The Use and Abuse of Literature (28 page)

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 creator 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:

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

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.

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.

“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 into 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,”

The Picture of Dorian Gray
engaged the question of whether the present could see itself and whether it could face what it saw. Read variously as a Gothic novel, a fiction of the doppelgänger, an allegory of
closeted homosexuality, and a narrative of aestheticism and its discontents,
Dorian Gray
is also the story of modern literature’s attempt to read itself reading, to see its own contemporaneity. One face or the other, the portrait or the man, could be seen or shown as it was, or as it seemed to be. The other face was occluded and would be seen only belatedly, after the fact.

We might compare the changing picture of Dorian Gray to another famous artifact embedded within a work of literature: the statue in the last scene of Shakespeare’s tragicomic romance
The Winter’s Tale.
³⁸
For in that play, as in Wilde’s novel, the audience is confronted with an artifact that seems to have changed—the supposed “statue” that is, in fact, the living Queen Hermione, hidden away from her husband for sixteen years and presented to him as if she were a work of art. The husband, though overjoyed, cannot resist an aesthetic objection: the statue does not accurately represent the woman he remembers. “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems.” The reply to his critique is swift: “So much the more our carver’s excellence, / Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her / As she liv’d now” (
WT
5.3.28–32). The word
now
once again makes the moment a shifter, always contemporaneous with the audience, the reader, the spectator. And the play ends, as virtually all Shakespeare’s plays do, with a gesture toward inclusion and dialogue, as the characters exit to talk over what they have experienced. Offstage, out of our hearing, they will “leisurely / Each one demand, and answer to his part / Perform’d in this wide gap in time.” This gap, whether it is sixteen years or the two hours’ traffic of the stage or the intervention of four centuries between 1611 and the present, opens a space for the use of literature: its openness for commentary, debate, wonder, and pleasure is what makes literature always contemporary.