Classicus Scriptor, Non Proletarius

A Discussion on Canon

The 2nd Century Roman Aulus Gellus refers to a writer as, “Classicus scriptor… non proletarius,” A distinguished, not a commonplace writer.

Canon, an ancient Greek word meaning “measuring rod, standard” was used by the Greeks and later by the Romans to judge and rank cultural works of art and literature. Writers included in a canon aren’t just proficient, but manage to change the medium, and are a measuring rod for all others to compare themselves to. The greatest example of a cultural canon, a collection of works deemed valuable, is the Holy Bible, put together by the Early Church Fathers from ancient Hebrew texts and the writings of the first Christians in the case of the New Testament.

“Originality must compound with inheritance.”

 ― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

This week our sphere found itself engaged in a lively discussion spurned on by Jeffro Johnson's acerbic proclamation that one should not read anything after 1980. Jeffro, best known for his book Appendix N, a critical look at the literary influences of Dungeons & Dragons approached the topic of the necessity for writers and readers to be well-read in the classics both in and outside the genre. The argument centered around the writings of Lord Dunsany. Katie Roome, her husband David, who hosts a podcast and an SFF Review site, along with being heavily involved with the online indie movement that identifies with the #IronAge tag, along with several adjacent writers joined the conversation taking offense at Jeffros pronouncements and started a flurry of interesting conversation on the topic of literary Canon, reading the classics, reading wide and deep in the genre, and what is the purpose of writing. 

I have strong feelings on this topic, and I’ve made it known that I believe that for one to be complete intellectually and spiritually, one must be well-read and immersed in the literary Western Literary Canon and deeply and widely read in the foundational novels in and out of the genres you engage with. Katie and David took the conversation away from the limitations of Twitter and continued the discussion in a long piece on their youtube channel, during which they directly engaged with several points I made. I strongly disagree with their conclusions and wanted to take some time to elaborate on my beliefs in a format more suited for long-form conversation, Twitter being inadequate for anything but bulleted insights. 

A friend and fellow author Alexander Hellene, who is on my side of the conversation beat me off the starting line with his excellent Substack piece titled Prerequisites. The first two paragraphs are a perfect statement on what I believe should be the uncontroversial position of every writer in our sphere, and arguably the default position of an individual that believes in the cultural and intellectual edification of art and literature. 

Before I address the topic I want to touch on two points related to this week's conversation. First I greatly respect what Katie and David are doing with their review site, podcast, and involvement in the writing community. I’ve said it in the past, but what the independent literary and art community lacks is a critical base. To succeed we need a collective mass of readers, critics, reviewers, and archivists, working together to connect the disparate threads into a cohesive conversation. While I am not interested in Science Fiction and Fantasy of the sort they enjoy, I applaud their efforts to build and elevate the greater indy community. Second, a part of a healthy critical community is debate and disagreement which strengthens positions and sharpens thinking. A community engaged in conversation is a thriving community. A caveat to this, one that I would be wrong to ignore, is that the pigheaded and insulting manner of Jefferos kayfabe¹ is insulting and unproductive. While I disagree with Katie on the greater points, unlike Jeffro I recognize that we are on the same side and our enemy outside the line is legion. The abrasive insulting online debate style of the previous decade has become stale. At this point, we should embrace grace and understanding, lifting each other instead of shamelessly degrading for dopamine hits and algorithm gains. So, while I agree with the underlying point Jeffro is trying to make, his delivery weakens and demeans us all. 

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I am a firm believer in The Great Conversation. Every work a writer puts out is part of a greater discussion between the writers of the past, his contemporaries, and the writers that will arrive in the future. This belief is not just a literary conceit but a spiritual, religious, and philosophical truth I accept with my whole being. I come to this understanding through my foundational faith in Orthodox Christianity and my high modernist conservative aesthetics in the vein of Roger Scruton and Edmund Burke. We are part of an intellectual tradition where every work of art, literature, music, and architecture is a building block in the greater monument of Western Civilization, and it is our duty and responsibility to engage with the past to protect it for our future generations. God gave us the gift of reason and subcreation and we must be cognizant of that fact and realize that every time one picks up a pen, a paintbrush, or sits at a keyboard, you are doing so with the weight of everyone that has come before you and engaging in an artistic and spiritual tradition that goes back to creation. 

Most importantly the greater forces of evil are actively engaged in the erasure of the past. We live in a time of disillusionment and disenchantment, the 20th century severed us from our rich cultural and spiritual history and the 21st century is well on the way to atomizing us into a hive of consumerism, force-feeding us synthetic syrup of pornographic funkpopified entertainment, devoid of spiritual beauty and truth. All around us the enemy is toppling statues of our ancestors, defacing great works of art, and destroying the intellectual institutions and traditions of the past. We don’t go a week without some freakish blue-haired professor, reeking of cat piss, attacking the great writers of the past and calls for the removal of Old Dead White Men, or some greasy anemic degenerate part of the nihilistic death cult desecrating our cultural heritage in a museum. 

So yes, I not only believe that everyone should be familiar with the Canon, both the greater Western one and the many genre classics, I think that it is our imperative duty, because our enemies are closer and closer to achieving their goals. I fear that one day, in the not-too-distant future, we will have to become like the months of the early Middle Age who protected the great works during the Roman collapse. 

This foundational belief is why the arguments presented by Katie and David make me recoil. It is fine if you don’t pick up the sword and shield and stand up for your civilization, but please do not sing the song of defeat and encourage our side to lay down arms for the comfort of fun and entertainment. 

