Journalist and author Roberto Lovato poses for a portrait in front of Joel Bergner’s 2004 mural, “Un Pasado Que Aún Vive,” which is based on stories from the Salvadoran civil war. The mural is one of many in the Mission District’s Balmy Alley. Photo: Alexis Terrazas
The son of Salvadoran immigrants, San Francisco author Roberto Lovato says he grew up never seeing his parents’ home country in American movies and books. That changed when he encountered Joan Didion.
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Didion brought El Salvador into the mainstream American view with her 1983 book “Salvador,” which recalled a two-week visit to the country during the Salvadoran Civil War. As Lovato saw it, a “titan of literature” was raising awareness about the crisis in his parents’ homeland through “brilliant and seductive” prose.
These days, his take on Didion is more complicated.
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“‘Terror is the given of the place,’” Lovato says, reciting one of Didion’s most memorable — and problematic — descriptions of El Salvador in the book. “I never caught that line until I read it with an anti-colonial lens. … She paints this picture of Salvadorans as these faceless, barbaric, two-dimensional people, and that approach to representing Salvadorans and Central Americans continues to this day.”
As conversations about rooting out bigotry and ending systemic racism continue to gain momentum, long-standing literary darlings like Didion — and the forces that put their books on a pedestal — are being scrutinized through various critical reading lenses.
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“The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages” by Harold Bloom Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The American literary canon — a collection of books and writers that are deemed to be of the highest cultural value — is a battleground where pundits, authors and academics argue for the inclusion and exclusion of certain titles. Some of these discussions focus on the pervasiveness of white male authors and their perspectives; others target racist, misogynistic and bigoted ideas expressed within classic texts.
When the late literary critic Harold Bloom published “The Western Canon” in 1994, he identified 26 “immortal” authors, from Homer to William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf. The book continued a fervent debate over what is great and who gets to decide that.
Now, the debate has extended to whether we should have such an organizing structure in the first place.
For queer Chicana writer Myriam Gurba, the canon’s origin is its own problem.
“The notion of the canon itself is one of these ‘monuments,’ because the British developed it as a civilizing tool to settle India, and the texts were chosen to serve as a pacifying influence upon colonized people,” Gurba says. “The notion of a canon is itself colonial, so perhaps we ought to retire the idea of it completely.”
Author Myriam Gurba Photo: Emily Books
Power and money have an outsize influence on how the canon has been shaped, says 18-year-old Leila Mottley, a Black queer writer from Oakland who earlier this year sold her novel “Nightcrawling” to Knopf at auction.
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“When you think of who constructs the canon, it’s based in a capitalist hierarchy of who has control over what is printed, shaped by the very privileged and very white powers in publishing,” Mottley says. Roughly 75% of employees in the publishing industry are cisgender white women, according to a recent survey by Lee & Low Books, an independent children’s book publisher.
“We get given our literature, and that’s one thing that embarking on a publication process has taught me,” Mottley says, adding that books backed by major publishers become “the books we learn about, read and assess to be important to the history of literature or not.”
There are ways to push back against the literary monolith, which for teachers, can mean creating a more diverse syllabus not centered on the white experience. Open Syllabus, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi, lists the top 50 authors taught in the field of English literature. Toni Morrison appears on the list, but she is only one of two black authors; every other author on the list is white.
Jordan Karnes is one of Mottley’s former teachers at the Oakland School for the Arts, and remembers teaching Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, two celebrated white Southern authors who used the “N word” and created characters who “(talked) about black people in a problematic way.” Contextualizing their work for high school students was challenging.
A survey of millions of school syllabi shows that, among a top-50 list of authors taught in English literature, the late American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the only Black authors. Photo: Michel Euler / Associated Press
“I had to ask myself, ‘Is it worth it?’” says Karnes, adding that while both authors are important to the canon, they are likely best saved for a university classroom.
“High school is the time for students to see themselves, develop an interest in reading books, and feel safe,” Karnes says.
Stanford English and humanities Professor Paula M.L. Moya has made a long-term effort to teach books primarily written by women of color who have been excluded from the canon. But she says there are still many important books within the canon and isn’t in favor of banning books or authors for any reason.
“No to banning; yes to making choices about what it is that we teach,” Moya says. “You’re cutting literature off at its knees if you say you cannot write about anything that you are not.”
She also points out that the canon is ever changing.
“As we become a more diverse society, and our attitudes about diversity change, sometimes for the better, some worse, the canon diversifies, and what we see in it diversifies and changes,” she says.
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Studies have shown that white Americans could be the minority by 2045, and as the debate over the existence of a canon continues, it might be impossible to uphold one that is almost exclusively white.
“I think the way the canon once existed was way too white, too Western, and way too male,” she says. “But there is some amazing literature there nevertheless. Ultimately, the canon reflects ourselves back to us, it says something about who we want to be.”
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