The Canon and the Syllabus
Life is short and there are many books to encounter. How does one underline the ones that are worthwhile? More importantly, how do whole societies and traditions take up certain readings as important and dispense with others at any given moment of time? If we keep aside the absolutely subjective element involved in any choice of reading, perhaps guesses can be made as to how certain texts gain authority over a period of time and then lose their power of suasion and magic in another age. Some others come to be called classics and thus turn ‘timeless.’ On the other hand, the formation, approval and implementation of a syllabus in a programme housed within an institutional framework are part of a wholly different story, of a much narrower scope. On the surface, there are more academic reasons for a syllabus to take shape in a particular way. But those academic reasons are always offset by partisan interests that stoke the fancy of the stakeholders, like politics or shifting trends or utilitarian reasons like employability. Reliability is perhaps the foremost criterion that helps inculcate canon consciousness. A set of texts become reliable over a period of time because it is able to provide generations of scholars a testing ground for certain principles of a knowledge base that tallies with the internal logic of an evolving discipline, which may be jurisprudence, theology or literature. This is what David Hume meant in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757) when he argued that in the final analysis the canon consists of “those works that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy.” Hume marries a collective idea of epistemological reliability with the notion of timelessness. The earliest formations of the canon therefore arise out of a text centered epistemology which the practitioners and the connoisseurs would hermeneutically unseal and bring forth. The guiding principles of the earliest texts were in fact based on interpreting revelation, emic reception of ritual application and deciphering natural philosophy. This scope of encountering the divine utterances (and deciphering the oracle/sutra)simultaneously gave canonical texts the stamp of a mystical authority, and also opened up possibilities of interpretive scope. For instance, the interpreter could argue that behind the apparent narrative of the gods and their actions lies another level of hidden meaning. A redemptive tradition of textual interpretation comes into being. In other situations, the mystery or sublimity of a poetic utterance or the symbolic nature of a painting gives rise to the restive and libertine tradition. But the basic idea remains the same: to consider form and excavate meaning, dwell in analysis and expand the ambit of the art object by means of imagination. Whatever is concealed in form and meaning (connotation, subtext or undertone in later times) is what the scholar or the connoisseur tries to seek out. But once you have a space for interpretation, the esoteric baseline of the canon opens up and becomes subject to divergent ways of analysis and imaginative interpretation. What started as rarified and mystical becomes evolving and dynamic. Reliability still remains a fundamental baseline but an argumentative tradition begins to emerge out of the enigmatic,as multiple interpretations of a text or a problem begins to blossom. Ineke Sluiter, the great Dutch scholar of the classics, used to say that obscurity is a disguise in blessing. The very act of writing a commentary or engaging in various textual practices tacitly acknowledges the fact that the text is not clear and therefore requires certain exegetical endeavours to unlock it. In fact, it would be impossible to think in analytical terms unless the text or the art object is obscure enough. There could be various reasons for obscurity to emerge in the most complicated movements and styles of literary and artistic production, say, in the classical world, the romantic movement or in the whole of modernism. Obscurity may also be a way to avoid obscenity or dogma and also a method for matching a hard subject matter with a certain style of expression (the epigram, the riddle and the parable are the earliest of such forms, leading eventually to figura and allegoresis). Obscurity may also be a stimulus for the readers and the students to delve deeper and make some serious effort to appreciate the nuances of various situations and problems that an art-object or a problem throws up. This will also keep the less motivated students outside of the purview. The canon is one way of initiation into degrees of difficulty, by which the would-be-specialist is thrown in at the deep end of the pool right at the onset. Besides, veiled messages in a text are also a way of protecting the author and the interlocutors in times of social turmoil. Most importantly, obscurity gives elbow room for a slow and gradual interpretation, rather than quickly trying to diagnose and move on with a text. One the other hand, textual particles of literature also sometimes emerge as sudden erruption of thought and then do not go anywhere. These we call fragments or trace. The romantic and certain forms of modernist art are fundamentally about such fragmentary erruptions. Freed from classical constraints, such works present the partial whole—“either a remnant of something once complete and now broken or decayed, or the beginning of something that remains unaccomplished.”If we care to expand confines of the idea, we shall realize that letters, excerpts, gnomic statements, speeches, epigrams and mythologies—all would lose crucial vitality without their fragmentary nature. Fragments let us retrieve and recast the whole if we so wish. The exercise would be somewhat like cracking a jigsaw puzzle. But the more daring prospect is to leave the trace as is and place oneself by the side of the composer and encounter a similar emotion of the partial whole every time one reads or listens to the fragment. Engaging with the fragmentary is also revelatory in a deeply secular sense. Canon formation is always relational in nature. This