SOURCE: Smoot, Jeanne J. “Multiculturalism, Censorship, and the Postmodern Assault on the Canon: Classical Answers to Contemporary Dilemmas.” Comparatist 24 (May 2000): 30-8.

[In the following essay, Smoot examines several of the dominant theories which helped multiculturalism reshape the literary canon in higher education in the United States.]

If we accept the simple premise that what we read influences who we are, then curricular matters in general and the concept of a canon in particular have profound political implications. Almost any dictator seeks to restrict what his subjects read, to control the flow of information, ideas, and philosophies. A free society, then, sustains itself by fostering an expansive and open canon. The idea of a literary canon itself suggests standards, the upholding or at least the respect for excellence in writing, creative expression, and dynamic ideas. The elasticity of this canon insures freedom, the ventilation of opposing ideas, and the development of new ways of thinking. James Madison makes a similar argument in Federalist Paper No. 10 to support, not the idea of an open canon, but democratic government and the need for factions in a free society.

Ironically today the notion of a canon is under attack from the very institution that in the past has been its primary incubator, the academy. Even more ironic, the canon is often under siege in the name of multiculturalism, which at its best should promote respect for all cultures and awareness of cultural differences. What passes for multiculturalism today, however, is sometimes a relentless assault on Western civilization.

John Ellis, in Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities, sees the race-gender-class critics, as he calls them, actually increasing divisiveness in postmodern society by focusing on the victim/victimizer paradigm. Ellis holds that such critics also harm literary study by selecting texts based on their ability to support particular social and political aims. So concerned was Ellis that literature was being neglected in favor of political and social agendas that he and others formed the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC), an international group, in 1994. While the ALSC's main purpose is to provide a forum for study and exchange for all those who value good literature (its members include classicists, literature professors and teachers of all types, creative writers, critics, editors, and people from other professions who simply have a love of the Word), the group also is concerned with fostering a climate in which good literature can flourish. For this reason, the ALSC has taken a closer look at what is actually being taught in the name of multiculturalism. The results, far from the respect for all cultures that one might have expected, are often deeply disturbing.

One of the ways the ALSC, which is mainly composed of US members, discerns the effect of some elements of multicultural studies is to ask its members to look at something so simple and seemingly benign as standards used to certify secondary school teachers in the fifty US states. While the ALSC saw much to praise, citing the California English language arts standards draft report as a particularly fine example of an evenhanded document that upholds the primacy of literature and refers to “universal themes in significant works of American, British and world literature,” the association was critical of the standards manual put out by the Texas State Board of Education, for example. The fall 1997 issue of the ALSC Newsletter noted what it saw as the deleterious effect of race-gender-class specialists on Texas certification standards. “Among the few authors mentioned, much space is devoted to Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and N. Scott Momaday, but none to, for example, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dickens, or Twain.” (ALSC Newsletter 8). Perhaps the drafters of the Texas manual felt the authors they were highlighting had been underrepresented in the past or would be in the future. But public documents, at least in the United States, have a way of becoming standards, especially if they are written as guidance for certification; and the privileging of writers like Morrison, Hughes, and Momaday has the net effect of diminishing or perhaps even eliminating such giants as Shakespeare and Mark Twain. Instead of incorporating more recent canonical authors, such as Hughes and Brooks, into its curriculum in the way canon formation should work, the Texas document insinuates antagonisms. As the Newsletter noted, the state manual contains a “long passage from Momaday [that] praises the distinctive ‘vision’ of native Americans—their ‘unifying perception of the interconnectedness of all things’ and contrasts this with the ‘cultural nearsightedness of American society.’” “Here the respect demanded for all cultures seems absent,” the Newsletter continued. The use of one quotation, taken out of context, makes it seem as if Momaday, a distinguished Native American writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for the novel House Made of Dawn, is extolling his own ethnicity in the name of multiculturalism while indicting the rest of American society. Further, in praising the “vision” of Native Americans, he appears to group all 278 recognized tribes and bands in the United States into one monolithic culture. This stereotyping, which one assumes Momaday would not tolerate, also obscures the full extent of his own cultural heritage, which is both European (French through his mother) and Native American (Cherokee, in addition to the Kiowa tribe whose traditions he celebrates).

