In Dialogue With Ben Trull

This essay was originally a comment on one of Ben Trull’s articles. Either he’s a great writer who provoked a lot of thoughts, or I’m long-winded as Polonius, but either way, an essay came out of it.

Since I left Thomas Aquinas College, I keep finding canons everywhere. There’s a canon of craft books. You need to have read The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, Aspects of a Novel by E.M. Forster, Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor, etc., etc., or people will keep saying, “As so-and-so says in such-and-such,” and you won’t know what they’re talking about. At the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, people kept bringing up Alice Monroe; professors kept assigning her work in seminars. However, it always bored me.

Once, at dinner with a faculty member in the Spanish Creative Writing program, he said, “Alice Monroe is so boring, and they consider her one of their greats.” I felt validated.

You see, I’m obsessed with Roberto Bolaño and Juan Rulfo. I always brought up these two authors in workshops, seminars, and parties, and no one had read Rulfo, but a few had read Bolaño, and those who had weren’t particularly impressed by him. One day, I brought him up at a party with only Spanish Creative Writing students. Everyone had read him. A game started that no one had initiated. We went in a circle talking about the first time we read Bolaño, the first encounter, what book it was, how we felt, the way some people would talk about a first kiss.

Because of canon, I felt more united in the Spanish Creative Writing circles than I did in the English ones.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Ben Trull’s articles on finding what to read while living in a world that offers so much. The phrase has stayed with me: “How do you decide what to read without a curriculum telling you?”

The sad truth is that canons exist. TAC is an example of an institution that leads people to the impression that canon can be cataloged. “Here are the Great Books of Western Civilization,” it seems to advertise, sometimes implicitly, sometimes less implicitly. “But where are the black and brown authors?” I ask. “We don’t see race.” Yeah, you’d have to have diversity to see race, but I digress.

Reed College is an example of a place that has many of the same quibbles with cataloged canon that I have. That is, I find its exclusivity to be not only alienating, but inaccurate to what Western Civilization is. There was a time in the Middle Ages when the University of Paris taught mostly works of Muslim scholars. There was a time when the education of a Western gentleman included books TAC would never include in its curriculum. So, places like Reed leave their students (the students of theirs I’ve met) with the impression that canon doesn’t exist or needs to be thrown out.

Yet, if you ask 100 random Anglophone writers to recommend a craft book to you, you’d probably hear Craft in the Real World about 60 times, Big Magic from a few of the more mixed media writers, A Swim in the Bond in the Rain from a couple of literary writers, and maybe Save the Cat! from a few writers who try to defend it but are ashamed to have read it. My personal recommendation is Wonderlands by Charles Baxter. You’ll see many repeated answers, and several people will have multiple recommendations and opinions on other people’s answers. This commonality, I think, is a form of canon.

Now, if you ask 100 random Hispanic writers the same question, you would hear something more like Formas Breves by Ricardo Piglia. This is a book that I’ve found more helpful than any of the ones mentioned above, but (to my knowledge) it hasn’t been translated into English, so you Anglophone readers will never know.

I’m someone who’s very inclined to be Catholic because I love seeing patterns. This gives me a special stomach for appreciating hierarchy, order, and a good long game of chess. When I spoke to my English writer friends who deny the existence of canon yet all talk about the same writers, I found canon, and I found that canon is boring, so I put it down. When I spoke to my Hispanic writer friends who deny the existence of canon yet all talk about the same books, I found canon, and I enjoyed that canon, so I kept reading it. They might deny that the pattern I’m seeing is one that can be called canon. “It’s not that rigid.” Who cares? Whatever you call it, the difference between what these canon-less anarchists do and what the canon-loving teacher’s pets do is that the pets wrote it down, codified it, and the anarchists keep it as an oral tradition (which means that they did a better job memorizing it).

But that’s not totally fair. At TAC, the curriculum doesn’t change (too much) year by year. The curriculum I studied is roughly the same as that of any other TAC alum.

On the other hand, at the IWW, the reading list is decided by the author that teaches the class. The curriculum changes every semester. The first class I took there was The Art of Adultery, a class that read novels about adultery to study their tropes, cliches, and craft. The reading list was one of the few that featured mostly non-American authors. The only American we read was James Baldwin. We worked through titles like The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, Woman with a Lap Dog by Chekhov, One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, and The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg. Madhuri Vijay selected the texts for that class. What’s impressive is that it’s unlikely those writers had read each other’s work. Yet, despite this, we did find common tropes, cliches, and craft techniques. It might have been a “canon” on literature about adultery, but “canon” in a loose sense. The lineage from Chekhov to Murugan is less clear than that of Aristotle to Aquinas.

The reason is that although canon exists, its existence is fleeting. It’s an artifact. It doesn’t have an essence. It’s reconstructed and deconstructed by Saint John’s and Wyoming Catholic and Reed College. It’s rewritten every time any individual reads something new that moves them. It’s personal, deeply personal. As I’ve gone through life noticing each of these little canons, finding a new one in every different circle of readers, I’ve also been constructing my own canon. I can’t stop recommending By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño and Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo.

So, back to the question at hand: “How do you decide what to read without a curriculum telling you?”

I offer my tentative answer: canon preexists code, canon outlives code. You design curricula more than curricula designs you.