The notion of a literary canon, a body of works considered centrally important and worthy of study, is—linguistically, at least—a fairly recent idea. Canon law, canons of saints, and canonical books of the Bible were all familiar concepts from the medieval period on. The word canon itself means rule, and it came to indicate a standard of judgment or authority, a test or criterion. But it’s really only in the twentieth century that the term regularly began to be applied to a list of modern books. (In effect, the literary canon was a secular version of the biblical canon: a system for designating books that were authentic and merited inclusion.) The development of Great Books curricula at places like Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College, and the publication of projects like the fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World in 1952, made such lists of major writers and thinkers widely available.
In this connection, it’s of some interest to note that the Chicago Great Books course, devised by university president Robert Hutchins and philosopher Mortimer Adler, was initially aimed at businessmen, and was intended to fill in gaps left in their education. This was not, that is to say, initially a freshman “core” course but a program intended to allow “successful business and professional men” to remedy the omission of literary reading in their earlier years of study by meeting “in a relatively painless fashion in congenial surroundings.” The year was 1943.
The concept met with immediate approval, and within a month the Great Books seminar, nicknamed by participants the “Fat Man’s Great Books Course,” began to meet once a month at the University Club.1 It was one of these businessmen, William Benton, the CEO of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (and later a U.S. senator from Connecticut), who had the idea of marketing a set of Great Books in conjunction with the encyclopedia. It was only when the Great Books of the Western World were sold like encyclopedias—by door-to-door salesmen explicitly recommending them as an instant educational upgrade for middle-class American households—that the set turned the corner from steep deficit to (modest) profit. To save money, the editors had chosen inferior translations in the public domain. Some nineteenth-century translations of the Greek classics were imbued with ejaculations and false archaism—“Ay me!” “Why weepest thou!”—at the same time these plays by Sophocles and Euripides were being translated by a brilliant new generation of scholars and published as The Complete Greek Tragedies by the University of Chicago Press.2
For decades the Great Books movement—which Dwight Macdonald, in a scathing review of the Adler-Hutchins venture, called “the fetish for Great Writers”3—had been tied to a notion of general education that promoted these texts as essential building blocks for college freshmen and sophomores. Today, however, many freshmen and sophomores rush straight ahead to professional training, skipping literature altogether, or taking only one or two literature courses over the four years of their undergraduate education. Some later come to regret the lost opportunity to learn about the humanities and the arts. As a result, the interest in brushing up the classics that animated executives in the 1940s and 1950s is again alive and well: an idea that began as a pick-me-up for businessmen has found a new audience among modern-day professionals. Very often readers who read these authors with pleasure in high school will return to an interest in literary culture only after establishing themselves in positions of professional—and financial—security through college and post-college training. Book clubs, leadership institutes, post-performance audience talk-backs in regional theaters, cruise-ship lectures, and alumni colleges are among the ways adult readers now encounter the literary classics. Business schools teach the plays of Shakespeare to exemplify good (and bad) business practices, management skills, and group motivation, and programs in medical humanities likewise use Shakespeare to illustrate key themes about life, death, and humanity. It is in extension courses and lifelong learning, though, that the appetite for reading great works of literature seems most directly expressed.
But what does it mean to read the classics or to study them? Dwight Macdonald’s review of the Hutchins-Adler Great Books series—a review that must have been real fun for him to write—takes note of the deliberate absence of a “scholarly apparatus” accompanying a set of books that span the disciplines of literature, philosophy, history, and science, and range from ancient Greece and medieval England to Freud and (inadequately selected works of) Marx. “The Advisory Board,” Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote, “recommended that no scholarly apparatus be included in the set. No ‘introductions’ giving the editors’ views of the authors should appear. The books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great. Since we hold that these works are intelligible to the ordinary man, we see no reason to interpose ourselves or anybody else between the author and the reader.”4
Macdonald found this particularly vexing in the case of the six volumes of scientific writing, which posed a problem “so urgent that almost no expository apparatus would suffice. A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work,” in his view, “partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist (equations, diagrams, and so on) and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science.” Thus, while Milton “does not supersede Homer,” and the historian Edward Gibbon “represents no advance over Thucydides,” scientific writing is “often revised, edited, or even superseded by the work of later scientists.”5 To underscore this point, Macdonald offered some quotations from Hippocrates that were meant to show how out of date he was as a scientist—for instance, “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” But as this example makes clear, such observations are very much of interest today in the history of science and medicine, and as well in the fields of women’s and gender studies. It has become a critical truism that the works of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are taught more often in literature courses than in the original disciplines (science, economics, philosophy, or philology) in which those writers began their work. This does not make them failures but, rather, successes—“crossover” successes. Hippocrates, likewise, has found new readers, new contexts, and new relevancies, even if physicians do not consult him on the treatment of ulcers and broken bones. These writers have become literary and historical. That does not mean they are useless but that they have found, or made, new uses. The literary is not the category of last resort (or of lost causes) but the category of textual richness and multiplicity of meanings.
