The millennium's canon

How does one draw up a list of key authors and their works ? Either they can be slotted in chronological order or be divided into major categories - dramatists, novelists, poets. These classifications may or may not hold. In any case, the best writers, important to all nations, are those who depict humanity in a meaningful way.There are bound to be misses in the 1000 years of literary history, but there should be no inclusion that has not stood the test of literary durability. RAVIVYAS draws up his shortlist for the millennium.

SOMETIME in the Thirties, the American poet Ezra Pound issued one the most famous diktats in literature: "Make it New," he declared, and added that "literature was news that stays news." By this Pound meant a great deal more than the age-old responsibility of the writer to be original and novel. What he meant was that if authors and their works were to endure the vicissitudes of time they would need to possess a certain strangeness, a mode of originality that could not be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange, when we begin to see and feel the world as they do. It is the idea that literature has a special obligation, an avant garde duty to go ahead of their age and along with that to establish "a tradition of the new", that is, to break almost entirely with the past, assert their connections with the present and the future. But above all, when you read a canonical work, you must encounter an uncanniness, an awakening rather than a fulfilment, rather like Kafka's "ice-axe that breaks the sea frozen inside us." Tradition, then, was not to be just a handing down or a process of benign transmission; it was also to become a conflict between past genius and present aspirations. This cycle of achievement goes from Dante's The Divine Comedy to Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame, from strangeness to strangeness.

But how does one draw up a list of the key authors and their works that are indispensable to contemporary literacy because the quality of 'strangeness' can never be defined or described? Where do we place the major writers - Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce? Where do we slot in Petrarch, Rabelais, Aristo, Spenser, Ben Johnson, Racine, Swift, Rousseau. Blake, Pushkin, Melville, Henry James, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Balzac, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Browning, Chekhov, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henrik Ibsen, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Luigo Pirandello, Jean Paul Sartre, and so many others?

One way would be to represent canons by their crucial figures. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens for England; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for Russia; Dante for Italy; Cervantes for Spain; Goethe and Thomas Mann for Germany; Borges and Neruda for Latin America, and so on. Or, we slot them by standards that are historical, that is, in chronological order? Or divide them into major categories - dramatists, novelists, poets? Any of these classifications would hold - or not hold, depending on how you see them - but if you believe that literature is not about language but about life and that the best writers who are most important to all nations are those who depict humanity in the most meaningful way - which is why the best French playwright is Shakespeare in French - categorisation is perhaps not the best way to draw up a core list.

Of course there is the argument that a writer's virtues are inseparable from his or her language, which is indeed true for poetry. However, it does not hold true for prose or even drama written in verse. To begin with, the most moving, the most enlightening part of any fiction is the story; it is not through words but through structure that a writer depicts how things fit together in the world, and the characters reveal their innermost being not through speeches but through actions. With these qualifications, the critical shortlist for the millennium would have to be your own, that which you have discovered through the adventure of private discovery, of passionate digression. To each his own then; there are bound to be misses in the 1000 years of literary history, but there should be no inclusion that has not stood the test of literary durability - according to Dr. Johnson at least 100 and more years of continuous usage since its first publication. Given the 'ifs' and 'buts' the pecking order would be somewhat as follows (Except for Shakespeare who stands like a 'colossus' over them all, the order could be shuffled around).

1. By far and away, Shakespeare is our greatest contemporary because as Keats once said about him, "he left nothing to say about nothing or anything." The core of Shakespeare's thoughts, the reason for their survival for the past 500 years is because we are using his lines (mostly unconsciously) in everyday speech all the time. Shakespeare's genius lies in his inventive and creative nature - in its scorn for tradition, custom, fetish, in his search for the 'real thing.' Just a random sampling to show much of him has passed imperceptibly into our language and our lives:

My salad days,/ When I was green in judgment. Antony and Cleopatra

All the world's stage,/ And all the men and women are merely players:/ They have their exits and entrances:/ And one man in his time plays many parts,/ His acts being in seven stages. At first the infant./ .....And then the whining school boy, with his satchel/ And the shining morning face, creeping like snail/ Unwilling to school. And then the lover/ Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,/ Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard./ Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,/ Seeking the bubble reputation/ Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice......... And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts/ Into the lean and slippered pantaloon/ With spectacles on nose and pouch on side./ His youthful hose well saved a world too wide/ For his shrunk sank; and his big manly voice./ Turning again toward childish treble, pipes/ And whistles in his sound./ Last scenes of all./ That ends this strange eventful history,/ Is second childishness and mere oblivion./ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As You like it

The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

I'll teach you differences.

