Canon and its changes

The cultural memory of the Earth, divided with humans oblivion, minus lost decades,
forgotten arts and neglected works, the result divided again with humans history and
subjectivity, creates what it is known as the canon. By this statement, I have no intention of
diminishing the actual value of it, or of the persons who chose and made the canon; I have a
profound respect for any work and author chosen to be canonized, as well as for the ones who
selected them. I only wish to emphasize on canons changeability and its always incomplete
state of being.
As time passes by, the world continuously changes from year to year, from moment to
moment, creating a consciousness of past time and future actions that influences each other
through the present state of human mind. Future, as time, changes as we make our own
decisions in the present; past, as time, changes as we go into the future of our choices and
realize that what we thought it was something, was actually something else; and so, it is
not the past that changes, but the way in which we see the past, and it is not the future that we
are modifying, but us in the future. Thus, the duality past-future, formed as a consequence of
the present, is unchangeable. One depends on the other as human mind depends on time, but
time doesnt flow; it exists.
Past and future are the results of our own subjectivity that recreates the world in which
we exist, giving it a temporary vision. Subjectivity is the one that changes what we saw and
what we will see. The thing that is remains the same, only our vision upon it changes. And so,
all that exists or existed is subjected to a recreation in our mind, as everything goes through
humans subjectivity, modifying its original esteem by adding to it, or on the contrary,
diminishing its actual value. As a consequence, the actual value of a work of art is in fact
never known entirely, being always under the spectrum of human mind (which, no matter how
much one tries, can never be completely objective). And bearing all this in mind, analyzing
everything from a temporal perspective (from which no one can escape, given our actual
condition that always implies time), one can find himself looking upon an evolution of
canon that reflects in itself the evolution of human subjectivity.
The process of canon formation and evolution is and has always been influenced by
cultural and historical change. As different currents of literature come and go, each writter
took the characteristics (of that certain current) and apply them to the text, modulating its core
in a way that would be closer to his personal way of thinking, but never changing the entire
essence of that ideology. And so, the task of selecting the right book or author to be part of the

canon has always been a very difficult and controversed one, thus giving the canon a
constantly uncertain and incomplete state of being (giving the fact that new works are being
written even nowadays).
The works of literature that are part of the canon, along with their writers, bear upon
them the mark of the time and the society they have been living in. But they do so not only
because the period in which the writers lived was that particular period, but also because the
people that came after them felt the difference of their time and mentality and chose particular
works to be representative for one moment or the other, works that embody the cultural and
political values of that society. What I am trying to say is that even if we try to remove from
the texts their writers and their temporality, there can never be made a general description that
could cover everything that is considered to be part of the canon, because the temporality of
the text is not given only by the author, but it also comes from the text itself, from within
itself. And because of that, the distance between the writer and the reader is always present,
no matter how much an author tries to make the text timeless. And so, the changes in the
canon can be seen as the writer often tries to influence the subjectivity of a supposed reader,
by presenting him the world he created, a world that becomes real as the reader takes part
with his mind to the journey that the author is proposing. And as this journey is always
completely controlled by the writer, there is always a certain dialogue inside the text between
the person that reads the book and the one who wrote it.
Through the years, the voice of the narrator in the canon never once changed its
direction (from writer to reader), but only its way of addressing. If in 1726, the writer
addressed directly to the reader through concrete words, an example being This may perhaps
pass with the Reader rather for a European or English story, as time passes by, the author
seems to be attracting the attention rather on himself than on the person of the reader, by using
divers techniques, like stream of consciousness or using the first person pronoun I. But by
doing so, the actual focus falls not on the writer or the reader, but on the text itself, because
such devices have either the purpose of creating the illusion of a dialogue (and as readers are
used from daily life to always encounter the situation of an addressor and an addressee, the
image of the author disappears from the readers mind, leaving only the story), or the purpose
of somehow giving the illusion of a merge between the readers mind and that of the narrator,
by this trying to overcome some of the barriers that are always present between the person
who writes and the person who is reading, barriers that always existed in any text no matter
the time period.

