Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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A couple of years ago, innocently enough, I brought my professor a Newsweek article on Chicano literature. I was pleased to have found something on a topic about which I knew she cared--but I'll never forget her impassioned rebuke. She insisted that a mainstream magazine could never understand minority culture, and then launched teary-eyed into a discussion of her own painful struggle to find a place for herself in academia. This emotional explosion was the farthest thing from what I was expecting that afternoon.

A few years later, a friend stands in my dorm room, attacking Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Enuf, the one book he considers ridiculously misplaced on the syllabus of English 129: the European Literary Tradition., that was thrown in somehow with Joyce and Homer. He calls it ridiculous, and wants to keep the classics safe from the new multicultural selections.

As students, we are caught in the crossfire of these impassioned wars over the literary canon. Opinions on both sides are so strong and so entrenched that it's hard to find any intelligent, reasoned critique. For both of the people who argued so forcefully with me over the canon, the issue was not an academic debate at all, but an intensely personal question of identity-a question of whose culture will be read as literature. Lillian Robinson's book, In the Canon's Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars is a refreshing, thoughtful, critical map of this otherwise difficult battleground.

Robinson's book is a series of short essays and speeches-an ideal format to discuss the question of the canon. Her politically charged arguments are tempered with humor, and her varied, short pieces cover many different aspects of the diverse, encompassing debate.

Robinson demonstrates that the culture wars have expanded beyond university walls, and are now tied to religion, politics, censorship and scholarship. "Everyone nowadays," she writes, "accepts that when we are talking culture, we are talking politics." Though Robinson's sympathies are clearly with the multiculturalist camp, her essays present coherent arguments that challenge assumptions and go beyond the rhetoric of both sides.

Robinson is particularly adept at delving beyond superficial issues highlighted by the press. She seizes on cases where her opponents are setting up soundbites and catchphrases, and instead demands clear, analytic arguments. She responds to articles from Texas Monthly and Chronicle of Higher Education which simply set up choices between Cisneros and Fitzgerald, Walker and Shakespeare, pointing out that no further arguments were made beyond the pairing of "certain tainted names" with the authors of the classics.

Robinson's sharp tongue lashes out at those who cannot defend their points, and her writing is spirited and colorful. When author Saul Bellow demands an African Proust before he will embrace new African novelists, Robinson asks whether Bellow "secretly thinks he's the Chicago Proust." Her sharp, satirical prose is interwoven with her more substantial intellectual arguments.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Robinson's book is its personal side. By peppering her book with personal anecdotes and amusing incidents from her own life, Robinson proves conclusively that debates over the canon do not stay within academic boundaries. At one point, Robinson's fourteen year old nephew and babysitter explains that his neighbor's work on a woman in the French Revolution is less unportant because he has never heard of any woman in the French Revolution. Robinson screams at him that "it was precisely to prevent fourteen-year-old smart-asses from being so sure that women were absent from the great events of history that such intellectual work was important (80).

The stories bring her book a down to earth: Robinson is not merely a 'radical academic' but also a mother, a teacher, and a community member. Her beliefs have been shaped by her life experiences. This connection, between the canon wars and real life, is what distinguishes Robinson 's book from the mass of writing about multiculturalism.

Robinson's view of the canon is nuanced enough to be interesting in its own right. She ponders and dissects the notion of the canon itself, and the characteristics of "literary quality, timelessness and universality" that define it. She admits that feminists do not have a unified approach to the canon, and expresses underlying ambivalence. She asks questions such as whether newly discovered books by women meet existing criteria, and whether the criteria themselves are flawed. She asks whose culture the literature will reflect-is the goal to represent all segments of the population or to present masterpieces? She considers the cultural values that underlie these questions, but does not always attempt to answer.

The greatest strength of Robinson's book is that it is not as extreme and presumptuous as so many of the arguments hurled from both sides in the culture wars. Her efforts not to oversimplify the issues even as she argues her viewpoint make In the Canon's Mouth extremely valuable. Robinson finds resourceful, new and often humorous ways to recast the canon wars as broad conflicts over culture, marshalling throughout a very powerful weapon: an incisive and critical intelligence.