Explode the Canon: How to Fight a Better Canon War

Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele by Jan Van Eyck, madonna del canonico van der paele, 1436. Cropped photo from Wikimedia Commons.

What should we read and teach our children? The 21st century version of this question is the familiar debate of whether the canon is too Eurocentric and, if so, what to do about it. But the debate is both ancient— Plato wished to banish poets from his republic— and interminable, involving matters of taste and aesthetics as well as questions of morals and values. The canon wars will always be with us— can we fight them better?

To begin with, the idea of a singular Canon forming the epicenter of literary value must be jettisoned. Not because there are no objective standards for art— there are!— but because there is no good reason to think that works from diverse literary traditions and cultures can be ranked on a scale of value. Don’t disrupt the Canon— explode it! Focus on the multiple intersecting traditions of influence, the lower-case “c” canons.

Stepping outside of literature shows how strange a singular Canon is and the merits of exploding it. Consider food as an example. It’s borderline nonsense to ask what a “canonical” dish is, outside of some particular cuisine: French food has a canon of dishes— every French chef will have to master the five mother sauces— that evolves over time and interacts with other cuisines. Isn’t this a more freeing approach? Chefs and food critics will still have plenty of arguments about the borders of any given cuisine and its canon, but they don’t waste time asking whether coq au vin is a recipe that any chef anywhere in the world should know. Why not use this more inclusive and less pointlessly controversial approach with literature? Instead of asking what the best works of literature are, as if the question were meaningful, read the best from multiple canons — ancient Greek drama, British poetry, Sanskrit epics, Latin American magical realism, Black southern fiction, the list is practically endless.

Exploding the Canon means focusing on multiple canons while being sensitive to their connections and points of influence over time. Comparative literature studies the transmission of ideas and literary forms within and between canons. With the advent of the “digital humanities,” the interactions between authors of different canons— writing at different times and in varying languages, cultures and genres— are being mapped and analyzed, showing the folly of carving out a single set of texts as canonical in a universal sense. An exploded Canon is also more diverse: Shakespeare and Cicero can be studied narrowly within their own canons, but this study is richer and deeper when paired with those they influenced, like Toni Morrison or W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Canon war is a zero-sum battle — “This book is problematic or hard to teach, replace it with this other one” — while the exploded canons allow more win-wins: “This work is important but controversial; let’s read it alongside its critics to see why it’s important and understand why some criticize it, so you can evaluate it properly.” Admittedly this is an easier task for a college seminar than for high school students, not to mention those in lower grades. A good university professor can teach a work that has flaws or an author whose moral views we now rightly reject without her students questioning whether she shares those objectionable views. Holding literature at arms length is difficult. This is a skill acquired through training and forged into habit, forming an intellectual virtue that is at the heart of a healthy academic culture.

Scholars call this “interrogating the text” or, in more friendly terms, “bringing the author into conversation” — but it’s best encapsulated as what I call critical distance. “Critical” not in an adversarial sense, but as a readiness to respond thoughtfully and critique where needed, applying “critical thinking” to the task of literary analysis. Why “distance”? Should we not want to be immersed in the text as much as possible? While some immersion is needed to enjoy literature and read charitably, keeping some distance from a text allows readers to learn from works whose values they reject and whose content might be troubling or upsetting.

Bringing these ideas together, the call to action for fighting better canon wars is two-fold: first, explode the Canon and start reading and teaching across canons, which naturally brings nuance and diversity to the table; second, reinforce the intellectual habit of critical distance to allow students to profit from reading authors they find challenging or even uncomfortable as they gain in literary mastery, while being mindful and sensitive to the needs of younger readers who have not yet developed this habit.

The canon wars are endless because literature matters: writers catch splinters of reality in their fingers as they try to grasp the world in its complexity and ugliness, and the way they tell their stories is never neutral and will never make everyone comfortable. There is no canon war in math; but art sure as heck ain’t math, and that’s for the best.

Let’s explode the Canon and cultivate critical distance, opening up new vistas and leaving behind stale arguments. To quote a great artist from the canon of American comic strips:

“It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!”

“A day full of possibilities! It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy … let’s go exploring!”