French Studies and the "Anxiety of Influence"

ABSTRACT
Harold Bloom’s criticism of expanding the canon (in The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages) provides a valuable starting point for debates about designing academic programs and curriculum, yet his most productive writing about the canon may well be an earlier work, The Anxiety of Influence. In this study, he posits the true importance of the canon: that great works of literature emerge from authors‚ struggles to free themselves from the shadow of their precursors. This was certainly true in the nineteenth century, as even those who would be known for dominating the century (Hugo, for example), were themselves in awe of earlier writers («être Chateaubriand ou rien»).

After arguing that the concept of "the canon" as applied to nineteenth-century French literature is deeply flawed, this paper will nonetheless show the importance of teaching those works commonly considered "canonical." Giving French literature and civilization courses as examples, we will use Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" to propose techniques for constructing courses and programs that respect the nineteenth-century "canon," while expanding it.



PAPER
Harold Bloom’s criticism of expanding the Canon (in The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages) provides a valuable starting point for debates about designing academic programs and curriculum. In this book, itself a loving testament to a number of the masterpieces of western literature, Bloom clearly defines his concept of “the Canon.” He distances it from its dictionary associations with religious texts (from the Greek kanon, to rule, “canon” is generally associated with ecclesiastical laws or with a list of religious books considered sacred). Instead, he posits the Canon as a list of books “authoritative in our culture” and notes that it originally referred to “the choice of books in our teaching institutions” (15). In reality, it is unfair to apply Bloom’s thoughts about the Canon to nineteenth and twentieth-century literature because he sets these periods apart, insisting that the passage of time is crucial for canon formation: “No one has the authority to tell us what the Western Canon is, certainly not from about 1800 to the present day. It is not, cannot be, precisely the list I give, or that anyone else might give” (37). His book deals primarily with those authors--Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, to name a few--whose works have stood the test of time and who are broadly recognized as inspirational for other authors.
Nonetheless, Bloom’s defense of the western canon (“the Canon”) is helpful for the discussion at hand. Although his introduction bristles against those that have accused him of being the gatekeeper of “sacred” texts, he underlines essential questions about the Canon’s formation and function, and specifically about our difficulty in agreeing about which books should be included in the Canon. First of all, if the Canon is, as he defines it, a body of works
considered “authoritative in our culture,” it is then reliant on “our culture,” a concept that may change from group to group, country to country, century to century. Canons, like all lists, are inextricable from the identity and taste of the list maker at the time they are made. This then is the great flaw of any canon, including the Western Canon: it is a list made at a specific time by a specific person or group of people and is liable to change. A list of the top 100 books of the nineteenth century made in 1900 differs substantially from the top 100 books of the nineteenth century made in 1950 or 2000. Bloom recognizes this and goes even further, proposing that canons never really close: “All canons including our currently fashionable counter-canons, are elitist, and as no secular canon is ever closed, what is now acclaimed as ‘opening up the Canon’ is a strictly redundant operation” (37).
Has the Canon really exploded? Or are we simply continuing to refine it? Might we, as academics, be better off devoting less time to discussing the Canon itself and more time to discussing our objectives as teachers (as we will in this NCFS session)? Perhaps most important is consideration of our motives for including books on course syllabi and on reading lists.
By beginning with a discussion of Bloom’s writings about the Canon, my intent is not to summarize his thoughts, nor is it to define the canonical books of nineteenth-century French literature or even to debate the relevance of canons themselves. Instead, I would like to look--from the perspective of a teacher--at the problems I have encountered in my own attempts at covering the “canonical” works of nineteenth-century French literature before proposing--from the perspective of a student--how reading “canonical” works can be helpful to a French major. By “canonical” (for the nineteenth century), I mean those books widely accepted from the end of the nineteenth century to today as “authoritative,” those that have been included in literary histories and anthologies from Lanson to Lagarde et Michard.
