Eagen, Emily

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Macalester InternationalVolume 3 Literature, the Creative Imagination, andGlobalization Article 13Spring 5-31-1996Response to GamelEmily EagenMacalester CollegeFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintlThis Response is brought to you for free and open access by the Institute for Global Citizenship at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in Macalester International by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information,please contact scholarpub@macalester.edu.Recommended CitationEagen, Emily (1996) "Response to Gamel," Macalester International: Vol. 3, Article 13.Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol3/iss1/1304/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdResponseEmily EagenI. IntroductionFirst, I would like to thank Professor Gamel for participating inthe Macalester International Roundtable. She has presented uswith an engaging perspective on the current state of the Westernliterary canon, and I have found her ideas to be both insightfuland thought-provoking. My remarks will incorporate what Ifind to be both the strengths and limitations of her paper, inter-woven with my own perspective on the literary canon. Theexperience that I bring to this forum is the experience of being ahigh-school and, now, college student in the midst of what hasbeen called “the canon wars.” To extend Harold Bloom’s reli-gious metaphor, I spent four high-school years in devotion tothe Western canon, and two years since then recovering in thepostcanonical wilderness of Macalester College’s EnglishDepartment. As a student, my education thus far has led me,much like Professor Gamel, to try to make sense of literary mapsand to see their relationships to a global one.II. AgreementI should start by saying that I found Professor Gamel’s paper tobe highly accessible, open to a multiplicity of readings. Thisstyle of writing is fitting with one of the overall themes of herpaper: a call to abandon the hierarchical relationships betweenwriter and reader. Her approach has allowed me to respond as acritic without feeling it necessary to create a closed debate. Pro-fessor Gamel’s comments are an excellent beginning for dia-logue.Professor Gamel exhibits the literary canon debate at a crucialturning point, in the nebulous area where the traditional canonis no longer a mystified body of sainted writers, yet hasn’t givenway to a new form. For critics, this is a crossroads. The questionsare: What to do with the inherited past? And where to go fromhere? Professor Gamel’s remarks highlight these tensions11504/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdbetween past and present, old and new. Her comments promisea forward look, toward a completely restructured “map” of lit-erary territory. However, I find that an equally strong, perhapsprevailing sentiment in her comments is that of retrospection —not nostalgia, in the melancholy sense of Harold Bloom, but astrong emphasis on the “classics” that have served as the foun-dations of Western literary study. Professor Gamel situates her-self at this crossroads, wondering how much canonical luggage— Homer, Petronius, Shakespeare — she can bring along to thenew territory of discourse that she is eager to enter.Professor Gamel emphasizes the need to preserve and reinter-pret older texts, making an argument that, perhaps inadver-tently, seems to compromise her goal of abandoning the canon.Much of her enthusiasm for change seems to rest on the faiththat the old ways will be preserved. It is as though ProfessorGamel holds her world vision up to Bloom as a consolation, say-ing, “Don’t worry—the new map will actually be familiar—theWestern canon will live on strongly.” Although her goal is todismantle the Western canon, I find that in three ways —metaphors of expansion, choice of texts, and modes of analysis—Professor Gamel works toward a contrary goal.III. ContentionImages of expansion (underlying the excitement) prevail in Pro-fessor Gamel’s paper. She calls for giant celebrations, multiplereadings of texts, a global “carnival” that links present, past, andfuture. Literature will benefit from moving beyond boundaries,she says. This is imagery that, in its size and tempo, alludes tothat of territorial exploration, forging the frontiers of unknownlands. To this end, the body of Western texts is ever adaptable,capable of being expanded, reinterpreted, and completely trans-ferable to a larger, worldwide culture. Professor Gamel showshow ancient texts fit modern concerns. Petronius speaks on classoppression, Caliban on colonization. She worries about the“preservation” of these texts, as though they may not survive inuncharted lands. To ease the fear of loss, Professor Gamel sug-gests that we can “use” the literary works we find, as resourcesfound on new land. The new terrain is valuable. How? Either asarchaeological “sites for future . . . investigation,”1 where olderMacalester International Vol. 311604/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdtexts are preserved, or consumer atmospheres like the carnivalor zoo. I am not suggesting that Professor Gamel intends theseimages to imply colonization. However, I am left uneasy by theopportunistic connotations that these images imply.Another way in which Western centrality is supported is byProfessor Gamel’s choice of texts. Her overriding enthusiasm isfor literature that is already incorporated into the mainstream ofthe Western canon. No examples are given of literature thatdoes not rely on Western texts; in fact, many of her examplescome from Harold Bloom’s canonical list. Professor Gamel statesthat “what matters is not particular texts but methods of read-ing.”2 But how can we begin to understand what “global cul-tures” mean if we look only at Western works? To use ananalogy, how well can you understand a foreign country if youstay in an American hotel? This is not to dismiss the texts