Guillory's Literary Capital

Guillory critiques liberal pluralism from a post-Marxian perspective, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu to address the class differences in literary capital.

Liberal pluralism is about equal representation of identities – women, black, Asian, poor, and so on. Many universities now include ‘non-canonical’ texts on the curriculum, claiming to represent those identities excluded and subordinated by dominant culture. But Guillory argues that the concept of ‘non-canonical’ is inadequate. It relies on extrinsic value and reinforces conservative control over the canon by maintaining and regulating ‘centre’ and ‘periphery.’ It erases specificity and difference, making particular texts representative of entire groups. Value is determined by degrees of marginalisation and oppression.

Reading Guillory was incredibly slow going and dense: faced with negatives and double negatives; he puts forward arguments that he doesn’t agree with only to refute them. I had to make a visual graph. Everything was clarified and then clarified again, to the point where I couldn’t tell which clarification I was supposed to agree with and which I was supposed to find ridiculous.

I was O’Brien’s child: reading too closely, too intensely, as though everything was new. I failed to maintain a balance between critical distance and emotional involvement. I didn’t understand the terms. I was General Stumm from How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read: plunged into profound anguish with no landmarks and nothing to hold on to. I was in so close that I failed to grasp the language itself; the very words seemed to slip away.

I felt outside the debate. Guillory was in dialogue with voices I couldn’t hear. However, this inaccessibility is exactly what Guillory is getting at. Not that language should be simplified, but that we should be better educated to understand and participate in it. Literary language, he argues, is constantly in dialogue with, and to some extent synthesises, texts and everyday speech, but is nonetheless specific. It endlessly refines itself into more effective modes of communicating cultural knowledge.

Yet somewhat ironically, reading Guillory forced me to recognise that this is a language I don’t understand, and I wonder if anyone ever really understands; if there is anything objective or if its just confidence (aka How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read) in the midst of intense ideological competition (aka Cassanova’s World Republic of Letters).

Central to Guillory’s argument is the idea that everyone should have access to literature through our educational institutions as the means of producing literary capital. This means access to all literature, not just canonical literature. The canon, he says, is an imaginary list of texts that is not expressive of a cultural homogeneity but retroactively constructs the impression of cultural unity. It can never represent everyone and does not reflect the syllabus. Rather the syllabus mediates the cultural imaginary and should thus be taught to people of all classes so that everyone can access cultural capital.

However, I wonder if privileging literary capital reflects Guillory’s self-interest in maintaining his own discipline. Perhaps other kinds of capital are valuable to different people. Individuals express specificities and nuances, without necessarily being universally communicable. Perhaps literary language changes so continuously that it is always illusive; always redefined depending on the position of the individual who speaks. A “common” literary language remains somewhat of an oxymoron when the enterprise is itself a refined and elite form of capital that, by its very nature, is not accessible to everyone. Although Guillory idealises that it might be so.

- Bayard, Pierre (2007) How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Jeffrey Mehlman (trans.) London: Granta Book

- Cassanova, Pascale (2004) "Principles of a World History of Literature". The World Republic of Letters. M. B. Debevoise (trans.), Harvard: Harvard University Press

- Guillory, John (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press

- O'Brien, Geoffrey (2000) The Browser's Ecstacy: A Meditation on Reading. Washington: Counterpoint