Depending on our universities, our students, and our objectives, the Canon can be extraordinarily useful in structuring curriculum and student objectives. My institution, Montclair State University, is New Jersey’s second largest university, known above all for its teacher education programs. As a result, many of our students have come for teacher training and need solid background about French history, civilization, and culture, information they will, in turn, use in the classroom. This requirement provides a particular set of parameters for teaching. Although we do not “teach to the test,” we do try to cover material that we know students may encounter on the Praxis examination given by the New Jersey Department of Education. This outside imperative makes the Canon very important for us. Because our primary goals are to form students with strong language skills and solid insights into the major historical, literary, and artistic movements in France and the Francophone world, we want them to be familiar with the works of the Canon.
Although I am ambivalent about canons (especially of their tendency to exclude texts that may deserve to be there, but have been overlooked), I do think that they are of crucial importance. They identify for students books that others have long considered worthy of reading, thus providing direction in a world in which there are too many books from which to choose. Canons also provide an aesthetic yardstick against which students can measure the value of these and other texts. Finally, they allow students to better understand previous writers and thinkers who have read and reacted to the same works.
Before discussing how I have found the Canon helpful in designing courses, let me begin with an example of how it can backfire. When I first arrived at Montclair, I was assigned an introductory master’s-level class entitled “Nineteenth-Century French Novel I.” Its course catalog description consisted of the following rather cryptic phrase: “Insight into major works of Balzac and Stendhal.” Recently arrived at Montclair, I didn’t know the students, their background, or their level in French. I thus assumed that their undergraduate education (like Montclair’s BA program) would have familiarized them with literary movements, French history, and the authors we would be studying. I planned the course to focus on close readings and discussion of several novels (including Le Lys dans la Vallée, La Peau de Chagrin, Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, Le Rouge et le Noir, La Chartreuse de Parme). Fiasco!
In the end, it turned out that while nearly everyone had read at least one Balzac novel, almost none (even those who had been schooled in France, Algeria, and Belgium) had read more than a few excerpts from Stendhal. Even worse, they had little to no understanding of the Romantic movement, of Realism, of other major contemporaries of Balzac and Stendhal or of the course of French history after the French Revolution. While we had terrific discussions about style and structure, the motivations of characters in Le Rouge et le Noir and Les Illusions perdues were difficult for them to understand without better familiarity with the context of post-Revolutionary France. It was an enjoyable semester and the students learned a great deal as we filled in the blanks, but in retrospect I felt terrible. I realized that this might be their only nineteenth century class and that they would know only a few of the novels of Balzac and Stendhal. If they did not go on to read more, these might be the only writers of the nineteenth century they ever studied in class (in reality, many of them fell in love with Balzac and went on to do thesis projects about him).
I have said that the class backfired because I stuck to the two canonical writers specified in the course description, but this isn’t really the Canon’s fault. It is precisely at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels--when students have already acquired broad general knowledge about French literature--that one should be able to offer such in-depth classes. One of the primary reasons for my disappointment with this course was that students should know the important literary and historical movements in France before beginning the M.A.. If I mention this, it is because it strikes me as symptomatic of what is happening more and more in undergraduate education today. As we redefine the Canon (which used to provide a clear indication of material to be covered), we risk forgetting what we want our French majors to be learning, both in each class and in their overall program. Should they simply speak good French? Is it enough to develop good critical thinking skills? How much information should they know about the history and traditions of France? Of those of French-speaking nations? What kind of assessment should we put in place to gauge that they have learned what we would like them to learn?
When I asked my students about their background, it turned out that their undergraduate courses had tended to focus on the close reading of isolated texts, primarily from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (French and Francophone). Their French skills were excellent, but they knew little about French history and about authors other than those they had read in their earlier classes. In this, they had received a formation similar to my own. Indeed, in my public high school (mid-eighties), we were not given book lists other than those we might read for a particular class. In college, my introductory literature classes (French and English) were outstanding, especially in terms of stylistic and thematic analysis, yet they were less concerned with covering the greatest works of French or English literature or with situating them against a historical context. Had I not gone on to graduate school, where I was provided with century-by-century reading lists, I might never have chosen to read many of the writers so important for French culture and tradition. Nor would my reading of them have been enriched by wonderful discoveries such as finding traces of a great writer’s thoughts or images in those of a later writer (like finding bits of Baudelaire and Hugo in Rimbaud). I don’t think that my case is isolated. One of the major implications of exploding the Canon is that students read texts with little idea of how they might relate to others or how they might relate to the time in which they were written. Lists are useful indicators of what one might hope to know.
