The issue of what’s canonical is either of devastating importance to you, or nothing more than a cultural parlour game - and basically there’s no correct answer. But to sum up:

Þ      Should the Canon be viewed as 1) a glorified recommended reading list or book chart? Or 2) should it be taken more seriously as an index of artistic excellence?

Þ      If 1), you’ll have no qualms about the ways in which the canon regenerates itself over time. It’s simply a contingent guide to contemporary opinion, and the responsibility for meaning in literature will fall squarely on the shoulders of the Common or Recreational Reader, call him what you will. This will have the advantage of being more democratic, but does invite the charge that it is uninformed - “difficult” books, or those that aren’t widely available are less likely to make the list.  And it will almost certainly take into account more contemporary work which will not have had the chance to prove its lasting worth, and genres (such as children’s fiction) that have hitherto not been considered appropriate or even worthy of inclusion. So while the list will be more varied, turnover will be higher, and any conclusions you can draw about literary meaning will not have the empirical value of the kind that can be broadly applied;

Þ      If 2), that last sentence will be the most disturbing to you. You’ll be looking for more informed opinion than most Recreational Readers will possess; a wider range of reading, and, hopefully opinions that offer some level of self-justification beyond simple matters of taste, like and dislike. You will be concerned that these opinions transcend the purely personal and aim for some kind of impartiality. The fact that the same names keep cropping up repeatedly will not necessarily concern you, because your criteria for entry into the canon will be that more stringent, however you have managed to formulate them.

By using a model for literary meaning, your inclusions will be necessarily more conservative; so you’ll need to take care that your template’s sufficiently elastic to admit at least some newcomers. But at base you’ll believe that meaning is an absolute, though shadowy, criterion of excellence.

Most of us, I suspect, combine elements from both groups. While the issue of literary meaning and its survival doesn’t give us sleepless nights, we like to think that for at least part of the time, what we’re reading has some value, and we’re more likely to use the criterion of longevity than perhaps any other if we’re going to choose a ‘worthy’ read, as opposed to something that’ll simply keep us amused. Certainly those recent polls suggest that us Recreational Readers are equally responsible for keeping Tolstoy’s reputation alive as the amount of attention he receives from academics.

But what we must also remember when we’re in the bookshop or library is that entry to the canon doesn’t automatically make a book any harder to read; its appearance on an arbitrary list doesn’t suddenly make its meaning harder to understand or experience. It just somehow feels that having been raised onto a cutural pedestal, it’s somehow less approachable. And of course it’s nothing of the kind. Dickens is just as much fun now he’s a “classic” writer as when his novels first appeared. OK, so critics write considered pieces about him -  but that needn’t spoil our enjoyment. We won’t have to work any harder to get at his meaning because of that. But whether we read the canon for pleasure or instruction, we should also bear in mind Matthew Arnold’s contention that the canon will survive, not by our assessments of the meaning contained in it, but out of man’s sheer naked instinct for self-preservation. We can’t, he thought, live without it and still claim to be human. For Arnold, literary meaning was that important.

So what we’ve been looking at in this section is the way readers react to texts, not so much how we interpret them - that’ll come in Part 4. But I’ll make no apologies for dwelling so long on a facet of reading that yields so few tangible results.

After all, if we don’t engage with a book on whatever level we’re capable of, nothing else will follow, and it’s worth trying to understand how this occurs, because it’s too often taken as a given, certainly by some of the canon-mongers who feel it’s our sworn duty as human beings to read these books.

And, certainly in this section, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there’s such a thing as a specifically ‘literary’ response to reading a text, or that meaning has to be judged exclusively by literary criteria, whatever they are. "The 'greatness' of literature," TS Eliot observed in his essay ‘Religion and Literature’, "cannot be determined solely by literary standards," and I’m with him there. But when an eminent (and prominent) critic like Harold Bloom (whose phenomenal canon I defy anyone to complete)  decries the contemporary “loss of the aesthetic” in the study of meaning, what I think he’s quite rightly decrying is the tokenistic and inappropriate importation of outside disciplines into the study of meaning for their own sake; what I hope he isn’t claiming is that literature doesn’t share ways of seeing things with other creative endeavours, from whatever discipline. Because he’d simply be WRONG.

And with this in mind, let’s conclude with another instalment of the travelogue, which, I think, in its emphasis on design and architecture, embodies what I’ve been yakking on about in this section -  that meaning argues Accessibility, Dialogue and Empathy if it’s going to be perceived, taken to heart, and survive:

So let’s travel to Washington DC, where just about every armed conflict the US has been involved in now has its own memorial. As have some of American history’s most dangerous men. Of the Presidential monuments, only George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt have their own: Theodore Roosevelt has an island on the Potomac River named after him, JFK has a performing arts centre, Lyndon B. Johnson a row of trees, Richard Nixon has nothing, and Ronald Reagan an enormous and ugly office/retail complex that went over $400 million over budget. Then there’s the memorials to the armed services, and the various international military campaigns fought by American troops.

