It’s been a project of mine, over the last year and bit, to read “the classics” that I missed when I was an undergraduate English major. Every few weeks, I try something new-old. Since I graduated from graduate school, I’ve read things like Oliver Twist and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. This week I read The House of Mirth.
So, of course, I start to wonder–as many have before me–why some books become part of the Western canon* and others don’t. It clearly doesn’t consist of the best reads, because some of the texts in the canon are awful**. And it’s not just texts that are exemplary pieces of literature because they are innovative for their time, or because they say something important about our culture or about people–because some books I think are brilliant in this respect are overlooked***. I suppose the best reason to question the canon is because no one can agree on what is and is not canon; it all depends on who you ask about it.
I think the reason we (as a culture) have even a nebulous notion of a canon is because I think there are books that people should read (or at least know about, for trivia contests if nothing else). Some books have made such an impact that they influence what comes after. To know those books helps you understand what came after. As a librarian, I often explain citation and research techniques in terms of a chain, from experiment to secondary literature to the students’ papers. I tell them that they’re taking part in a conversation. I heard a professor from my university’s English department explain with an even better metaphor. It’s like walking into a party late. Everyone around you is talking and making references to what was said before. With effort, you can catch up and make your own contributions.
Of course, this point doesn’t help at all with deciding exactly what we need to read, just that there are some books and texts out there that we all should read.
* I’m amused by the fact that there is no one list of works that are in the canon. The Wikipedia link here actually lists more than a dozen links to lists from various institutions.
** Even though he’s been dead for about four hundred years, I still can’t forgive Edmund Spenser for The Faerie Queene. Ugh.
*** Anne Brontë, among others.