When the poet and playwright Ben Jonson wrote, in his memorial poem on Shakespeare, that “he was not of an age, but for all time,” Jonson was praising the timeless quality of Shakespeare’s work, but his words also point toward its uncanny timeliness, its capacity to intersect with the times. “Thou art alive still,” he assured his dead friend and rival, “while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read, and praise to give.”1 Although this capacity to live is often regarded as synonymous with the elusive quality we call greatness, it is in fact, as Jonson notes here, also a collaborative effect produced by the relationship between text (“thy book”) and reader. In a similar spirit, Virginia Woolf remarked about the Romantic critic William Hazlitt, “He has an extraordinary power of making us contemporary with himself.”2
No matter how much we historicize works of literature, putting them in the context of the age of the author or his times (the Age of Dante; the Age of Jonson; the Age of Elizabeth, etc.), poems, plays, novels, and other works of literature, whether imaginative or intellectual, are being read right now—and that now is always shifting with the time and place of the current reader. So reading any literary work involves a kind of stereo-optical vision: one eye on the image of the past, the other on the present, the two eyes then combining them into a vivid single picture.
Often an author, a genre, or a specific work changes under the scrutiny of time, so that it is impossible to say with certainty that today’s valued texts will be regarded as literature tomorrow, or that today’s pulp fiction will not ascend to canonical status in the future. It may seem paradoxical to claim that all literature is contemporary. It would appear that the opposite is the case. But this seeming paradox, I want to argue, is intrinsic to the nature and culture of literature, and also—not incidentally—to the pleasures of reading and writing.
On the one hand, the situation is so straightforward: a reader today encounters a work of literature from the perspective of the present. No matter how much the reader tries to project back into the past—into, let us say, a time when Chaucer’s works were available only in manuscript form, or when Donne’s poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets circulated privately among a small group (“his sugared sonnets among his private friends,” as one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries noted3,) or when Gertrude Stein hosted writers like Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, and Ezra Pound in her Paris salon in the twenties—there is always some consciousness, or perhaps we should say some unconsciousness, of the difference between that “now” and the “now” of the present day. Not only are methods of printing, dissemination, and reading different; so are other essential categories like dress, politics, hygiene, transportation, and the availability of electric power. The change in reading habits from public and collective to private, solitary reading, has been commented upon by many critics, and we have only to look at some of the latest technologies, like the iPad, the Nook, the Kindle, and the Sony Reader, to remember that there is no timeless and universal reading practice. Not only for those with photographic memories, who remember passages from their placement on the page, the typeface, and the quality of the paper, but indeed for everyone who reads, sees, hears, or hears about a work of literature, the situation of the encounter is part of the reading experience.
A few years ago I was invited to address the Jane Austen Society of North America at a Boston hotel. When I arrived, I found a ballroom filled with a large and enthusiastic group of self-professed “Janeites,” men and women, older and younger, who had gathered from around the world. By my approximate estimate, about 20 percent were in period costume, wearing the dresses, knee breeches, laces (and in some cases, wigs) of the late eighteenth century. None of them were, I presume, time travelers, though all were having a good time celebrating their favorite author. As with other popular modes of historical reconstruction, the dressing up was part of the fun, and also part of the learning process. Visitors to Austen’s Chawton Cottage are likewise welcomed to the property by a young man stationed at the door in period dress, but the gift shops at such historical properties, with their postcards, aprons, and calendars for the current year, are as determinedly of the present day as the costumed greeter is of the “past.”