Let’s return, though, to the purist claim made by Hutchins and Adler—that the omission of a scholarly or expository apparatus was a plus, morally, ethically, and literarily, for their Great Books series, removing a barrier between reader and writer. Dwight Macdonald quite sensibly suggests that “surely, without distracting the reader from the text,” a scholarly apparatus could have given the essential information about the historical and cultural context in which each work appeared and have translated terms and concepts whose meaning has changed with time.6 The word apparatus is an unlovely word, conjuring up as it does a kind of mechanical contraption or scaffolding. In fact, apparatus comes from the same root as prepare, and means a way of getting ready. A scholarly apparatus, however, sounds particularly menacing and constraining, like a harness (or a HAZMAT suit).
This idea, that scholarship and criticism somehow got in the way of and impeded the direct interaction between reader and work, is an artifact of the times—the late forties and early to mid-fifties. It is related to the romance of the Great Books as part of a theory of general education, a theory that was, in turn, indebted to concepts of American individualism, self-realization, and the spread of democracy in the post–World War II period. It is, in fact, the forerunner of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the resistance to literary theory, which was widely regarded as a dangerous foreign import.
One of the recurrent flashpoints in the public discussion of the humanities is whether specialization is ruining literary studies, replacing generalists who know and love the canon and the great (and small) works across periods and genres with specialists, intensely localized and professionalized, who know every inch of a particular piece of literary terrain (the American nineteenth-century novel, or seventeenth-century religious poetry, or medieval drama, or Dickens) but who no longer command—or, it is implied, much care about—the larger picture.
Not long ago, that larger picture would have included the classics of ancient Greece and Rome (preferably read and studied in the original languages), Dante and Petrarch, French literature from (at least) Corneille and Racine through the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth century, and many other works from what came to be known, too broadly, as the Western tradition. Time moves on, and—happily—writers keep writing, and so we now have not only a more global sense of world literature but also a constant consciousness of new work, poems and plays and novels and essays, that is published, reviewed, and read every day. No one can read all of this; no one can command it. And certainly no scholar can read the preponderance of scholarly work being produced today. A century ago the world of literary scholarship was smaller, more intimate, clubbier—riven by factions and sometimes astonishingly personal and intemperate in its expression, but at the same time rather self-protective, insulated as well as isolated.
We can’t go back to that time, nor—in the main—should we want to do so. The world of literary studies has become, to a great extent (though not completely), democratized and pluralized, with beneficial effects for scholarship and teaching. But the question remains about that elusive, and to some extent delusory, “larger picture.” The old divisions and categories—period, genre, author, nation—have all been questioned, their borderlines exposed as permeable (when does medieval begin or end? Do terms like epic and pastoral have modern and postmodern equivalents? How do we assess collaborative or collective authorship? Does it matter whether Beckett is an Irish author or a French author?). After decades in which master narratives were set aside in favor of the local, the particular, the outsider, and the idea of bricolage, there is an understandable longing on the part of students, and of some teachers and scholars, for a broader arc, a story if not a picture.
The language of specialist and generalist is sometimes deployed as a kind of code, implying that members of the former are technocrats (or even bureaucrats) and careerists, while the latter are genuinely committed to literary study and, as a strong and insistent subtext, to teaching, by which is meant the teaching of undergraduates (and non-majors) rather than graduate students. This divide, too, I think is false, and not only inaccurate but meretricious. It sets up the terms of apparent difference in a way that fails to understand or to value the continuum between teaching and scholarship, intellectual excitement and painstaking research, pleasure and profit, learnedness and learning.
