Rhetorical Device | Fire the Literary Canon

Fire the Literary Canon

After having read many books on the craft of writing, especially ones written by authors I admire, I’ve noticed that each author expresses, in the course of building a framework in which to discuss the novel, a personal literary canon.

The following table provides a brief comparison of the canon as implied by John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist.

I’ve made some editorial judgements as to when a passing reference without a specific citation should be elided (Gardner’s mention of Nietzsche, for instance) or when a discourse without a citation is sufficiently long to merit inclusion (such as Kundera’s discussion of Hegel).

Author/Work Cited	John Gardner	Milan Kundera	Mario Vargas Llosa
Alighieri, Dante The Divine Comedy	•	•
Austen, Jane Emma	•
Balzac, Honoré de Les illusions perdues	•	•	•
Baudelaire, Charles Le Fleur du Mal		•
Bierce, Ambrose An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge			•
Beckett, Samuel	•
Beowulf	•
Bellow, Saul Seize the Day	•
Beauvoir, Simone de All Men Are Mortal			•
Broch, Hermann The Sleepwalkers		•
Borges, Jorge Luis The Secret Miracle The Book of Imaginary Beings Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius			•
Burroughs, William S. Junky The Ticket That Exploded	•		•
Butor, Michel Passing Time			•
Caillois, Roger Anthologie du Fantastique			•
Casares, Adolfo Bioy The Celestial Plot			•
Carpentier, Alejo The Kingdom of the World Journey to the Seed			•
Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote de la Mancha	•	•	•
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Journey to the End of Night Death on the Installment Plan	•		•
Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales The Book of the Duchess	•
Conrad, Joseph Under Western Eyes		•
Cortázar, Julio Hopscotch The Idol of the Cyclades Letter to a Young Lady in Paris The Maenads The Night Face Up The Winners			•
Dafoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe			•
Dario, Felix Ruben Garcia Sarmiento			•
Delibes, Miguel Five Hours with Mario			•
Dickens, Charles Nicholas Nickleby	•
Denon, Dominique Vivant Baron de Point de lendemain		•
Descartes, René		•
Diderot, Denis Jacque le Fataliste et son Maître		•
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich The Possessed Crime and Punishment	•	•
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy Sister Carrie	•
Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying Flags in the Dust Mosquitoes Sanctuary Sartoris The Wild Palms The Hamlet	•		•
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary A Sentimental Education The Temptation of Saint Anthony	•	•	•
Fuentes, Carlos Aura, Terra Nostra		•	•
Gass, Willian Omensetter’s Luck The Pedersen Kid	•
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von The Sorrows of Young Werther		•
Gogol, Nikolai		•
Gombrowicz, Witold Ferdydurke		•
Goytisolo, Juan Juan the Landless			•
Grass, Gunter The Tin Drum			•
Hašek, Jaroslav The Good Soldier Schweik		•
Heidegger, Martin Being and Time	•	•
Hemingway, Ernest The Sun Also Rises the Old Man and the Sea The Killers			•
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich		•
Hesse, Hermann Steppenwolf			•
Homer Iliad	•	•
Hugo, Victor Les Miserables			•
Husserl, Edmund Logische Untersuchungen		•
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw	•		•
Joyce, James Ulysses Dubliners Finnegan's Wake	•	•	•
Kafka, Franz Amerika The Trial The Metamorphosis The Castle		•	•
Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de Les Liaisons Dangereuses		•
Leibniz, Gottfried		•
Lem, Stanislaw	•
Lowes, John Livingston The Road to Xanadu			•
Mann, Thomas Doctor Faustus Death in Venice		•
Márquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude Love in the Time of Cholera			•
Matorell, Joanot Tirant Lo Blanc			•
Melville, Herman Moby Dick Bartleby the Scrivener Omoo	•		•
Miller, Walter A., Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz	•
Montalban, Manuel Vazquez Galindez			•
Monterroso, Augosto The Dinosaur			•
Musil, Robert The Man Without Qualities		•
Nabokov, Vladimir	•	•
Nietzsche, Friedrich		•
Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen		•
Onetti, Juan Carlos A Brief Life			•
Orwell, George 1984	•	•
Pascal, Blaise Pensées		•
Proust, Marcel À la recherche du temps perdu	•	•	•
Pynchon, Thomas Gravity’s Rainbow	•
Rabelais, François Gargantua and Pantagruel		•
Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas M. Nicolas			•
Rhodes, David Rock Island Line	•
Richardson, Samuel Clarissa	•
Rilke, Rainer Maria The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge		•
Robbe-Grillet, Alain For a New Novel, Jealousy			•
Rosa, Joao Guimaraes The Devil to Pay in the Backlands			•
Rulfo, Juan Pedro Paramo			•
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin Port Royal			•
Sainte-Exupery, Antoine de Citadelle			•
Sartre, Jean-Paul What is Writing?		•
Schiller, Friedrich		•
Steinbeck, John Grapes of Wrath			•
Stendhal Le Rouge et le Noir		•
Sterne, Laurence Tristam Shandy		•	•
Stevenson, R.L. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde			•
Stifter, Adalbert Indian Summer		•
Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel			•
Thousand and One Nights, The			•
Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina	•	•
Warren, Robert Penn All the King’s Men	•
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine			•
Wilson, Edmund To the Finland Station			•
Wilson, Robert Schrodinger’s Cat	•
Wolfe, Thomas The Autobiography of an American Novelist			•
Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway Orlando			•

