Questioning the Canon

Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature

Christine Meyer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110674422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

To what extent do minority writers feel represented by the literary canon of a nation and its body of "great works"? To what extent do they adhere to, or contest, the supposedly universal values conveyed through those texts and how do they situate their own works within the national tradition? Building on Edward W. Said's contrapuntal readings and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's reflections on the voice of the subaltern, this monograph examines the ways in which Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu have re-read, challenged, and adapted the German canon. Similar to other writers in postcolonial contexts, their work on the canon entails an inquiry into history and a negotiation of their relation to the texts and representations that define the "host" nation. Through close analyses of the works of these non-native German authors, the book investigates the intersection between politics, ethics, and aesthetics in their work, focusing on the appropriation and re-evaluation of cultural legacies in German-language literature. Opening up a rich critical dialogue with scholars of German Studies and Postcolonial Theory, Christine Meyer provides a fresh perspective on German-language minority literature since the reunification.

Watch our talk with the editor Christine Meyer here: https://youtu.be/bIOn-8q5QIU

PART I The Forms and Foci of Canon Critique

Chapter 1 Postcolonialism and the Canon

“Literary history is the great morgue where everyone seeks his dead, those whom he loves and to whom he is related.” Henrich Heine (1833)^1

Reflection on the literary canon, understood as the collection of texts that constitute the cultural patrimony of a given community as it is passed on by scholarly, academic, and cultural institutions, initially falls to those who do not feel themselves represented by this communal corpus: firstly women and ethnic minorities, i. e. African-American descendants of the enslaved in the US, immigrant populations throughout the Western world composed essentially of former colonial subjects, and finally sexual minorities such as those in the LGBTQ+ community. Starting at the end of the 1970s, these population groups designated as minorities brought the problem of the representation of minorities in schools and on the literary market to the surface in Anglo-Saxon universities. They could not identify with either the subject of discourse presented in the texts taught, i. e. the white Western male who held economic, institutional, and symbolic power, or its object, in which they found themselves described with the traits of the absolute Other, at once provoking fear, fascination, contempt, and revulsion.²

Reread through the eyes of former colonial subjects, of the descendants of the enslaved, of oppressed women – that is, of every individual situated in a position of inferiority in relation to the supremacy of the white Western male – the text that formed the object of general consensus, thus revealed themselves to constitute an exclusive normative discourse whatever the grand ethical, humanist, or republican values they otherwise embodied. What was called into question by this reading “against the grain” from the point of view of the excluded and dominated was the pretension of canonical authors to represent the whole of humanity, moreover, the aptitude to do so attributed to them by institutions.

In the academic world, the first texts indicted in this manner were those that directly addressed the confrontation with the Other: travel literature of the colonial period as well as ethnological studies and the works of art inspired by these voyages. The work that comparatist Edward Said, originally from Palestine, devoted to Orientalism in 1978 became the foundational reference for postcolonial studies. Relying on a critical analysis of texts by Nerval, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, Byron, and Conrad among others; the operas of Verdi, Mozart, and Beethoven; the films of Rudolph Valentino, etc., Said affirms that the “Orient” is a fiction created by the West and demonstrates that the colonizer’s discourse, in depicting the dominated as the ultimate Other and in constructing it as an object of knowledge, at once justifies and exercises power. Literary works contribute, just as scientific treatises do, to reinforcing and extending the domination of socio-economic institutions and even governments over subjugated peoples: in representing a culturally backwards East, archaic and degenerate, cruel, barbarous, or lascivious, writers validate and strengthen the economic, military, and religious stranglehold on these territories. The history, anthropology, and literature constructed for intellectually understanding the colonies are cultural productions with real historical power, and the vision of the “Orient” that resulted is extensive and coherent, though without any connection to extra-linguistic reality. The East described in these documents is an object, never a subject of its own discourse. Said underlines how the East has endured as a spectacle, even after decolonization, for the West. Although the tone has changed and many of the texts of that era appear caricaturish with distance, most of the stereotypes remain. Part of Said’s goal is thus to explain how this power dynamic persisted, and to chase the traces of Orientalist representations out of contemporary discourse. Undergirded by Foucault’s work on “the order of discourse,” Said’s study rests on a project of awareness: the aim is to bring to light, in a constant back-and-forth between the past and present, what today’s world is made of and what representations we have of it. This epistemological and hermeneutic project doubles as a political project. By means of this awareness, the long-term objective is to break away from the power dynamic between “the West” and “the Rest,” that is to say: to leave behind the colonial paradigm.