My own education was as a generalist, and I am to a certain extent a generalist still, “dabbling,” as the dismissive term has it, in periods and others not “my own.” From time to time I have taught courses on Jane Austen as well as Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, on modern and postmodern drama as well as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, on detective fiction (from Oedipus to Agatha Christie to Crick and Watson’s double helix), on literary and cultural theory, and on ghosts in literature, as well as what used to be called survey courses in English literature, the epic and the novel, and drama from the Greeks to the present day. If we were to try to adapt the terms of Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” to the realm of literary study, rather than of literary production, I would be pretty clearly on the side of the fox rather than the hedgehog.7 Or, to put it another way, my interests are transhistorical, eclectic, thematic, and theoretical. I am less interested in thick description and period-based work, more intrigued by following out an idea, an intuition, a hunch, or a series of associations wherever they lead me. But I am deeply committed to research, to evidence, to documentation, to the acknowledgment of prior scholars’ work, and to other things that belong to the apparatus of scholarship.
So for me, the dichotomy between so-called specialists and so-called generalists is a false divide. Since I believe, along with many of the critics I have cited in these pages, that the colloquy is always being held across the centuries between and among writers, whether of fiction, poetry, drama, or any other genre, to specialize will mean to know the intellectual surround (as well as the historical background) of any given author’s work, its precursors and successors, its effects and affects. What I want to emphasize here, though, is the distinct kind of pleasure that comes from connecting one literary work or phrase or character or passage with another—the experience that is sometimes called getting, or catching, or recognizing a literary allusion.
The title of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is a reference to the theme song of Disney’s Three Little Pigs (1933), but it would have no resonance if the name Virginia Woolf didn’t already carry some important connotative power (feminist writer; major twentieth-century novelist; innovative stylist; Bloomsbury icon). Albee apparently said that when he saw the phrase scrawled on a mirror, he thought of it as “a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”8 It’s hard to know whether such a joke would today be the typical product of college wit. Or take a slightly different kind of example, T. S. Eliot’s play Sweeney Agonistes, which offers a wry reference to John Milton’s verse tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671). The titles of both Sweeney Agonistes and Gary Wills’s biography Nixon Agonistes (1969) assume at least a fleeting familiarity with Milton’s poem, or at least with its title. As with Albee’s Virginia Woolf, the wit lies in the apparent disjunction between the original and the subsequent allusion.
But the practice of allusion seems to have moved from the realm of classic literature to popular culture and politics. The old-style literary allusion required that the reader or hearer identify the reference. Thus, the American poet Amy Lowell could, in 1912, title a poem “Fresh Woods and Pastures New” and assume that her readers would understand the allusion to the last line of Milton’s “Lycidas.” An exhibition of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape drawings with that title toured in 2000, having originated in a university art gallery. Slate used the same phrase appositely as the title of a posted item on the move of a professor from one law school to another; the professor, it turned out, was writing a book on law and Shakespeare, so he was twice embarking on a new venture, field, and vocation.9 But these audiences of readers are comparatively cognoscenti. How many readers would catch a witty reference to “fresh woods and pastures new” today?
Let’s take another example, perhaps a more familiar one to modern readers, the phrase “miles to go before I sleep” from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (The alert reader of this book will see that I got from Milton’s woods to Frost’s woods by a process of association, though it is more conventional to associate Frost’s entry into the woods with that of Dante in his Inferno.) In any case, “miles to go before I sleep” has had a lively itinerary, having been used in 1974 as the title of a movie about a lonely senior citizen (played by Martin Balsam) and, with signifying parentheses, as the title of a love song, “Miles to Go (Before I Sleep),” which appears on a 1997 CD by Celine Dion. Arguably, audiences for both works would recognize the allusion to Frost, one of the most frequently taught lyric poets in the high school curriculum.
Some authors—like Laurence Sterne, for example, or T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce—demonstrably use allusion as a major constituent part of their own creative work.10 Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is, in formal and intellectual terms, both a tapestry of allusions and a send-up of, or a challenge to, the very idea of allusion. But if an allusion falls (or is dropped) and no one catches it, does it really allude?
