The Use and Abuse of Literature

by Marjorie Garber

  And the woodland haunter

  Shall not cease to saunter

  When, far down some glade

  Of the great world’s burning,

  One soft flame upturning

  Seems, to his discerning,

  Crocus in the shade …

  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.

  Deliberate Anachronism

  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:

  It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

  … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

  Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

  … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

  History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor—are brazenly pragmatic.

  The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.26

  This is brilliant as well as comical, and speaks directly to the point. Read through the lens of the present, labeled “pragmatic” because James was a pragmatist, the text of version two (Menard) is compared to the text of version one (Cervantes). Knowing that Menard is a twentieth-century French speaker, we see the foreign and affected tinge in language we previously thought graceful and straightforward. Viewed from the vantage point of a Freudian century and anticipating the mise en abyme of postmodernism, the phrase “mother of truth” makes history a creat
or rather than a chronicle. “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.”27

  André Maurois, commenting on this last sentence, notes that although apparently absurd, it expresses “a real idea: the Quixote that we read is not that of Cervantes, any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert. Each twentieth-century reader involuntarily rewrites in his own way the masterpieces of past centuries.”28 Literature is always contemporary. But is the process always involuntary? Menard’s voluntary task contrasted with the involuntary rewriting of the normative reader invoked by Maurois. But Borges, speaking through his deliberately sententious and sometimes fatuous scholar-narrator, concludes his story with a fantasy that both describes the state of the art then, and the spinoffs, adaptations, and appropriations of later decades, from Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres to John Updike’s Claudius and Gertrude:

  Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution.29

  That is to say, the technique deployed so inventively and economically in “Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote.”

  Blind Spots

  I began this chapter by suggesting that literature is always contemporary because it is read by contemporary readers. Such readers can no more shake off their own time and place, however skillfully and diligently they study the past, than they can change their instinctive body carriage or their habituated sense of fashion and style. The bell-bottom trousers and sideburns of the seventies are different from their modern incarnations, however these styles may be revived and made newly fashionable. Some authors translate readily into multiple time periods, seeming to be timeless by the way they are taken up, appropriated, and understood by successive generations. Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens are clear examples of this temporal sleight of hand, which may be likened to trains that, moving along parallel tracks at similar speeds, give the illusion of standing still. Other authors and texts, as we’ve seen previously, are—sometimes deliberately (and often very effectively)—out of synch or out of time with the always moving present, so their archaism or quaintness or otherness is made, at least periodically, into a quality of difference that can itself be valued. And sometimes those difficult or distant texts can coincide with a cultural moment as in the case, perhaps, of the Gothic, which always seems, appropriately for its content, to be a revival or a revenant, disrupting the present, whether the period when it appears is the late eighteenth century of The Castle of Otranto, the nineteenth century of Poe, the Brontës, or Robert Louis Stevenson, the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and Harper Lee, or the popular Gothic romances of the mid-twentieth century, or the twenty-first century’s revived interest in vampires.

  But there is one persistent exception to this capacity on the part of the reader to see with contemporary eyes, and that is when what is being read and judged is the work of the present. Contemporary literature is, apparently paradoxically, the one period of literature that can generate or elicit a critical blind spot. In an odd sense, the literature of today and of recent times is partially blocked from view by our proximity to it. As she did with the immediacy of poetry, Virginia Woolf deftly explored the problem, in this case in an essay first published in The Times Literary Supplement titled “How It Strikes a Contemporary.”

  Woolf’s interest, at least initially, is in the unreliability of critics when it comes to contemporary writing.

