My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

WHAT'S ART GOT TO DO WITH IT? 39
number of constituencies. The mechanism of discrimination between
canonical and noncanonical works is not dismantled but rather extended
to previously uncovered areas. Institutionalized multiculturalism represents
the culmination of Arnoldian principles of distinction; its great failure
lies in its tacit acceptance of the concept of touchstone or representative
works. To be sure, institutionalized multiculturalism represents a
necessary revision of the concept of representation. In this newer context,
what is represented by a work is not, at least in the first place, the culture
understood as a homogenous whole. But an initial recognition of ethnic
origin often gives way to a supervening program of cultural recuperation,
where works are chosen because they represent "ennobling" voices of their
subculture, voices that enter into "the great conversation" of universal
human values, as proponents of the Great Books used to put it. Houston
Baker, in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, makes an eloquent case for
something like this strategy when he argues for the mask of mastering
form over the guerrilla tactic of deforming mastery. The uncertain success
of this strategy is represented by the pride of place given, in such textbooks
as the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, to the sonnets of Countee
Cullen and Claude McKay and the exclusion in the same anthologies of
the dialect and vernacular poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon
Johnson, and Sterling Brown, which, however, can be found in the
new multicultural Heath Anthology of American Literature.
Despite the fact that the Heath anthology does a better job of "representing"
the touchstones of American culture than Norton, I see no radical
conceptual difference between the two. Both have the primary effect
of taking a very heterogeneous field and domesticating it. Both represent
literature in measured doses, uniform typography, and levelling head- and
footnotes-making the poetry the subject of its frame rather than presenting
poetry itself as a contest-a conflict-of frames.
One thing the Norton modern poetry anthologies have never done is
to represent white or European culture. Yet this point is too rarely acknowledged
because of a confusion as to what constitutes "high" or canonical
culture in America, a situation abetted by the fact that many of the
defenders of a putative "high" culture imagine this culture to exist solely
in the past-or as if it were in the past.
The cultural canon of the Norton anthology is as aggressively anti­
"high" cultural as the Heath anthology. As a matter of policy, the Norton
anthology systematically excludes the aesthetically radical innovations of
European and American art in preference for a "middlebrow" or suburban
poetry that tends to be anti-European and is often anti-aesthetic. Within
this deaestheticizing ideology, it is far easier to include token ethnic representation,
as the Norton Modern does in its most recent version, than to