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Canonicity
May. 22nd, 2015 08:21 pmOriginally, the Greek Kanon meant a rod or measuring-stick. Its use in English goes back to two Latin extensions of the word: first, there's an ecclesiastical use, which is applied variously to certain standards or people: Canon Law, the Gregorian Canon, Canons of a cathedral and which I don't want to address here immediately; and a literary one.
The literary one has its ground in the schools of later antiquity. Canonical texts were those which made up the standard for the (highly-standardized) set of books used on courses.
These have left a significant impact on us. With the exception of a handful of plays of Euripides which derive (we infer) from one volume of an alphabetically-organized collection of his complete plays, the classical tragedies we have, which are a tiny subset of the ones that Cicero, say, would have known, are those which had become the set text for studying Greek literature in the late Roman Empire. Those were the ones which were copied enough that they had a chance of survival. Likewise, we have Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius -- and a rich manuscript history for all five -- because they were standard texts. Lots of copies were made for schoolboys; a few survived.
In fact, it's probably not unfair to say that we have a fairly intact set of works from the late classical canon.
However, there were a lot of other great works. Some we have: Catullus, for example (one copy of the Carmina survived to be reprinted); the elegies of Sextus Propertius survive in a number of MSS but were certainly not in any sense "canonical" during the Middle Ages or the classical period. But of Agathon, for example, whom Plato includes in the Symposium and who was counted as a major tragedian, we have only scraps. The Prometheus Unbound we have in outline, and a handful of excerpts, only.
In addition, the canon by the end of the Middle Ages was not that of the Classical World: Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages goes over that standard school-texts of the high mediaeval period.
Then the Renaissance humanists reset the canon again, removing the authors from late antiquity and adding back pretty well only the most "classical" of classical authors. That list remains the core of a Classical Studies degree today.
Note that "canon" continued to mean not only that works were studied, but that they were copied. One began early doing "composition" which means translating into Latin or Greek texts written in the style of a known classical author. (I still have a copy of Woodhouse; I remember in particular doing one composition modelled on Theophrastus, who as far as I know founded a genre with two examples: his own work, and that of La Bruyère.) Later on, when one was more competent, one was expected to do one's own composition in Virgilian hexameters or Horatian metrics. (Homer, being non-standard, was always canonical but not a model for imitation.)
Canonical is not the same as major, or "has lasted long enough". At least from about 1550 on, the Confessions were granted to be a great work, and had certainly lasted a millennium, but were not in any meaningful sense canonical.
To be honest, nobody really worried about canon in English as such until the late Nineteenth Century. Oh, there were rhetorical flourishes in the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes regarding modern equivalents of ancient writers (or as early as Meres Palladis Tamia, who makes an early mention of Shakespeare in one such list). But until the late Nineteenth Century, classical education remained the norm, and English literature, as such, was not a school subject.
There were recognized "great authors", and occasional works, like Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, which were based on an informal model of what the canon might be if there were one. There were authors who were pointed at as good ones from whom to learn technique, if you were a budding writer (not quite the same thing: imitating Shakespeare or Milton has always been a quick route to mediocrity: it's better to imitate solid examples rather than tight-wire artists).
The idea of an English canon (or, later, a comparative literature canon) is a product of the creation of English Departments at the university level, on one level; on another it is partly a result of reprint publishers like Dent (Everyman's Library) needing to define whom they were going to publish in their cheap editions for the masses[1].
There have been wars fought over how reductive the canon should be: F.R. Leavis' Great Tradition being the most prominent: "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."[2] There have been battles fought over whether there should be a canon at all ("Is there a text in this class?"). And Harold Bloom built his late career around it.
What I want to look at is small canons, though: the reflection into a genre of the idea of a canon. What does it mean for a work to be "canonical" in that context?
Most SF readers and writers are less than concerned with what might be considered part of a standard course curriculum in academia.
A few weeks ago, the Coode Street Podcast had an interesting talk about the SF canon. They took as a more-or-less-given that "canon" was, ultimately short form for "it's lasted a long time, or looks as though it will", and certainly works that are not read would not normally be considered canonical.
But I think that there is something more to the idea of canon, transmitted all the way from that original meaning of a ruler: a canonical work is one which is, or has been, taken as an exemplar of its type, or a model to be followed. Eccentric works with no following may last -- contrary to Dr. Johnson's dictum, Tristram Shandy has lasted -- but they are canonical, at best, only in an academic context, i.e. if they are studied. Of course, there are now academic courses covering SF, and eccentric works can be as good a topic of study as any other, but within the normal SFnal context to call something canonical is not to reference academia, but the field itself, of successions of writers in the context of successions of dedicated readers.
