Aiming the Canon: National Emergency and the Errant Courses of the Literary
- Aiming the Canon: National Emergency and the Errant Courses of the Literary
William Spanos provocatively occasions his book, The Errant Art of Moby Dick: the Canon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Studies with an untimely call for a thinking that attempts to wrestle with the failure of the oppositional momentum of contemporary theory in the face of a more ‘traditional’ discourse of canon formation. The call for such an investigation is untimely because it is claimed that we have suffered from a surfeit of critical theory and that to pursue even its failure is to stubbornly continue to flog a dead horse. On the contrary, I would argue that the urgency of Spanos’ call for a historicization of ‘failure’ is in fact inexorable in light of our own occasion, which for the purposes of this paper, I choose to mark primarily with the terrifying arsenal deployed in Lynne Cheney’s responses to what in common parlance has come to be called, simply, ‘9/11.’ In the aftermath of the attacks, the therapeutic solution proposed by the vice-president’s wife has, in one of its avatars taken the form of a sustained effort to reinvigorate American Studies and pedagogically instill traditional American values, by means of canonical interventions in the field.1 According to the terms of this cultural contract, the aforementioned values are in turn guaranteed to combat a ‘multiculturalist agenda,’ which under the aegis of the present Bush administration is codified as necessarily and principally ‘un-American.’2 Not surprisingly, the explicitly conservative stance demonstrated in this attempt to institutionalize homespun values with a view to conquering ‘the alien threat,’ has its corollary in branding indelibly ‘unpatriotic’ those minds which attempt to theorize the variegated modalities by which an oppressive architectonics of the dominant political power is sustained.3 In the context of my own argument one of these modalities is to be understood as the discourse of canon formation, that is, the institutional production and consumption of literary texts and the dissemination of discourses ancillary to these texts.
A Bond is Sealed
In affirming according to his own terms what several twentieth-century minds have disclosed, Spanos remarks that theory in its questioning of what he calls the “ontotheological literary tradition” has shown that “the history of canon formation since the epoch of the theologos bears witness to a transformation of the operations of power relations at the site of textuality analogous to and complicitous with the transformation of power relations at the site of sociopolitics” (11). If this is so, then the ‘failure of theory’ too must be resonant with implications for any thinking that chooses to interrogate the changing relationship between discourses of truth and sociopolitical power in a world increasingly under the sway of unilateralism, a world repeatedly hailed as one that Melville’s Moby Dick had proleptically imagined. This is however neither a paper exclusively about the professional de-privileging of contemporary theory and its apotheosis in the conservatism of Lynne Cheney’s attacks, nor is it an effort to simply ‘read’ Moby Dick . Rather, this investigation will be my attempt to demonstrate the profound bond between literature and what I understand as theoretical work, and hence to try and grapple with the threat posed, in our own moment, to both these modes of thinking. For Spanos’ ‘theoretical’ work the particularly provocative aspect of Melville’s ‘literary’ text is manifest in Ishmael’s ‘errant’ narrative, which releases the differentialities occasioned by time from the imperial clutches of a metaphysical imagination. The trope of ‘story-telling’ is thus intrinsically significant to Spanos’ formulations, but as he emphatically suggests, Ishmael’s narrative is not a ‘telling’ structured from the panoptic perspective of the ‘end’ or the ‘outside.’ It is in fact, au contraire, an act of ‘repetition’ or ‘re-telling’ that finds itself in medias res . That is, it does not depend on a form of recollection that ‘remembers’ only to ‘forget’ disparities, accidents and differentialities, or in other words, to regulate and stabilize them into a cohesive whole bereft of any and every temporal randomness. The ‘errancy’ of Ishmael’s narrative unabashedly foregrounded in the digressions, excresences, and...
