The Use and Abuse of Literature (27 page)

Donaldson’s observation “Such a woman naturally appeals to a man” is partly a version of the writing style that in fiction is known as free indirect discourse: he is projecting this thought, as the second half of his sentence makes clear, into the mind of Chaucer’s narrator, a personage often called “Chaucer the pilgrim,” since the poet deftly gives the intermittently naive figure a name identical to his own. It’s nominally the enthusiastic narrator who develops a crush on the Prioress, enough so that he overlooks her failings in charity to focus on her adorable ways. But there remains some residue in “Such a woman naturally appeals to a man” (notice, again, the present tense) that allows a twinkling suggestion that the scholar, too, is not immune to the Prioress’s charms. And if any readers bridle at “naturally” (or, indeed, at “to a man”), that is part of the tone achieved by this urbane account—an account that dares
to transgress into the realm of the almost personal, and that, in doing so, makes the appeal of the Prioress, a fourteenth-century figure, both historical and contemporary. I should note that by “contemporary,” I mean the date of Donaldson’s text, originally published in 1958. Fifty years later, such an observation seems either bold, dated, or, charmingly, a little of both.

The word
now
is what linguists call a shifter:
now
in 1920 meant 1920;
now
in 2019 will, presumably, mean 2019. To put the case in literary-historical terms, Shakespeare’s
Henry V
exists in at least three time zones—the time in which it was written (the end of the sixteenth century), the time in which it is set (the medieval kingship of Henry V, 1413–22), and the time in which it is being read, interpreted, or performed. Moreover (and this will come as no surprise to anyone who follows the sinuous ins and outs of academic scholarship), the epithet
presentist
has now become a proud badge of identity. Titles of essays and essay collections now display the once disfavored term as an affirmative critical stance.
¹²
After some intense years of historicizing, critics began to say that the “present moment had been obliterated” by some of the techniques used to focus attention on the past.
¹³
“As what must be excluded from critical awareness to sustain historical contact,” wrote one scholar of English Renaissance literature, “the present may be considered the unconscious of new historicism.”
¹⁴
Where the pejorative use pointed toward what was presumed to be an unbridgeable cultural gap between that time and this, the presentist critic asserts that older literature continues to shape ideas about identity, politics, gender, and power.

In fact, presentism, minus the
-ism
—indeed, minus any label at all—is what many, perhaps most, readers do when they pick up a book and read it. If Flaubert the author could say about the main character of his novel, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!,” so indeed do many readers. Whether the book in question is
Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, The Bostonians
, or
Catch-22
, readers tend to identify with the major characters
and to measure their actions and thoughts by the degree to which they imagine themselves in similar situations or with similar choices.

One symptom of this tendency to experience older texts as works of the present is the renewed commercial popularity of novels that have been made into films. These are not novelizations but repackagings. Typically they will replace a traditional book or cover with a still from the movie or the mention of an actor who played a starring role, in the same way the novels made popular by Oprah’s Book Club, republished with that information clearly marked, have brought a wider new readership to works like
Anna Karenina
or the novels by William Faulkner. An
Oprah
producer shared her thoughts on a current selection, George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
, by citing on her blog the following description of the novel, credited to Vintage Classics: “Bright, beautiful, and rebellious Dorothea has married the wrong man, and Lydgate—the ambitious new doctor in town—has married the wrong woman. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world, but their lives do not proceed as expected. Along with the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, they must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.” This is a presentist summary, since it gives no indication of a time period other than the present—though
Middlemarch
is elsewhere clearly described as a “classic novel.” Married to the wrong person, longing to make a positive difference in the world—these are dilemmas with which the reader is tacitly invited to identify. The book is not presented as self-help or as anything other than a major novel (though there is no information given on George Eliot or any date of publication other than the honorific “classic,” which means, among other things, “not new”).

Needless to say, the word
present
is as much a shifter as the word
now
, and there have been presentists in all periods, not just in the
present
present. The Bloomsbury art critic Roger Fry used the term to describe himself at a time when the focus of art historians was largely on the past:
“I’ve never been a Passéist,” he wrote to his friend Helen Anrep, “—I was a Futurist but I have gradually trained myself to be a Presentist, which is the most difficult.”
¹⁵
It was Fry’s friend and biographer Virginia Woolf—the critic who admired Hazlitt for his “compelling power of making us contemporary with himself”—who set out for book readers, and book lovers, a compelling vision of the continuing presentness of literature. “The poet is always our contemporary,” Woolf wrote in the essay called “How Should One Read a Book?” “[T]he illusion of fiction is gradual, its effects are prepared,” she wrote, but “who when they read [lines of verse] stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne’s house or Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the succession of generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for a moment is centred and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion.”
¹⁶

