With our online algorithms wrapped tight to our personalities, it’s rare to stumble across content that you’ll completely disagree with. Even if on your feed you find content that’s not exactly to your taste, it’ll at least contain an aesthetic which, if you can’t appreciate it, you’ll at least understand.
The literary critic Harold Bloom is a figure I’d never before come across until he made it to the top of my YouTube feed. Comforted by the fact that YouTube knows me well, I began to watch his interview with Charlie Rose on the ‘Western Canon’.
Without reducing his argument to an unforgivable extent, Bloom’s point in principle centred on the idea of maintaining academic and artistic integrity. From his viewpoint, the Tolstoy’s, the Shakespeare’s, the Milton’s and the Chaucer’s sit at the peak of artistic culture and ought to be studied as mandatory.
And not only should they retain their establishment within the canon, they should not be placed under scrutiny by whom he calls the ‘school of resentment’ . These people arguing for inclusion and wider representation he sees as motivated by political ends which do not serve to elevate artistic merit.
What Bloom seems to take for granted is that the establishment of Tolstoy, Chaucer and Austen were not solely based on artistic achievement but were too subject to acts of politic. We only need to look at how Shakespeare – a bard of the people during his time – became embraced by the aristocracy and was there forth set upon a pedestal ever since.
My biggest contention to this issue is that in any discussion of this kind, we have to look at the fundamentals of the criteria we are discussing. We have to scrutinise on what basis the Western Canon attributes great artistic achievement.
Critical Western literature, of which Bloom was a contemporary, values complexity, seriousness, intellectualism, a sense of cohesion and rationality, and a discourse that favours the ‘nobility of mind’.
And whilst none of these are aims can be knocked, they are not the only factors worthy of attention and inclusion. Art cannot be divorced from politics, and I find nothing wrong in including such motivation, however overt, when determining inclusion into the Western canon.
As a final thought, to my mind it seems that much of the struggle undertaken by ‘marginalised writers’ seems to be from trying to conform to the underlying criteria’s of the Western canon.
Striving to develop a narrative voice and structure in line with Western literary presumptions, these artists at once stifle their own inclinations, if indeed they have one that they can particularly identify.
Margin Page.
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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