Whipping Homer, Cudgeling Shakespeare: Thinking Canon-Tradition

Abstract

Whipping Homer, Cudgeling Shakespeare:Thinking Canon-Tradition Ranjan Ghosh (bio) Homer I deem worthy—in a trial by combat—of good cudgeling,and Archilochos the same. —Heraclitus (2001, Fragment 119) It may sound paradoxical, but any understanding of canon comes with canon-loading, with an engagement with "waste" and pleasure, turbulence and tradition; it's a world circumscribed by world-making, a system which just does not transcend itself but emerges from the negations that it builds and builds it. William Franke points out that we should not forget that currency was given to the term also by Polykleitos' Kanon, his Pythagoras-inspired treatise on sculpture with its classical ideal of perfect proportions and symmetry as the source of aesthetic beauty. This ideal was embodied most perfectly in his Doryphoros (circa 450 B.C.), a male nude sculpture which he named—like the lost treatise whose principles it illustrated—"Kanon." Given this polygeneticism bringing together multiple semantic backgrounds, typically normative terms such as "canon" and "revelation," as well as "divinity" and "prophecy," take on senses that evade the statically traditional. (Franke 2014, 2) Canon, thus, assumes a totalization with its own inherent stress and stocasticism; a totalizing system or gesture that need not stand hostile to "imaginative nature of human tradition and of the inextricably poetic nature of all our knowledge, which makes it an affair of relations without intrinsic limits—of continual, unbounded 'carryings over' ('meta-phor' in its etymological sense)" (Franke 2014). If a canonical text is considered beautiful its harmony is not about parts aggregating and cohering in summation to create the whole; there is an a "self-interrupting whole—one animated, as it were, by a 'too much' of pressure from within its midst" (Santner 2001, 136). [End Page 445] Harold Bloom is somewhat overbearingly right in pointing out that "all canonizing of literary texts is a self-contradictory process, for by canonizing a text you are troping upon it, which means you are misreading it. Canonization is the most extreme form of what Nietzsche called Interpretation, or the exercise of the Will-to-Power over texts" (Bloom 1975, 100). He points out that "tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion" (Bloom 1997). Canon-formation has an interruptive-continuity with tradition—being enframed by tradition is also about producing tradition within a transactional metastability. Simon Bronner quite rightly sees in tradition a "conceptual softness": "given to emotional usage, tradition can appear imprecise, inconsistent, and infuriatingly elusive. At the same time, therein lies its significance, for it offers something essential in the human condition" (Bronner 1998, 10). If we analyze the complicated rapport between culture and tradition, we are somehow tempted to see what makes our culture of thinking and what makes us "traditional." Whether with Marx or Freud or Max Weber, tradition is considered as a dead lump that needs to be transcended—an "unreflective habit"—something that impedes progression by shouting out from the dead. Tradition promotes an unquestioning cycle of repetition, an encrustation that we do not consciously seek to alter. But if tradition is seen to declare a continuity with the past, the fact of being "traditional" is achieved through "critical thinking": what comes home is the realization that tradition conceals spaces for innovative introjections and zones of refiguration. This is made possible through our reconceptualization of the social, political and other disciplinary forces. Traditions, therefore, offer themselves to be invented, manipulated and rethought. They refuse to stay as mere voices from the past that reaffirm their unchangeability. Tradition is formed through "whipping" and with it comes our ways of forming and sustaining the canon. It is interesting to follow Josef Pieper here: The "trans" which inheres in tradition and which is so clearly articulated in the verb "transmettre" with which the French language indicates the action associated with tradition—this "trans" appears to indicate three places: first, the place from which something is taken to be transmitted; secondly, the place to which it is brought; thirdly, the place where the transmitter happens to be. To "transport...