Entering the 20th century, only about 20% of the human population could read.
So even with nearly 900 movies and over 500 television shows (just counting those which are scripted - who knows the number of nonfiction programs), you still might miss seeing the most recent Marvel movie, Oscar-nominee, or binge-able series because you're too busy uploading pictures of your puppy, commenting on Reddit, or watching Tasty videos.
This doesn't even begin to address the issue of translation and multiculturalism. Since translation has gotten better, and more content is available from more cultures and literacies, this adds another strain to mastering even a single Canon. We have unprecedented access to the music and literature of other cultures - traditions that are centuries or millennia old. And in the last 100 years we've added, and disseminated, the new media products of these cultures as well: film, games, comics, television. Time spent "straying" into a different Canon is time not spent on mastering your own, as Harold Bloom seemed to assert.
Since the population was 1.6 billion - one fifth of our current total entering 2020 - that means roughly 320,000,000 people could read. Those who were literate were connected to the millennia-old literary traditions: India, the Middle East, East Asia (China, Korea, Japan), and Europe. The latter had spread its literacy globally. Other literacies, like the Mayan, had gone extinct by 1900. But in the land where they'd once written Mayan glyphs, Spanish, a European literacy, had come to dominate. Likewise, English traveled to Great Britain's commonwealth and colonies, and French migrated to places like French Indochina.
These core literacies were, in the late 18- and early 1900s, just starting to be shared and exchanged, and translated, globally. Chinese classics didn't get translated into English until the 1840s - despite both civilizations having literary traditions thousands of years old. And of course, much of the translation done in the 1800s is horribly inadequate for today.
Take, for example of these inadequacies, English translations of even close neighbors: such as Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, from the French. Victorian sensibilities led to whole sections of the work being deemed "untranslatable" on account of being too bawdy. Similarly, Thomas Bowdler famously "cleaned up" Shakespeare to be less offensive, and these translation and publication practices continued well into the 20th century, often earning the term 'Bowdlerization'. Only recently have these issues begun to be addressed.
Classic texts were part of all of the world's major literacies, and even with lousy translations, by the early to mid-20th century, a rough Canon of material, globally important, could be formed. From China you had texts like The Analects of Confucius, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and Journey to the West. India provided the core texts of both Hinduism and Buddhism, and Sanskrit classics like Kalidasa's Recognition of Shakuntala. Europe could claim Homer's epics, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the essays of Montaigne. And from the Middle East came the Epic of Gilgamesh (rediscovered in 1853), the poetry of Rumi, and A Thousand and One Arabian Nights - not to mention the Bible and Qur'an.
Gilgamesh is watching you... read.
As civil servants in British India, Harvard scholars, and aspirants taking China's traditional exams based on the Four Books - an 800 year-old practice - engaged their culture's literacy, they learned the classics of the core literacies - both their own, and, often, the adopted core of their colonial-rulers' cultures. This was the way of things in 1900, entering the 20th century.
But then the population ballooned to 7.7 billion.
And colonization ended. And, by 2020, fewer that 15% of the planet is illiterate.
Oral traditions, especially African, were written down for the first time. Post-colonial narratives arrived, with titans like Wole Soyinka and Frantz Fanon producing important literary and nonfiction works. Latin and South American countries stopped trying to sound like Europeans and created their own literary movements and styles, most notably the magical realism of authors like Mexico's Juan Rulfo and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Asia, which started the century strong with a strong literary history, ran into problems. Great Chinese authors of the early 20th century, like Lu Xun, Lao She, and Cao Yu, had no equal after the civil war, Japanese occupation, and Maoism. For the better part of the century Chinese-language literature languished. India continued strong, but more than ever, in an era of translation and dissimulation, the myriad languages became an issue. Only those writing in English found large global audiences, unlike the majority of authors of great works in Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, Kannada, and so on. Indonesia, the world's third largest nation by population, left colonialism and, like many an African nation, entered into dictatorship: Indonesians were suppressed by Sukarno from 1945-1967, and then Suharto from 1968-1998. War ravaged Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the Southeast Asian peninsula in general was chaotic. True, dictatorships reigned in Latin America as well - but with centuries of literacy and independence since the early 1800s, their situation was different from the former Asian and African colonies with only recent independence and historically lower literacy rates. The Middle East, as well, was not producing significant literature during the 20th century after first being colonized, and then, until now, living under dictatorships and suppression in most of the countries in the region.
Whole lotta dictators.
So you can perhaps forgive Harold Bloom for thinking the Western Canon was special. And, to be fair, it is a wonderful collection of work. It's just not unique, nor inevitable. So why did he think it was?
