Levine has little time for the "intrinsic merit" school of literary canonizers, for years best represented by Cleanth Brooks in his once-indispensable literary analysis, The Well-Wrought Urn, and even more forcefully argued by the earlier mentioned high-culture maven, Harold Bloom. In The Western Canon, Bloom asserts that intrinsic aesthetic merit does exist, the test of literary greatness being the power of an author's work to influence other writers over the ages. Bloom's is a self-referential canon, determined not by school teachers or book reviewers or television personalities but by writers speaking to writers. The best writers are those who "provoke immense ambivalence in those who come after them," a phenomenon that Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence." Bloom's canon of great books doesn't exist to free readers from anxiety; a canon is an achieved anxiety, just as any strong literary work is its author's achieved anxiety. The literary canon does not baptize us into cultures; it does not make us free of cultural anxiety. Rather, it "confirms" our cultural anxieties, yet helps give them form and coherence.
Given this intramural definition of the great as anxiety producers, Bloom's choice as the most important author in the Western canon is--hold on to your hats, now--Shakespeare. And after the Bard, the writers of the Bible. The most influential American writer is Walt Whitman, with a nod to Emily Dickinson. Moreover, Bloom reviles those scholars he calls "the extra-literary `School of Resentment'"--the Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians, who care nothing for literature per se; these resentful theorists, Bloom says, are using literature as a chip in a game of social engineering or as a signifier in a nihilistic and meaningless dance of words.
In fact, Bloom himself expressly abjures any social "worth" for literature. "Reading the very best writers . . . is [not] going to make us better citizens." Bloom claims that "the study of literature . . . will not save any individual any more than it will improve any society." So much for those who believe that Lincoln was right when he identified Harriet Beecher Stowe as "the little woman who started this big war" or that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle got us The Pure Food & Drug Act. Bloom won't even grant that reading good books is fun: "The text is there not to give pleasure but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser text will not provide." I'll bet that all of you who read Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus or the "who begot whom" chapters of the Bible experienced some "difficult pleasure"; you just didn't recognize it as pleasure of any sort. Reading Bloom's best books "can bring one to the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."
Charlotte's Web probably won't do that. Neither will Dorothy's conclusion that "There's no place like home." But I frankly do not demand a confrontation with my mortality in every good book I read. And I certainly can't expect my students to face up to the Grim Reaper in every daily assignment. One wonders if Bloom could bring himself to appreciate Mark Twain's satire or James Thurber's essays. Or even the Miami newspaper columnist Dave Barry, who convulses me once a Sunday. Can a "great" book be funny? Somehow I don't think a confrontation with mortality in every book would wring a smile from even the most necrophiliac Common Reader.
So where are we? Whom can we trust? What should we read? I depend primarily on my friends to expand my own canon. Cedric Bryant, my friend and colleague in English here, forces me to read his discoveries--Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is the latest. John Edgar Wideman's stories were another Bryant addition. My physicist buddy, Shelby Nelson, introduced me to a little gem of a novel, The All of It by Jeannette Haien, a pleasure I had been missing since its publication in 1986. And I have my own idiosyncratic favorite, John O'Hara--who is on some canons (Bloom's, the Modern Library's), off others (Radcliffe's). I leap to admit that Bassett's Canon--like all those other canons, individual or committee-generated--reflects Bassett's own gender, race, class, sexual orientation, occupation, religion, etc. But then, so does everyone else's list.
Several years ago, someone diagnosed my fascination with O'Hara as pure identification: O'Hara and I were middle-class Irish Catholics struggling to enchant the country club set in socially rigid small cities. Now, both of us, having read The Great Gatsby and recognizing the anxiety of its influence, should have realized that our pitiful struggles were doomed and faced up to our mortality. But O'Hara went on to publish 406 short stories, 13 novels, eight plays (remember Pal Joey?), several books of novellas and two collections of essays. He died many times a millionaire in a self-designed manor house on Pretty Brook Road near Princeton.
And here I am writing in Colby.
Not too bad for non-canonical grouches.
But read every chance you get. Read your way through the Modern Library list and make Christopher Cerf rich. Re-read The Wizard of Oz and come to appreciate Kansas. Read Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey and please my friend Conarroe. Read newspapers, read magazines, read journals. Reading needn't be confined to print media: read movies, sit-coms, paintings, advertising. Interpret, "deconstruct," speculate, discuss. Don't sit mindlessly staring at Paulie, whose silly parrot may have a deep cultural significance that escaped me. Seek the great. You'll never find it until you read. Settle for the interesting if you have to. No matter what Bloom claims--you'll have one heck of a good time in the process. And you never know what you might learn. I happen to know that there are two Charles Bassetts in the Boise telephone directory.
Charles Bassett is Lee Family Professor of American Studies and English.
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