shechooses. But I think Professor Gamel’s comments would bestrengthened by a look at non-Western works that render thecanon not only peripheral, but irrelevant.In the examples she gives, Professor Gamel focuses on theWestern works that shaped the non-Western, giving little atten-tion to the non-Western artistic features. In her example of TheBacchae, she downplays the political significance of Soyinka’salterations to Euripides’ text, instead focusing on his artisticfaithfulness to Euripides. She relates Soyinka primarily toEuripides himself, as though the symbiotic relationship betweenthe two artists is the most relevant to our understanding oftoday’s “global culture.” In actuality, it seems more relevant tothe practice of literary criticism, which gives precedence to theserelationships. The “global” use of literary criticism is limited atbest, as Gregory Jusdanis exemplifies in Belated Modernity andAesthetic Culture. He claims that while a European or NorthAmerican theory can be used to derive an interpretation of atext, it is “inapplicable in other cultural situations.. .as a mode ofexplanation seeking to understand cultural settings with foreignconceptual tools.”3 In Gamel’s analysis of The Bacchae, a mentionof “African elements” is the extent to which a Nigerian culturalsetting is noted. Through an omission of further elaboration, thetexts appear as the dominant sources of creativity and legitima-tion, ironically following the pattern of the “center/periphery”model that Professor Gamel seeks to replace.Emily Eagen11704/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdThese are the ways I find Professor Gamel’s new map to fallshort of being transformative. Unless we are truly capable ofceding the center to the periphery, to use Professor Gamel’smetaphor, we will maintain a vision of global literary consump-tion that functions much like the canon.In order to find a conception of “global culture” that does notimitate hegemony, it is critical to ask ourselves what “global”really means. Professor Gamel uses the terms “global” and“globalization” with certainty, as though they are not as equallymetaphorical as the “canon.” What are “the events now takingplace”4 that she refers to? What is the meaning of “global cul-ture,” as distinguished from “globalization”? It is hard, withonly an ambiguous notion of these transformations, to come toan understanding of how literature operates in the wake. This isthe challenge that the essay has critically demonstrated, and it isa difficulty that most critics find in conceptualizing literaturewithout the “canon.” One way to negotiate this difficulty is tostart by breaking down the canon itself, as Professor Gamel hasbegun to do. It is certainly valuable to criticize texts, profferalternate methods of reading, and suggest new connections, asProfessor Gamel has shown. All this was achieved by acknowl-edging the fictional properties of the canon. By seeing it as ametaphor, we notice creative ways to work around it.But the canon is also an institution that has an actual function.As Professor Gamel indicates, literature cannot be separatedfrom ideology. She notes its use in schools, where, as John Guil-lory has said, literature helps to maintain the privileged positionof the bourgeois literate class by operating as one of its “strate-gies of identification.”5 Any of us — critics, writers, students —are caught up in this as we try to work around the “canon” and,simultaneously, work through the canon. Therefore, if we reallywant to get away from the restrictions of canonical thinking, it isnecessary to look toward educational institutions themselves,where “literature” is defined and employed.I look to my own experience to understand this — my pre-college education. There, the canon was very real. Actually, Inever heard the word “canon” at all, except in orchestra class.Neither did I use the term, as there were no “world” history orliterature classes to give the word a meaning. Europe and Amer-ica were the world. Similarly, the distinction between “canoni-Macalester International Vol. 311804/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdcal” and “noncanonical” was irrelevant. There was somethingcalled “literature” — that you read for school — and somethingcalled “fiction” that you chose yourself. The dichotomies wereso fixed as to be invisible.Elitism played a large role in the identity of my public highschool. All students had taken a test to enter. The result was aracially diverse group that equally represented the city’s racialmakeup, but was labeled “smarter.” Divisions of elitism werefurther drawn by the elaborate institution of honors classes.While the school itself may have been diverse, the honors andAdvanced Placement classes were almost exclusively white andmiddle to upper-middle class. Therefore, the myth of equalaccess was preserved, but the reality was an extreme division. Itwas an atmosphere charged with racial and class tension,strained by this intellectual hierarchy.Fascinatingly, the honors classes went on as though intellec-tualism were their business, and nothing else. Any negativerelation to the school’s ideology was unvoiced. It was as thoughthe elitist rhetoric of the school had little effect on the vision ofhistory or literature that was being taught. It was as though thecontent of the courses and the teaching methods could have lit-tle influence, positive or negative, on the social atmosphere ofthe school.The classroom, in this way, is mystified, much like the canonitself. Yet I argue that the classroom is never divorced from theissues in the school at large. More crucially, neither is the cur-riculum. The very way that information is taught reinforces andreflects the institution that contains it. Specific to the study of lit-erature, we can see that the canon serves this purpose. How isthis achieved? I’ll give you some of my own examples.In my tenth-grade honors literature course, I was taught rev-erence for