  In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same time will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics now are in agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why they differ.30

  Readers seek guidance, writers seek appreciation. The inability of critics to offer definitive judgments disconcerts both “the reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary literature” and “the writer who has a natural desire to know whether his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters or, on the contrary, to put out the fire.” But even the great critics of the past—Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold—were hardly impeccable in their judgments of new work. “The mistakes of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to be worth recording.” Woolf has her own views about her own contemporaries: “Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness, but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages of Far Away and Long Ago [a memoir of W. H. Hudson’s childhood] will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”31

  How have her predictions fared over time? “Mr. Lawrence” is D. H. Lawrence. That memorable catastrophe, Joyce’s Ulysses, has been subsequently regarded, together with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—as perhaps the greatest novel of its time. Hudson, the author of Green Mansions, is a supporting player rather than a lead actor in the estimation of the period. Woolf, herself both a writer and a critic, hopes that “the critics whose task it is to pass judgment upon the books of the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often distasteful,” will approach their work with generosity, but at the same time be “sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and fade, and make the wearers, in six months’ time, look a little ridiculous.”32 She enjoins them to “take a wider, a less personal view of modern literature,” and above all, to ignore the tempting byways of historical gossip (“that fascinating topic—whether Byron married his sister”) and instead to “say something interesting about literature itself.”33

  Contemporary literature after Woolf’s time has continued to pose this same set of dilemmas. At Harvard in the early 1980s undergraduate English majors were not permitted to write their senior theses on writers who were still living. I’m not sure why—perhaps the idea was that the critical verdict had not yet been definitively rendered on these writers, since their careers were still in motion, or that there was not sufficient critical writing (essays, critical books and articles, reviews, etc.) for a young scholar to consult and assess. But times have changed. These days there are so many students who want to write about living or recent authors that the “older” writers are neglected in favor of the new. From an institutional point of view, we might say that contemporary writing, which was in some sense always literary, has now become literature—the inside rather than the outside, or the boundary or limit case. What is acknowledged, both tacitly (in the lifting of this interdiction, one that no present-day student would imagine as reasonable) and explicitly (through the teaching of the work of living writers and their periodic visits to campus), is that literature itself is a work in progress and in flux. Literature, that is to say, is itself a literary artifact.

  Seeing the Mountain Near

  “You cannot see the mountain near,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson about the difficulty of critics’ experience in perceiving the stature of a contemporary. “It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.”34 Emerson’s mountain metaphor is wonderfully chosen and immediately persuasive. Distance—a viewpoint, a perspective, an observation perch—is required to bring the invisible, unsuspected neighboring immensity int
o view. And the mountain, once too close to be seen, is the monumental figure of William Shakespeare, now become “the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see.” Instead of blocking the view, the author, over time, becomes its measure and its module; again paradoxically, his work becomes contemporary. “Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized.” “Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm.”

  We notice the effect of words like now and at present, terms we have identified as shifters, words that can be understood only from their context. In such temporal markings—the now and at present of 1850—we can observe the history of presentism, its own inevitable repositioning as the past. Consider this pair of maxims from Oscar Wilde, both directly relevant to the question of seeing through contemporary eyes: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”35 In both cases, an age looks at itself, misrecognizing what it sees, or what it fails to see.

  The maxims are part of the preface to Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray—a novel that takes as its central conceit its main character’s increasing debauchery and his wish, which is granted, that his portrait should age and become disfigured while he himself remains young and beautiful. After Dorian’s death, the portrait reverts to its original beauty, while his body bears all the signs of age and vice. The frame of this modern fable is a conversation between the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton and the portrait painter Basil Hallward, who are both taken with Dorian’s beauty. Wilde wrote to a correspondent, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”36

  Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann points out that in “The Critic as Artist,” a critical dialogue written at the same time as the novel, Wilde argued that literature was superior to visual art. Because literature exists in time and not only in space, it can change—or, as Ellmann says, “it involves a psychic response to one’s own history.” In Dorian Gray, Wilde set out to write a fictional narrative that would embody this argument by allowing literature and painting to exchange their roles for a moment: the painting changes, the literary character appears to stop time, until the denouement, where, dramatically, each is restored to its intrinsic form. As he declared in “The Critic as Artist,”