Does this tendency blindly to prioritize one culture over another, as seen in the Texas manual and its use of Momaday, occur just with Native American culture in relation to US culture at large? Of course not Rather, the attack on American culture is symptomatic of a wider assault on Western culture in general that valorizes anything non-Western over the then vilified and marginalized West. Ellis sees this assault deriving primarily and ironically from a very positive and distinctly Western impulse: the utopic desire. Always seeking the ideal, Western culture has tended to be self-analytic and, by extension, self-critical. When this impulse becomes exaggerated, however, or blinded to the positive things Western culture has produced, multiculturalism then becomes code for devaluation of anything Western. Postmodern critics who fall into this trap tend to see literature as a manifestation of the struggle among races, genders, and classes. Literature for them then becomes the validation and exaltation of their culture or group over another; and literature, which in the past has been seen as a unifying force, is now distorted to foreground divisiveness rather than diversity. Philosopher and educator Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) in his writings, and especially in his multivolume, unfinished work Order and History, envisioned this detrimental interplay between politics and literature, particularly in light of multiculturalism, a concept he understood before it came into vogue.

Robert V. Young in his recent book, At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education, sees the extremists among the multiculturalists and other postmodern critics as literally being at war with the Word itself, in all its mythic and deeply religious connotations. The Word is Logos, that which brings order and distinguishes human beings from other creatures. When we stress divisiveness among ourselves, we diminish not only literature but also our own humanity, says Young.

David H. Richter, author of the near-classic The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, takes a more cavalier approach, though on balance he too sees multicultural excesses as diminishing literary quality and appreciation. “Madonna Studies, anyone?” he asks at the end of a chapter on “New Historicism and Cultural Studies.” Here he expands the notion of multiculturalism to include cultures within cultures, groups within groups, like Madonna Studies within American or Western culture as a whole, with each group seeking to exalt its own particular identity or interest. While Richter is a distinctly contemporary commentator on the critical scene, he is at times reminiscent of a much stodgier and more conservative James Fenimore Cooper. An incredibly popular novelist, Cooper enraged some egalitarian contemporaries in 1838 by writing the satiric The American Democrat. Coming just after the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-37), the first American president of humble origins, this book calls into question exactly what democracy means. Does it mean, for instance, the lowest common denominator—prioritizing all cultures, so that the idea of excellence becomes meaningless? Praising all cultural expressions equally just because they are representative of a particular group, or “demos,” meaning “people”? Obviously the Yale-educated Cooper, who had just lived through Jackson's regime and learned of his frontiersmen supporters reeling through White House halls and using its floors as giant spittoons, thus destroying priceless rugs and other furnishings, thought otherwise.

Looking to our own time for an accurate or coherent definition of multiculturalism will leave us reeling as well. It also forces us to realize that the canon today, far from flourishing as the fluid and ideal instrument Virgil Nemoianu describes in his essay “Literary Canons and Social Value Options,” is being constricted by political intrusion.

Consider, for example, the University of Georgia undergraduate program. There it was determined that diversity meant reading about four specific ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. There is now a requirement at Georgia that students take a course in one of these four ethnic areas. Because this course can also fulfill the literature requirement, this proposal has the potential to gut the distinguished world literature courses and comparative literature program there, since students often opt for the easiest way to fulfill requirements. In the name of cultural diversity, the most extreme parochialism is being institutionalized in Georgia, as if only these four ethnic groups had enriched that state, or as if students could not emerge equally well educated if they took a course with such writers as Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Li Po, or Murasaki Shikibu. Other states are seeking other lofty goals, though with equally dubious methods. In Massachusetts there is a movement at the precollege level to make certain that all protected groups in the United States be represented in the literature taught. Must a healthy, heterosexual white male, such as Melville for instance, be displaced by Cervantes, who can join the high school curriculum only because he had a maimed hand and, hence, belonged to a protected group, the disabled? And will much of pre-1970 literature be excluded because depictions of women, African Americans, and others might show them in roles that are no longer acceptable or might not show them in the wide range of roles such individuals can enjoy and assume today? These questions may seem silly and extreme, but extremism is on the rise today both in America at large and in academe, and literary study is often under assault in the process.

Virtually no one in academe today—or in society at large for that matter—has a whit of sympathy for any form of censorship, least of all censorship from Church and State. The lists of books compiled by the Roman Catholic Church, the first official one being issued by Pope Gelasius I in 496, followed by other such lists, and then the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first published in 1559, are anathema today. Similar such restrictions drawn up by other religious groups of whatever stripe are also repudiated by thinking individuals today as mind throttling. Governmental censorship is usually met with similar revulsion today, particularly in the more flagrant examples of Italy, Spain, and Germany prior to World War II or Stalinist Russia, when books were systematically confiscated and burned publicly. Political intrusion is political intrusion, whether from the Church or the State, the right or the left. Somehow, though, academics today seem more adept at seeing prior examples of such malfeasance and especially able to discern its encroachment when it comes from the right. They are less quick to see the threat of censorship—the ultimate closure of not just the canon but the lifeblood of literature and free thought itself—when it comes from the left.