* * *
For the West, the 20th century was also a fascinating example of monoculturalism. Take television - in the UK you had the BBC, which only gradually expanded to have multiple channels. In the USA there were only three channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Fox didn't arrive until 1986. And cable, with the hundreds of channels that became our current nightmare, slowly developed over the late 1970s and 80s. In 2019 we hit a new record: 532 scripted television shows were broadcast - or streamed. These impacted monoculturalism, but not until the last quarter of the century.
Much of the 20th century felt, and relatively was, monocultural, and this made the Canon seem more inevitable. There were only a few channels on T.V. Musicians couldn't make it big or reach audiences without a record contract with one of the big companies. In 2018, 878 films were released in the U.S. and Canada alone. But twenty years ago, in 2000 it was only 371. Going back further, during the heyday of the studio era, the main attractions were shared by most audiences.
And the same monoculture goes for literature. Western audiences inherited the hierarchy of Chaucer, Moliere, Plato, and Aquinas. There were even some 20th-century authors immediately inducted, due to their clear innovations (always prized for Canon-worthiness): Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf were, by mid-century, considered entrants into the Western Canon. Just as Tolstoy, Baudelaire, and Melville had been inducted into the ranks the century before. Our systems of higher education reinforced these classics, with students in secondary schools reading the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Hamlet, and Greek tragedies.
Monoculture was further enforced by the Cold War, clearly demarcating, emphasizing and identifying the boundaries of cultures and traditions. Lenin and Yevtushenko might be "Western", but they were also clearly Soviet. So it was that, until the very late 20th century, propelled by centuries of non-admixture, and the unique factors of monoculture (created by media monopolies or censors), it seemed like the global literacies, the Canons of the world, were secure. But when the monoculture disappeared, as I think it unarguably has done, the Canons now came under a new, inordinately problematic, threat.
First, there's volume. Since the first generation of Gutenberg's printing press there have been more books than you could read in a lifetime. But the Canon was, to an extent, a counter to that overwhelming flood. You didn't have to read everything: you could focus on these essential works. Yet, as the new technologies of the 20th century and 21st century have shown, that list is now insufficient.
Ruining completionists' dreams since 1440.
Consider Western classical music. In 1890 there were a handful of Canonical composers, maybe a score, whom a basic familiarity could be expected: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, and so forth. There were plenty of second-tier composers - just as there are quality second-tier authors, whose work wasn't deemed Canon in music or literature: Elgar and Agatha Christie, Gabriela Mistral and Palestrina, Lermontov and Martinu. But, with the advent music recording, all of a sudden the the number of genres, and musicians, skyrockets, encompassing everything from Scott Joplin's piano rolls, to Joao Gilberto's mid-century bossa nova, to the 90s hiphop of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. The Western Canon now included a vast amount of music.
The same would take place in film, evolving from Charlie Chaplin's silent comedies, to Jean-Luc Goddard and the New Wave, to Quentin Tarantino. Television too evolved, although only recently. A list of the greatest or essential shows written in 2005 (Cheers, St. Elsewhere, The Honeymooners) would be very different from one now (Lost, Breaking Bad, The Office). Indeed, since the 21st century television has changed enormously. These were new media forms, not hardly present at the 20th century's outset. There were many more new formats evolving, such as comic books in the 1940s or the music video in the late 20th century, producing their own requisite essentials like Superman or Michael Jackson's Thriller.
The same would take place in film, evolving from Charlie Chaplin's silent comedies, to Jean-Luc Goddard and the New Wave, to Quentin Tarantino. Television too evolved, although only recently. A list of the greatest or essential shows written in 2005 (Cheers, St. Elsewhere, The Honeymooners) would be very different from one now (Lost, Breaking Bad, The Office). Indeed, since the 21st century television has changed enormously. These were new media forms, not hardly present at the 20th century's outset. There were many more new formats evolving, such as comic books in the 1940s or the music video in the late 20th century, producing their own requisite essentials like Superman or Michael Jackson's Thriller.
And then, of course, there are the many new forms of 21st century, digital, entertainment. YouTube, with subscriptions and channels that range from sketch comedy to reality television-esque, Real World-style voyeurism of other people's lives. Podcasts. Social media and forums - although these are not perhaps Canonical, they take up an increasingly large slice of people's time: whittled away on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Vine, LiveJournal, MySpace, blogging (...), and so forth. If we accept the premise that social media is a form of entertainment (likely a form of video/computer game), then the issue of this new media form becomes one of time-management.
Canon.
So even with nearly 900 movies and over 500 television shows (just counting those which are scripted - who knows the number of nonfiction programs), you still might miss seeing the most recent Marvel movie, Oscar-nominee, or binge-able series because you're too busy uploading pictures of your puppy, commenting on Reddit, or watching Tasty videos.
