To begin, we basically have to ask ourselves three significant questions. Firstly, was the canon of European literature imposed from above, either by a government definition of national culture or, more democratically, by artists themselves defining their own place in an emerging tradition ? Secondly, was the canon created by historians as part of a process of creating national myths and a national consciousness? And thirdly was the canon finally defined by Literary Historians as a means of separating themselves, and litrerature from a series of exclusively national agendas ? Or were they merely reaffiriming those agendas? Perhaps this liberation was merely a further act of definition and therefore served to narrow the margins and to create new negatives? There is a long tradition of believing that certain historic rulers acted as sponsors of national cultures and as pro-active patrons of particular writers who were in turnrequired to respond to an official agenda or to participate in anexclusive court culture. Romantic and Victorian painters throughout Europe were fond of showing the Emperor Augustus as the patron of Virgil, or of Chaucer reading his works at the court of Edward III , of Elizabeth I of England listening to Shakespeare declaim, or of Louis XIV as the patron of Molière. In the instances of Augustus and Louis XIV there was some validity in the notion of imperial or royal patronage, but there is no evidence of Elizabeth’s involvement with Shakespeare and Chaucer seems to have had no relationship at all with the court of Edward III. He was certainly very much a court poet in the reign of Richard II, but he seems to have been a singularly a-political one (there is barely a reference either to the Wycliffites or to the Peasants’ Revolt for example). Terry Jones has recently, and very contentiously, claimed that Chaucer was in deep political trouble for his commitment to Richard II in the reign of Richard’s successor Henry IV, but the evidence is scanty and inconclusive. What this romantic idea of a union of art and sovreignty implied was that the artist was the happy and willing servant of the nation state and was present at crucial moments in the development of a national culture sponsored by the state. Looking back in history the writer could therefore be cast as a political tool, as a national propagandist, or perhaps, more benevolently, be cast as a nation builder. Much depends on European myths of nationhood, on the interpretation of key moments in history or on the idea of the decisive, galvanizing ruler. For the most part we have to see art as distinct from the state, and the artist often cast as indifferent to the state. Shakespeare might have helped create national myths by working with national history, but he seems to have done so independtly of a court culture. Indeed, as the history of his play Richard II suggests, though it might support the idea of monarchy, and of the legitimate succession it was a contentious political drama from the beginning and it got Shakespeare’s company into trouble when it was put on by supporters of the Earl of Essex shortly before his attempted coup d’etat. Shakespeare might have been a royalist by inclination, and a conservative by conviction, but we can’t exactly tell. What is patently true is that he was a commercial playwright, content with the prestige of perfomances of his plays at court, but decidely not a servant of the state or an official propagandist. He was, though, a highly political writer. Augustus may have sought the services of Virgil in order to justify the hegemony of Rome, and Louis XIV may have recognized the sophistication that Molière brought to a distinctly French culture but we should be wary of thinking of a state literary culture in both cases. In England court patronage has never really figured prominently in the history of English literature. Indeed in the eighteenth century, with one German king (George I) who couldn’t speak English, and a successor (George II) who professed to ‘hate all boets and bainters’ it is easier to sense that much of the literaure saw itself as written in active opposition to the dictates of the court. Think too of the loathing of Sir Robert Walpole (the first real Prime Minister) felt by most eighteenth century writers. Above all, think of the very distinct detachment of Romantic artists from the state in the period during and following the French Revolution. The idea of the Romantic and Revolutionary artist, and of the dissident poet is one which is, for example, true of western Europe but is particularly common in the way in which central and eastern European cultures define themselves. What I am trying to suggest is that literature as it evolved in most of Europe was not seen as especially useful in propping up a specific regime or in proclaiming royal or presidential glory. If we are hard-pressed to find examples in England or France in the eighteenth century and in the Romantic period, then take glaring twentieth century examples. Western poets in the 1920s and 30s were often distinctly ‘detached’ if they were modernists and distinctly dissident or Marxist if they were would-be populists. But can we now readily recall any writer who worked for the Nazi propaganda machine who had any real talent? The Nazi regime was very far from an old-fashioned monarchy, but it was very much a one=party state in which hhr interests of nationalism and a national art were seen as expressions of the Aryan Übermenschen. In terms of another one-part state, the Soviet regime in Russia, much of Gorki’s and most of Scholokov’s propagandist work has now often been discredited, whereas the poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelshtam has at last come into its own. In the West a Pound or a Yeats may have drifted to the right in politics in the 1930s, but neither sought to be an apologist for Germany (though Pound, and American exile in Europe expoused Italian Fascism). We think of certain prominentEuropean writers as great dissidents (such as Voltaire), or libertarian dissenters (such as Blake) or as exiles (such as