Reading Comprehension

The literary canon, that informal and contested list of works whose continued reading is taken to require no special justification, has, of late, attracted both the strongest defences and the most insistent attacks of its history. The defences appeal to an enduring aesthetic value that the canonical works are taken to embody, and the attacks point to the social processes — schooling, anthology-making, patronage — by which lists of works are assembled and sustained. The defences mistake their adversaries when they treat the attacks as an attempt to deny that any work is better than any other; the attacks mistake theirs when they treat the defences as an attempt to deny that lists of approved works are sustained by social means.

A more interesting position has, in fact, been available for some time, though it has not always been argued in the most patient register. Works can have aesthetic features that genuinely command attention — formal compression, depth of suggestion, a sustained engagement with the materials of their medium — without those features being sufficient to explain why some works with them have been read for centuries while others, no less endowed, have not. The selecting and re-selecting work that produced the canon as we now have it was not a neutral registration of value; it was shaped by who could afford to print, to anthologise, to keep their editions in circulation, and to teach the works to the generations whose reading habits, in turn, sustained the list.

To grant this is not to grant that the canon is therefore arbitrary, or that any list assembled by any other process would have done as well. The works that survived this filtration have, by and large, repaid attention; their continued reading is not, in most cases, a discreditable habit. What it is to grant is that the works are not survivors of an inscrutable test of pure quality, but participants in a long social process some of whose features were responsive to aesthetic features and others of whose features were not. The defenders of the canon are entitled to its strength as a working selection; they are not entitled to confuse a working selection with a metaphysical authority.

What the careful position requires of its holders is double attention: to keep reading what has rewarded reading, and to keep asking what the conditions of selection have hidden from view. Neither attention precludes the other, and the rhetorical tendency, in the present debate, to treat them as mutually exclusive is, on inspection, less a feature of the underlying issue than a feature of how the issue has come to be staged. The materials, when read again with both attentions in mind, generally do better than the staging suggests.