The Shape of Their Appreciation

There is, as one might expect, a cultural bias: Gardner lists more Americans, Kundera more Germans and Slavs, and Llosa more Latin Americans than do the others. Additionally, Kundera writes at length on the Western philosophical tradition; for him, the novel is inextricably bound to the cultural climate that produced it, which is one of the reasons he is the only one of the three to discuss the influence of the composers Bach, Beethoven, Janáček, Bartok and Schönberg on the modern European novel.

Gardner, who wrote a retelling of Beowulf from Grendel’s perspective, is the only one of these authors to cite early Anglo-Saxon and Middle English works like Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, probably because neither is as culturally important to non-anglophones¹1. One could say, for instance, that the Italian Canterbury Tales is The Decameron, while the French Beowulf is the Chanson de Roland..

One does, however, find points of confluence: Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the collected work of Honoré de Balzac, Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu are universally lauded as milestones in the development of literature. The Quixote is referred to by all three men as the first European novel, Madame Bovary as the transition point to modernity, and Proust and Joyce as the vanguard of what would become the post-modern novel: the interior life depicted as the greatest frontier — however, Virginia Woolf, who was doing work of equal value during the same period, is only fully recognized by Llosa.

Kundera mentions no female authors, Llosa only Woolf, and Gardner, though he mentions several, only delves into Jane Austen’s Emma; surely this exaggerates the relative absence of female authors up until the late twentieth century, but it’s hard to know by how much.

None of these authors seem to share Madison Bell’s theory, as stated in Narrative Design, that film is the primary source of new narrative techniques in the late twentieth century, and only Gardner acknowledges the contributions of science fiction, but he does so with characteristic style:

“Though it is true that most science fiction is junk, some of it is excellent. Certain books spring immediately to mind — some of Ray Bradbury’s work or Kurt Vonnegut’s, certain modern classics like Brave New World and 1984, not to mention works of obvious high-class intent, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, William Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded, or the work of major writers outside America, like Kobo Abe, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, or Doris Lessing. The number of aesthetically valuable works of science fiction is greater than the academy generally notices. One finds intelligence and emotional power in, for instance, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the fiction of Samuel R. Delaney [sic], some of Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Isaac Asimov, and, when he holds in the fascism, Robert Heinlein. One finds a fair measure of literary merit in Algis J. Budrys’s Michaelmas or the work of Robert Wilson, whose novels (for instance, Schrodinger’s Cat) out-Barth John Barth without sacrificing the primary quality of good fiction, interesting storytelling. And science fiction is the domain of one of the greatest living writers, Stanislaw Lem.”

Cautionary Pedagogy

Because Llosa’s and Gardner’s works are directed at young writers, they offer a great deal of advice and insight into the nature of the process. Llosa, for instance, likens the need to write to a tapeworm that lives inside his gut, travels with him everywhere and experiences everything he does — a parasite for which he lives. Gardner recommends attempting any and every other vocation before succumbing to a lifetime of impoverished servitude to a fickle and unappreciative muse.