At the very least, the Canon is helpful in pointing students to books that generations of readers have considered masterpieces. Students crave such lists. In teaching “Great Books and Ideas” classes for the Honors Program at Montclair, for example, I have found students eager to know what others have considered “great.” Because we can’t cover much ground in one semester, I often refer them to lists such as those included at the end of Bloom’s The Western Canon. Granted, this tends to be a motivated group, but many of them thank me for the direction, writing back with enthusiastic reports about their summer or vacation reading. Such lists also provide a mnemonic technique for situating generations of writers. Knowing their relationships to one another not only helps students remember the individual writers, but also their importance for their time.
My own epiphany about the value of the Canon came as a senior at Wellesley College, when I enrolled for a year-long course in the English Department that, despite its rather bland title (“Survey of English Literature”) ended up being one of the best courses I had taken; it was critical for my decision to go on to graduate school. The course was taught by Terry Tyler who, on the first day, apologized for the unpopularity of offering such a “great books” course (this in the middle of the “culture wars”), while insisting on how important he thought it was to have a good grounding in English literature (he had fought to get the department to offer the course). The class followed the two volumes of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, while adding Dickens’s Hard Times and literary theory for a variety of writers covered in greater depth than the others.
I was fairly well-read in English literature before going to college, but this ended up being one of the most useful and fascinating courses I had taken. Why? Because we studied writers considered important by other writers, the people often most responsible for establishing their reputation. Although we read only extracts of many works, knowing the names and titles of canonical works provided me with a beginning, a list to which I have returned many times, reading the works in their entirety. I formed my own impressions of the texts, but they also helped me immeasurably in understanding the works of other authors who had also read Milton, Shakespeare, or Wordsworth, among others. What a pleasure to see so many points of contact and to discuss them in class! At the time, I was reading the Anxiety of Influence for a senior thesis on Proust. Bloom’s theory, which posits that great works of literature often result from creative misreadings of earlier texts made a great deal of sense, given the “Survey of English Literature” class. Obvious Oedipal anguish aside (Bloom excludes this aspect from his theory), writers respond constantly to what they have read.
It is the anxiety of influence, after all, that lies at the heart of canon formation. Is it not primarily writers and thinkers who make the reputation of their predecessors? Were the literary successes of both Baudelaire and Verlaine not achieved thanks to the recognition of the young writers that would later be labeled Symbolists? As Bloom points out, “There can be no strong, canonical writing without the process of literary influence, a process vexing to undergo and difficult to understand [...]” (8). Indeed, having a champion goes a long way to being placed on the Canon and to being remembered. Canons are “survivor’s lists,” as Bloom puts it. Those included in the Canon are survivors because they were read over time, their works quoted and reworked. They have not been forgotten. Many of those who were important in their time, such as George Sand (Zola proclaimed her the most influential writer of the nineteenth century--with Balzac--in his numerous essays about her work), did not have a champion and fell (temporarily) out of favor. Rediscovering them is one of the great pleasures of re-evaluating the Canon.
Echoing the subtext of Bloom’s writing in The Western Canon, I would argue that the Canon itself is of much less interest than the relationships among texts suggested by the Anxiety of Influence. Would the young Zola have come to develop his theories of Naturalism as a reaction to Romanticism if he had not first discarded the poems he had written in the vein of Musset, Hugo, and Sand, realizing that they were inferior? Would he have come up with the theory behind Naturalism without (mis)reading Claude Bernard? Perhaps the best canon for a program in French literature would be that composed of books that a large number of other writers read and considered influential.