No one ever censors anything for an ignoble reason—at least not outwardly. The Catholic Church stated that its lists were to preserve true religion, the souls of its parishioners, and their moral well-being. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, and others of their ilk said they were trying to build idealized states, to protect and nurture their citizens. But in each case, the initial results were the same. Free thought was diminished, and literature became an ideological tool rather than a means to greater truth, enlightenment, or revelation, or, perhaps more realistically, simply the means to the free exchange and ventilation of ideas.

Those today who think literature should be chosen for what it says about women, or minorities, or other groups or ideologies, have similar lofty goals, and there is a place in the curriculum for such study, but not if it involves the denigration and vilification of anything that does not fit a prescribed political formula. Forcing all discourse into an ideological grid is, simply put, intellectual censorship. If that is the case, then why aren't more academics speaking out against such excesses? There are probably many reasons—sympathy for previously underrepresented groups and the fervent desire for their voices to be heard undoubtedly play a part. But there is perhaps another reason. Just as early opponents of the Roman Catholic List of Forbidden Books were called anti-Church, so those who oppose ideological selection of literature texts are sometimes called antifeminist, or antiethnic, or racist. Take, for example, Arizona State University Professor Jared Sakren, who was, in effect, fired for teaching canonical works. As recorded in a November 4, 1998, Wall Street Journal story titled “The Bard, Barred,” Shakespeare was singled out as one of those authors whom “the feminists” on campus found most objectionable. Sakren had taught at Yale and the Julliard School of Performing Arts before being hired by Arizona State “to establish a nationally respected actor training program.” And he had many successes to his credit, having trained movie actors Annette Bening, Kelly McGillis, and Val Kilmer, among others. Sakren was accused of a “conservatory approach” for focusing on such dramatists as Shakespeare, Congreve, and Ibsen. According to a letter from his department head, Lin Wright, “The feminists are offended by the selection [sic] works from a sexist European canon that is approached traditionally.” In another memo she charged, “there is a tension between the use of a European-American canon of dramatic literature and production vs. post-modern feminist/ethnic canons and production styles.”

Unfortunately, no amount of support from students both past and present, both male and female, or even from Annette Bening herself and another student who described herself as a feminist could halt the ax. In her memo to Sakren, Ms. Wright warned, “No one, in this political climate, is a free agent.” Sakren is now fighting fire with fire, suing the university and claiming racial discrimination against those of European background and the selection of European works. In the meantime, the Bard, William Shakespeare—if he is taught at all—is truly barred unless viewed through the filters of race-gender-class critics (Schaefer A22).

Is this really what literature is all about? Are we simply retrogrades slinging literary mud around, vilifying one another in the name of diversity? Perhaps here, it is helpful to look at the classics to get perspective and perhaps some idea of a true utopia, where different groups do, in fact, interact amiably. Interestingly, when Ellis in Literature Lost cites the utopic impulse run wild as the reason for discontent with Western culture and the concomitant valorization of non-Western traditions, he recalls the Roman historian Tacitus as an example of the similar process in antiquity. In his Germania (c. 98 CE), Tacitus repeatedly praises the vigor, bravery, and truthfulness of the German tribes, which he relentlessly juxtaposes to the effeteness of Roman society. As Ellis quotes Tacitus, who says of the Germans, “They live uncorrupted by the temptations of public shows or the excitements of banquets,” the reader realizes that Tacitus, who lived under Nero (37-68 CE), is really telling us more about Rome than about the Germans. When he writes that “good morality is more effective in Germany than good laws are elsewhere,” his implicit criticism of the Roman Empire becomes even more transparent (qtd. in Ellis 13, 14). Since the earliest times, then, valorizing one culture over another has sometimes been a form of self-criticism, as in Montaigne's essay, “Des cannibales,” and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. These are healthy impulses, but in postmodern times there has been a deleterious tendency to take the exaggerated claims made for the exalted society too literally or to become demoralized by the sometimes equally exaggerated denigrating charges brought against one's own culture.

