'To Call Something Literature is to Start a Canon'

“Literature is always wider than the class of works which we call literary. Wherever a man has fairly set down the best that he knows about the thing he knows best, and in words that tell his meaning, there, always, will be literature.”

The writer is George Stuart Gordon (1881-1942), the British literary scholar, as quoted by his widow, Mary Campbell Gordon, in the preface to his posthumously published Letters of George S. Gordon (Oxford University Press, 1943). She cites no source, and I don’t find the passage among Gordon’s letters, but it seems worth remembering and contemplating. By Gordon’s definition, a deeply researched, well-organized field guide to the dragonflies of North America can be judged literature, as can a 271-word presidential address and collections of essays devoted to boxing, French cuisine and World War II combat. There’s more to literature than the academic straightjacket of novels, poems and plays.

I’m reminded of a working definition of literature formulated by my late friend David Myers: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” Such unscientific elasticity will bother some, though not those “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Literature is the work we value, regardless of the author or his intent. When we value something we wish to save it. As David writes:

“Literature is just the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on. (I call that the ‘canonical impulse.’ Canons are inseparable from literature. To call something literature is to start a canon.)”

[Leave it to Dave Lull to find the unfindable. The passage at the top is from Gordon’s Anglo-American Literary Relations (1943). Thanks, Dave.]