Ethnic Writers and the Western Literary Canon

The literary canon has no gatekeeper, carefully selecting which texts shall and shall not be valued for future generations. The canon does have certain criteria for entrance, however, and these criteria are purely aesthetic and must remain so if literature is to have any meaning now and in the future.

Any attempt to expand the canon on any other than aesthetic grounds must be immediately regarded as an threat to literature, indeed to all of art. There can be no affirmative action of literary greatness; either a piece of literature achieves the greatness that all canonical works achieve, or it does not. There is no room for mediocre art with a powerful political message. Some of these works of contemporary artistis with powerful political agendas will be remembered, but not as works of great literature. Their importance is preserved by the annals of history and/or political thought.

Harold Bloom, much criticized in recent years for upholding the traditional "dead white male" status quo, argues that aesthetic value is autonomous of both morality and politics. He also insists that aesthetic originality is the only qualification for inclusion in the canon of Western literature. One of Bloom's major points is the autonomy of the aesthetic. Art, and the values by which we judge art, are and must remain distinct from other social values. To question the importance of the expansion of the canon with the inclusion of "ethnic" texts that dramatize the predicament of underrepresented people is to devalue the tremendous works by such groups that are already included in the canon. The criteria for judging art must be completely separate and distinct from the criteria by which we judge political or social agendas, for art serves another purpose than politics. Truly great literature has no regard for the material boundaries of political limitations or earthly oppressions because the work transcends those boundaries. To argue this point is not to turn one's back on reality, to hold one's head in the clouds. Art allows us to transcend the differences which us and mark us as different and consequently targets of oppression. At the same time, art can also brand us with a painful and passionate awareness of ourselves as individuals, as members of a community, and as members of humanity.

A cliched tenet of the multicultural movement is the tolerance, understanding, and respect of cultures other than our own. Ironically, some of the most vocal opponents of the Western canon are, at the same time, most vocal about its expansion. The canon does not represent some large fraternity of like-minded individuals' imaginative works, a library where every story ends the same. Shakespeare, Austen, Wordsworth, Achebe, Nabakob: who can say that these authors represent any single value? The greatest of artists, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or gender, will be the most subversive of all values, not only the values of the dominant culture, but the values of their own culture as well. John Ruskin wrote that the greatest art provokes the greatest number of great feelings. Bloom, perhaps Shakespeare's greatest fan, argues that reading the work of the great bard will make us neither better people nor worse people. Shakespeare's genius lies in his capacity to teach us to overhear ourselves and, in that process, learn something about ourselves. This characteristic is not unique to Europeans, but it is unique to those artists who achieve canonical status.

Each artist creates from a particular perspective, a particular experience. Each artist has faced, and continues to face his or her own oppressions. The artist's experience of his or her own art will never be exactly the same as the reader, or spectator, or audience. It can not be, as we each have different minds.

One mark of an artist's originality that can win canonical status for a literary work, Bloom writes in TheWestern Canon, is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies. Dante is the largest instance of the first possibility, and Shakespeare, the overwhelming example of the second.

Few literary critics who are true to their discipline could doubt that writers such as Toni Morrison, Cherríe Moraga, or Richard Rodriguez lack these qualities as artists, regardless of political intent. The inclusion of "ethnic" writers in the canon seems less an issue of oppression than evolution. As more and more writers "of color" produce texts and other works of art, they will be incorporated into the literary canon. At the same time, they will forever change the nature of Western literature.