Far better, though, in truly characterizing a utopia and, by extension, speaking of what constitutes an ideal society, is Homer's approach in The Odyssey. In Book VI, he introduces the mythical realm of the Phaiákians, headed by the ideal couple, Alkínoös and his wife, Arêtê. Their names symbolize their claim to rule. Alkínoös means strong or high in intelligence. Arêtê means virtue. When virtue and intelligence are united, the kingdom is strong—whether it be German, Roman, or an American democracy. In contrast to the Phaiákians, whose kingdom is one of harmony, prosperity, and grace, are Penelope's suitors, whose drunken ringleader, Antínoös, has the telling name, Antí-noös, enemy of knowledge or intelligence. Homer is extolling absolute virtues and qualities, not one people over another, in his epic The Odyssey.

Just as Homer speaks in absolutist or universal terms when he discusses the ideal, he also generalizes about its opposite. The mythic Kyklopês cannot really be identified with any particular group, but they definitely can be identified with certain brutish attitudes. These “louts” are

                    without a law to bless them.
In ignorance leaving the fruitage of the earth in mystery
to the immortal gods, they neither plow
nor sow by hand, nor till the ground, though grain—
wild wheat and barley—grows untended, and
wine-grapes, in clusters, ripen in heaven's rain.
Kyklopês have no muster and no meeting,
no consultation or old tribal ways,
but each one dwells in his own mountain cave
dealing out rough justice to wife and child,
indifferent to what the others do.

(IX: 111-121)

This famous passage outlines what constitutes civilized society, all of which eludes the Kyklopês. Notice, too, Homer's attitude toward the law; it is a blessing not to be found among the Kyklopês. They also have no agriculture, not because nature has not made it clear to them how to utilize the bounty of the earth—“wild wheat and barley” grow “untended, and / wine-grapes, in clusters, ripen in heaven's rain”—but rather because they are lazy or too stupid to take advantage of opportunity. The Kyklopês have no sense of community, no ability to unify for the common good, and no sense of tradition (no “old tribal ways”). Instead, they live isolated, “indifferent to what others do,” “dealing out rough justice to wife and child,” the classical equivalent of the wife and child abuser. Throughout the description Homer goes from the general with the audience left to go to the particular in terms of their own lives and experiences. But this knowledge of what makes a civilized society, the union of virtue and intelligence, blessed by law and hard work, ingenuity, practical science and technology, and the guidance of traditional ways and a sense of community, was not easily gained by either Homer or his fictive hero. Assuming that one person actually composed both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the world of The Iliad differs greatly from the one presented in the chronologically later Odyssey. In the first part of The Iliad, loyalty is to the chieftain, or warlord. Some of the men besieging Troy follow Odysseus, others Achilles, and they all agree to heed Agamemnon—at least for a while. But even this scant order breaks down when Achilles and Agamemnon fight over a war prize, and Agamemnon in his arrogance and materialistic equation of things with power and prestige insults Achilles' manhood. Then, Achilles withdraws from the fray, and all his men do likewise. There is no loyalty to nation or creed, but only to an individual. Even in the war itself there are times when individual alliances or kinship or simply notions of honor itself outweigh all other allegiances. In Book VII, for example, Homer tells of Telemonian Aias and Hektor, who have just fought a life-threatening duel that is halted only because “It is a good thing to give way to the night-time” (1.293). Homer says these two fought each other in heart-consuming hate, then “joined with each other in close friendship, before they were parted” (301-02). The warriors exchange gifts as a further sign of mutual respect.

But this grand elevation of honor and the individual also brings much suffering. Because the Myrmidons, for instance, are so loyal to Achilles, they leave the fighting when he does; and scores of Achaians then lose their lives as the Trojans gain the advantage. Absolute loyalty to a principle or to an individual can be grand, as Homer shows. But it can also bring absolute chaos and destruction to society. There must be that concomitant sense of community, that sense of coming together, of “consultation,” and of “old tribal ways” that Homer exalts by inversion when he speaks of the deficiencies of the Kyklopês in The Odyssey.

Learning the need for order, concern for the community, responsible authority, and submission to a worthy leader—not a petulant man who sits on the sidelines hoping his own side will lose so that his personal stature and glory will be increased—is difficult. These are some of the many lessons that Odysseus learns before this weary, wayworn wanderer is tossed up on the shores of Phaiákia, the ideal kingdom of virtue and intelligence. Battle-scarred and swollen from two days in a turbulent sea, he has learned discipline and the quick-wittedness essential to survival. In a sense, his sea bath has been a purification that prepares him for the lessons of Phaiákia. At the same time, the reader notices that the idealized state of the Phaiákians has, in a sense, made them soft. Perpetually prosperous and able to live in harmony, they are no match for Odysseus in the games that follow, and he is easily able to win them with his words. And so, as Homer upholds Phaiákia as a utopia, he nevertheless bows to the reality that all Hellenes came to realize, and that is perhaps most eloquently expressed by the later Aeschylus in the Oresteia, that “[m]en must learn by suffering” (Agamemnon 1.168).

