Literature + Sacred = Canons?

Literature, according to Robert Scholes in “The English Apparatus” (1985), “has a much higher standing in our language and culture than the word ‘art’” (12). His arguments about the division between production of literature and consumption of it are something I hope we dive into during class. (Homeboy also loves his Derrida. And Barthes. And Foucault. It’s like a 1980s theorist party! Woo!). For this post, though, I just want to look at what literature means to Scholes and then dig into John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as a way to look deeper at this definition.

Literature isn’t just higher than art in Scholes’ article. He says that “we mark those texts labeled literature as good or important and dismiss those non-literary texts as beneath our notice” (5). His work as breaking down the division between literary/non-literary, he admits, is well underway at the time of writing this article, but he privileges the “great books” idea of literature almost as a straw man (7-8). He then goes on to state that:

in our culture literature has been positioned in much the same place as scripture. We have a canon; we have exegetes who produce commentary; and, above all, we have believed that these texts contain treasures of wisdom and truth that justify the process of canonization and exegesis.(12)

Literature has become “secular scripture” and those who profess it its clergy (12).

Now, this article is almost as old as I am. And the literary field has changed, moving away from all the male-authored canonical idea of “great books” (though they still lurk there in the background) and making a wider variety of texts studied as literature, or at least under the literature umbrella. Take Cleland’s Memoirs, which has become itself canonical in studies of erotica. Peter Sabor’s introduction to the Oxford edition – also published in 1985 – ends with the call that Memoirs “deserves a permanent place not only in libertine literature but in the canon of the English novel” (xxvi).

But I want to push the idea of literature further, drawing on Vilém Flusser’s “Line and Surface” (1973) that we also read for this week. He creates a distinction between mass and elite media forms, saying that mass culture deals with “surface fiction” (like images) and elite with “linear fiction” (like written texts) (29). But engravings, a popular practice in ye olde eighteenth century, starts to potentially blur these divisions of mass/elite, literary/non-literary. Check it out:

There’s a 1766 edition of Memoirs with engravings by Hubert-François Gravelot, a respected and famous artist of the period. He also engravings for a 1742 edition of Richardson’s Pamela. Can you guess which one is full of graphic smut?

(ok, so the headers tell you. But still, there's not much difference stylistically is there?)

There are much more graphic engravings from Gravelot’s collection for this edition, but along with the textual markings, the ease with which these images could be swapped for both Pamela and Memoirs shows yet another way that the difference between Richardson’s work as canonical and Cleland’s as porn is tied to something beyond content.

So what changes have occurred in the field of literary studies since 1985? What’s stayed the same? I find it troubling that Scholes cites no women in his text (please correct me if I’m wrong); the feminist recovery movement seems to have helped trouble his idea of literature as sacred object as well. In any case, I’m glad that the definition of literature has seemingly expanded to let folks like me explore popular fiction, not just canonical works by dead white men.

Pamela image via Wikipedia. More here if you're interested. Memoirs image via Eighteenth-Century Erotica.