In The American Scholar, Robert Zaretsky argues that we need to do something about the Western canon. Exactly what, he’s not sure.

He begins by saying that when he started teaching he was committed to “expanding” the canon to include writers of color:

As part of my teaching load, I participated in a team-taught course devoted to the Western canon. Though I did not read Bloom’s book, I found myself teaching many of the same authors that constitute his 26 immortals. From Dante, Shakespeare, and Montaigne through Goethe, Austen, and Dickinson to Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett, our teams have lectured on the works written by Bloom’s ‘happy few.’ These writers, we believed, took on universal themes in uniquely powerful fashion.

In addition, however, we also taught works by writers such as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. At the time, we thought we were simply expanding the canon—as Bloom himself did by adding these writers to his posthumous The American Canon. From today’s vantage point, it would perhaps be more accurate to say we were trying to ‘reform’ the canon. We thought, in effect, that we were reformers—big tent canonists dedicated to diversity and intent on inclusion.

Now he thinks, with a clunky allusion to the current debate about defunding police, that reformation was not enough. Perhaps the canon should be “defunded,” too, whatever that means: “Were my colleagues and I right to think that the institution to which we had given much of our professional lives could be reformed? Was our particular culture as teachers of Western culture compromised to the core? If it was, must we then, well, defund the teaching of the canon?”

His answer, he says, is “complicated”:

Here’s the problem: I had failed to look deeply enough into Marlow’s words. One student, looking down at her hands, declared, ‘I am so tired of reading books filled with the n-word.’ Another student, also African American, sighed: ‘I’m tired of being told the classics are good for me.’ Yet other students of Arabic, Hispanic, or Asian backgrounds aired their anger not just at the story, but at its author . . . I now begin to understand what I then refused to understand. My students do not need to be asked to attend to the subtleties of lines that compare, say, an African boilerman to ‘a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs.’ The haze of uncertainty, especially when exhaled by a 19th-century white novelist, was not what my students needed before George Floyd was murdered. It certainly is not what they—or their professors—need now.

Where to start with this? First, he suggests that critics who take style seriously are out-of-touch, amoral aesthetes by picking an absurd example from Conrad. The implication is that discussing style is a waste of time, an astonishing admission from a professor of literature, as if style itself has nothing whatsoever to do with morality.

Then there is his empty use of the word “need.” Reading Conrad is not what students “need,” nor is it what professors “need now,” he says. What does he mean by this? He is certainly not referring to what students need intellectually. Their complaints are not philosophic. (“I’m tired of being told the classics are good for me.” By the way, who tells students this? What an odd approach to literature.) Nor is he referring to what students need morally—at least he offers no moral reasons for giving up on style. Nor, as far as I can tell, is he ultimately referring to what students and professors might need therapeutically, though this may be part of it.

No, what students “need,” he says, are fewer white faculty members and works by writers of color to be treated as “essential representations of our political, social, and cultural traditions”:

What, then, are the needs of teachers and students? If true reform is ever to be achieved, there are at least two essential needs. First, deans ought to take immediate and concrete steps to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk, of increasing faculty diversity. (Among the dozens of colleagues with whom I have taught this class, just one has been African American.)  Second, we must treat writings by marginalized and oppressed minorities not as supplements to a white canon, but instead as essential representations of our political, social, and cultural traditions.

Was he not treating these works as essential before? Or is he suggesting we should now treat works by writers like Shakespeare and Milton as inessential? Does he know how canons work, at least literary ones, which are, by definition, in flux and, at the same time, thought to offer a suitable list of essential works?

But perhaps I am taking his words too seriously. Anyone who calls on deans to take “concrete steps” to “walk the walk” is surely just pulling phrases from the air. As Pope said: “Some ne’er advance a judgment of their own, / But catch the spreading notion of the town; / They reason and conclude by precedent, / And own stale nonsense which they ne’er invent.”

In other news: How transgender advocates hurt girls: “In the last decade, across the West, gender dysphoria — severe discomfort in one’s biological sex — has spiked by 1,000 percent in the US and 4,000 percent in the UK. And while for the nearly 100-year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria, the disorder typically presented in early childhood (ages two to four) and overwhelmingly afflicted boys and men, the demographic driving the recent surge is utterly different. It is adolescent girls who had no history of childhood dysphoria at all. The more I learned about the adolescents who suddenly identify as transgender, the more haunted I became by one question: what’s ailing these girls?”

A history of swimming: “The first-known depictions of swimming are pictographs made eight thousand years ago on the walls of the so-called Cave of the Swimmers in the middle of the Sahara, where there were once deep-water lakes. The ancient Greeks often triumphed in battle due to their swimming prowess. After the fall of the Roman Empire, swimming all but vanished from Europe for over a thousand years – it was thought unhealthy and even a sign of witchcraft. Benjamin Franklin and Lord Byron helped repopularise swimming, and as it became popular over the 19th century, when the first public pools were built in Britain (in 1828) and the USA (in 1868), swimmers in those countries stubbornly stuck to breaststroke, snubbing the front crawl of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the South Pacific as uncivilised.”

Some people don’t like the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Will an expensive restoration change that?

Matthew Dooley wins the Wodehouse Prize: “A graphic novel about ice-cream turf wars in an English seaside town has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comedic fiction. Flake by Matthew Dooley is the first graphic novel ever to win the award, which goes to a work ‘in the spirit’ of the Jeeves and Wooster creator PG Wodehouse.”

What will concert hall stages look like when symphony orchestras begin performing for physical audiences again? “Kazushi Ono recently led scientific tests with Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra in the Bunka Kaikan Hall to determine a safe and musically viable distance between players. He shares the research.”

How the working class shifted right: Bob McManus reviews David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot. “Beginning shortly before noon on May 8, 1970—the 25th anniversary of V-E Day and four days after national guardsmen shot dead four students at Kent State University in Ohio—several hundred helmeted building tradesmen left work sites across downtown, laid into a large anti-war protest near Federal Hall, and undertook a two-hour rumpus that eventually rolled over the steps of City Hall, leaving 70 injured, six arrested, and the city itself in startled confusion. What quickly became known as—what else?—New York’s ‘Hardhat Riot’ was a noteworthy event in the nation’s protracted Vietnam War drama. Hitherto the role of the working class had been to contribute its sons to the war effort—while leaving the politics, and the moral preening, to its betters. No longer, as journalist David Paul Kuhn details in this very fluid account of the event, its context, and its aftermath.”

Photos: Antarctica

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