We can approach this matter by recalling that the process of reading itself, though by no means always critical, is inevitably theoretical; no better illustration of this point can be cited than the frequently noticed tendency of any school of reading (critical or precritical) to privilege, whether implicitly or explicitly, a particular area of the literary terrain. Two widely diverse examples may be noted. Lukácsian criticism, which is certainly a critical theory, is overwhelmingly oriented toward the novel of classical realism. Balzac and Tolstoy provide Lukács with his essential models, and, despite the immense range of his empirical erudition, he seldom strays far from them in any conceptual sense. His intense admiration for Thomas Mann—one of the most consistent enthusiasms of Lukács’s very long career—is based on his ability to theoretically construct Mann as the authentic successor of the nineteenth-century realists. Conversely, literary modernism seldom figures in his work save as an object of denunciation or (as with his late recognition of Brecht) an object assimilable to the basic principles of realism after all. Lyric poetry scarcely even exists for Lukács.
But lyric poetry (to take our second example), especially the lyric poetry of T. S. Eliot and his seventeenth-century precursors, is the central genre for American New Criticism, a school of considerable technical sophistication but one whose conceptual orientation is predominantly precritical. (There is some irony here, as the more philosophically schooled of the New Critics were directly indebted to Kant himself. But they tended to understand Kantian aesthetic contemplation as the empiricist apprehension of works existing on a Wimsattian “objective” level, rather than as constructive or radically interpretative in character.) Engaged in working out pedagogically convenient styles of “close reading” on short and highly wrought poetic artifacts, the New Critics have far less to say about prose fiction (Cleanth Brooks’s work on Faulkner is exceptional and not, indeed, a particularly New Critical project), and they would be hopelessly at sea with a work like Finnegans Wake (1939), not to mention, say, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1932–33).
There is, of course, a major difference between Lukács and the New Critics. Genuinely critical in the sense defined in the preceding chapter, Lukács knows what he is doing with clear self-consciousness. He is constructing a theory of realism for determinate ends both philosophical (the justification of orthodox Marxism as Lukács understands the latter to be the heir of the classical metaphysical line from Aristotle to Hegel) and political (the struggle against fascism). The New Critics, by contrast, seem to imagine, though doubtless with some degree of neo-Agrarian mauvaise foi, that they are simply and innocently “reading.” But it is noteworthy how both posit a privileged generic space, and it could readily be shown how equivalent generic spaces are assumed or stated by other schools as well: organicist English fiction, especially that of Lawrence, by the Scrutiny school; symbolist poetry like Mallarmé’s by Derridean deconstruction; high modernist drama and fiction by the Frankfurt School and by Althusserian Marxism; the Bible and the Prophetic Books of Blake (as well as much Shakespearean and Spenserian romance) by the myth criticism of Northrop Frye; Romantic and neo-Romantic poetry by the influence criticism of Harold Bloom; and so forth. Science fiction, it must be noted, has been overtly privileged by relatively few influential readers.
What this pattern of generic privileging suggests, I think, is not simply the importance of genre to the reading of literature but a way in which genre must be thought as a more fundamental category than literature itself. Genre is a substantive property of discourse and its context, a tendential mode whereby signifying practices are organized. Literature, by contrast (understanding the term in any sense more specific than that of all written documents whatever) is a formally arbitrary and socially determinate category. Literature, in other words, is a wholly functional term.4 Those works are literature that are designated literature by the minority of readers who, in a given time and place, possess the social and institutional power (as Nietzsche would say) that enables their views on the matter to prevail. In our present historical situation, these authoritative readers include academic critics and teachers, publishing executives, librarians, editors of journals and reviews, and others. Such agents, acting in a determinate social context and toward determinate (if often unconscious) ends, decide that a certain relatively small number of texts, out of the much vaster number that actually exist, shall be considered—that is, shall be canonized—as literature. They judge, for instance, that the poems, essays, and some of the letters written by Wallace Stevens are literature, while the insurance policies and office memoranda also written by him are not. But, of course, such judgments vary greatly in various historical situations, as the most cursory acquaintance with literary history reveals. Paradise Lost (1667), to be sure, was literature on the day of its first publication and remains so today. In 1776, on the other hand, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was literature in a sense in which it probably no longer is and in which the last scholarly publication by the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics almost certainly is not. Conversely, the plays of Shakespeare have progressed from being minimally or hardly at all literature to being more centrally literature than any other texts in the language.5 The attempt to construct an essential or transhistorically substantive definition of literature is, accordingly, in vain. Reading, one might say, does not merely respond to literature: reading (of a certain sort) creates literature.
This kind of reading, then—this process of creation—may be understood as at one with the process of canon-formation itself, which, as becomes evident, comprises three overlapping but distinct phases, in each of which genre plays an important role. In the primary phase of canonization—the construction of the very category of literature out of all verbal documents extant—genre is a nearly all-powerful factor. To put it another way, in this phase the ideology of canon-formation makes itself felt mainly through generic mediation. So it is that the business memoranda of so conservative and respectable an author as Stevens are denied the title of literature, while a poem by a militant and unknown slumdweller, if it obeyed a few simple conventions, would not be denied the title. It is in this sense that genre must be understood as a category logically prior to literature: the very existence of the latter is radically enabled by the former. Indeed, generic determination operates so functionally on this primary level of canon-formation that the same verbal construction may be literary or nonliterary depending upon the material context. The sentence, Walk with light, would be literature in a book of spiritual aphorisms but not on a metal sign at a street intersection.
Most works of literature, however—like the slumdweller’s poem, probably—are generally considered bad or negligible literature, and are relegated to near-invisibility at the periphery of the canon. There is, then, a secondary phase of the canon-constructing process, which is devoted to forming a secondary canon: a canon-within-the-canon that distinguishes “good” literature, literature that deserves to be taken seriously, literature that is literature in more than the bare bibliographic sense, literature worth studying and teaching and writing articles about. Though nongeneric ideological considerations are more important here than in the primary phase of the process, the power of genre is still strong. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were generally convinced of his personal genius, and there was a dawning awareness that the scripts of English stage plays might in some sense be literature; there was, however, widespread resistance to considering such scripts as literature in quite the same honorific sense that applied to ancient drama or to English odes and sonnets. The boom in Shakespeare’s reputation was directly dependent upon the collapse of this inhibition. Somewhat similarly perhaps, academic critics in our own time seem to be deciding that autobiography belongs more centrally to the literary canon than they would have allowed only a generation or two ago. In practice, there is bound to be overlapping between the primary and secondary phases of canon-formation, if only because of the inevitable semantic slippage between the concept of membership in a grouping and the concept of exemplifying the grouping favorably; all groupings have a tendency to