T. S. Eliot famously added learned footnotes to his poem The Waste Land when it was published in 1922. References to Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ezekiel, Dickens, etc., are essential to the structure, tone, and content of the poem, but the footnotes are selective, didactic, and (deliberately?) pompous and condescending. In a preliminary note, for example, Eliot cites “Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge)” and “another work of anthropology … one which has influenced our generation profoundly: I mean The Golden Bough.”11 (No author is cited here; those who don’t know, don’t know.) Eliot proceeds to comment that “Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” The tone is droll, deadpan: there are sheep and goats, insiders and outsiders. And the language is scholarly piling-on: “anyone,” “immediately,” and the tantalizingly vague “certain references.” Again, if you know, you know. These are parody footnotes, allusions to footnotes, allusions to allusions. Yet, like many others of my generation, I wanted to know what the poets knew. Eliot’s poem and its footnotes were my homeschooling. I went in quest of the works of Mr. Frazer, The White Devil, and the philosophical writings of F. H. Bradley. I read Dante and Spenser and whatever translations of the Upanishads I could find. I also bought and read Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, a slim book that became a must-have on the bookshelves of the time, right next to all those New Directions poetry paperbacks.
Much critical sport has been made of Eliot’s learnedly mocking footnote on the song of the hermit-thrush, which cites the bird’s Latin name (Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii), Chapman’s commentary on it in the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, and a further ornithological observation from the annotator-poet: “Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” What Eliot doesn’t mention is that the hermit-thrush is Whitman’s bird and plays an important role in two of the best-known poems in the American canon, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, in which the solitary thrush becomes an American elegist and muse. This is a kind of allusion by omission, even a misdirection ploy, as the diligent student is invited to hunt down Frank Chapman’s field handbook to regional birds (not even the author’s full name is given) rather than to speculate upon the canonical place of the hermit-thrush in poetry.
But these notes, however belatedly added to the poem, are themselves works of art rather than of scholarship, as the next footnote makes clear. “The following lines,” writes Eliot, “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s) …” No academic could get away with this insouciance or this inexactitude. Despite my early eagerness to follow the track of the poet’s reading—rather like J. L. Lowes’s exhaustive study of Coleridge’s reading in The Road to Xanadu—such notes are tantalizing digressions rather than allusions, since their associations (assuming them to be truthful rather than completely fictive) are personal rather than public.
Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions were much of the moment when Eliot was writing. The unsuccessful but heroic Endurance expedition took place in 1914–16, and Shackleton died on yet another voyage to Antarctica in 1922, the year The Waste Land was published. But it’s also the case that the “delusion” to which Eliot here refers, on the part of the explorers in extremis, “that there was one more member than could actually be counted,” has its familiar literary-historical counterpart in the famous stories told about the early performances of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, when “the visible apparition of the Devill” was said to have joined the actors onstage.12 (The fact that Shackleton was educated at Dulwich College, founded by Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor who played Faustus on this occasion, may be put down to one of those coincidences it is perhaps not worth considering too curiously.)
What I want to emphasize is not the creative process, the ways—direct and oblique—that poets and writers get their ideas and find their words, but, rather, the difference between a reference and an allusion, indeed between a literary allusion (pointing toward another literary work or phrase) and a historical allusion. The borderline is tricky and fluid: if the phrase “who is the third who walks always beside you?” were taken by Eliot from the language of one of the Antarctic accounts, it would be—by my admittedly ad hoc standards—a literary, or perhaps better, a textual allusion. But if Eliot is imagining the phrase, taking an idea and bringing it to verbal life, then (for me) he is using Shackleton as a source, the way Shakespeare uses Holinshed’s Chronicles as a source, not as an allusion.
Why should this distinction matter? you may well ask. Because, I might reply—assuming we were to remain in this subjunctive mood—it speaks again to the heart of the literary enterprise. A conversation among texts is different from a conversation among persons, and a literary allusion is different from a historical reference. To take up the third, and manifestly overdetermined, case I mentioned above, that of James Joyce, whose range of literary and cultural allusion is simply staggering: to identify the Irish physician, poet, footballer, and wit Oliver St. John Gogarty as Joyce’s inspiration for the figure of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses is perhaps an interesting piece of historical fact. But when Stephen Daedalus in the same novel is obsessed with the phrase “Agenbite of inwit,” that is a literary allusion—as, indeed, is Stephen’s surname (and, if we want to pursue the question, his given name). The Ayenbite of Inwyt, as the title is usually spelled, is a Middle English work, the title of which means Prick of Conscience or Remorse of Conscience. Again-bite and in-wit are nicely Joycean terms that originate, here, in a mid-fourteenth-century Kentish dialect.