In support of her claim about immediacy and the “immense range of emotion” evoked by poetry, Woolf offered five passages, none of which she identifies for her readers, and several of which, I am guessing, would be difficult for today’s “common reader” to recognize. The editor of the annotated edition, published in 1986, footnotes four of them: passages from Beaumont and Fletcher’s
Maid’s Tragedy
, John Ford’s
Lover’s Melancholy
, Wordsworth’s
Prelude
, and Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. The fifth passage, described by Woolf as a “splendid fantasy,” reads as follows:

To this passage, the editor’s footnote reads, “These lines remain unidentified.” Certainly I myself did not recognize them, but in the age of the Internet, it took me under a minute to find the author, Ebenezer Jones, a
minor poet of the nineteenth century. The poem (“When the World Is Burning”) was included in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s
Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900
, so at the time of that collection’s publication, 1919, it was canonical and respected enough to merit selection and inclusion. We might consider this an example of the non-contemporaneity of literature (who today reads Ebenezer Jones or would cite him as an example in a general discussion of the poet as “always our contemporary”?), but Woolf’s tone is confident: Jones’s poetry, like that of the Jacobean playwrights and the Romantic poets, offers the reader an opportunity “to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into characters as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff and Lear; his power to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.”
¹⁷

Once and forever. This treads perilously close to “timeless and universal,” and yet Woolf’s invitation and injunction to the reader is to
compare
these passages, not merely to respond to them. Taste, she says, can be trained and developed, allowing the reader to find commonalities—she suggests—between, for example,
Lear
and the
Agamemnon:
“Thus with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination.” And so on to the reading of critics as well as writers, critics like Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, whose own “rules” and taste may challenge that of the reader but whose views should not turn readers into sheep who lie down under their authority. “They are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading.”
¹⁸
It is the act of questioning, of finding questions, rather than the determination of rules or answers, that is the real literary activity. But as Woolf is at some pains to point out, this is, again, not the same thing as “I know what I like” or “Anything goes.” The further and rarer pleasure is the pleasure of discrimination, distinction, comparison, analysis, interpretation.

The last paragraph of Woolf’s essay directly addresses the central
preoccupation of this book, the use of literature. “Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable?” she asks, not entirely rhetorically. “Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them?”
¹⁹
Both “pursuit” and “practice” seem important concepts here. A pursuit is both an occupation and a pastime; to practice is, similarly, both a method and a regimen.

Every great author, wrote Wordsworth, has the “task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed; so it has been, so will it continue to be.”
²⁰
This utterance immediately became so famous that it was regularly parodied. Thomas de Quincey, for example, begins his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” with a satirical praise of the murderer John Williams, whose attention “to the composition of a fine murder” had, “as Mr. Wordsworth observes, ‘created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.’ ”
²¹
But the sentiment had staying power—for the art of murder as depicted in subsequent crime fiction, indeed, as well as for more conventional poetry, plays, and novels—and if it seems a truism, that does not mean it is not a truth.

We might compare this to a remark made over a century later by Jorge Luis Borges. “The fact is that each writer
creates
his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
²²
Where Wordsworth looked ahead to successor generations, Borges describes something more uncanny: the alteration of the past. Long before Photoshop, image manipulation, or
Zelig
, literature had developed techniques, theories, and practices that transformed and rewrote past works by the act of reading them.

Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, the Author of the
Quixote
,” describes, in the voice of a (fictional) bibliographical scholar, the attempt of a (fictional) French novelist to write Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
. “He did not want to compose another
Quixote
—which is easy—but
the Quixote
itself
. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”
²³
The scholar-narrator quotes from a long letter he received from his friend Menard: “To compose the
Quixote
at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the
Quixote
itself.”
²⁴
Nevertheless—or perhaps we should say
therefore
—the critical admirer asserts that “Menard’s fragmentary
Quixote
is more subtle than Cervantes’.” He thus sees artful irony in certain details of the text, like Don Quixote’s preference of arms over letters: “Cervantes was a former soldier: his verdict is understandable. But that Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote—a contemporary of
La trahison des clercs
and Bertrand Russell—should fall prey to such nebulous sophistries!” Where other critics have tried to explain this away, as, for example, “(not at all perspicaciously) a
transcription
of the
Quixote
” the scholar suggests that a more plausible explanation “(which I judge to be irrefutable)” was “the influence of Nietzsche,” to which he adds one further suggestion: Menard’s modesty led him, whether by irony or by resignation, to propagate ideas that were the opposite of the ones he believed.
²⁵

It’s easy to see what fun Borges had, especially when he produced (still in the persona of the scholar-friend) what is claimed to be a devastating comparison between the two texts—texts that, on the page, look (to the uninitiated) exactly alike: