On Literary Canons

[hrj]

I posted this in a comment thread at File770 where a discussion of SFF canons was going hot and heavy...only to realize that I'd shown up at the discussion after everyone else had moved on. SoI thought I'l post it here, though in a somewhat less context-rich environment.

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On Literary Canons

At some point when I and my brothers were very young, our mother (who was a wonderful, brilliant, talented human being so just keep that in mind if you think you know what the moral of this story is) drew up a list of 100 books that she thought we should have read by the time we became adults. The list included fiction from several centuries, books on history, on philosophy, on social and hard sciences — all works that she (coming out of a Masters program in education) thought were a good index to what a well-rounded, well-read person should be exposed to.

She posted the list on the inside of the door of one of the cabinets of books in the house. The cabinet contained some of the books on the list, but far from all of them — we were a library-going family more than a book-buying family. We knew the list was there, but we didn’t give it much thought.

We were too busy reading.

Speaking only for myself, I read voraciously and indiscriminately. I read from one end to the other of the children’s fiction section in the library well before I was allowed an adult library card. I read encyclopedias cover to cover. I read history books and books on farming and books on zoology and after I started inventing my own languages, I read books on language. I read a calculus textbook just for fun. I read a LOT of books.

I read a fair number of the books on that list of 100 books, but I didn’t read a majority of them. In some cases, I started a title and bounced off it. In some cases, it wasn’t a subject that interested me. In some cases, the work was no longer the best (or even anywhere near the best) work on the particular subject. Sometimes the books I’d read instead on the topic hadn’t even been published yet when my mother drew up the list. Sometimes a book that had seemed earthshaking and important in 1960 didn’t stand the test of time. (Does the name Velikovsky ring a bell?)

When my parents retired and decided to sell the family home to move elsewhere, my mother took down the list from the inside of that cabinet door and commented sadly that she’d always been disappointed that we’d never finished reading every book on that list.

That’s what a canon is. It’s the list of 100 books that your mother drew up when you first learned to read that she decided was the measure of being well-read because they were the books she’d read.

[Note: details of this account are from memory and may not always match exact historical events and utterances.]

Comments

[evil_macaroni]

I think there is some value in canons. There are a lot of cultural references to major books that will be lost on a person who hasn’t read the referenced book. But yeah - they are drawn from individuals’ perspectives. At best they are subjective and limited. At worst they exclude works by anyone who isn’t a member of the dominant culture (whatever that means in that context).

[hrj]

Cultural references can be picked up without reference to the original work--at least sufficiently for the purpos. .I "get" cultural references to an awful lot of books and tv shows and movies (and video games, and comic books, and ...) that I've never consumed directly. No doubt there are nuance I miss, but people who consumed the materials directly may skim over, forget, or not understand aspects that become cultural references. There are classic works of fiction where I honestly don't remember whether I read them or not because I know them well enough to understand their cultural importance, but if I did, it was long enough ago that the details have faded. To some extent, that kind of cultural reference is something like herd immunity: if enough people have direct experience, then you can pick up the benefits indirectly.

[vittoriosa]

i love this! something that people often seem to forget about canons is that they are malleable, and they evolve (they must evolve), and they are also deeply situational and/or contextual.

[hrj]

Canons *must* evolve -- because society doesn't stop evolving and the relation of the society to the canon would change unrecognizably if the canon didn't change.

[choirwoman]

Eek Velikovsky yes. I read a lot of that when I was babysitting (my most frequent babysitting address had a bookcase full of that kind of thing; very instructive). What I remember best was a book that "proved" that the moon we have is the 3rd or 4th moon that Earth has had, and detailed what happened to the earlier ones (I don't recall any details; it's almost half a century ago and I was scared)

[hrj]

In retrospect, it's easy to consider Velikovsky an obvious crank, but roughly the same era was when the theory of continental drift was developing and becoming established, and it was considered rather far out by many at the time.