Cf. Brian McHale, in Constructing Postmodernism affirms that You in modern

English the only pronoun of direct address, always implies an act of communication, and so
it compels the reader [] to hypothesize a circuit of communication. Starting from this
statement, we can see that in all the canonic texts the presence of the pronoun you can be
found, the variety consisting in the fact that different authors from different periods of time
chose to use this pronoun in different ways, as canon evolved, using it more subtle, making
the reader less and less conscious of the actual dialog that occurs and so more unaware of the
narrators voice, or on the contrary, using it in a very obvious way, making the reader very
conscious of the communication that takes place. As a result, in the entire evolution of canon,
the situation of the direct address never changed, only the ways in which it is accomplished is
different. We can observe a certain evolution from the direct addressing uses implicitly in the
text the word reader, to a form of the text that contains in it a confession, a stream of
consciousness, or the narrators own point of view about himself/herself.
Also, along with this evolution, we can also observe a changing in the topics that are
discussed throughout the canon, the subjects starting to approach the human mind and its
psychology.
In a text from 1848, the author might speak very direct and frankly about Vanity Fair,
considering it not a moral place, certainly; not a merry one though very noisy, referring to
his own point of view, and also considering the perspective of others: Some people consider
fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their servants and families: very likely they
are right. But he insists on his perspective and also tries to suggest it to the reader through
that circuit of communication that is established at the level of the text: But persons who
think otherwise, and are of a lazy, or benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step
in for half-an-hour, and look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts: some dreadful
combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very
middling indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business.
In 1900 texts (and authors) begin to focus their interest more and more on the
emotions and feelings of the characters and some of them make use of the direct address by
using the first person pronoun in rhetorical questions, which brings the reader closer to the
text and also, through this, giving a wider view of the characters mind: We ought to know.
He is one of us- and have I not stood up once like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal
constancy? Was I so very wrong after all?.
Topics that are more abstract and philosophical start to make their way in the canon
with the passing of time, in 1928 the condition of human being a subject treated by different
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authors through their characters: The only things that concern us are the little relative gods
and evils of history and geography, the little relative gods and evils of individual casuistry.
Everything else is non-human and beside the point; [] a mans a creature on a tight-rope,
walking delicately equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his
balancing pole and body and instinct and all thats unconscious and earthly and mysterious at
the other. Balanced. Which is damnably difficult. Here, the eternal duality between body and
mind, consciousness and instinct is insisted upon, a duality that defines human being, as he
always has to be in a perfect balance between the two, on the narrow line that unifies and give
harmony to a person. But this line and the balance that a person can have is relative,
depending on each situation, so the only absolute he can really know is the absolute of
perfect balance. The absoluteness of perfect relativity. Which is a paradox and nonsense
intellectually. And so, texts about paradoxes and human psychic starts to cover more and
more of the canons content, as stream of consciousness is being used more often in order to
express the discontinuity or abundance of the thoughts of the human mind, along with the
ambiguity that appears when opposed concepts meet: Pictures dont lie! This image has been
faked! Free the press! Ban nosy journalists! The novel is dead! God is dead! Aaragh, theyre
all alive and theyre coming after us! [] Lies are truth! Hate is love! Two and two makes
five! And everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.
Rhetorical questions continue, and this time referring to the author, to the one that
creates in his book the world in which the reader enters only to find that the reality inside it
is no more different that the one outside (in terms of emotions and ideas): how can a novelist
achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
There is no one, no entity of higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that
can forgive her. No atonement for God, or novelist, even if they are atheists.
As a conclusion, it can be easily seen that canons evolution has a direct connection to
humans evolution, as the writers are but humans, and the world they create is but a reflection
of the world inside their minds (composed by their own ideas and visions), and as long as
humans metaphysical mind evolves, humans capacity of creation is inexhaustible,
constraining the canon to always live an open gate for whatever may come.