Of this last group, the latest to be completed is the Korean War site (1995), which is certainly striking while remaining curiously unmoving. It’s a triangular field  with nineteen life-size representations of battle-weary or wounded soldiers trudging to their next objective. And what it seems to be trying to communicate in a graphically literal way is the heroic yet grim determination of the US troops in conditions of both tedium and hardship - at least judging by the posture and the facial expressions of the steel effigies. The location doesn’t help this determinedly downbeat mood either; situated quite close to the Lincoln Memorial, it’s hidden in a wooded area, as if the city were somehow ashamed of it. And it’s a million miles from the cheery medics on the TV series M*A*S*H, the most familiar image modern America has of those events on the 38th parallel, which ran over eight years longer than the conflict on which it was based.

Now contrast this literal depiction of the horrors of war with the completely abstract Vietnam memorial, known locally as ‘The Wall’ and consecrated in 1982. For a start, it’s thronged with visitors - far more than at its Korean counterpart. It consists of two black marble walls at right angles to one another gradually sloping into the ground, the deepest point being at where they join. As you walk down the gentle incline towards this junction, inscribed onto the walls are the names of every one of the 60,000 American service men and women who died in the conflict, arranged in the order (or as nearly as can be ascertained) of their demise. So walking the full length of The Wall takes you on a chronological excursion through the carnage from 1959, the date of the first combat death, to 1975, when Saigon fell and the last choppers took off from the American embassy. The lower you get, the higher the wall towers above you, and the more names you see, until, by the time you get to the bottom, you’re almost drowning in them. Then, turning right, you gradually emerge out of the memorial, the names grow sparser as the wall diminishes, and then you’re out in the open air again. It’s like a journey into hell and back, and you’d have to be an unusually inflexible pacifist not to be moved by the experience.

And yet many of the Vietnam vets didn’t like the memorial at first; it wasn’t graphic enough. Some said it belittled the sheer horror of what they’d experienced. How on earth can we learn the lessons of war if we play down its brutality?, they argued. The Government quickly capitulated to their request, and erected a conventional statue depicting three (male) soldiers in states of grim distress, each supporting the other. Appropriate symbolism, but most people when we were there walked straight past it in their hurry to experience The Wall. And of course the moment you start separating out individual groups, no-one (quite rightly) wants to be omitted, in case their contribution gets overlooked by posterity. So, in 1992, the Women Veterans fought for (and got) a third memorial, commemorating their involvement. This one could run and run.

To have respected the wishes of the veterans, is, of course, highly laudable. They fought the damn war after all. But commissioning separate statues completely missed the point of the original memorial’s symbolism. By eschewing all forms of literal representation, it was actually inviting everyone to react to it in their own way. Even people who weren’t born when the hostilities were happening. And this invites the kind of conversation between art and its consumers that I hope we’ve agreed is essential if its meaning is to resonate as widely as possible. Let’s not forget the three necessary stages of accessibility, dialogue and empathy we’ve just been looking at.

If you haven’t come prepared with a guide book and you see this black gash in the earth for the first time, you’ve initially no idea what it is; whereas looking at the Korean assemblage it’s immediately identifiable as a war memorial. It’s as if it yields up its meaning too easily, there’s too much accessibility, short-circuiting the spectator’s natural curiosity. So by steering an audience’s reaction too overtly (and, like it or not, the more representational your memorial, the more you are guiding people to a specific message), the less they feel consulted, and the more meaning resembles a monologue. The rules of engagement are pre-packaged, and you react to, not with the art you’re looking at.

In the case of The Wall, however, the scale of the monument has an impact, and the blackness of the marble sets a certain tone, as does the symbolism of the descent and the almost dizzying density of names. But that’s the full extent of what it’s saying, or, rather suggesting. It’s not going for the sympathy vote by graphically depicting suffering  - that’s an inevitable product of conflict, and something of which we (hopefully) don’t need reminding. So at the heart of The Wall’s meaning is a restraint which acts as a sort of tabula rasa on which spectators can inscribe an interpretation that’s personal to them. [1] You can remember. Or learn. Or contemplate. Or try to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. The Wall’s not telling you what to do; it doesn’t steer you in any particular direction. It’s your choice how you react to it, and there’s room for everyone inside meaning that encourages this kind of dialogue.

The net result in the case of the two memorials is that while the Korean sculpture is quite rightly held in high regard, the Vietnam Wall is actually loved. And don’t just take my word for it - visit www.vietvet.org/thewall and look at the poetry and reminiscences it has inspired, from children, ex-hippies and combatants alike. As yet, I’ve been unable to find an equivalent site for the Korean monument. In terms of what we’ve been discussing, the former’s a classic; the latter isn’t, and never will be.

So, in conclusion, we might say that if you want your meaning to last, say it subtly. And let your readers do some of that saying for you.

Now let’s see what writers have to say about that.

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