Learning by suffering to live in harmony with one another, with people of different types and interests, of different backgrounds and ethnicities, becomes as difficult for the person of classical antiquity as it is for the individual of today. Homer's response, elevating certain values and absolutes above any other loyalties, resonates but then ultimately strikes a different chord in the other great voice from antiquity, Virgil.

Virgil retains the great respect for the Law; in fact, in The Aeneid he sees the giving of the law as the greatest achievement of the Romans. But, whereas Homer goes always from the general or absolute to allow the audience to fill in the particulars, Virgil in both his thinking and style repeatedly goes from the particular to the universal, forever ending with the glorification of the Roman Empire above all civilizations.

In this process, Virgil's treatment of other groups, other tribes, parallels the way Edward Said says the West has always viewed the Orient. Rome, like the West for Said, is forever viewing others in negative terms. Given that Virgil wrote The Aeneid to glorify his patron, Caesar Augustus, the poet's preference for the Roman Empire is explicable. But even more than the desire to please his patron is Virgil's apparent conviction that Rome had indeed restored order to the world. Virgil (70-19 BCE), like others of his era, had experienced strife of all kinds, the constant dread of insurrection and outright civil war that staggered Rome prior to the defeat of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE. Virgil probably began The Aeneid as early as a year after that victory by Augustus, who was his friend as well as his patron. Like many an author and critic, Virgil then finds his judgment clouded by his own political and ethnocentric allegiances, and proceeds to write a masterpiece predicated on an illogicality: the reconciliation of Augustus's now imperial Rome with the virtues of the forever lost Republic. Aeneas, essentially a peace-loving man who goes to war only to preserve and protect the future of Rome, becomes the apotheosis of Augustus, the new emperor.

Not only does Virgil vilify anything non-Roman—the wildly barbarous and tyrannical Mezentius whose own people rise up against him in his war with Aeneas—but anything also that does not fit with Rome's manly militaristic view of the world. Indeed, Virgil's perception of virtue itself is colored by its etymological root in Latin, vir, viri, m. man. The frenzied Dido, the furious Allecto, the passionate, Amazon-like Camilla, or the foolish self-destructive Amata all must be destroyed or subverted along with the primitive, lawless tribes who inhabit the region Aeneas seeks to repopulate for the establishment of almighty, imperial Rome. Not so blatantly heavy-handed as some of the postmodern race-gender-class critics, however, Virgil deftly melds all the various tribes of the region into one mighty Latin race once Aeneas has trumped his noble but uncivilized adversary Turnus.

So, what do the classics teach us about multiculturalism and problems of whose voices will and should be heard? Much that we already know. Multiculturalism in antiquity, just as today, sometimes serves to glorify one group over another, as it does in Virgil's Aeneid as he proclaims the Super Race, the Romans sprung from the unification of the Trojan remnant and their leader Aeneas and the peoples of the Tiber Valley and surrounding regions. In Homer, however, we see a clearer vision. Here we see higher principles of true virtue, not the manliness of the Roman leader, Aeneas, but Arêtê, virtue personified significantly in the female ruler of Phaiákia. Virtue urges us to unite with Alkínoös, the one strong in knowledge, intelligence, and reason, not for the purpose of denigrating or subjugating another culture, but rather so that together we may, as the Kyklopês could not, “consult,” “meet,” learn from “old tribal ways,” “muster” only when necessary for the defense of the common good, cultivate the richness of the soil provided to us, use our ingenuity and craft to better our lives, and allow the law always to bless us, but never to allow us wantonly to crush another under our heel.

Works Cited

ALSC Newsletter 3.4 (Fall 1997).

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968.

Ellis, John. Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.

Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Trans. and introd. Richmond P. Lattimore. 10th ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960.

———. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Anchor, 1963.

Nemoianu, Virgil. “Literary Canons and Social Value Options.” The Hospitable Canon: Essays on Literary Play, Scholarly Choice, and Popular Pressures. Eds. Virgil Nemoianu and Robert Royal. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991. 215-47.

Richter, David H. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.

Schaefer, Naomi. “The Bard, Barred.” Wall Street Journal. 4 Nov. 1998: A22.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1974.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. New York: Scribner's, 1951.

Young, R. V. At War with the Word. Wilmington: ISI Books, 1999.