* * *
This isn't a bad thing, necessarily. But it is bad for the Canon. As monoculture shudders and dies, the Canons of the various literacies are increasingly embattled. There's no time for second-tier authors anymore, especially when the new art forms and entertainments are so demanding. Game of Thrones takes nearly three days to watch without breaks - much longer than the seemingly similar epic proportions of Wagner's Ring Cycle (a mere 17 hours). A 1,000 page novel might sound like a chore. It might take days of dedicated reading to get through. But The West Wing, without breaks, lasts six days and ten hours: far longer than all but the most intense reading projects. And video games... They calculate game play now in tens of hours: a game like Dark Souls can take 50-60 hours; much longer than it would take to hear all of Beethoven's symphonies (5 hours), read all of Gulliver's Travels, or look at every painting on display in the Uffizi in Florence.
Granted, I've not seen Game of Thrones, but apparently this comparison makes sense?
This doesn't even begin to address the issue of translation and multiculturalism. Since translation has gotten better, and more content is available from more cultures and literacies, this adds another strain to mastering even a single Canon. We have unprecedented access to the music and literature of other cultures - traditions that are centuries or millennia old. And in the last 100 years we've added, and disseminated, the new media products of these cultures as well: film, games, comics, television. Time spent "straying" into a different Canon is time not spent on mastering your own, as Harold Bloom seemed to assert.
Harold Bloom, a fairly pompous proponent of the Western Canon, died in 2019. But his vision of its supremacy had died a few years before he did. I think, facing down the death of the monoculture which kept the vision of the Western Canon's know-ability alive, we tried to hold on for about a decade. Until 2010 or so, we could still identify the major musicians, authors, and films of our time. In the early 2000s we shared JK Rowling and the YA lit trend, The Strokes and low-fi indie rock: these sorts of trends were identifiable and monocultural, to an extent. But over the past decade that has effectively disappeared. Few people, even critics and experts, would agree on whom the essential musicians were of this past decade, or authors, or films.
Multiculturalism is a Good Thing. There's no reason why an American student should be more familiar with The Aeneid or The Odyssey than The Epic of Mwindo or the Sundiata of West Africa. But time is a factor. Bloom had an ace up his sleeve: a truly prodigious memory. From his obituary in the New York Times:
His memory was superhuman; he carried in his head not just poems but whole libraries, word for word. At Yale, where he taught for many decades, he was known on campus for a kind of parlor trick: If you saw him crossing the quad, you could quote a line of John Milton, and he would take the baton, as he walked, and recite the lines that followed. He kept all of “Paradise Lost” — one of the longest poems in the English language, more than 10,000 lines — in his mind-vault, unabridged, alongside (supposedly) all of Shakespeare, all of William Blake, huge portions of Wallace Stevens and countless others. He was a one-man rejoinder to Plato’s complaint that writing would destroy human memory. In his final decade Bloom could still quote, off the cuff, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” — the long, difficult poem that had electrified him as a child, some 80 years earlier.
But most of us aren't so fortunate; aren't prodigies. To become familiar with one culture's Canon, in one media subset (books, movies, television, music) takes decades of work. To become fluent in our own primary Canons the work begins as infants, with texts like Goodnight Moon, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We learn the lullabies, poems, and myths of our cultures as children. When I gave a series of poems by Chinese poet Du Fu to my students to read, one student, from China, groaned - for he had been required, like his classmates for generations, to memorize his poems as a young child.
As such, it takes a dedicated lifetime to master even our own Canons across media, and especially to do so if we wish to 1) learn the Canons of other cultures and 2) keep abreast of the new potential entrants and inductees. The will to do so, the access, the ability - all are uncertain in the century ahead. Indeed, like the illiterate feudal peasants of medieval Japan, China, or Europe, we may be more focused on the daily struggles of living than the desire to know the Classics, despite our advantageous literacy. Or, our focus may shift because binging television, while time-consuming, is more of a receptive activity and perhaps easier than reading a novel, or sitting quietly through an opera. Maybe our attention is diverted not by competing media at all, but by concerns other than mastering any Canon: the need to address climate change, to fix political systems, and other calls to action in an era of emergency.
At any rate, there will be some, probably, who continue to take up the challenge of Canons. And in the upcoming century the role the Canonically-literate have in deciding and shaping narratives will be all the more important. So long as we have systems of public education in place, the Canon will continue to exist. Whether it is multicultural, or not, whether it is gender-balanced, whether it is reliant more on ancient authors or modern ones, these choices will shape the lives of those who end up reading Jane Austen or Toni Morrison - Matsuo Basho or Kenzaburo Oe. So long as education is free, and unhindered by tyranny and censorship, the Canon will, in some format, survive.
