From: dwp@cci632.cci.com (Dana Paxson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Summary: Appreciation
Date: 12 Aug 92 16:06:00 GMT
Organization: [Computer Consoles, Inc., Rochester, NY

In article <65746@hydra.gatech.EDU> barclay@RAIL9000.gatech.edu (Barclay Blanchard) writes:
>
> [much deleted]
>
>But there is a context for African American writers that goes back at least as
>far as 1899 (we studied Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces in a lit class last
>spring, about the blacks' struggle to become part of American society's power
>structure after the Civil War, written in the then accepted form of a 
>sentimental novel, and our teacher said that there are several other such works
>published and others still being found).  There's also some context for women
>writers.  The problem, IMO, is that many (if not most) African American and 
>women writers (etc.) don't get much chance to study their particular heritages.
>And studying a work in a class is a lot different and ideally richer an
>experience (in my experience) than reading it in a vacuum, on one's own
>without the benefit of historical context and a lot of other information that
>teachers often bring out.
>

Barclay Blanchard's comments touched me.

One thing that has triggered for me in this thread was the repeated
mention of Dante in connection with the established literary canon
membership.  I read most of Inferno, some of Purgatorio, and some of
Paradiso in years past, in the Binyon translation.  Then I wandered
through John Ciardi's version.  Finally, after learning some tourist
Italian and venturing into some of the complexities of literary
Italian, I had a chance to ask an educated Italian, a poet himself,
some questions about Dante.  I'll never forget leaving a house on a
beautiful starry night with him, looking up to the sky, and hearing him
quote the last line of Inferno in the original Italian, which in
English goes something like, "We came out, and then beheld the stars."

The setting was the emergence from the darkness of the tunnel by which
Dante and Vergil escaped the last circle of hell, and emerged on the
opposite side of the earth.  In my friend's choice of words I felt a
deep struggle within him, for which seeing the stars was a healing
balm.

My friend went on to explain one word in the line: Uscimmo (in English,
"we came out").  It is in a verb tense we do not have in English,
termed the "remote past" (passato remoto).  He told me it is for use in
certain situations with a sense of deep moment, feeling and
spirituality; there was in his explanation a sense of the eternal, of
longing, of regret, of loss, of fulfillment.  His wife had once used it
to say, in one word, "I was", when someone complimented her on her
beauty, as if to say, "I was once, but no more; and it is a loss to
me."  Her word, in Italian, was, simply, "Fu."  She and her husband
spoke no English.

In reflecting on this, I thought after seeing what so many others had
shared here that I would want a teacher of a work to be immersed in its
depths of feeling and nuance, and to convey those depths to me, so that
I would not ignore its power to move me as a cat would ignore my words
in favor of a passing fly.  It is not enough for me simply to read; I
must embrace with my soul, and be embraced by what I take in.  Maybe
that's why I don't get as much reading done as I would like.  And in a
world of literature so rich in human variety and feeling, whether in
the Western canon, the emerging bodies of African, women's, African-
American, South American, or other worlds of writing, this is a loss to
me.


Dana Paxson
Network Applications Systems Group
Northern Telecom
97 Humboldt Street
Rochester, New York  14609

Disclaimer:  The opinions expressed above are mine personally,
	     and do not necessarily reflect the views of my 
	     employer, whose reading interests are probably
	     vastly different from mine.  
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books