Allusion as a literary practice differs from the concept of intertextuality in that it ordinarily presumes an intention on the part of the author, whereas intertextuality—a term coined by the theorist Julia Kristeva—posits a relationship between or among literary works, a kind of textual conversation that is observed, participated in, and augmented by the reader. Now, obviously, the reader also participates, as we have seen, in getting or catching an allusion, and it is conceivable that some allusions are unconscious rather than conscious on the part of the author. Some of the most basic questions about authorial intention and authorial control of meaning touch upon this kind of issue: did the writer intend an allusion to poem X or author Y? If he or she cannot be said to have done so, then the claim is sometimes made that the critic is “reading too much into” the work, as if that intensive reading process were not legitimate, were not, in fact, at the very heart of the literary enterprise (and the “use” of literature).
Literary allusions may be overt or covert, manifest or hidden, direct or indirect, faithful or parodic. But there is a dog-whistle aspect to the process: some readers will hear the signal, and some will not. A reader who has never encountered the classical epic (or read any of the critical scholarship) may miss the fact that Joyce’s Ulysses is based on Homer’s Odyssey. More basically yet, that reader may not register the importance of an English-language poem designed or written in twelve books (Spenser’s plan for the unfinished Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, both reflecting on Virgil’s Aeneid), or hear the echoes and revisions of Milton’s poem in Wordsworth’s Prelude. All of these were standard literary-historical expectations for students of the canon in the middle of the twentieth century—as indeed was the Virgilian sequence of pastoral elegy, eclogue, and epic in the evolution of a poet. Or the notion of the “elegy on the death of the poet,” written by a mourning, and surviving, successor.
Such allusions are formal, not verbal, although some tropes can be both, like the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, or of Paradise Lost, passages the English student was in the past often expected to memorize and know by heart (in an idiom that goes back to Chaucer). Even the number of lines—the first eighteen lines of The Canterbury Tales, the first twenty-six lines of Paradise Lost—were engraved upon memory. Here they are:
Whan that Aprill with his shouers soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour:
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
5
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes, and the younge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
10
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sundry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
15
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blissful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
—Geoffrey Chaucer,
“General Prologue,” The Canterbury Tales
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
5
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
10
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aeonian mount, while it pursues
15
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou O spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
20
Dovelike sat’st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad’st it pregnant, what in me is dark
Illumine; what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
25
And justify the ways of God to men.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1
I print these two blockbuster passages together not because one refers to or alludes to the other but because between them, they could be said to author the English literary canon. How many students, even graduate students, can recite them now? Memorization, learning by heart, is out of fashion as a pedagogical skill, though students of all ages regularly memorize the lyrics of popular songs, the Pledge of Allegiance, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—although the latter is often committed to memory phonetically rather than in terms of units of sense, like the famous and comical rendition of a religious hymn as “Gladly the Crosseyed Bear.”
But there is much to learn from these passages committed to memory and recited out loud. The sequencing of ideas and rhythms in the Chaucer (“when,” “when,” “then,” as if there were an inescapable seasonal logic to these human migrations) and the Google Earth–like literary zoom lens, zeroing in on a tighter and tighter focus (from the calendar and the heavenly constellations to the desire for pilgrimage and the Canterbury pilgrims), are superbly indicative not only of the economy of art but of the wit of the poet. His ability to paint genre images comparable to that of Breugel (the birds are sleepless with spring fever and desires of their own) is matched by a poetic daring—and humor—that allows the last line to flirt with bathos, nine simple single-syllable words and a past participle expressing the homeliest of sentiments (“That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke”). “Seeke” and “seke” may rhyme, but aren’t they also homophones, words that share the same pronunciation? If so, what does that doubled relation (rhyme and homophony) do to the poetic logic? Does it make the sentiment seem redundant? Does it make the fictional poet-speaker sound unartful? And did I mention that this long unfolding pageant occurs over the course of a single sentence? Many critics have noticed that the weather report seems off: March in the environs of Canterbury is distinctly not a month of drought. This is a classical trope, the meteorology of Virgilian Rome, maybe, but not an accurate forecast for England. And yet those small birds are so distinctly native. Eighteen lines. And we have just begun to talk about them.
