The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,71

education and not simply morally instructive fodder designed for the working classes. (The Chaucer Society was founded in 1848, four hundred years after Chaucer died.) No. This exchange seems unusual somehow, keener. It has a more strenuously argued (and felt) defense and a more vigorously insistent attack. And both defenses and attacks have spilled out of the academy into the popular press. Why? Resistance to displacement within or expansion of a canon is not, after all, surprising or unwarranted. That’s what canonization is for. (And the question of whether there should be a canon or not seems disingenuous to me—there always is one whether there should be or not—for it is in the interests of the professional critical community to have one.) Certainly a sharp alertness as to why a work is or is not worthy of study is the legitimate occupation of the critic, the pedagogue, and the artist. What is astonishing in the contemporary debate is not the resistance to displacement of works or to the expansion of genre within it, but the virulent passion that accompanies this resistance and, more importantly, the quality of its defense weaponry. The guns are very big; the trigger fingers quick. But I am convinced the mechanism of the defenders of the flame is faulty. Not only may the hands of the gunslinging cowboy-scholars be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration (the sacred texts) is sacrificed, disfigured in the battle. This canon fodder may kill the canon. And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare, or James or Twain or Hawthorne, or Melville, etc., etc., etc. There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them.

When Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, identified the historical territory of the novel by saying, “The novel is Europe’s creation” and that “the only context for grasping a novel’s worth is the history of the European novel,” the New Yorker reviewer stiffened. Kundera’s “personal ‘idea of the novel,’ ” he wrote, “is so profoundly Eurocentric that it’s likely to seem exotic, even perverse, to American readers….‘The Art of the Novel’ gives off the occasional (but pungent) whiff of cultural arrogance, and we may feel that Kundera’s discourse…reveals an aspect of his character that we’d rather not have known about….In order to become the artist he now is, the Czech novelist had to discover himself a second time, as a European. But what if that second, grander possibility hadn’t been there to be discovered? What if Broch, Kafka, Musil—all that reading—had never been a part of his education, or had entered it only as exotic, alien presences? Kundera’s polemical fervor in ‘The Art of the Novel’ annoys us, as American readers, because we feel defensive, excluded from the transcendent ‘idea of the novel’ that for him seems simply to have been there for the taking. (If only he had cited, in his redeeming version of the novel’s history, a few more heroes from the New World’s culture.) Our novelists don’t discover cultural values within themselves; they invent them.”4

Kundera’s views, obliterating American writers (with the exception of William Faulkner) from his own canon, are relegated to a “smugness” that Terrence Rafferty disassociates from Kundera’s imaginative work and applies to the “sublime confidence” of his critical prose. The confidence of an exile who has the sentimental education of, and the choice to become, a European.

I was refreshed by Rafferty’s comments. With the substitution of certain phrases, his observations and the justifiable umbrage he takes can be appropriated entirely by Afro-American writers regarding their own exclusion from the “transcendent ‘idea of the novel.’ ” For the present turbulence seems not to be about the flexibility of a canon, its range among and between Western countries, but about its miscegenation. The word is informative here and I do mean its use. A powerful ingredient in this debate concerns the incursion of third-world or so-called minority literature into a Eurocentric stronghold. When the topic of third-world culture is raised, unlike the topic of Scandinavian culture, for example, a possible threat to and implicit criticism of the reigning equilibrium is seen to be raised as well. From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, the arguments resisting that incursion have marched in predictable sequence: (1) there is no Afro-American (or third-world) art, (2) it exists but is inferior, (3) it exists and is superior when it measures up to the “universal” criteria of Western art,