Victor Hugo) or as outsiders (such as Tolstoi). They fit into modern canons, but certainly wouldn’t have been thought of conforming to a national agenda by their contemporaries. To impose a canon from above has therefore been difficult when it comes to insisting that the writer of the present conform to the defined national principles inherited from the past. Most good writers seek to rebel, and the rebellion does not have to be revolution. The dead, who are beyond protest, are more easily and profitably incorporated into canons and agendas than the living who are all too willing to step out of line. This seems to be as true of the subjects of monarchies and dictatorships as it is of democracies. I argued in the introduction to my Short Oxford History of English Literature that writers have tended to make their own canons. A writer very rarely works without a literary context, and the more independent a writer is the more he or she tends to chose the tradition in which they seek to work. The Futurist experiment, which aimed to dispense with every aspect of the past, was short-lived and often ended up findfing a home in Fascist politics. Poets, playwrights and novelists never really shake off all the influence of their predecessors. They may reject the immediate past, but they generally recognize a sympathetic spirit from somewhere in the inherited tradition and then to incorporate that spirit or spirits into a personal canon. I expect the case of T.S. Eliot is an obvious one. Eliot rejects the Romantic tradition (in which Yeats or Hardy worked) in order to find a voice which has inflections which echo Dante, Baudelaire, Shakespeare and Donne. Donne was a poet working in court circles in the 17th century, but his secular poetry never circulated widely and he was best known to his own contemporaries as a prose writer, and particularly as a religious prose writer. The poems were never forgotten, but the secular poems were rarely anthologized before the 1920s. Now he is a distinctly canonical poet and a much appreciated one. This reassessment is in no small measure due to Eliot and Eliot’s first readers. A modernist re-made the canon by both breaking it and opening it up. Eliot’s canon was small, sharply defined and provocative, but it was none the less a canon.Eliot to some degree resembles the poet who was once both patronisingly and sexistly called ‘the father of English poetry’: Chaucer. Chaucer had his own canon and conspicuously reminded his readers of the tradition in which he worked. He was almost certainly ignorant of the earliest English poetry (the Old English poetry that he would have found highly obscure or already incomprehensible), and he didn’t much appreciate the work of his immediate English predecessors, but he proclaims himself the heir of Virgil and Ovid, of Dante and Boccaccio. He works in a distinctly European tradition in order to self-fashion himself as an English poet for his day. He is the first poet in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, but he wasn’t buried there because he was a poet. It is ‘Poets’ Corner’ (rather than the Poet’s Corner) because Chaucer’s successors, Spenser, Jonson and Dryden were buried in his shadow. Even Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Wordsworth, who aren’t buried in Poets’ Corner, are now commemorated there because their work was consciously shaped by the existing tradition. Nowadays Literary Societies clamour for a memorial to their particular favourite in order to prove how acceptably ‘canonical’ they are (and English literary societies are often very parochial in their interests). Few playwrights in the English tradition benefitted from imitating Shakespeare, but no English, Irish or American playwright can completely shrug off Shakespeare’s influence or example (perhaps because English-speaking actors generally aspire to act in Shakespeare they carry the ‘classical’ influence with them into non-Shakespearian roles). For non-British dramatists in the nineteenth century (Schiller, Hugo, Pushkin) Shakespeare proved to be, by contrast, a truly liberating influence. Nobody imposed a dramatic ‘canon’ on any of these dramatists, they discovered a tradition for themselves and ‘patriated’ a playwright from an exsiting but formerly ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ tradition. Just as the dramas of the ancient Greeks which were re-animated at the time of the Renaissance, have proved most fruitful both as influences and as examples to be re-worked (Anouilh’s Antigone for example), so Shakespeare released from the confines of Renaissance England, both from the ‘ghettro’ of history and the ‘province’ of his own nation has proved both an international model of convention and a supranational model of innovation into our own day. To respond to the second question I posed at the outset we have not only relate national history to the formation of national identity, but to recognize that until a hundred years ago the writing of history was regarded as integral to literature. Before the triumph of the novel, well-written histories were seen as in part epic and in part rhetoric. That written history is part of a definition of national identity can be seen not only in the work of the Greek and Roman historians whose work survived to inspire both the middle ages and the renaissance but also in a Latin history such as Bede’s History of the English Church and People, a work which consistently refers to the relationship of England to Catholic Europe in the post-Imperial centuries. It also stresses the unity given to the English people by their language and their national literary expression in the vernacular. We can think here of the story of Caedmon, recorded by Bede, the inarticulate Abbey servant at Whitby inspired in a dream to compose a short rapturous poem in praise of Heaven in his native tongue. In post-Conquest Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth would write down the stories of King Arthur as if they were a true record in order to insist on the Britishness as opposed to Englishness of his native island. The