It would be possible to pose a similar set of initial questions and observations about the opening lines of Paradise Lost. A reader needs to start somewhere: since few English majors these days come to Milton with a prior knowledge of Homer and Virgil, of the traditional epic invocatio (address to the Muse) or principium (statement of the poem’s scope of action), or, indeed, of Latin syntax, will a close-reading strategy work for unpacking this powerful and moving passage? To begin a sentence or a work with of would be familiar structure in Latin, or in early-modern English (think of Bacon’s essays titled “Of Studies” or “Of Fame,” “Of Youth and Age,” “Of Truth,” and so on, themselves based on classical models). But—or and—for a modern reader, the experience of waiting six lines to get from the prepositional clause (“Of man’s first disobedience”) to the verb (“sing”) is a powerful tactic of suspension and delay. Milton’s enjambments (the carrying over of the sentence from one line to the next) are celebrated, and they teach a great deal about how literature works. What is the effect of ending the first line of verse with “the fruit” and then carrying the sense over to the next (“Of that forbidden tree”)? The effect of double take here is similar to the enjambment of Richard III’s opening lines: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York” (1.1.1–2). In both cases, the listener needs to rethink the syntax, and therefore the meaning, of what has gone before. “Fruit” refers both directly to the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and also to the results, or consequences, of this transgression. And so on. The personal “I” appears in the middle of line 12, after the caesura, or the pause in the verse. The commas, line breaks, caesurae, personal pronouns, and verb forms (invocations, assertions, declarations) are all underscored in the process of reciting aloud. So “having” these twenty-six lines may give the reader—even, or especially, the reader largely unfamiliar with Milton—a template for interpreting, understanding, analyzing, and responding to the rest of this long poem.
The arts of memory go back thousands of years, to cultures and literatures that flourished before printing, and before sophisticated systems of number and placement were developed to assist in retaining and collecting ideas, words, lists, and places so they could be readily and systematically recalled. What people memorize is culturally indicative, whether it’s words to a pop song or lines from a political treatise. But to a large extent, memorization has faded from the practices of higher education in literature, even as research on historical memory, medieval “memory theaters,” and other mnemonic devices, architectural memorials, and false memory syndrome have increasingly interested scholars in other disciplines. Being asked, or required, to memorize passages of poetry became associated with lack of imagination on the part of the teacher and lack of freedom on the part of the students.
When I began teaching a lecture course on Shakespeare many years ago, I initially thought of the memorization requirement as an old-fashioned practice that was basically a waste of time. How wrong I was. After a year or two, wanting my students to get closer to the text and to feel ownership of it, I restored the requirement that each student memorize twenty consecutive lines of text—any twenty but preferably a single speech—and perform it in the section, or small-group, part of the course. If a student were really reluctant, he or she could recite the lines in office hours, but once it became normalized, students were usually agreeable to, and often eager for, the chance to perform in front of their classmates. Some of the performances were simply stunning and taught me things I had not known about the plays. I remember with particular pleasure a young man who performed Cassius’s speech about Brutus (“Why man, he doth bestride the earth / Like a Colossus”) with an unbelievably strong outburst of bitter feeling toward the end, when Cassius reports having once rescued “the tired Caesar” from drowning. “And this man / Is now become a god.” I never read these lines now without hearing that student’s voice behind them, and he was only one of hundreds who did this exercise every year. I tell my students that they will always remember the lines they have memorized—that at their twenty-fifth class reunions, long after they have forgotten what I said about the plays in lecture, they would still be able to call up “their” Shakespeare speech from deep memory and recite it. I’ve asked some reunion classes about this, and they’ve said it is true. The lines had become their lines. They owned a piece of Shakespeare.
Memorization is often conflated with rote learning, in which nothing is really learned but only repeated. Lately, in the press, this kind of memorization has been associated with indoctrination or even with terrorist ideology, as in the account of madrassas (Islamic religious schools) that teach their students to memorize passages from the Koran. Of course, the United States has some texts that are routinely memorized as well, like the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, and “America the Beautiful.” Rarely do we subject any of these to textual analysis—as we would certainly do with poetry or other memorized passages in a literature class—and it might make for some very lively discussions to compare the merits, for example, of “purple mountain majesties” (which is what Katharine Lee Bates wrote in 1895) to “purple mountain’s majesty,” which is what many people sing.