King Lear

To be or not to be; that is the question.

Hamlet

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words words.

There is nothing good or bad, but thinking

makes

it so.

To be honest, as this world goes/ Is to be one

man picked out of ten thousand.

Though this be madness, yet there is a method

in't.

There is a divinity that shapes our ends./

Rough-

hew them how we will.

Hamlet

One could go on and on. But when you read the plays and the sonnets, their sheer impact on our lives and the mastering seizure of our thoughts and feelings compels the question whether in the genesis of great art and its effects upon us, there is some analogy to the coming into being of life itself; whether it is not an act of God. No prose paraphrase can give a fair equivalent of Shakespeare's words; nor can we translate 'downward' Hamlet's soliloquies, Macbeth's meditations on death or Clepatra's lament for her fallen lover. You have to simply read them yourself and draw your own conclusions that will change as time passes by. Virginia Woolf said it all: "To record one's impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year would be to virtually record one's own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments on what we know." There can be no end to Shakespeare either now, or for all time to come.

2. One of the great dramatic tempers after Shakespeare was Dostoevsky whose Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov showed that the most dangerous of all religions was the new-found faith in the power of reason, science, industry, revolution and the perfectibility of man. Until you have read him, you have not quite realised how monstrously stupid and twisted human beings can be, or simply that man is not a rational creature because of "the crooked timber of humanity." Dostoevsky works embody all our reasons for despair, all the reactionary facts of life.

As against Dostoevsky stands Tolstoy, a mind intoxicated with reason and fact, thirsting for truth in War and Peace and Anna Karenina "keeping in at all times in the high road to life." Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were different from each other but they were the two Russian masters who shared the all-pervading sense of the impermanence of the Russian way of life, who were prepared to listen to new answers to every question. In both, there was a hunger for all sorts of panaceas - most of them deadly - but also for the truth. It is the questions they raise that matter, not the answers. But the answers they provided were uncertain and tentative, a social version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that arose because of the fallibility of the observer. In Dostoevsky and Tolstoy there are characters who compel you to think (Dostoevsky's Ivan telling his Brothers that "if everything in life was rational nothing would happen"), an intellectual friction that question the given rules of those who govern society.

To go back to the European classics, the obvious winners - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes - who cover a period of a thousand years from about 650 B.C. to 350 A.D. fall outside our millennium and therefore strictly cannot be included here. But the history of classical western philosophy and literature is no more than a series of footnotes in Plato's The Republic, The Last Days of Socrates, Aristole's Poetics, Homer's Odyssey and The Iliad and should be included as an introduction to Greek and Latin literature that was to follow. (The Greeks are included in some literature courses of Indian universities). What should be stressed is that a great deal of medieval European and English literature is really a spin off from the ancient classics. For instance, Dante's Italian classic, The Divine Comedy which is one man's vision into the state of souls after death written with the purpose of saving all mankind is a form of a journey like the Odyssey. The poem, divided into three parts, begins with The Inferno passes through Purgatory and finally ends in Paradise. The Cantos provide an understanding of much religious medieval literature and centuries later inspired Ezra Pound with his own Cantos. In our case, too, a great deal of the sub-texts of Indian regional literatures can be appreciated only by a close reading of The Mahabharata. Hence the inclusion of ancient classics in any listing of the millennium's literary landmarks.

No elegy for the Western canon can be complete without an appreciation of the canonical critic. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709- 1784), "unmatched by an critic in any nation before and after him," according to the Shakespearean scholar, Harold Bloom. Good as he was great, he was wildly strange, a strangeness that has been conveyed in the best of literary biographies, Boswell's Life of Johnson. Dr. Johnson wrote what has been described as "wisdom literature" which is conveyed in the famous sentence early in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765): "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature." Two more Johnsonian 'truths' from the Life:

"A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage married immediately after his wife's death. Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

"It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of the person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." A good novelist is also a social historian; the operative word is also. If you go by this criterion there is a great deal in the 18th and 19th century English literature that needs to be checked out: Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Jane Austen (Persuasion), Dickens (Bleak House), George Eliot's Middlemarch, all of whom, in some form or another, are studied in academic courses.