It is for this second point that Said is most often attacked by his successors. They, beginning with Bhabha, do not question Orientalism’s presuppositions and likewise approve of its anti-establishment aims, but they point to the reductive aspect of an analysis that reveals itself to be, on the whole, incapable of transcending the binary vision instilled by colonialism. By imputing the entire responsibility for the problems inherited from colonialism to “the West” (just as monolithic and undifferentiated a concept in its way as the “Orient”), Said ultimately did nothing more, in their eyes, than comfort formerly colonized peoples in their victimhood. To free themselves from the mental framework imposed by the former “centers” of the colonial world, however, they would have to adopt a point of view that permitted them to think differently about alterity. This is what Bhabha first attempted to do in 1994 with The Location of Culture by indicating that the relationship between the colonized and the colonizing culture is not one-way but rather dialectic. Thence Bhabha developed a theory of “hybridity,” which pays as much attention to the role of imitation among the colonized (“mimicry,” the art of copying as strategic duplicity) as to the transformation the colonizer undergoes in turn from contact with the foreign country. According to Bhabha, this reciprocal influence gives rise to the desire to change and permits the relationship to evolve; the ambivalent intimacy between the colonizer and colonized opens a hybrid space, an “in-between-space” or “third space” where forms of resistance are discovered. The analysis Bhabha performs on stereotypes in the colonial and neocolonial discourse sheds a light on the ambivalent, fundamentally unstable, and precarious character of the colonial identity and its hegemonic pretensions. These reflections thus present the basis of an ethnological critique of the West.

Another American scholar from the Indian subcontinent, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has attempted to develop a concept of “subalternity” inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. A Marxist and disciple of Derrida, Spivak pursues the analyses inaugurated by Said and Bhabha from a perspective at once more political and more feminist. In particular, she insists on the disparities that exist even within post-colonial spaces and on the gap that separates the intellectual elites from the truly “subaltern” social strata (peasants and paupers), but even more so from the lower-class women subjected at once to imperialist power and that of the colonized men. Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak asks in the title of her now most famous work published in 1988. The answer is: no. Poor women of formerly colonized countries do not have access to the subject position claimed by postcolonial writers.

What is at stake in postcolonial studies and, beyond them, in the cultural practices of the places concerned, is precisely the question of knowing how to transcend that incapacity to speak, how to leave the position of object to attain dignity, a voice, and “agency” (another key concept in postcolonial studies) as a free and sovereign subject. Owing to the inherent schizophrenia of the colonized position,³ this reappropriation of the status of subject comes by way of a confrontation with the interiorized colonizing discourse. Precolonial “purity,” a hypothetical state of innocence supposed to predate colonization, cannot be reconstituted. Postcolonial creators must therefore invent new strategies, e. g. defining the contours of the dominant discourse by exposing its presuppositions and mechanisms, dismantling that discourse, and destroying it. In the literary domain, this happens by means of work on the “canon” by which the postcolonial writers are simultaneously nourished, notably through scholarly institutions, and dispossessed of their proper cultural identity. The fourth foundational work in postcolonial studies, a book-manifesto published in 1989 by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin entitled The Empire Writes Back, is dedicated to such responses. In order to detail the strategies of resistance from the periphery against the center, the authors analyze several texts that serve as an example from this perspective: the re-readings of Shakespeare’s Tempest by Caribbean or Australian authors who adopt the point of view of Caliban, the rewriting of Robinson Crusoe by South African author J. M. Coetzee from the point of view of a woman and taking for its true hero a Friday with his tongue cut out (Foe, 1986). These texts are responses, at once analytical and polemical, to Shakespeare and Defoe.

