17 Canon John Guillory 'ANON” descends from an ancient Greek word, anon, meaning a “teed” for “rod” used as an instrument of measurement. In later times kanon de- veloped the secondary sense of “rule” or “law; and this sense descends as its primary meaning into modern European languages. The sense of the word im- portant to literary critics first appeared in the fourth century A.D., when “canon” was used to signify a list of texts or anthors, specifically the books of the Bible and of the early theologians of Christianity. In this context “canon” suggested to its users a principle of selection by which some authors or texts were deemed worthier of preservation than others. It is easy to sce in retrospect what this principle was: Those scriptural writings of the Hebrews which were excluded from the biblical canon—the Bible as we know it—were excluded for dogmatic reasons, because early Christianity had to decide what its “truths” were, what it ‘was going to teach its followers. It may surprise us today that many writers who believed they were as Christian as Matthew or Paul (for example, the “gnostic” Christians of the first century A.D.) did not find their writings included in the final form of the New ‘Testament. At a certain point the biblical canon became closed forever. In the same way a number of carly Christian theologians were excluded from the final list of “Church Fathers because they promulgated doc- trines which were inconsistent with the emergent orthodoxy of Christianity. Hence the “canonizers” of early Christianity were not concerned with how beau- tiful texts were, nor with how universal their appeal might be. They acted with a very clear concept of how texts would “measure up” to the standards of their religious community, or conform to their “rule.” They were concerned above all else with distinguishing the orthodox from the heretical. In recent years many literary critics have become convinced that the selection of literary texts for “canonization” (the selection of what are conventionally called the “classics”) operates in a way very like the formation of the biblical canon. These critics detect beneath the supposed objectivity of value judgments ical agenda: the exclusion of many groups of people from representation in the literary canon. The controversy erupting over this question has produced 233JOHN GUILLORY 4 great volume of polemical writing, so much in fact chat one must say tha hy controversy is one of the more important events in the history of twentieeh, century criticism. It was certainly not the case before the last several decades that the question of canon-formation itself was controversial, even though critics have always argued about the relative merits of individual writers. The critics of canon-formation have based theit case upon a disturbing and indisputable face If one were to glance at the entite list of “great” Western European authors. the canon—one would find very few women, even fewer writers who are non. white, and very few writers of lower-class origin. This is simply a fact. What are we to make of it? Clearly some process of exctusion is at work—but what process? As soon as wwe begin to think about this question, we are forced to consider some surprising hypotheses. Could it be possible that all along good or great works have been written, but that they have not been preserved, or not canonized, because their authors were not upper-class, or white, or male? Is it possible now to recover these great works from their undeserved obscurity? Literary critics have long known that the reputations of many writers have risen or fallen through the ages, and for many complex reasons. Is it possible to correlate acts of judgment with the categories of gender, race, or class? If this were possible, then the history of canon-formation would appear as a kind of conspiracy, a tacit or deliberate at- tempt to repress the writing of those who do not belong to a socially or politi cally powerful group or whose writing does not in some overt or covert way express the “ideology” of the dominant groups. Consequent upon this hypoth- esis, many new research projects have been undertaken, which have indeed te- covered a number of forgotten works. Yet these works are fewer than one might expect, if it really were the case that individuals of excluded groups had been producing good literary works throughout Western history alongside the works of the famous, canonical authors. I shall return to this puzzling question in a moment. At this point we need to consider a little more carefully the process of sclection itself. How does a work become canonical? How does a work become aclassic? For many readers and critics, this question has not been difficult to answer at all, since they would say that some works just are great, and have simply been recognized as such, One might maintain this very simple position until the mo- ment when two intelligent readers disagree about the greatness of a particular work or writer, At this point, how is one to decide about who is right in the matter of judgment? Several possibilities emerge. We can say that readers dis- agree about the relative value of works because works can never be judged on “aesthetic” grounds alone, simply as works of art, whatever that might mean. Here the contemporary ctitic of the canon would say that the process of canon- formation has always been determined by the interests of the more powerful, and that is why works by women, or blacks, or other subject groups do notCANON, appear in the canon, Now let us imagine, if you will, the scene of judgment as that scene is implied by the debate between those who believe that great litera- ture only needs to be recognized as such, and those who believe that judgment is always interested, or prejudicial To take the latter group first, it would seem that these critics must argue that literary works are judged by a kind of secret and exclusive ballot, that a certain elite group gathers together in order to decide which works will be canonized, which not. It is immediately obvious from this imaginary scene that if the ones who decide are all male, or upper-class, or white, then the works they judge to be good will tend to reflect their social position and their beliefs, their ideology, But if other social groups participate in the process of selection, then the canon will become truly representative; it will represent the identities and interests of the different social groups that actually do constitute the society as a whole. According to this argument, then, one can never be sure about the actual good- ness of literary works, but one can take measures to be certain that the canon is properly representative. Let us call this position, commonly known as the argu- ment for “opening the canon?’ the liberal critique of the canon. It is based ult mately upon an appeal to the standards of representative democracy, where dis- agreements are supposed to be resolved by a communal decision-making process which always secks to guarantee the rights of minorities to representation, Out of this liberal critique many new programs and syllabi have been devel- oped, familiar to us now as the curricular innovations of such minorities-studies programs as Women’s Studies or Afro-American Studies. One can hardly under- estimate the beneficial effects of this development, not the least of which is that students have been disabused of the notion that only certain people can produce good literature, or judge it. The critique of the canon has forced teachers to confront questions about the teaching of literature that were answered too simply, if asked at all. Nevertheless we can still wonder whether the liberal cri- tique, by transforming a scene of conspiracy into a scene of representation, has accurately described the historical process by which works become canonical. Notice, for example, that though this critique might well explain disagreements about value judgments between social groups, it cannot explain disagreements within a homogeneous social group without falling back on a concept of acs- thetic value it regards as irremediably suspect. This problem points us to the great contradiction of the liberal critique: it must smuggle in a concept of real literary value if it wants to claim that some works—formerly noncanonical works—are just as good as the canonical works. Otherwise the liberal critique is committed to the erection of separate canons for different social groups, and there is no reason to assume that these different canons will not replicate the hierarchical positions of the social groups in the society at large. It has indeed been the case that these separate canons have often been regarded as separate but not equal. 235