession of individual historical “moments”—effectively, distinct cultures. And in such an account, canonicity is repeatedly conferred (if it is, or withheld) extrinsically; the agents of canonization are those discrete, subsequent cultures. In at least some versions of this view, moreover, the difference between one culture and another regarding issues of literary status is presented as potentially radical and absolute. Terry Eagleton offers his version of Smith’s theoretical principle and then illustrates with a startling hypothesis: The so-called “literary canon,” the unquestioned “great tradition ” of the “national literature,” has to be regarded as a construct , fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition that is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone Conclusion 157 might have said or come to say about it. “Value” is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in speci fic situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works might seem desperately alien, full of styles of thought and feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a situation, Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti.3 The prevailing critical premise, then, is that a given work’s canonical status must be reproduced in each successive historical moment, and that this might be done in significantly, even radically, different ways in different geographical locations and at different moments on the...