work of Bede and Geoffrey long remained quarries for future historians and, equally significantly, for imaginative writers. National historians in Western Europe, fostering the vernacular which the Catholic church had encouraged, saw literarature and literary expression as keys to the nation state and to national identity. Did they also begin to establish the ‘canon’? Well, probably yes. National languages were integral to nationhood itself. The written languagre, in virtually every European state, was part of the definition of the idea of nation long before ‘nationalism’ was conjured into existence. This was particularly true of mediaeval England where French had been imposed on the kingdom by the Norman invaders in the eleventh century and had only been superseded as the language of the court in the late fourteenth century. Chaucer’s pride in his ability to express himself in sophisticated English is vital not only to his role at court but also to his vision of himself as a European poet who is claiming equality with the poets in the Romance tradition. When we move to the renaissance period English writers in particular look to Italy for new forms of secular expression but also very often espouse the Royal cause of defining a newly Protestant state against European Catholic norms. They want to be both like and un-like, largely because they want to define a new kind of Englishness. Their canon is, therefore, sometimes sectarian but it is far more an expression of a national idenity which is perforce cut off from a significant European mainstream. Shakespeare’s ambiguities about Ancient Rome in a play like Cymbeline or his seeming antipathy to Papal power in a play like King John are part of a national propaganda exercise. Encouraged by the royal establishment, but not directly sponsorred by it. Milton in the seventeenth century sought to assert the link between national destiny and protestant anti-Romanism. Even the execution of Charles I is justified because England can do things differently. Seventeeenth-century literature is highly political, but it also uses the idea of a canon to justify the distinctive destinmies if England (and by extension Scotland). The most obvious examples of a marshalling of national literature to define national identity occur, of course, in the age of nationalism, the nineteenth century. Most European nations in the century either discover a distinct identity through a new literature (the Czechs, the Russians, the Romanians for example) or, as in England, they tend to fitliterature into a national agenda. The drawing up of school sylabuses in England, France, Germany or Italy reinforced the process. Shakespeare was thus rendered a ‘national’ poet and any inconvenieces or embarrassments in his work tended to be edited out (by, say, a Bowdler) or overlooked (the sonnets dedicated to the young man, for example). Victorians ‘definers’ looked back in particualr to the nascent ‘nationalism’ of the Elizabethans. The process would continue, with rather more subtlety and questioning, in the essays of T.S.Eliot in the 1920s-1940s. Shakespeare (Olivier’s Hamlet &, Henry V) were of course integral to an even more conscious and urgent propaganda campaign, this time Government sponsored, during the Second World War. England, and then Britain, become identified with English literature.To conclude with the third question I raised. Where does this leave the literary historian? I firmly believe the writing of literary history should be related to the writing of history. That is, it should follow roughly the same rules of chronology, selection and critical scrutiny and interpretation of data. I see the point of a genre based literary history, but just to compare epic forms, or to contrast tragedies from different periods, seems to me to ignore context. I regard the absence of an historical or social context as a deep flaw in much theory based criticism. What really matters for the literary historian, and particualrly of a literary historian dealing with a European literary tradition which has ceased to be exclusively European, is to recognise that narrow national agendas are constrictive and unnnatural. English, Spanish and French literatures now exist and flourish outside England, Spain and France. I personally think I can still write about English literature without immediate reference to work in English written in America, Australia, India and Africa, but many other writers and critics do not. It is a different matter when I read and write about fiction, or poetry or drama written by men and women born or educated outside Britain who still feel part of an ‘English’ mainsteam (Eliot or Rushdie for example). Most American writers feel distinctly American, despite their inheritance of an exclusively English tradition until the development of a distinctive American identity. What I want to suggest is that we have to be open readers nowadays, alert to national contexts but extremely wary of nationalist agendas. Those agendas can be expressions of other nations’ nationalisms. A conference such as this one is addressed to the European canon. I am here to put English Literautre in that particular context. But there are other contexts to which I must be alert. If I were speaking of Anglo-Scottish literature or Anglo-Irish literature I would feel obliged to state that I would proably be starting from quite other premises than exclusively English ones. Were I addressing the relationship of American or African literature in English to Europe I might not need to think about the weight of the European canon or the significance of a Eurocentric canon. But I do need to be open minded, and prepared to rejoice in the extraordinary variety of the literature produced in the European islands of Britain and Ireland both in the past and in the twenty-first century. Canons, I want to suggest, should not be nationalistic straightjackets, but contexts which on one level are national, but on another, as I hope this conference shows creatively supranational. We learn from difference when we recognize the cognate and the parallel. |