The tenor of the Pledge of Allegiance as a recitation piece, and a political document and a loyalty oath, was changed when the phrase “under God” was inserted in 1954. From a poetic point of view, the rhythm was altered, as the line comes to a thudding halt: “One nation [heavy pause], under God [heavy pause], indivisible [heavy pause], with liberty and justice for all.” Equally significant and equally forgotten are (1) the fact that the pledge was originally written by a Baptist minister and Christian socialist and was distributed as part of a marketing ploy for a popular children’s magazine, The Youth’s Companion, in connection with the sale of flags in the public schools; and (2) the fact that from 1892 to 1942 the recitation of the pledge was accompanied by a stiff salute, the arm outstretched and the palm upward, that looked disconcertingly like the Nazi salute and was therefore changed, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the now familiar hand over the heart.
Or consider the case of “God Bless America.” We seldom if ever acknowledge that this song, which has become an informal but universal favorite, sung now at ballparks (especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) as well as in classrooms, was originally written in 1918 for an army revue called Yip Yip Yaphank and was popularized in 1938 by Irving Berlin and the singer Kate Smith as part of the home front resistance to Hitler. There is a tendency to think that it has always been part of the national spirit. We worry so much about performers hitting the high notes in the national anthem, and about their remembering the words, that we don’t ordinarily discuss questions like voice and address (who is speaking when we sing “O say can you see?,” and to whom?) or the fact that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is based on a particular historical event (the defense of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812).
In other words, memorization can either replace analysis and context or be combined with them. Without some sense of what the words mean, have meant, and might come to mean (Irving Berlin changed a key phrase in “God Bless America” from “to the right” to “through the night,” to avoid the sense that “right” meant the political right wing, not “impartial justice”), these are formulas, not texts. The same is true of works we consider part of a literary canon rather than a national (or religious) canon.
Here I want to stress a point I’ve made before about literary analysis—that it does not damage but tends to strengthen the status of the texts being analyzed. Their greatness, however we want to define that term, is enhanced rather than undercut by the discussion, interpretation, and examination of historical context. The works of Chaucer do not need to be protected from feminist analysis—just to give one example—any more than the Pledge of Allegiance needs to be protected from its origins in advertising tie-ins and marketing. The more we know, the more we discuss, the more we interpret, the more familiar we become with the language, nuance, history, and meanings (in the plural) of these texts, the better. And this is especially the case, I’d contend, with works that have achieved canonical status. They should be alive to us, which means that they grow and change as the times change and readers change. If they are immobile, marmoreal, and untouchable, venerated rather than read and interpreted, then they are no longer literary and no longer living.
Re-cognition is cognition. You never go anywhere for the first time—you have always somehow imagined or “experienced” it before, in dreams, in images, in novels, in travel documentaries, in fantasy. Hamlet is often described in just this way—as a web of quotations, a play that cannot be read for the first time because it has so permeated cultures around the world. The indubitable and indisputable pleasures of the canon are pleasures of rereading, and pleasures of recognition, and pleasures of shape-shifting, as “literary allusions” and “literary influence” and “swerving from strong predecessors” and “the burden of the past” have all made—as, again, is often said—the Western tradition into a single gigantic work of literature.13
The invocation of the phrase “Western tradition” raises a few central questions. First, is there a literary canon anymore? Was there ever? With fewer and fewer readers commanding the classical languages, and fewer studying French and German (instead of, for example, Spanish, the language of much of the Western Hemisphere, or various languages deemed politically or commercially important, like Mandarin, Japanese, or Arabic), has the idea of a literary canon lost its meaning or its cachet? The moves toward what was called “opening up the canon” (to women, to ethnic writers, to the token text from India or China) now look like a medial step—as doomsayers warned—toward discarding the notion altogether, since an inclusive canon cannot also be exclusive.14
It’s been remarked that any Web search under canon produces dozens of sites about photographical and digital products before you reach the first timid citation for literature. But perhaps this hieroglyphic is itself a lesson. The canon has changed. It has intersected, precisely, with the photographic, the reduplicative, the digital, the electronic. If you are looking for a copy of a poem—say, one of those I have discussed above—you can find it, often in many iterations, on the Web.
Yet ultimately this may be one reason to cherish the canon, or a canon, especially if we think of it as something like an interconnected reading list, rather than only as a list of Great Books. Mortimer Adler’s rather grandiose phrase “The Great Conversation,” used to advertise and publish his Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Ideas series, may seem to belong to a different era, but perhaps for that very reason the concept of a literary canon conversation across the continents and centuries is more important than ever.