“Re-reading” and “re-writing”: these intertextual procedures are at the core of literary creation in the postcolonial context. Contrary to the ludic forms of intertextuality that developed in the Western world as an effect of “anything goes” 1980s postmodernism, there is nothing gratuitous about these practices. Quite the opposite: for postcolonial subjects, like for women in Western countries, rewriting the canon is a question of survival.⁴ Born of the need to establish oneself as subject, these discursive techniques distinguish themselves from the postmodern game by their political and dialectic character; they are essentially subversive modalities of writing. As Jacqueline Bardolph notes, there is a radical opposition between the postcolonial approach founded on the conquest of agency, “the subject’s assumption of responsibility for the collective future,” and the “pessimistic but impotent contemplation of contemporary disorder,” which nourishes postmodernism. The postmodern, Bardolph adds,

places the problem of representation at the heart of production, favoring the metafictional and reflexivity in works while the postcolonial is ultimately seeking a representation better suited to the awareness that would enable social change. Postcolonial theory as a whole refutes the postmodern vision of cultural mixing as too close to the dominant consensus, which causes the discourse on multiculturalism to slip into a demobilizing cultural relativism.⁵

For writers in the postcolonial context, working on the canon is thus working on history, in the sense that it consists of (re)reading the texts of a past wherein they find themselves represented, but not from their own point of view. The critical, corrective reading of these texts is a means of responding to the other’s pretensions of domination and so of re-appropriating one’s own history. This work has nothing to do with strategies of integration or acculturation. Nor is it reducible, contrary to the image one might glean from its detractors like Harold Bloom (1994), to a simple repudiation: one does not take the time to “retort” in like manner to texts unless one thinks their impact withstands the test of time, that is, unless deep down one recognizes their authority, even beyond the fact that they have been perverted by institutions as instruments of domination. It is a matter precisely of historicizing the very process of canonization to make possible a confrontation with the text itself, stripped of the aura of universality that confers on it a tendentious and normative “tradition.”

Theorizing the Canon

The concept of a canon implies a dialectic rapport between permanence and evolution, inclusion and exclusion, and the universal and particular. Considered as a selective corpus of texts withdrawn from the historicity of thought and human endeavors, the canon is itself subject to the evolution of taste, values, and representations. “The canon is nothing other than a list of enduring works, or what are supposed to be,” Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes (2006: 11). This claim of resisting time is nevertheless regularly reevaluated within literary history with a mind toward updating the canonical corpus, which was explicitly prescriptive for centuries, without the ethical and aesthetic bases of the normative apparatus provoking discussion. At the end of the twentieth century, however, following the unprecedented acceleration of the rhythm with which literary movements succeeded each other after the turn of the nineteenth century (always in more or less stark opposition to the aesthetic norms prevailing until then), consciousness of the canon’s relativity and the questions raised by its malleability and subjectivity began to take hold – so much so that, as Fabrice Malkani, Anne-Marie Saint-Gille, and Ralf Zschachlitz argue, “archetypical forms of research into canonical truths gave way to conceptions of truth in progress” (2007: 526). This outcome, corroborated by the work of Pierre Nora among others on “sites of memory,” translated itself into a new understanding of the canon. Henceforth, “[i]t is the aptitude to recontextualize themselves beyond the original situation that bestows status on patrimonial works or objects. Canons establish themselves according to the societies or milieus that cultivate them.”⁶ Thus, the cultural patrimony is no longer thought of “as an immutable canon” (Textkanon), but “always considered a renewable canon” (Deutungskanon) (2007: 527).

Inversely, this new approach resulting from the transgressive experiences of modernity honed the perception one might have of the residual normativity inherent in any canon. Like it or not, the body of works passed on and circulated through institutional channels is always “the site of a sedimentation of fetishized texts and dead interpretations” (Lecercle 2006: 11). Moreover, the process of canonization takes place according to selection criteria, which while in no way inappropriate, do imbed themselves within cultural politics, the object of which is to justify and propagate the dominant group’s values. As Ralf Zschachlitz observes, the perception of the mechanisms of power that determine a society’s cultural memory parallels the model of the literary field developed by Pierre Bourdieu:

It is the struggle within the literary field that forms the history of the field […], struggle for the monopoly to impose legitimate categories of perception and appreciation; it is the “combat between those who have made their mark on history and fight to endure and those who cannot in turn leave their mark without relegating those with an interest in stopping time, in eternalizing the present, to the past.”⁷

For, Zschachlitz continues: “[I]n Bourdieu’s model of the literary field, a canon of stable works and points of view cannot exist. Every successful canonization immediately calls forth a reaction meant to destabilize the new canon; every new element, every new arrival destabilizes the ever-precarious harmony of the field and established canons.”⁸ Across the consolidation of a cultural system that forms an integral part of the social system as a whole, ensuring...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Endorsements
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Translation
• Introduction
• PART I The Forms and Foci of Canon Critique
• PART II The Canon and Its Discontents: Palimpsestic Re-Inscriptions in Schami, Özdamar, and Zaimoglu
• Conclusion