Alternative Canons
Context
While not as ancient as the epic and poetry, it is not an exaggeration to say that the novel as a genre has truly come to its own. Its development over the centuries as a literary genre has expanded to accommodate functions other than pure mimesis of the day-to-day, and nowhere do we see such extraneous functions more clearly at work than in the dynamics of national canons in the realm of world literature. Novels contain not just textual meaning, but more interestingly, contextual import of a sociocultural and political nature in their reception and assimilation into existing knowledge. The genre of the novel has, in essence, acquired a metonymic function as representation of cultural identity.
We can say that the rise of world literature, and by extension the corresponding idea of national literatures, is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to the early 19th century. Specifically, Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur calls to mind the national insecurity that Germans had in relation to the predominance of English and French cultures during his time. It is this tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that Georg Brandes problematizes in his essay “World Literature” (1899), when he claims that after all, “when one speaks of world literature, one thinks primarily and principally of belles-lettres in all their forms” (62).
In bringing to the fore this idea of national literatures as being defined and presented by belles-lettres, Brandes underscores two important and interconnected problems in world literature. First, that there exist parallel canons that are dichotomized between “world-famous” works, or what David Damrosch would refer to as hypercanonical works, and “numberless others [that] are preserved, loved, respected, and continuously read in their countries of origin without being known abroad” (Brandes 62-63); as seen for example in the divide between Shakespeare (world-famous) and Marlowe (“merely” English). Second, that the position that a writer and his language occupy in the global context affects their chances of obtaining fame, cultural capital, or even “mere” recognition or name-recall; those who are writing in Italian, Spanish, and to an even lesser extent Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, or Greek are at a disadvantage when compared to those who are writing in English, French, and even German.
These questions of canonicity, cultural capital, and linguistic primacy perhaps become even more palpable in the context of postcolonial literatures, which are defined by colonized people’s attempts to individuate an “authentic” cultural identity distinct from their colonial heritage. Attempts from writers such as Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’O, who decided to write primarily in the Gikuyu language as an attempt to reinforce sociocultural and ethnic ideology in the face of linguistic dominance of English in Africa, try to situate the postcolonial-national within the imperial-global context through an engagement of the questions “Who are we?” and “How do we portray ourselves?”, which in turn belie the epistemological and ontological needs of postcolonial peoples to arrive at an essential definition of their identities relative to others. Once decolonized, the question of how postcolonial states must look at and represent themselves in relation to their former colonizers becomes an all-too real struggle, one that must not be reduced to mere “isolationism but [be] a recognition that national liberation is the basis of an internationalism of all the democratic and social struggles for human equality, justice, peace, and progress” (Ngũgĩ 300). The struggle for national identity, therefore, is also the struggle of democracy.
It therefore makes sense to view national identity, especially that of postcolonial states, as both the by-product and field of contestation among opinions, values, and cultures whose multivocalities are not always necessarily harmonic. This pluralistic view of identity would thus run counter to the prevailing notion that the nation—and correspondingly, its representative literature—is monolithic and homogeneous, with the political and intellectual elite as its vanguard. As it stands, it is the elites’ view, propagated through the institutionalization of canon in curricula and discourse, which encompasses our view of the nation. This is evidenced concretely in the kinds of texts that fall under the categories of “literary” or belles-lettres and problematized in discourses within academic circles, to the detriment of interest in grassroots or popular texts, which are primarily relegated to the status of cheap, anti-intellectual, and populist works.
This tension is usually framed in Comparative Literature within the institutional insecurities about national languages and literatures, which are typically represented by a few texts that have traveled across borders and have garnered cultural capital in their circulation. In a postcolonial context, national literatures are entrenched in “economies of value”, or a hierarchization that privileges one discourse over another, either because of ethnolinguistic disparities or sociopolitical inequalities. In this presentation, [this project] will look into how the construction of canon might be problematized in order to call into question hitherto accepted notions of cultural capital and national supremacy, categories which may well be considered organic constructs established to maintain the asymmetrical power dynamics between the center and the periphery. Within the context of globalization and linguistic shifts, the national narrative seems to exist as a pliable concept within the contestatory poles of canon. It can be argued that this national narrative, and subsequently national identity, can be situated within the alternative matrix of popular culture rather than in traditional canon, and that this alternative canon can be mobilized as a mode of cultural representation that could complement or even dismantle the status quo.
