From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 19:31:07 GMT


                              Friday, the 28th of August, 1992
  
Michael Sean Rooney writes:
  I'll try to beat the clock.

You just did. I'm off tomorrow morning.
  
  I wouldn't be so sure about that.  Are the modern Turks "indisputably
  white"?  I don't think so, by the "functional definitions" North Americans
  (e.g., Clayton Cramer) use today.

Umm, *my* feeling for the usage is overwhelmingly determined by forms
I've filled out which have asked me to say what my race is. Thus ``white''
to me means not African-American, not Asian-American, not Native
American, not Latin American. I have never encountered anything official 
which would have me differentiate between North European ancestry
and South European. My guess is this usage of ``white'' is what Clayton
meant, though he can speak for himself.

[Four comments: (1) Personally, I can tell blond, blue-eyed
Scandinavian features from dark-haired Mediterranean features, and
that's about the extent of it. I have met people, however, who claim to
be able to tell Slavic from Gallic from English. A good friend of mine,
from Poland, claimed once that I have a ``Jewish nose''. This seemed
bizarre to me, so we discussed it and, anyway, it seems to
me that he had an eye much more sensitized than mine towards
perceiving racial features (whether his eye was accurate or not is
a whole nother question).

(2) You must recognize that Clayton's comment
was made within the political context of the, er, controversial
claims of Martin Bernal. Bernal's thesis, as I understand it
from reading Mary Lefkowitz's and Jasper Griffin's negative
reviews of Bernal's _Black Athena_, is really much more sensible
and limited than has been popularized, but the pop
(caricature) version is that the Greeks didn't invent anything,
only took it all from the Egyptians, who were black Africans.
Knowing about this claim that Egyptian civilization was
really black African certainly made me wonder at first if Michelle
were not confuddling the Black Athena hypothesis.

(3) OK, my artistic eye ain't very good, but I would say
that I can detect Chinese racial features in Chinese painting,
Mesoamerican Indian racial features in Mayan art, black African
racial features in African statuary. Now, I'm well willing to
consider that I'm wrong about this, and I well understand
that classical Greek statuary originally was painted, that we don't
have that visual guide now, but the statuary does not look to me
like it is representative of the same race of people as modern
Greeks. It doesn't look Scandinavian or English to me either, but
it also doesn't look like modern Mediterraneans. This makes some sense
to me, because the Greek city states may have been created in
part by invasion from the north, and there have certainly been two 
millenia of further mixing of Mediterranean peoples since classical
times. I feel uneasy about this because, as I said, my own eye isn't
good, and I would fear it's been too trained by Cecil B. DeMille when
it comes to imagining Greeks and Romans.

(4) In any event I'm willing to grant for the sake of argument that
classical Greeks looked exactly like modern Turks. The subsequent
flamage you and Clayton can work out for yourselves, but I still
find no cause, even granting this, for you to have taken
issue with Clayton.]

We seem to be in agreement that modern racial categories are
mostly inapplicable to how the ancients thought about it.

  Clayton is of the Ronald Reagan school of color-blind greatness.  I.e.,
  if there aren't very many blacks or women in Congress then they must not
  be trying hard enough.  This negative freedom-thinking (equal and free
  on paper = equal and free in actuality) conveniently ignores indirect
  (e.g., socio-economic) repression/racism/etc.

Well, I guess I don't know about Clayton, but I'm certainly of this
school myself. At least I believe that I can do no more than not violate,
and insist that government not violate, the absolute, inalienable,
Creator-endowed Rights of other individual human beings. This is a far
cry from offering economic equality to them or promising
to them that no one is going to hurt their feelings, both of which I
believe *are* quite up to them. (In fact I believe that doing anything
positive to actualize equality---beyond insisting on equal opportunity
before the law---would most probably lead to a criminal violation of some
individual's Rights.) (Of course, since I think I loathe the politics of
Ronald Reagan, I'm not sure I understood quite what you were saying.)

  Well, there's the heart of our disagreement -- Mike, you believe that
  there is such a thing as indisputably "great" works, and that said
  greatness can be apprehended by all persons in all times in all places.
  I don't.  
  
  I also think that the Tale of Genji is a "great" work of art, as well as
  the Qu'ran and hundreds of other "non-white" (i.e., non-European/American)
  works.  Yet, by and large, these works (as well as stuff like Phil Dick)
  aren't in the canon.  What gives?

I think you are quite mistaken as to my belief about greatness. I think
canons of great works---say, specifically the Britannica Great Books
set---invariably have *reasonable* reasons and criteria for inclusion
and exclusion. The Great Books set incorporates a measure of merit
(determined by 17-time readability, which I think is a pretty
objective criterion), yes (I do not know if there is any measure
for comparing the artistic merit of Joyce versus Proust versus Murasaki,
but all of these simply *weigh* more than Hemingway, who, in turn, *weighs*
more than Stephen King), but inclusion also measures centrality to the
Great Conversation of Western Culture (which imposes a measure of
time---why P.K. Dick is automagically not up for consideration).
The list makes no claim to be all great books or all great books
of importance or all great books of world culture.

A canon of books of world importance would be different than a canon
of Western great books. It also might be harder to come up with such
a canon except by committee or opinion poll. In other words, it'd
be hard to have expertise in the same one can have expertise about
Western lit or Sci-fi or whatever.

I have made *no* claim that _War and Peace_ is better than _Genji Monogatari_.
I think such a claim would be dopey except as a expression of
personal and informed taste.

On the other hand, I do claim that the only place a prescriptive use
for any canon comes in is in deciding about curricula. In that case,
I *do* claim that Thucydides is much more relevant to teach to American
high schoolers (assuming always my fantasy world in which these high schoolers
would actually read) than Ssu-Ma Chien, even if these high schoolers
were all of Chinese ancestry. The reason is that part of the purpose
of compulsory education in a liberal democracy is preparation
of citizens for the high office of democratically electoral citizenship,
and Thucydides is much more relevant to understanding American citizenship
(in particular, I think he offers criticism of certain pop notions of
``democracy'') than Ssu-Ma Chien. 

If I *really* could realize my educational fantasies, there'd be time
for teaching the Koran and Genji, too. After, that is, the stuff more
relevant to American citizenship were taught.

              Mike Morris
      (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)