Chuck Klosterman is one of my favorite writers, partly because he’s funny and fun to read, and partly because he offers unusual and unexpected perspectives on things I think I know.
His book But What If We’re Wrong? explores the destabilizing (but someone reasonable) premise that we are wrong about…well, maybe everything.
One of these things is the “canon” in any given form (music, literature, film, etc.).
Canon formation is all but impossible to predict in the long haul, and Klosterman gives several examples of our (failed) attempts to do so. Sometimes, as in the example of Melville’s Moby Dick or Kafka’s body of work, present-day canon isn’t appreciated in its own time.
Beyond the predictive difficulty, Klosterman points out another feature of canons—how membership has a self-perpetuating aspect. Or rather, how the unknowing public perpetuates the canon, even (or especially) when they have no specialized knowledge.
An example of this public-perpetuation is in the world of architecture:
But once something is safely inside the walls of [the canon], the relative merits of its content matters much less. […]
Take architecture: Here we have a creative process of immense functional consequence. It’s the backbone of the urban world we inhabit, and it’s an art form most people vaguely understand—an architect is a person who designs a structure on paper, and that design emerges as the structure itself. Architects fuse aesthetics with physics and sociology. And there is a deep consensus over who did this best, at least among non-architects: If we walked down the street of any American city and asked people to name the greatest architect of the twentieth century, most would say Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, if someone provided a different answer, we’d have to assume we’ve stumbled across an actual working architect, an architectural historian, or a personal friend of Frank Gehry. Of course, most individuals in those subsets would cit Wright, too. But in order for someone to argue in favor of any architect except Wright (or even to be in a position to name three other plausible candidates), that person would almost need to be an expert in architecture. Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities. And what emerges from that social condition is an insane kind of logic: Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the twentieth century, and the only people who’d potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question.
History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.
Klosterman doesn’t mean to say that Wright’s inclusion in the canon is without merit—he spends the next page outlining Wright’s greatness—but that merit isn’t widely understood by the typical person. Wright’s status as one of the great (or the greatest) architect has more to do with the fact that people think this of him.
Once you start looking, evidence of the perceived canon is everwhere. So much of the greatness we take for granted—Robert Johnson in the blues, Einstein in the sciences, Pele in soccer—is received rather than understood.
Actual understanding (in place of received opinion) when it comes to the canon is a rare thing.
Taylor Coe 