To the Editors:
While there is no denying the provocative nature of Mark Helprin’s “The Canon Under Siege” in your September 1988 issue, a number of his assertions strike mc as mistaken. Mr. Helprin charges academia with using literature for political ends, discarding “traditionalist” works in favor of writing by “women, minorities, and people of color.” I agree with him that judging literature according to the sex or color of the writer is deplorable. However, isn’t it closer to the truth to say that academia is engaged in an impassioned argument over the merits of certain “traditionalist” works? After all, are the established writers to remain the only names on the list? Are they never to undergo a revaluation, a comparison with newer voices? Many “traditionalists” were not always so. They too waged a struggle for assimilation and acceptance. Mr. Helprin mentions Galileo as an example of a “traditionalist” dismissed by the academic “guerrillas” simply because he was a “white male.” But there was a time when Galileo was dismissed precisely because he was not a “traditionalist” and his ideas were seen as threatening to the establishment viewpoint. I am not saying that we should discard Galileo or Dante or Shakespeare in favor of more contemporary or “politically correct” names, but rather that the debate and discussion that pits one group against the other should be allowed to run its course. Furthermore, academia is very definitely the setting in which the argument should air itself.
At another point in his essay Mr. Helprin writes: “Boat person and peer will choose and reject similarly, for the qualities of merit lie in the objects themselves rather than in the circumstances of those who perceive them.” If only this were true; then the whole matter of critical acumen, taste, perception, and discrimination would be a simple affair. Everyone would acknowledge the superiority of a Proust, a James, a Nabokov. We know, however, that these writers are not immediately accessible and that only great readers, cultivated readers, can fully appreciate them. Proust wrote, “In reality, each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book. It is this reading within himself what is also in the book which constitutes the proof of the accuracy of the latter and vice versa—at least to a certain extent, for any discrepancy between the two texts should be laid to the blame of the reader, not the author.” Or put another way: “If an ass peers into a mirror one cannot expect an angel to peer back.” Unfortunately “qualities of merit” are very much a matter of the “circumstances of those who perceive them.”
Finally, while I am delighted at Mr. Helprin’s ravaging of the minimalists I can only wonder at the timing of his assault. They have been busily producing their brand of fiction for quite some time. To rail at them now is a little like yelling “fire” when the barn has nearly burned to the ground. The armies of minimalist writers have advanced too far and Mr. Helprin’s essay, much to our regret, can do little to check their progress. Nevertheless, those readers who perceived the dangers of the minimalist movement early on can only be gratified by Mr. Helprin’s attack, however overdue it may be.
Marcela Breton
Huntington, CT
Mark Helprin replies:
I am grateful to Marcela Breton for her letter, and I will try to respond to her comments.
In regard to maintaining or altering a literary “canon,” she says that “the debate and discussion that pits one group against another should be allowed to run its course,” one group being “the established writers,” and the other, those whose ideas are “threatening to the establishment viewpoint.” I suggest to her that the outcome of a struggle between groups is of far less importance than the appeal of reason and good sense to those who read, write, and think outside of groups. If the Muslims and the Christians fight at Tours, does the outcome determine who is God, or does it determine who fights the best that day at Tours? The answer is obvious and I will not belabor the point except to anticipate the rejoinder that no “established” belief is anything but the result of the political and perceptual victories of its proponents. I claim that this, in face, is not so, and that the established canon (something which, in my essay, I took pains to describe as loosely defined and subject to continual revision) is determined by the same kind of process that makes the weather in the world. In a planetary weather system the infinite variations of a relatively small number of common laws and processes make ever recurring seasons that are never exactly alike but always strikingly similar. A civilization is much the same, in that a relatively small number of common themes and shared experiences can be expressed in an infinite number of ways that nonetheless have common threads running through them. The totalitarian impulse is to cut those threads and dictate new criteria (no pun intended) through one or another type of force, or what Marcela Breton refers to as “struggle.” “Struggle” burned most of the lewish books in Europe. “Struggle” elevated Socialist Realism and silenced Pasternak. “Struggle” gave laurels to D’Annunzio and suppressed Croce. “Struggle” destroyed the library at Alexandria, made Galileo recant, and deprived Van Gogh of an audience. What country is this, anyway? Syria?
As if enough difficulties do not exist in art without considering political interference a benefit, Miss Breton then goes on to inform us that” ‘qualities of merit’ are very much a matter of . . . ‘those who perceive them,’” and that “if an ass peers into a mirror one cannot expect an angel to peer back.” I know this is not so, because I have read Shakespeare. An angel peered back. This is because literature is not a mirror, it is a window. Fascists, Marxists, and inflexible dogmatists of all kinds do their best to make it a mirror, but it resists. When it does, when despite their efforts they cannot see themselves but are forced to look out into a starry sky—because the glass is clear and true—they simply throw it out. Hence the demand at Stanford that the books on the reading list “reflect” the student body. Perhaps I am a freak, but when I arrived as a freshman, and thereafter, I had a great passion to know about nearly everything except myself. After all, I had been imprisoned in the myopia of childhood and youth for the previous eighteen years, and suddenly I had a chance to discover nothing less than the whole world. If today’s undergraduates (and those of their professors captured by arrested development) are convinced that the great and powerful telescopic eye of literature is nothing more than a mirror that reflects upon them, and that the greatness of a Dante or a Raphael rests in the accidental abilities and political inclinations of later generations, they need most of all to study that history and literature that they do not want to study. It would show them by example that qualities of merit do reside in the thing itself rather than in the perception of it. That is part of the magic of Western Civilization and why they would do well to look into it.
As for the sentiment that my attack on the minimalists is too little and too late, because they “have advanced too far,” I must report that I have been urged to lay off them because they are so much in decline and so pathetic. In both cases, horses were invoked. In this case, the horse (by implication) was already out the barn door before I attempted to close it. In the other, the horse was dead and I was cruelly beating it. This is positively Manichean. What should I think?
The answer occurs to me, and it is this. At the moment of their greatest success, those who have risen are most vulnerable, for it is from that point that they proceed downward. Hence the split perception. Needless to say, the best time to attack your adversary is when he has reached his very apogee. He has put all his cards on the table, his energy is spent, he has nowhere to go, and he presents a rich and substantial target. As a soldier, I was taught neither to fear nor to pity my adversaries. Perhaps that will explain the timing of my essay, and perhaps Miss Breton will forgive me for it.