To Dispel The Western Canon
It is a deep truth that every writer must or does read.
Not only that, it seems to be a deep truth that many people in life enjoy reading. Nowadays, in the year 2019, it may not be solely dedicated to the long winded works that we’d consider tomes, that were once to be splayed out and read in the afternoon. Nowadays, it’s what we always do, with our phones, our texts, our op-eds and social media, all we continue to do is read. Naturally with all the things we do, we like to celebrate them, we like to rank them. We do it with what social media sites we like the most, what newspapers produce the best articles, and we’ve done it with our books and authors.
The Western Canon is a collection of writers and/or their works that are regarded as “great”, they are the great heralds of literature. Though such a list is bound to be marred down by some subjectivity, it is hard to deny how influential and celebrated such writers are. Dana Schwartz wrote an article that pointed out the ignorance of the western canon, particularly from Bloom in ‘The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages’, which lists 26 authors of note that Bloom believes are central in the canon.
There are such great and profound writers such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Tolstoy, Milton, Whitman. Ah, but what about profound female authors? Well there is Austen, Woolf, Dickinson and Eliot. Yes, just those four as Schwartz points out. But don’t worry, there’s 16 other writers on the list. 14 of which are white men, and only two, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges are Latin American.
Now truthfully, there is a myriad of complex reasons as to why and how some of the most notable and publicly celebrated writers in the past few centuries have been mostly white men. Racism, sexism and privilege all have played a big role. So it would make sense as to why western canon, for a time, would have these authors and these authors alone on the list, with only a few women writers, a pitiful two Latin American writers and no black writers.
Except Bloom’s list was published in 1994, because of course by the year 1994 nothing of note concerning how we recognise and treat people of colour had happened in recent years, especially in western countries. To have these authors alone on a list by 1994 is ignorant, and whilst all those writers deserve a spot on the list, it is clear that The Western Canon badly needs to be updated.
By 2019 alone, it is surprising that authors such as Langston Hughes, the author of jazz poetry, Alex Haley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award winner, Alice Walker who wrote ‘The Colour Purple’ and Octavia Butler, who used science fiction to speak about the human condition and experience of African Americans.
There’s also Jhumpa Lahiri, another Pulitzer Prize winner, Arundhati Roy, writer of ‘The God of Small Things’ which is the biggest selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. That’s seven authors, all of whom are accomplished, all of whom are black, two of which are Indian, and four of which are women. Yet most of the time, not many people know about these authors.
Why? Well it turns out when you have a list of great works and celebrate them in a list such as The Western Canon, many people will continue to read them and then add them to their list of great works.
This can be fine, if the original list is ever updated. But it only seems in recent years that people are only now beginning to questioning The Western Canon and its lack of being updated.
The world has shifted a lot in the past few decades. The world of the canon no longer exists. It is a world relegated to the history books, and it is important to recognise it was a world with such attitudes that didn’t allow certain voices to be heard. There is now more chance for more women and people of colour to break out into literature.
I’m not here to simply say that we should add people strictly based on the colour of their skin or their gender alone. Nor am I advocating for the “erasure” of the white writers already within the canon and those considered for it, as some will grossly misinterpret. But as writers we should know that wisdom comes from many places and many experiences.
The state of the canon, as it stands, is a statue, old and decayed.
It’s a celebration of the thoughts of a bygone generation that should only ever be looked upon to see the origins of something greater, a collection of great authors of all diverse backgrounds who offered the very best in literature. The western canon is to be studied in its state only to see the ignorance of its exclusivity in comparison to the modern world, much like how we bawk at those who once owned slaves, even as we accept it was a gross habit of their time. It is not to be admired today, not without
It is a deep truth that every writer must or does read. I only hope that we can live in a world where it is evident that we use our open mind at our disposal, and begin to read from all kinds of diverse voices.