literature. The mood was worshipful, the authority ofthe text was assumed. It was the true beginning of culturalacquisition, where I learned what “good” literature was, andhow to read it. With the great joy of learning to love these textscame a proud sense of intellectual success.Eleventh-grade English was American Literature. From a uni-fied critical method, we analyzed themes and symbols of stan-dard American classics. For the one assignment to read a bookby a “minority or woman writer,” the purpose was to apply theEmily Eagen11904/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdsame critical techniques, transforming the book into familiar ter-ritory. This was a glimpse at how the canon is ever expanding,subsuming anything in its path.Twelfth grade was the year of the Advanced Placement exam.This exam had a rigid structure, and we learned to adhere to itsdemands. Writing was done in third-person only, as to assumean objective voice about a text. Consumption was an importantfocus as well: the more canonical texts we had read, the more“capital” there was at our command. We were already in an eliteplace as A.P. students; now the goal was to refine and advancethis position.This occurred with varying degrees of subtlety—and perhapssays as much about me as it does about my school. In any case,the political and social functions of learning literature becameabundantly clear. First, the advanced students of literature weredivided from the rest of the student body on sharp racial andclass lines. Then, this position of privilege was greatly enhancedby the teaching of literature. By learning “good” literature, welearned our privileged place. By learning how to assimilatetexts, we learned ways to prevent any unsettling of our place.And by working toward an exam, we learned the role of educa-tion in achieving an even higher place.You can hear, I hope, the rhetoric of elitist ideology in thesedescriptions. You can also see, perhaps, that simply expandingthe body of texts, as many have attempted in “pluralizing” thecanon, would not effectively dismantle the ideology in place.Furthermore, any attempt to grasp “global” issues or global con-cerns in this setting would be colored by the social atmosphereof the school and the classroom instruction that reflected it. I usethe example of my education not to attack the existence of ideol-ogy in an institution that, if reformed, could rid itself of thispoliticization; rather, my intent is to indicate that any such insti-tution has this rhetoric inherent in the structure, and it is themystification of this structure that prevents understanding, andpromotes a false sense of “absolute truth,” which, like Bloom’sreligious canon, fuels a system of power and subservience.Macalester International Vol. 312004/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdIV. Concluding ThoughtsFor those of us who, like Professor Gamel, seek to promoteglobal communication outside of an abstruse system of power, itis absolutely essential to trace the prevailing attitudes to theirroots. With regard to literature, we have to look to where elitistand Eurocentric models of literature originate. Surely, many ofthem are in place long before high school, but I think that highschool is the turning point where much of the privileging isarticulated and solidified. It is rare, I have found in my reading,to come across an academic analysis of the canon that takes intoaccount the role of secondary education. Furthermore, amongscholars of comparative literature there seems to be littleacknowledgment of the need to teach at the high-school levelalternate ways of reading and thinking that are usually reservedfor the college level. I have found one example, described by EdAhearn and Arnold Weinstein in “The Function of Criticism atthe Present Time,” of a program coordinated between BrownUniversity and local secondary schools. This program exposeshigh-school students to an interdisciplinary, critical approach tononcanonical literature, leading them to question the existenceof a monolithic body of literature and thought.6I cannot conceive of a way to establish good global relationsthat does not demand this fundamental restructuring of institu-tions. I would claim that the United States is fundamentallyincompatible with a global society, but that is perhaps more pes-simism than I want to express in my closing remarks. Rather, Iwill conclude with the reminder that there is a great deal ofwork to be done. At this point, I think it would be impossible tojump in and harmonize all global cultures, even at the level ofone nation to another. On the other hand, I have no doubt thatindividuals can establish such positive connections with otherindividuals in this world. Essentially, I am affirming ProfessorGamel’s conclusion — that what people “make out of this mish-mash is up to them/her/me/us.”7 Certainly we are all linked toinstitutions. But the basis for world understanding can beginwhen we try to put institutions of dominance aside, and giveourselves the authority to perceive. This, and only this, is what Iwould call “the creative imagination.”Emily Eagen12104/18/96  7:51 PM      1880eag2.qxdNotes1. Mary-Kay Gamel, “Genuine Corinthian Bronze: The ‘Western Canon’ in theAge of Global Culture,” Macalester International 3 (Spring 1996): 104.2. Ibid., 108.3. Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing NationalLiterature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): 9.4. Mary-Kay Gamel, “Genuine Corinthian Bronze”: 88.5. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Foundation(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 117.6. Ed Ahearn and Arnold Weinstein, “The Function of Criticism at the PresentTime” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bern-heimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 82–83.7. Mary-Kay Gamel, “Genuine Corinthian Bronze”: 111.Macalester International Vol. 3122

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