MICHAEL H.

KEEFER

History and the Canon: The Case of

Doctor Faustus

The relationship between the two key words of my title is a curiously intricate one. Since the notion of canonicity implies a controlled transmis sion of the past into the future, to talk about literary canons is also, unavoidably, to invoke one or another view of history. Yet, paradoxically, some of the recently and currently most inuential critical positions have encouraged understandings of canonicity that are thoroughly antihistorical. I shall be concerned in the rst part of this essay with some of the implications of this paradox. In the second part, turning to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a play that is by common consent of some importance in our literary canon, I will consider certain practical consequences, both textual and interpretive, of attempts to lift the canon out of history. Another less stolid title, that of a recent academic conference, may serve to introduce the issues I wish to discuss. 'Beyond the Canon: Literary Innovation and Integration' - these words, from one point of view, are no more than an elliptical summary of the inescapable process of canon revision. Any new text is 'beyond the canon' in the banal sense of being not yet canonical - and sometimes also in the more interesting sense of being genuinely innovative, of embodying moves that extend beyond the limits implied by the current literary canon. Critical commen tary, where it is not simply dismissive, serves to integrate the new text into the canon by discovering some degree of 'conformity between the old and the new/ which also implies making adjustments to the 'ideal order' formed by the 'existing monuments' of literature.1 This is a familiar perspective, as the tags from T.S. Eliofs Tradition and the Individual Talenf will already have signalled. And it is one that within certain limits can accommodate historically oriented canon revisions as well: witness Eliofs revisionary insistence that 'the main current... does not at all ow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.'1 But perhaps 'Beyond the Canon' is meant to evoke something a little more exciting. Taken in another sense, the words suggest, indeed invite, a kind of deliberate transgression. Since in other contexts a prepositional phrase of this kind might as easily be hortatory as descriptive, can one be blind in this case to its hidden persuasive force? 'Down to the river! into the street!' cried Allen Ginsberg in the second part of Howl.3 Why not then 'Beyond the Canon!'? Yet as we surge forward, arm in arm, two doubts may assail us.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1987