In the classroom, where one can cover only a very limited number of texts, using canonical works in conjunction with less canonical ones can be extremely fruitful. The second time I taught a nineteenth-century novel class (Nineteenth-Century French Novel II), I broke radically with the course description (“insights into the major works of Flaubert and Zola”) and structured it as a course in which we explored the ways in which nineteenth-century writers reacted to one another, in prefaces, essays, interviews, and in their novels. My hope was to get students to draw their own conclusions about the theoretical premises and stylistic techniques driving the realist and decadent novel by examining the different approaches to reality traced in the novels chosen. We read François le Champi, L’Education sentimentale, Au Bonheur des Dames, Le Docteur Pascal, A Rebours, and Monsieur Vénus as well as extracts from Jules Huret’s Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire. The course was a huge success. By comparing the different narrative stances, the subject matter, and use of descriptions, we could have filled hours and hours of additional discussion (much of this took place via Internet on the electronic discussion board for the class). Above all, students analyzed the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel was subject to great experimentation, leading to its serious modification in the twentieth. By juxtaposing lesser-read authors such as Rachilde to canonical writers like Zola, students used their knowledge of the texts to analyze both the characters and their actions and to evaluate the impact of Rachilde’s novel. Far from “offer[ing] little but the resentment they have developed as part of their identity,” as Bloom argues that expansion of the Canon might do, Rachilde’s gender-bending novel enriched our understanding of the canonical works and vice versa.
I have discussed primarily master’s level classes, but I also borrowed Terry Tyler’s approach to the “Survey of English Literature” course in a “Nineteenth-Century French literature” class I taught at the undergraduate level. Supplementing a Lagarde et Michard literary anthology (primarily for the poems, artwork, and historical overview) with La Fille aux yeux d’or, L’Education sentimentale, and Le Ventre de Paris, we looked at representations of country and city across the nineteenth century. Through electronic discussions of questions posted to a forum (Blackboard), in-class discussion and presentation, and independent research into projects of their choosing (they were free to choose a topic or to use some of those I provided), the students gained greater exposure to the literature, art, and history of the nineteenth century, clearly explaining to each other through concrete examples, the ways in which different writers and artists represented reality through their work.
My own not-so-distant educational experience has convinced me of the importance of understanding French literature in terms of both the Canon and French history. But is really important for a French major to know such things today? The answer may vary according to the institution, the department, the students, and one’s pedagogical objectives, but I say “YES!”
Today, when American leaders seem to ignore cultural difference, trample other nation’s sensibilities, and put aside the lessons of history, it seems even more imperative to help students understand the importance tradition has played in our country and perhaps especially in others. As Bloom puts it, the Canon is above all a “literary Art of Memory,” “the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written” (17). Without teaching those works that the French have come to accept as “authoritative in [their] culture,” we do a disservice to our students. They learn to read texts and to analyze them, but without seeing their place in the French canon, a pantheon of great works that inspires national pride (even if great works are no longer read by most French students). How can we form teachers of French who do not understand the rich cultural heritage of France and its importance for French identity? How can one appreciate new developments in literature without knowing what came before?
We are today’s canon-makers, whether we want to be or not; every choice we make impacts our students’ experiences. Perhaps we should put aside discussion of the Canon, itself a distraction from the real issue at hand, and to focus more energy to determining what books our students should read and for what reasons. Whether we believe in the utility of canons or not, we should think long and hard about our students today, their linguistic competency, and what we expect them to learn in the short time they are with us. Bloom was correct in insisting that the Canon is not closed, especially for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is in a constant state of evaluation and redefinition. My department has recently learned this the hard way. At the time I write this paper, we’re struggling to establish a new examination reading list for the M.A. in French after completely re-vamping our program last spring. We have now instituted a dual-track system in which literature stands alone while a second track in French studies will allow those students more likely to apply their knowledge to business, translation, or entertainment to develop their own combination of courses from a selection of interdisciplinary offerings. While nearly everyone is agreement about texts from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, our greatest discussions have focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.