On the Death of Canon

[mark_asphodel]

I’m coming to the conclusion that the breakdown of any kind of “Western canon” of films, books, music, etc is a root cause of some of the stupid media “discourse" infesting every corner of the internet.

Case in point: The Bible (specifically the King James Version) was the single most important reference point in Anglophonic Western literature for centuries AND was a text that every educated man and woman was expected to know. If you are not even passingly familiar with The Bible or what was then mainstream Christianity, then the quotes, references, images, symbols, and analogues that litter what used to be the Western Canon are going to be decorative at best and impenetrable at worst, and more recent works that reference The Bible second-hand or third-hand via reference to those earlier works in the "Canon" are going to look simply like homages to or even plagiarism of the old Canon.

So you get YA authors accused of "plagiarizing" Tolkein over one line ("don't go where I can't follow) that IIRC evoked dialogue between Christ and Simon Peter in the Gospel of John to start with and a bunch of nitwit children on tumblr attempting to make the arguments that literary symbolism doesn't even exist and IDK was invented by mean pretentious English teachers. (I am guessing the average age of these children is about 15, which is the age where I read The Old Man and the Sea and hated it, but that doesn't mean the shitty fish book is not in fact drenched with symbolism.)

Is the solution to dig in one's heels and defend the Canon of dead Anglophonic White Christian Men? No. Is the solution to start teaching The Bible in schools again? Hell no. But watching these nonsensical debates unfold in real time definitely gives me the sense that some useful way of 'reading' art and literature and hell superhero movies-- aka culture in the sense of a group's shared stories-- has been lost and right now there's no good, solid, inclusive, relatable non-white-dude-centric paradigm in its place. It's literally children screaming from a position of ignorance.

I have more to say about the film angle but that'll involve referencing The Last Jedi and right now I'm too tired for that. 

Comments

[queenlua]

okay, in fairness, i think the average high school English teacher does a fantastically stupid job explaining canon, symbolism, etc, and why anyone should give a shit, so it's pretty unsurprising that the average high schooler has only a hazy grasp of, well, any of this.

when a kid asks the teacher, "how do we know that 'red' symbolizes 'life' in Heart of Darkness," they're asking a perfectly legitimate question. this isn't fuckin Biblical allegoryville, or at least not obviously so; yeah they're referencing red blood a lot but that's because blood is fucking red, so where exactly are you going with this?

ideally, the teacher would be pointing out this symbolism in service of some greater argument—say, perhaps the author abruptly drops all mentions of color partway through the book, and we can infer the author was suggesting that Things Strongly Suggested By Those Colors disappear partway through the book as well, transforming a subtle event into one that has devastating impact and magnitude, and blah blah blah—basically, the teacher could point out that all literary criticism is kind of a meta-artform, and paying attention to possible symbols can make your meta-art more rich, lend itself to more deep and interesting readings, and so on.

but generally the teacher says some equivalent of "just because, i mean, did you even read it," and if you're me you roll your eyes and answer "blood = life" on the dumbass multiple-choice test you're given after reading the book. but if you're the kind who actually tries to push back against dumbassery, of course you scrawl "this is bullshit" on the multiple choice exam and fume about how all this symbolism stuff seems pretty made-up.

the root cause of a lot of these particular issues, i think, is that the average high school teacher has only been trained in one school of literary criticism, and it's a school that places outsized importance on Art As A Wholly Autonomous Unit, The Author Is Dead, Don't Consider Any Outside Context, and also Symbols Are Extremely Cool. if that's the only framework a teacher has to think about literature with, then their only answer to Did The Author Really Mean That is The Author Is Dead, whereas a more dynamic background may allow a teacher to pivot and say: okay, let's really think about what the author meant, then. let's go read a biography of his life, and the historic events of his time, and think about how those things might've influenced their making of this particular art... which is a perfectly valid way to approach literature, just tremendously unfashionable, but i'd rather a kid learn an unfashionable mode of criticism while actually being engaged, instead of just deciding this whole criticism thing is bunk.

