The Extra 265
On literary assumptions that are always shifting and which therefore produce revised canons- each of which we then see as universal and permanent. Tompkins points out that all anthologists- all canon-makers- agree that their “main” criterion of selection is literary excellence. For Tompkins, this reveals their common misconception of what makes a classic: “while the term ‘literary excellence’ or ‘literary value’ remains constant over time, its meaning- what literary excellence turns out to be in each case- does not. Contrary to what [Perry] Miller believed, great literature does not exert its force over and against time, but changes with the changing current of social and political life.” We take Hawthorne and Melville to be the major writers of the American Renaissance because we have been taught to see them this way. Our anthologists and teachers have devised “universal” aesthetic standard to justify their choice. Fifty years from now they will be championing other figures (perhaps Longfellow’s time will come around again); new aesthetic standards will be in place, presumably just as “universal” as those underlying the enshrinement of Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, and other white male authors.
Despite the many good points she makes, I cannot agree with Tompkins’ conclusions because she takes her relativism so far as to argue that a canon based on aesthetic standards is impossible. As Kolodny remarks in a passage quoted earlier, the ground upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or universal. This should make us quite cautious about the conclusions we reach, but why should it force us to abandon them altogether? All values may be relative, as people had long began to suspect long before Foucault and Derrida, but this does not require us to throw up our hands if asked to decide whether Nathaniel Hawthorne or Susan Warner is the better writer. Tompkins argues quite seriously that this question is unanswerable, that Warner’s intentions are so different from Hawthorne’s that they cannot be compared. I agree that Warner’s didactic purposes have biased many critics against her work and made useful comparisons with a writer such as Hawthorne virtually impossible. But I cannot see that such comparisons are intrinsically impossible. Once we realize that Warner wrote a
Tompkins, p. 192