To come down quickly to the modern age, the two Americas, North and South, Africa and the rest. Going by Pound's criterion of "newness", the writers who have been established and will take us comfortably into the next millennium and may be beyond would be the following:

Henrik Ibsen: Basically, for A Doll's House which has been described as the most influential play ever written on the 'woman question' and the 'marriage problem' where the 'child wife' Nora walks out on her husband and slams the door offstage in a final gesture of a defence - the best remembered ending in modern drama. The play has been a clarion call of the women's movement ever since it was published in 1879 and a general promise of self-realisation that is afforded to all women who break out of the shackles of marriage.

Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and Lord Jim. Basically these are psychological novels where characters come face to face with some double, a secret sharer who resembles them, reminds them of the ambiguity of the world and the psychological incompleteness of the self, and initiates them into an awareness of chaos and duplicity.

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. Mann was to describe his books as journeys into decadence and also pursuits of "the idea, the concept of a future humanity which has experienced the deepest knowledge of sickness and death."

Marcel Proust: Remembrances of Things Past, the title taken from a Shakespearean sonnet: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon remembrances of things past...". The three- volume novel is a story of lost time - time lost in two ways. It is lost because time has disappeared into the past and cannot be brought back again. And it has been lost because it has been wasted in frivolous social activity and irrelevancies.

James Joyce: Ulysses has been almost unanimously voted as the greatest novel of the 20th Century. It is a novel about a day in the life of three Dubliners which uses a battery of technical devices like the stream of consciousness where events are remembered not in chronological order but as free association brings them to mind. In a sense, it is a description of how the mind works, not always in a logical sequences but rather like the swing of a pendulum from one extreme to another.

T. S. Eliot: The Wasteland is the greatest poem of the 20th Century. It is a poem from which much modern English verse has flowed and deals with post First World War despair, spiritual drought and anarchy.

Luigi Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author, a play that is a celebration of the double vision that is fundamental to modern literature, a way of seeing everything in the light of its opposite, "where every yes becomes a no, a spirit of unmasking, of seeing life if not naked, then in its undershirt."

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway is a stream of consciousness novel, rather like Joyce's Ulysses where Clarissa Dolloway, a social parasite has a set of tasks to get through in a day which she manages to do despite the endless distractions of her thoughts and sense.

Franz Kafka: The Trial and The Castle. Both are prophecies of the modern bureaucratic state where the dividing lines between jurisdictions are blurred and asks a number of disturbing questions: In what relation do bureaucracy and corruption increase, why one and the same man can be responsible for everything and for nothing and how officials mostly hide behind each other, and so why it is difficult to discover what any official is responsible for.

Shaw has been attributed with the epigram that describes Britain and America as two nations divided by the same language. American English (as distinct from British English) which is increasingly being accepted everywhere is close to the bone, spare, frugal, hard-boiled that seems best to describe modern times with its hectic pace of life Apart from the 19th century American novel. Melville's Moby Dick, Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is the 20th century that will dominate the next century: Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Saul Bellow's Dangling Man and Herzog. And this is not merely because of the vitality of the language but because they deal with basic human themes - racism, discrimination, the diversity and perversity of human life which is what all literature deals with.

It is the Latin America novel that has dominated the literary scene in the second half of the 20th century. The names are all familiar: Borges, Neruda, Cortazar, Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fuents and many, many others who will carry us comfortably into the next century. And the reasons are not merely that they deal with universal themes of humanity in all its colours but that there is a structural change that has been brought into the modern novel: the future - the notion of that which is yet to happen - is set at the back of the speaker. The past which can be seen because it has already happened, lies all before him. The protagonist backs into the future unknown; memory moves forward, hope backwards. This is the exact reversal of the primary coordinates by which the Anglo-American novel has hitherto been organised. What the Latin American have brought home is that the novel is "plasticity itself. It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review - "newness" in Pound's dictum. Having come so far, it must be said that much has been left out. Yeats, Beckett, some of the African writers and Arab writers? And what about ourselves? Going by the standards set out, it is difficult to include very many in the millennium's list. May be in the second string, but just about may be. After all, as the American essayist, Susan Sontag said, "literature is not an equal opportunity employer", or what Salman Rushdie described as "the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports."

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