outsiders to a discipline are often way better at sniffing out bullshit than insiders. i think kids are rightly detecting some bullshit and just drawing the wrong conclusions. not because they're stupid, but because no one's offering good answers to their very legitimate questions.

i mean, it's a similar thing wrt plagiarism. i think the awkward entanglement of & tensions between forces like copyright law vs public domain vs "is this illegal stealing or just boring and derivative stealing" vs "sampling" are just bubbling up in places like this. unlike Ye Olde Days, when everyone agreed you could just ape from the Bible as much as you wanted, that's both considered stylistically boring nowadays (we put tremendous emphasis on novelty compared to previous art periods) and potentially dangerous (again: copyright law, don't want to get sued, etc). so people start pouncing all over little snippets of "plagiarized" dialogue. of course they do! lawyers do it too and they get paid way more than their high school english teacher!

so, idk, i suspect the problem isn't canon collapse, so much as... i guess, a need for a meta-canon? it'd be really nice if we taught high school students, "hey, there is more than one way to approach a work of literature! here's five different major schools of thought, and how each of them may approach something like Hamlet!" because anything that's just taught as Here Is The One Correct Way Because I Say So is bound to either produce slavish compliance to form, or rebellion and incoherence, and neither's great.

((...also, in general, i expect Star Wars to be uh, the last place i'd find actually serious/interesting critics.))

((ALSO i think you might like this piece by n+1's film critic, in particular starting with "THE INTERNET DIDN’T INVENT BAD CRITICISM or gullible and complicit thinking. For that I blame USA Today, which began the 1980s trend of dumbing-down news into bite-size nuggets, and Entertainment Weekly, which institutionalized the consumer-guide approach to film criticism . . .))

[samuraiter]

The first thought that jumps into my mind is from Hayao Miyazaki when he talks about animators basing their drawings upon animation, rather than upon real people – in other words, deriving from things that are already derivative. (I like his ending to the original quote: "It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans.") The disappearance of canon that you describe feels similar to that in that people are arguing from derivatives of what has already decayed (q.v. old commercial jingles becoming the pop music of the future depicted in Demolition Man).

[damoselceles]

I remember a Prof of mine who specialized in European Medieval Lit was frustrated by how very few of his incoming students had even glancing knowledge for Biblical symbolism. I think because he basically had to break down and explain every one, considering how drenched most Medieval texts are with them. (he also once asked where we could recognize the term "warg" from, someone answered Game of Thrones and he was all "No, it's Tolkien!" haha)
I had another (blacker) Eng Prof extremely tired of the Old Dead White Men's Classics, who always tried to make a more diverse reading list for American Classics. Which, at least personally, I felt my historical knowledge helped me navigate since the references were usually heavily based upon the events of the times. For both classes I was lucky to be a history nerd and for the former one had an advantage because of my personal Bibliological studies.

Symbolism, allegory, and references are all something that seem to be... ignored? Dismissed? Erroneously interpreted?? Quite often with the younger fandom crowd these days. It might be because of how literally they tend to tackle fiction, almost always trying to 1:1 it with their IRL experiences rather than grounding it in any extraneous contexts. I've seen a lot of posts discussing how tumblr fandom especially picked up a lot of literary jargon without fully understanding how to apply/test it in an academic way. They're trying, but right now act more as exclusive gatekeepers than anything.

Funny thing about the KJV is at least from what I'd last heard, it's not been the popular standard for theological studies for several decades now. Because of translation and the debate of accuracy- it was one of the earliest common language translation, thus because super well known. But now that people can go back to the original Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew and more directly translate- those modern versions are more preferred. (and often have me thinking of bad practices of translation accuracy, when game companies decide to translate based on an English translation of a Japanese script- a giant game of telephone in worse cases).