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The Flneur: The CanonizationAuthor(s): Sven BirkertsSource: Harvard Review, No. 2 (Fall, 1992), pp. 23-24

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THE FL?NEURTHECANONIZATIONby Sven Birkerts

I've always believed that debates and controversies remain live inour culture until themoment when the first popularized "topic" anthologiesappear, atwhich point the free-market contest of ideas becomes embalmed asproduct. My belief was most recently confirmed forme when I saw that theso-called "storm" over the canon and political correctness ("P.C.") wasdressed in glossy cover stock and sported the usual array of promotionalblurbs. Indeed, the near-simultaneous publication of "readers" on thesubject, one edited by Paul Berman and another by Patricia Aufderheide, letme know that these matters were officially exhausted as provocations andwere ready to begin their afterlife as the stuff of cultural history.As it happened, however, part of my labors on a literature textbookrequired that Iactually familiarize myself with the ins and outs of the debate.I took a deep breath and worked my way through the bulk of what had beengathered between covers. And my reaction, apart from the usual miming ofnods and grimaces, was a genuine surprise. The more I read, the more itstruck me that the whole issue of the canon was from both sides being misperceived and mis-argued.The canon controversy, as everyone by now doubtless knows, has todo with the question of what texts shall form the basis of the universitycurriculum. Conservatives, citing the documented erosion of literacy and animperiled sense of tradition among the young, argue that the curriculummust now more than ever be stabilized around the approved touchstones oftheWestern tradition?around the best that has been thought and written (orso they say). Their more liberal adversaries charge that such designations?"best," "enduring," etc.?are but a thin cover for what is the ongoinghegemony of the ideology of dead white males. To remain relevant, theyassert, the curriculum must be pried open to admit new voices and newcultural perspectives, including those of feminist, gay, and ethnically

marginalized constituencies. Eliot must sidle over tomake room for AliceWalker, and so on.

What I realized as I tried to follow the ping-pong of the debate washow nearly all of the disputants, never mind their political orientation,insisted upon treating the issue as yet another engagement between embattled ideologies, on a continuum with abortion rights and artistic freespeech. Which it is to an extent, of course. But to see the canon controversyin strictly these terms is to trivialize and deadlock a discussion which carriesa far greater range of implication.The canon debate is in fact the first symptom of what may prove to

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be amalaise of untold larger consequences. The partisanship actually servesto distract us from a recognition of the underlying crisis, which is that we, asa culture, are taking our leave of the book and the printed page and areentering upon a whole new set of understandings and ways of processinginformation about the world. I am referring, of course, to the full-scaleelectronification that is happening all around us?via the chip, the video, theinteractive software programs_The outcry against themodification of thecanon is really a cry on behalf of the old reflexes and routines. And the cry formulticultural inclusiveness is a last ditch bid for connection to the fadinglegacy of print. The logic is simple. When a resource is threatened?madescarce?then people fight. In this case the struggle is not over oil, water, orland, but over textual power in an increasingly non-textual age. The futureof books and reading iswhat is at stake, and it is a dim intuition of this by thecontending factions that drives the controversy.As Katha Pollitt argued so shrewdly in her much-cited article in theNation (the piece is anthologized in Berman's Debating P.C.): ifwe were anation of readers, there would be no issue. No one would be arguing aboutwhether to put Toni Morrison on the college syllabus because Toni Morrisonwould be a staple of the reader's regular diet anyway. The reason why theselists are suddenly so important is because they represent, very often, the onlyserious works that the student is every likely to be exposed to. Whoevercontrols the lists comes out ahead in the struggle for the hearts and minds ofthe young.One can readily see where the pro-canon folks are coming from. Andone feels for them. They must advocate for a set of texts that seem, with everypassing year, less accessible and less relevant to the student reader.Shakespeare, Conrad, Austen, Mill. . . .Works by these writers are oftenlinguistically and syntactically complex, and demanding in their thematic

presentations. They are, as any teacher will tell you, ever harder to sell to thestudent audience?an audience conditioned by the quick fluidity of theelectronic media. The contested works, by contrast, the works by theintruders?the feminists, gays, and ethnic minorities?at least carry thecultural cachet of topicality. They carry a strong dissenting energy and areoften stylistically more accessible. Laurence Sterne, or Amy Tan? You tellmeto which text the 19-year-old?and, in time, her beleaguered teacher?willgravitate. But here is the crux, the paradox. What the pro-canonists do not seeis that if the debate is re-framed?is viewed, that is,not as a political onslaughtwaged by bearded liberals, but rather as one of the symptoms of the death ofreading?then the works that they are bent upon fencing out may in fact betheir last and best hope. If they are to have any hope of getting the childrenof the video age to their approved masterworks, those children will have tobe seduced?led back slowly via a series of provisional bridges. And someof those bridges, like it or not, will have funny names?like Oscar Hijuelos,Leslie Maim?n Silko, Paule Marshall, David Leavitt, Richard Rodriguez,John Edgar Wideman_

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