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One analogy both Katie and David used in their video was the tree. She correctly pointed out that one does not need to see the roots of the tree to know it’s a tree. I agree, one does not need to know anything about the tree to enjoy its fruit. Who am I to deny a man that joy, after all, I wouldn’t judge a hungry man for eating, candy is still sustenance when one is starving. The birds and beasts eat from the trees without knowing their roots. But, we are not birds and beasts, we are men, and we have been tasked with being gardeners. How much greater is the fulfillment if you do understand the roots, the soil, the land, and the weather? You are no longer a consumer but a participant in the life of the tree, and most importantly a steward. Because if you understand the roots, when that tree comes under attack by parasitical insects, like our culture is today, you will know how to protect it, and even if it succumbs you know where you can take a healthy cutting so you can plant it in the right soil for the future. 

Another strain of insidious argument presented is the one that art and beauty are subjective, the rejection of the very idea of a literary and artistic Canon. The idea is that reading the great works of the past is just an exercise for academics and that the common reader doesn’t need to know the great works of the past to enjoy contemporary pieces. This of course is a monstrous idea firmly rooted in progressive post-modernism. It is shockingly illustrative of the fact that the anti-traditionalist progressives are culturally dominant and that their ideas are being championed by a group that identifies itself as nominally conservative. How insane is it that conservative writers and critics are advocating the position that one doesn’t have to read the classics and one does not have to understand the foundational works of literature and its genres? From my philosophical position, it is hard to not slide into the aggressive stance taken by Jeffro because while they might not be the enemy they are taking positions right out of the enemy's playbook.

Art and literature, to be truly understood have to be taken in through the lens of the greater culture. One can enjoy a work of art for its surface features in the same way one can enjoy a beautiful leaf one comes across during a walk, but to truly understand and get the deep joy out of art and literature one must have a solid grasp of the cultural and historical conversation around it. We humans with reason live in a greater cultural narrative. We take in the world around us as a narrative. Everything we consume is a stone in that narrative wall. This is our strength, and because it is our strength the enemy tries to pry the stones of the past and future out of that wall. Do not help him.

Art and literature are elitist, it requires work on the part of the reader and viewer. Dave, on his Distributism Podcast a few weeks ago fielded a question on this topic. He used the ancient Roman marble statue The Dying Gaul to illustrate this point. One can look at that statue and enjoy its aesthetical and technical qualities. But, how much more powerful does this statue become when you realize what it depicts? The image of a dying Gaul, a defeated enemy of the Roman empire depicted with such honor, grace, and power. What does it say about the Roman artist and his people that they would create such a powerful and edifying artistic monument depicting their enemy? What does it say about the values of Rome, the Ancient World's greatest empire, that they would show such reverence towards their defeated enemy? With the historical understanding of Rome and her wars with the Gauls, the piece becomes part of a greater conversation, much more than its surface aesthetic. This piece is part of the greater Western Conversation that takes the values of the Hellenistic world, speaks of contemporary Roman values, and communicates them to us and our descendants. This is how The Great Conversation works. 

The need for understanding the Canon and the joy of being part of and understanding the cultural conversation isn’t limited to works of high art and literature. Even in the genres of Science Fiction, the best works are rooted in the Canon. I don’t have to elaborate on the works of Tolkien belonging to the tradition of Nordic myth and biblical philosophy. Everyone familiar with Tolkien understands that he was part of an intellectual circle of professors, historians, and mystics, firmly entrenched in greater conversation. Consider other modern masterpieces, such as my favorite work of Science Fiction, Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos, a novel whose very title is an allusion to both the classical world and to the literary Romantic poetry of Keats while its format and presentation of a direct reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. One can read Hyperion and enjoy the exciting science fiction narrative, but once the surface is broken the depth of the work is monumental alluding to Biblical scripture, medieval poetry, existentialism, Jewish philosophy, transhumanist thought, and numerous elements of western intellectual culture. The same, if not more, could be said about another 20th-century masterpiece of science fiction, Gene Wolfes Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy that is beyond comprehension without delving into the depths of Catholic theology and Western Medieval thought. 

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So yes, one can enjoy and get nourishment from the fruit born by the tree of Western Civilization, but I believe that we have a responsibility to join in on the conversation, to understand our past to pass it to the ones that come behind us. We have a responsibility as readers, writers, and critics to encourage the highest of standards, to go beyond mere pornographic consumer entertainment, and become part of the great tradition². This responsibility and standard were once upheld by our great institutions, our churches, our universities, and our cultural leaders, but in our century the established institutions have absolved themselves of this duty and often aim to do the opposite, therefore it falls on us, pilgrims of the techno-demonic labyrinth to remember and uphold the traditions, art, and literature of the past, preserving it for future generations. 

We cannot uphold our duty if we actively parrot the post-modern deconstructionist ideas of the enemy. 

1. Ultimately a lot of this is Kayfabe and hyperbole, but I do take my claims about the seriousness of the task and the value of the Western Canon seriously. I want a healthy intellectual and independent community separate from the screlotic and diseased mainstream channels. This means that sometimes we have to debate our points. A critical community cannot exist unless we criticize it. If everything is good and has value then nothing does.

2. So much of the internet discussion in our sphere is descriptive. Yes, we know things are bad, but what are we going to do about it? I believe that becoming educated in the Western Canon is edifying, and while I might not have the answers I have a strong conviction that the solution to a lot of our cultural issues can begin to be found in the great work of the past. The next question would be, where to begin? I don’t think you can go wrong with reading through Howard Blooms The Western Canon, engaging with the work, and starting a conversation with each other.