A Country without a Canon? Canadian Literature and the Esthetics of Idealism

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In a recent review of Charles Altieri's Canons and Consequences, Bernard Harrison poses some important questions about the relation between canons and culture. He asks:

Can a culture survive without a system of values rich enough to preserve

it from eventual disintegration through mere alteration of manners and

ways of thinking? ... And can such systems of values exist without canons:

without bodies of works, in literature, history or philosophy, generally

regarded as "important": works to be brandished, sniped at, accused,

devalued or revalued, which by manifesting the values of the tribe in each

succeeding generation permit the renewal of a living sense of both the

scope and the limitations of those values? (25) While such questions have been central to discussions of canonicity outside Canada, the study of canons and canonicity in English-Canadian literature has been less productive than one might have hoped, mainly because the relation between culture and value (the central canonical matrix) remains largely unexplored. Although the 1980s produced some scattered commentary, and even a few direct challenges to what was perceived as canonical authority (see MacLaren, Powe, and Stuewe), the first book on the topic did not appear until 1991 (Canadian Canons, Lecker, ed.), and there is still no sustained consideration of how a (shifting) Canadian canon--if such an animal exists--can be seen as historically contingent, politically self-serving, ideologically generated, and culture-ridden. As in most discussions about Canadian literature, there is no sense of debate, by which I mean a focused and disruptive exchange of ideas on a topic considered worthy of dispute. Even the most pointed challenges to what has been called the Canadian canon have been met with indifference rather than hostility. (I think here, in particular, of the challenges posed by Metcalf and Weir.)

This indifference contrasts sharply with the conditions prevailing in France, the United States and Great Britain, where for years critics have been engaged in what John Guillory calls "a legitimation crisis with far-ranging consequences" in which "pressures conceived to be extrinsic to the practice of criticism seem to have shaken literary pedagogy in fundamental ways" ("Canonical" 483). Writing in 1990, Paul Lauter asserts that "Today, canon study is perhaps as popular a subject for academic disquisitions as post-structuralist |theory'" (144). It is precisely because the range of "canon study" outside Canada is so popular and extensive that it cannot be summarized with ease. In his review of Canons--the influential collection of essays that comprised the September 1983 issue of Critical Inquiry-Louis Renza noted that "Recent critical trends clearly suggest that ... canonical self-certainty is on the wane. Almost daily, it seems, critical articles and scholarly works appear informing us that we have wrongly overlooked the value of this or that writer's work because the inherited, pedagogically assumed canon has simply seen fit to relegate them to the status of |minor literature'--or has even forced them to disappear from canonical consideration altogether" (258). For Renza, revisionist arguments about the canon, which constitute "a declaration of intellectual guerilla war against canonical thinking or cultural imperialism" (268), are encountered "Almost daily." For Canadians, even today, it is "almost never."

Indeed, the very desire to bring this debate to Canada is seen by some theorists as an expression of a "colonial cringe" (Godard 12) that is rooted in "an idealization of critical practice in other countries, particularly that of the United States" (Davey, "Critical Response" 674). What seems overlooked, however, is that the debate about the canon outside Canada--and especially in the United States--is grounded in non-American, poststructural attempts to "theorize power, action, agency, and resistance" (Bove 61). As Guillory observes, "The problem of canon-formation is one aspect of a much larger history of the ways in which societies have organized and regulated practices of reading and writing" ("Canon" 239). To argue that a Canadian interest in canonicity is colonial, or that it is irrelevant to Canadians, is to ignore the ways in which the canon debate contributes to crucial interrogations (of politics, of ideology, of gender, of subjectivity) that know no national bounds. Lennard Davis and M. Bella Mirabella go so far as to say that "The study of the canon has been one of the most important issues to come out of recent examinations of the institution of literary studies. The political implications of the very existence of a literary canon and what that canon means in terms of gender, race, class, nationality, and ideology are enormous. It is no coincidence that the current public debates over the quality of education and the success or failure of Western civilization hinge on the issues stirred up by revising the canon" (125). Despite these claims, the debates raging in other countries simply do not appear in Canada. Why is this the case?

The answer to this question seems to depend on whether one believes that Canadian canons (or a canon of fiction or poetry) exist (whereas in other countries the liberal critique of the canon has flourished because national canons are assumed to exist). Those who do claim the existence of a Canadian canon can be quite assertive in their claim. To Paul Hjartarson, for example, "The question is not whether a canon exists and, if not, whether we should formulate one. The canon does exist; we have already formulated it. We formulate it every day. The canonical texts are those that figure prominently in our own discourse--they are the texts we teach, we write about, we cite. The classical texts, in short, are those we value" (67).

In this construction, the "we" who value the "classical texts" are emphatically university teachers; the canon is seen as having absolutely nothing to say to people beyond the institution's walls. Other critics who perceive a Canadian literary canon see it as a displaced expression of nationalist ideology: "Canadian literature, perceived internally as a mosaic, remains generally monolithic in its assertion of Canadian difference from the canonical British or the more recently threatening neo-colonialism of American culture"; it retains a "nationalist stance" and has "not generated corresponding theories of literary hybridity to replace the nationalist approach" (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 36). Leon Surette asserts that the valorization of nationalist thought is synonymous with the valorization of Canadian literary history. Dermot McCarthy reaches a similar conclusion when he writes that "The gathering of the scattered texts into a |permanent form,' the selection and organization of a literary canon, and the ideological program of nation-building and identity-definition, all cohere isomorphically from the beginning in Canadian literary history" (33).

Although the notion of referential and mimetic discourse has been undermined by a recognition of the materiality and contingency of language, the assumption on the part of many critics is that if there is a Canadian canon, its formation and development is referential: the canon is seen as a vehicle through which the value of the nation as a cultural force is represented and conveyed. This perspective grounds my own 1990 essay entitled "The Canonization of Canadian Literature." In that work I argued that there was a Canadian canon, that it valued mimetic forms of discourse, that it viewed literature as a displaced trope of nationalism, and that it was the conservative by-product of the conservative institution that supported its enshrinement. I also suggested that the Canadian canon was so solidified that as a topic it was beyond controversy, a factor which accounted for the characteristic lack of debate in discussions about Canadian literature and literary history.

The objection to this conception of a Canadian canon is best summed up by Frank Davey in his response to my essay. For Davey, the Canadian canon I had constructed was academic, humanist, unitary, realist, conservative, nationalist, and narrow in its denial of those forces that have refused the neo-conservative esthetic that governed my canonical universe. For this reason, Davey felt that my concept of the canon restricted discursive choices, offered no sense of contestation, and erected a one-sided canonical monolith that denied plurality and difference. His conclusion was that "|Canadian criticism' is nowhere near as monolithic as [I] depict[s] it, that class, gender, ethnicity, region, …