Consider, for a moment, Little, Big. It's a really major work, and I'd argue better than Downbelow Station, to which it lost the Hugo Award in 1982 (how it compares to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, one of the component parts of which was also on the ballot, is another question). The writing is very, very good, the ideas are subtle, characterisation is fine. But it has had no real successors and stands as an odd sort of outpost in the Urban (really Rural) Fantasy subgenre. But is it canonical? It stands at the head of no tradition; it is a representative example only of itself.
A similar argument can be made regarding Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it hasn't had the time to demonstrate a similar sort of splendid isolation, and it's possible to argue that it has "partial" successors in books like Kowal's Glamour series (books with a style reminiscent of Nineteenth Century novels, although the style is in detail nothing like Clarke's).
If I were to teach / supervise / run a seminar (academic-year-length, which is 20 weeks) on SFF generally, I doubt that either would make it onto the course list (although they'd be on an extended reading list). At a book a week, or two shortish and closely-related ones in some cases (Starship Troopers and The Forever War, or any Heinlein Juvenile and Rite of Passage), I might have up to 30 books to set out, and I would want to cover the major sectors and major authors of the field. It's not hard to come up with 30 authors who need to be represented, as well as a number of periods / movements. In the end, inclusion will be highly correlated to canonicity, and not pure quality.
On the other hand, for a mix of historical and influence reasons, Shelley, Verne, Smith, Gernsback, Campbell ("The Thing" -- any class covering the Golden Age can at least cover a good number of authors via short story), Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Tolkien, Pohl, Delaney, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Niven, LeGuin, Herbert, Silverberg, one or another fat fantasy author from the 1980's (which one isn't critical -- none are excellent, but they have an important historical role), Wolfe, Vinge, Gibson, Stephenson, Bujold, Martin would have to be on it at minimum. And that list manages to miss out on modern urban fantasy, steampunk, and other substantial subgenres.
[1]Hugh Kenner pointed out, in conversation at least, that one reason the canon cut off at the end of the Nineteenth Century for a long period was because the Copyright Act's extension of copyright placed the modern writers who immediately followed out of the hands of reprint publishers for a long time. T.S. Eliot is just coming out of copyright; Pound will not be out of copyright until the 2020s.
[2]Parodied by Frederick C. Crews as: "The great English novels are Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Women in Love. Some malicious persons, who have had the cheek to call me narrow-minded in the past, will doubtless welcome this statement as proof of their views." (Leavis later embraced the works of D.H. Lawrence fervently.)
The literary one has its ground in the schools of later antiquity. Canonical texts were those which made up the standard for the (highly-standardized) set of books used on courses.
These have left a significant impact on us. With the exception of a handful of plays of Euripides which derive (we infer) from one volume of an alphabetically-organized collection of his complete plays, the classical tragedies we have, which are a tiny subset of the ones that Cicero, say, would have known, are those which had become the set text for studying Greek literature in the late Roman Empire. Those were the ones which were copied enough that they had a chance of survival. Likewise, we have Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius -- and a rich manuscript history for all five -- because they were standard texts. Lots of copies were made for schoolboys; a few survived.
In fact, it's probably not unfair to say that we have a fairly intact set of works from the late classical canon.
However, there were a lot of other great works. Some we have: Catullus, for example (one copy of the Carmina survived to be reprinted); the elegies of Sextus Propertius survive in a number of MSS but were certainly not in any sense "canonical" during the Middle Ages or the classical period. But of Agathon, for example, whom Plato includes in the Symposium and who was counted as a major tragedian, we have only scraps. The Prometheus Unbound we have in outline, and a handful of excerpts, only.
In addition, the canon by the end of the Middle Ages was not that of the Classical World: Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages goes over that standard school-texts of the high mediaeval period.
Then the Renaissance humanists reset the canon again, removing the authors from late antiquity and adding back pretty well only the most "classical" of classical authors. That list remains the core of a Classical Studies degree today.
Note that "canon" continued to mean not only that works were studied, but that they were copied. One began early doing "composition" which means translating into Latin or Greek texts written in the style of a known classical author. (I still have a copy of Woodhouse; I remember in particular doing one composition modelled on Theophrastus, who as far as I know founded a genre with two examples: his own work, and that of La Bruyère.) Later on, when one was more competent, one was expected to do one's own composition in Virgilian hexameters or Horatian metrics. (Homer, being non-standard, was always canonical but not a model for imitation.)
Canonical is not the same as major, or "has lasted long enough". At least from about 1550 on, the Confessions were granted to be a great work, and had certainly lasted a millennium, but were not in any meaningful sense canonical.
