Rejecting the Canons. All the Canons.
Obviously, I believe canons exist… I’ve just stopped seeing them as indicators of any intrinsic literary superiority, or even intrinsic literary merit.
There’s been a fair amount of talk in science fiction and fantasy circles this August about the “canon” and how readers and writers should relate to it. If I can summarize the discussion exceedingly flippantly, quite a bit of evidence has piled up that the people responsible for many of the genre’s foundational texts had racist and misogynist tendencies, and that these tendencies crept into the texts, and into the curation of the texts, and while many people feel we would all be better off acknowledging this, quite a few people would like to cling to their cherished classics and are willing to excuse away all manner of failings in order to do so—and sometimes it’s because they’ve absorbed the lessons of the texts a little too strongly, if you catch my drift.
A lot of very excellent writers have weighed in on the situation. As Catherynne M. Valente pointed out on Twitter, “We live in the futures these men wrote when our parents hadn’t even been born! [And] it’s not just brave white men conquering the galaxy & their inner demons with white women clinging to their knees.” No big surprise, then, that we don’t find their visions of the 21st century compelling.
Meg Elison did read just about the entire Golden Age of science fiction to establish her genre credentials, she recalls, but this is what it taught her:
“It doesn’t matter that I’ve read it.
It did not gain me the respect or even the less-disdain of the old guard.
They don’t care what I know or even what I write. They decided on sight that I don’t belong.”
“You and your career are far, far better served,” Elison concludes, “by reading the current market, reading broadly from living writers, and from refusing to submit to anybody’s purity test over Dune or Vernor Vinge or Ender’s Game.”
I am just old enough that, when I stumbled onto science fiction and fantasy as a teenager in the mid-1980s, virtually the entirety of the genre (as defined by the gatekeepers of the era) was still in print or otherwise readily available—and still small enough that you could at least pretend to have read it all, or still feel that you had a decent shot at being able to do so. And, being a somewhat withdrawn adolescent, with not much else to do, I took a crack at it. I even had The Dune Encyclopedia, to confirm my familiarity with the first four Dune books (which are still, in my personal gatekeeping mind, the only ones).
I think it’s fair to say I absorbed quite a bit of toxic masculinity as a result of that particular self-education—some of it so obvious, like John Norman or late Heinlein, that even fifteen-year-old me knew something was off, and though it would be at least half a decade before I was introduced to the concept of “the male gaze,” as soon as it came up in my feminist studies class I knew exactly what my professor was talking about.
The problem was all the examples that weren’t so obvious, and the pervasiveness of what we could probably call “the white male gaze,” which I imagine people were talking about back then, but those conversations definitely weren’t filtering down to me. Anyway, long story short, I took on a bunch of cultural baggage without even realizing it, and in recent years I’ve had to spend a great deal of time sorting that out, and I’m certainly not alone in that project.
Nor, of course, is it limited to science fiction and fantasy.
In fact, by my mid-twenties, science fiction and fantasy had ceased to be my central concern—partly because I’d gone on to pursue a master’s degree in film studies, where I ended up concentrating my thought processes on why filmmakers chose certain historical figures as the subjects of their movies, and what that said about the culture. Mentally, I connected that to the challenges that were being levied against “the Western canon,” or “Great Books,” and the possibilities of alternate canons.
Ultimately, I stopped believing in canons at all. Well, obviously, I believe canons exist; I believe there are lists of books that certain groups of people deem worth remembering. I’ve just stopped seeing them as indicators of any intrinsic literary superiority, or even intrinsic literary merit. The thing that clinched that for me, funnily enough, was all the years that I’ve spent as a book reviewer.
As Samuel Johnson once said, “We owe few of the rules of writing to the acuteness of critics, who have generally no other merit than that, having read the works of great authors with attention, they have observed the arrangement of their matter, or the grace of their expression, and then expected honour and reverence for precepts which they never could have invented.”
So when a literary critic like William Giraldi comes along and defines “necessary literature” as “the time-tried classics which have come before and informed our civilization,” I remind myself that there’s more than one civilization on the planet, or that the “time-tried classics” only became classics because they were handpicked by critics—who, as Johnson said, basically just notice stuff in books, then go on to find other books that have stuff like that, and when they’ve found enough books they claim it’s a tradition. If they find books with stuff that totally isn’t like that, then if they think it’s any good it’s a radical break from tradition, and if they don’t think it’s any good to hell with it.
And that’s how canons get made. It’s actually not that different from how you pick out your favorite books, except you don’t have huge cultural institutions backing you up on those selections.
Remember Harold Bloom? Harold Bloom was a guy who had carved out a life for himself where all he had to do was read his favorite books over and over again, and every now and then he would show up in a classroom and talk about them, and sometimes he would the things he said down and publish them, and once he has published enough to get tenure he was pretty much set for life.
Nice work if you can get it.
I actually find myself agreeing with Bloom a bit when he writes (in The Western Canon, appropriately enough) that reading deeply is about cultivating “the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.” Where we disagree would most likely lie in what books, and what types of books, are or aren’t suitable for that process by virtue of their enduring literary value.
But the fate of the world isn’t hanging on you or me perpetuating the Western Canon, and if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t know that any “literary values” are truly “enduring.” Books “endure” because people keep them around; if we started keeping different books around, boom, the definition of “enduring” literature would change.
That’s as true when it comes to science fiction as it is when it comes to Great Books.
You read, and you learn things; if you’re really lucky, you learn things about yourself. You talk, or you write, about what you learned; if you’re lucky, somebody responds to what you’ve said or written, and then you can learn from them, too.
If a book doesn’t speak to you, or actively speaks against you, you can stop reading it. And you’ll be able to tell the difference between a book that doesn’t speak to you, a book that actively speaks against you, and a book that does speak to you but is telling you something that unsettles you in a way that might turn out to be productive if you set aside your resistance.
Sometimes those are the books that can do you the most good.