A Canon You Can Name

The canon of a major literature behaves like geology. It is the deposit of centuries: academies, universities, prizes, publishing houses, school syllabuses, generations of critics arguing past one another until certain names settle into place and others wash out. No single person controls it, and its authority comes precisely from that. A tradition that no one author can be blamed for, or credited with, feels less like a choice and more like a fact of nature. You can contest the canon of French or Russian literature, but you are contesting something with the inertia of an institution behind it.

The canon of a small, young or minoritised literature behaves like architecture. It was built, recently, by hands that can be named. Often the same few people write the books, translate the foreign ones, teach the subject at the only university that offers it, edit the anthologies that fix the list, and write the literary history that turns the list into a narrative. Sometimes it is not a few people. Sometimes it is one. This changes what a canon is, and what it costs.

HANDS THAT CAN BE NAMED

Consider how the modern literature of Malta acquired its shape. For much of the late twentieth century one figure, Oliver Friggieri, was at once its most prominent poet and novelist, its leading critic, the professor who taught it at the national university, and the historian who wrote its standard account. To study Maltese literature was, to a considerable degree, to study it through him: his anthologies decided which earlier writers were remembered, his criticism set the terms in which they were read, his own work supplied the contemporary benchmark. None of this reflects on the man. It describes a structural fact about small literatures, where the labour of building a tradition is too large for the number of people available to do it, so the roles collapse into the same few biographies.

The same collapse appears elsewhere in different proportions. Basque literature over the last forty years has been, for most readers outside the language, very largely the work of Bernardo Atxaga, whose international success made him not only a writer but the de facto shape of what contemporary Basque writing was taken to be. And a young literature can be canonised with startling speed when the conditions are right: modern Hebrew built a contemporary canon within a couple of generations of becoming a living literary language again, with a handful of figures, Bialik foremost among them, installed as classics almost within their own lifetimes. What takes a large literature centuries can take a small or revived one decades, because there is no sediment to displace, only a space to be filled and few hands filling it.

THE CASE FOR THE ONE WHO DECIDES

There is a serious argument that this concentration performs a necessary function and should be valued rather than regretted. A literature is not a pile of books. It becomes a tradition only when someone takes the responsibility of saying which books matter, how they relate, what line runs from one to the next. In a large literature that work is distributed and invisible. In a small one it has to be done by identifiable people willing to make the claim and defend it. The defining figure gives a scattered body of writing a form it can be recognised by: a shape that can be taught to students, argued with by rivals, translated for outsiders, handed to the next generation as something to inherit or to rebel against. Without that act of shaping, a small literature can remain illegible even to itself, a set of individual talents with no sense of belonging to a common enterprise. The person who imposes a canon also gives the literature a spine.

THE COST OF A CANON YOU CAN NAME

The same act has a price, and the price is paid by everything the shaping leaves out. A canon assembled by a few people inevitably carries their angle of vision: their generation, their politics, their sense of what counts as serious, their blind spots. What falls outside that angle does not merely go unranked. It risks going unrecorded, because in a small literature there is rarely a second, competing apparatus to catch what the first one missed. The most familiar instance is gender. National canons assembled largely by men have, with dreary regularity, thinned out the women who wrote alongside the canonised, who were then recovered decades later by scholars asking why the tradition looked so male and discovering that it had been made to. Recovery is possible, but it is expensive and slow, and it depends on someone deciding the recovery is worth doing.

There is a subtler cost. A canon made by few presents itself, like every canon, as a discovery rather than a decision: this is simply what our literature is. In a large tradition the pretence is at least cushioned by the number of hands involved. In a small one it can amount to a single sensibility wearing the mask of historical necessity. The choices that follow from it, which language variety is literary and which is dialect, which register is serious and which is folkloric, which themes are central and which provincial, get transmitted as the natural order of things rather than as the preferences they were. And because the apparatus is thin, the canon is at once rigid and fragile: rigid, because there is no distributed process through which it might be revised from within; fragile, because it can rest so heavily on particular people that it wobbles when their authority fades.

KNOWING IT WAS BUILT

None of this yields a verdict, because the enabling condition and the risk are the same condition. A small literature cannot have the speed and coherence of an authored tradition without also having its exposure. Remove the defining figures and you do not get a fairer, more distributed canon; you get no canon at all, and a body of writing that struggles to be seen as a body. Keep them and you accept that what is handed down as the tradition is, to a degree a large literature never has to admit, the judgment of a few namable people.

What a small literature can do is know which kind of thing its canon is. A tradition that takes itself for geology will defend its list as nature and treat every challenge as vandalism. A tradition that recognises itself as architecture knows the building is recent, knows who drew the plans, and knows that what was built can be extended and partly rebuilt without the whole structure coming down. That knowledge does not weaken the canon; it is what lets a canon made by few stay honest, visible about its own authorship and therefore open to the question every canon should have to answer, which is who decided, and who was not in the room when they did.