To be honest, nobody really worried about canon in English as such until the late Nineteenth Century. Oh, there were rhetorical flourishes in the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes regarding modern equivalents of ancient writers (or as early as Meres Palladis Tamia, who makes an early mention of Shakespeare in one such list). But until the late Nineteenth Century, classical education remained the norm, and English literature, as such, was not a school subject.
There were recognized "great authors", and occasional works, like Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, which were based on an informal model of what the canon might be if there were one. There were authors who were pointed at as good ones from whom to learn technique, if you were a budding writer (not quite the same thing: imitating Shakespeare or Milton has always been a quick route to mediocrity: it's better to imitate solid examples rather than tight-wire artists).
The idea of an English canon (or, later, a comparative literature canon) is a product of the creation of English Departments at the university level, on one level; on another it is partly a result of reprint publishers like Dent (Everyman's Library) needing to define whom they were going to publish in their cheap editions for the masses[1].
There have been wars fought over how reductive the canon should be: F.R. Leavis' Great Tradition being the most prominent: "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."[2] There have been battles fought over whether there should be a canon at all ("Is there a text in this class?"). And Harold Bloom built his late career around it.
What I want to look at is small canons, though: the reflection into a genre of the idea of a canon. What does it mean for a work to be "canonical" in that context?
Most SF readers and writers are less than concerned with what might be considered part of a standard course curriculum in academia.
A few weeks ago, the Coode Street Podcast had an interesting talk about the SF canon. They took as a more-or-less-given that "canon" was, ultimately short form for "it's lasted a long time, or looks as though it will", and certainly works that are not read would not normally be considered canonical.
But I think that there is something more to the idea of canon, transmitted all the way from that original meaning of a ruler: a canonical work is one which is, or has been, taken as an exemplar of its type, or a model to be followed. Eccentric works with no following may last -- contrary to Dr. Johnson's dictum, Tristram Shandy has lasted -- but they are canonical, at best, only in an academic context, i.e. if they are studied. Of course, there are now academic courses covering SF, and eccentric works can be as good a topic of study as any other, but within the normal SFnal context to call something canonical is not to reference academia, but the field itself, of successions of writers in the context of successions of dedicated readers.
Consider, for a moment, Little, Big. It's a really major work, and I'd argue better than Downbelow Station, to which it lost the Hugo Award in 1982 (how it compares to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, one of the component parts of which was also on the ballot, is another question). The writing is very, very good, the ideas are subtle, characterisation is fine. But it has had no real successors and stands as an odd sort of outpost in the Urban (really Rural) Fantasy subgenre. But is it canonical? It stands at the head of no tradition; it is a representative example only of itself.
A similar argument can be made regarding Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it hasn't had the time to demonstrate a similar sort of splendid isolation, and it's possible to argue that it has "partial" successors in books like Kowal's Glamour series (books with a style reminiscent of Nineteenth Century novels, although the style is in detail nothing like Clarke's).
If I were to teach / supervise / run a seminar (academic-year-length, which is 20 weeks) on SFF generally, I doubt that either would make it onto the course list (although they'd be on an extended reading list). At a book a week, or two shortish and closely-related ones in some cases (Starship Troopers and The Forever War, or any Heinlein Juvenile and Rite of Passage), I might have up to 30 books to set out, and I would want to cover the major sectors and major authors of the field. It's not hard to come up with 30 authors who need to be represented, as well as a number of periods / movements. In the end, inclusion will be highly correlated to canonicity, and not pure quality.
On the other hand, for a mix of historical and influence reasons, Shelley, Verne, Smith, Gernsback, Campbell ("The Thing" -- any class covering the Golden Age can at least cover a good number of authors via short story), Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Tolkien, Pohl, Delaney, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Niven, LeGuin, Herbert, Silverberg, one or another fat fantasy author from the 1980's (which one isn't critical -- none are excellent, but they have an important historical role), Wolfe, Vinge, Gibson, Stephenson, Bujold, Martin would have to be on it at minimum. And that list manages to miss out on modern urban fantasy, steampunk, and other substantial subgenres.
[1]Hugh Kenner pointed out, in conversation at least, that one reason the canon cut off at the end of the Nineteenth Century for a long period was because the Copyright Act's extension of copyright placed the modern writers who immediately followed out of the hands of reprint publishers for a long time. T.S. Eliot is just coming out of copyright; Pound will not be out of copyright until the 2020s.
[2]Parodied by Frederick C. Crews as: "The great English novels are Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Women in Love. Some malicious persons, who have had the cheek to call me narrow-minded in the past, will doubtless welcome this statement as proof of their views." (Leavis later embraced the works of D.H. Lawrence fervently.)