But not the Western Canon of Bloom: the idea that the West is superior, and everyone, in order to be educated, needs to read Descartes and Dickens. Depending on the political and economic shifts of the century ahead, we may instead see a global reorientation to the Canons of China, or Russia - excluding, I suspect, the dissident voices voices of Liu Xiaobo or dissident works like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Much of the world is still censored. As Ray Bradbury suggests in Fahrenheit 451, at some level we may need, as Bloom did, to rely on our memories to preserve the literature, movies, and music of humanity's Canon. It's not a cheery scenario - but given our adaptability and resilience, perhaps our stories and teachings, the old Canon, mixed with the new media, will live on.
As for me, I intend to be one of those guardians. I am always trying to expand my media, my multicultural Canons, and I hope I've done a decent job learning them and disseminating them to my students and friends. In the Memoirs of Hadrian French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, put these words into the mouth of the Roman emperor Hadrian:
Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.
To be a 'continuator' - that to me is a worthy, and noble goal. And as long as you are engaging at least a little in the new and old, Western and non-Western, written, auditory, or visual Canons, you are a continuator too - and that's a title to be proud of.
Multiculturalism is a Good Thing. There's no reason why an American student should be more familiar with The Aeneid or The Odyssey than The Epic of Mwindo or the Sundiata of West Africa. But time is a factor. Bloom had an ace up his sleeve: a truly prodigious memory. From his obituary in the New York Times:
His memory was superhuman; he carried in his head not just poems but whole libraries, word for word. At Yale, where he taught for many decades, he was known on campus for a kind of parlor trick: If you saw him crossing the quad, you could quote a line of John Milton, and he would take the baton, as he walked, and recite the lines that followed. He kept all of “Paradise Lost” — one of the longest poems in the English language, more than 10,000 lines — in his mind-vault, unabridged, alongside (supposedly) all of Shakespeare, all of William Blake, huge portions of Wallace Stevens and countless others. He was a one-man rejoinder to Plato’s complaint that writing would destroy human memory. In his final decade Bloom could still quote, off the cuff, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” — the long, difficult poem that had electrified him as a child, some 80 years earlier.
But most of us aren't so fortunate; aren't prodigies. To become familiar with one culture's Canon, in one media subset (books, movies, television, music) takes decades of work. To become fluent in our own primary Canons the work begins as infants, with texts like Goodnight Moon, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We learn the lullabies, poems, and myths of our cultures as children. When I gave a series of poems by Chinese poet Du Fu to my students to read, one student, from China, groaned - for he had been required, like his classmates for generations, to memorize his poems as a young child.
Bloom, memorizing a list of reasons why he's better than you.
As such, it takes a dedicated lifetime to master even our own Canons across media, and especially to do so if we wish to 1) learn the Canons of other cultures and 2) keep abreast of the new potential entrants and inductees. The will to do so, the access, the ability - all are uncertain in the century ahead. Indeed, like the illiterate feudal peasants of medieval Japan, China, or Europe, we may be more focused on the daily struggles of living than the desire to know the Classics, despite our advantageous literacy. Or, our focus may shift because binging television, while time-consuming, is more of a receptive activity and perhaps easier than reading a novel, or sitting quietly through an opera. Maybe our attention is diverted not by competing media at all, but by concerns other than mastering any Canon: the need to address climate change, to fix political systems, and other calls to action in an era of emergency.
At any rate, there will be some, probably, who continue to take up the challenge of Canons. And in the upcoming century the role the Canonically-literate have in deciding and shaping narratives will be all the more important. So long as we have systems of public education in place, the Canon will continue to exist. Whether it is multicultural, or not, whether it is gender-balanced, whether it is reliant more on ancient authors or modern ones, these choices will shape the lives of those who end up reading Jane Austen or Toni Morrison - Matsuo Basho or Kenzaburo Oe. So long as education is free, and unhindered by tyranny and censorship, the Canon will, in some format, survive.
But not the Western Canon of Bloom: the idea that the West is superior, and everyone, in order to be educated, needs to read Descartes and Dickens. Depending on the political and economic shifts of the century ahead, we may instead see a global reorientation to the Canons of China, or Russia - excluding, I suspect, the dissident voices voices of Liu Xiaobo or dissident works like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Much of the world is still censored. As Ray Bradbury suggests in Fahrenheit 451, at some level we may need, as Bloom did, to rely on our memories to preserve the literature, movies, and music of humanity's Canon. It's not a cheery scenario - but given our adaptability and resilience, perhaps our stories and teachings, the old Canon, mixed with the new media, will live on.
Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.
To be a 'continuator' - that to me is a worthy, and noble goal. And as long as you are engaging at least a little in the new and old, Western and non-Western, written, auditory, or visual Canons, you are a continuator too - and that's a title to be proud of.
