Canon Fathers and Myth Universe

Abstract

N THE SUBTEXT of these remarks are two questions that, together, constitute the pretext for what follows. The first of these questions is that of the reader who asks, What the hell does that title mean, anyway: Canon Fathers and Myth Universe? Well, it refers to the generally patriarchal literary canon, the literally patriarchal biblical one that is the source of the metaphor, the Fathers of the Church, whose patristic writings include the bases of law, the Anglican cathedral clergy, whose title is canon and who may be addressed as Father, and, of course, the military imagination, with its fecund visions of can(n)on fodder. And then there are the notions of a universal myth, the dominant myth of a human universal that turns out to be male, and the sexist international competition for Miss Universe. My title is at once the portmanteau that contains all that conceptual baggage and the background upon which the essay itself is projected. The other question in my suband pre-text is one that I have been asking myself with increasing insistence whenever I accept an invitation to give a guest lecture under the aegis of a Department of English or Comparative Literature. Crudely expressed (which is exactly how it is expressed in the depths of my consciousness), my question goes: Shall I choose a subject in feminist criticism or in criticism? This is a genuine question. On the one hand, my reputation and intellectual identity have both been informed by my work as a feminist critic. But the invitation is frequently at the instance of a search committee, as part of the hiring process. As a professional who is not gainfully employed, ought I not show that I can do regular criticism too? So the question is heartfelt and authentic. Yet it horrifies me. For criticism should not be served, like coffee, in and variant versions. In fact, though, depending on the region of this country in which you order it, coffee is interpreted as meaning that the cream has been added or, conversely, that it has not. (Regular, that is, is the opposite of both black and white-depending on where you stand.) Surely, I have been telling myself, I can construct an argument to show why, at this time, the proper project of criticism is the one with the feminism in it.

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