Such re-created environments, commemorating literary personages, their ancestral homes, and the artifacts surrounding them—what is now generally called “cultural tourism”—are one striking aspect of contemporary life. They range from “Shakespeare’s Birthplace” in Stratford, so memorably described in a delectable short story by Henry James, to cultural pilgrimage sites like the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, and the Keats-Shelley house in Rome. Often the goal is to give visitors some sense of the imminent presence of the author, as if he or she has only momentarily stepped out of the room. When I visited the Brecht House in Augsburg, Germany, some years ago, the playwright’s eyeglasses lay beguilingly on a table, as if he had just set them aside. Like the historical reenactment of famous battles, or the frozen-in-time colonial sites and living museums (Plimoth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, Colonial Williamsburg) where modern people in period clothing churn butter and tend livestock, these cultural sites are places where readers, fans, and buffs enjoy a touch of the faux real. As such, they are monuments at once to nostalgia and to commerce, the twin engines of literary flamekeeping. I’m a constant and fascinated visitor to such places, especially the homes of poets and writers. I do want to emphasize, though, that the very phenomenon is itself contemporary: what we are experiencing is not—or not only—the eighteenth century but, rather, the “eighteenth century” in deliberate, detectable quotation marks, the diacritical indicators of the present day.
The literary critic Susan Stewart has some wise things to say about the healthiness of anachronism and the value of change, both of which, resisting a deadly authenticity, produce instead the energy of life. She cites with approval the views of the Scottish poet and novelist James Hogg, who judged a ballad’s antiquity by the degree to which it had been modernized: “this must be attributed to its currency, being much liked, and very much sung in the neighborhood.”4 For Stewart, likewise, “the ballad arrested, integral, and impervious, is the ballad as artifact,” whereas what she calls, delightedly, “ballads-in-drag,” which “find their most exaggerated and exemplary forms in such fabrications as Chatterton’s ‘Bristowe Tragedie’ and Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel,” generate an atmosphere of pageant and spectacle in which “performer, audience, and narrative are mutually enfolded in a decorative ‘pastness.’ ”5
It’s this word, pastness, that I want to take up for a moment. Clearly, pastness is not the same as the past. It seems to mean something like the flavor of the past. The suffix -ness indicates a state or condition. (The stately Oxford English Dictionary, in a sportive mood, offers as examples some “distinctive nonce-uses of the suffix since the nineteenth century,” including Coleridge’s “Sir-Thomas-Browne-ness,” George Eliot’s “dislike-to-get-up-in-the-morning-ness,” and Percy Grainger’s “love-child-ness.”) On this model, pastness is an effect, something between an idea and a sensation. It is not merely a concept, nor yet a temporality, but a feeling imparted to, or by, something—in Stewart’s example, the audience and performers of a ballad that evokes the past by using devices of the present. Pastness in this sense is not fakery. It does not pretend to be the past, nor is it designed to deceive. It is instead a kind of form—let’s call it, for the moment, literary—that assertively has things both ways: the past as a creation of the present.
Reading from the present has come in for rather a lot of bashing lately, from historians and literary scholars, who decry presentism as an anachronistic application of contemporary attitudes or standards to the events or the literature of the past. Despite the trendy suffix -ism, the term is about a century old. Accusations of presentism were, for a while, a kind of academic gotcha, with the implication that the presentist had not done his or her historical homework or was not committed to interpreting the literary text in the context of its original time and place. Attacks on presentism have come from outside, as well as within, the university. The Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic Jonathan Yardley, citing Gordon S. Wood’s essay collection The Purpose of the Past, lamented that “this practice of ‘presentism’ is now so widespread in academia that it threatens to become standard and accepted practice.” In this case, it was the professional scholars who were being accused of presentism because of their interest in categories like race, class, and gender. Yardley rued the “complaints by professional historians about abuses of history, by politicians and other amateur malefactors,” when, in his view, it was not the writers of popular history but the academics, members of departments of history, who needed to resist the “trend” of viewing the past “through whatever contemporary lens they find congenial.”6
Some celebrated instances may make clear the way in which critics, for better or worse, can make a work contemporary. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge says, “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so,”7 or when T. S. Eliot writes about Othello’s last great speech (“Soft you; a word or two before you go, / I have done the state some service, and they know’t—” [5.2.336–354]) that “What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up,”8 they might seem to be bringing the text forward into the present day.9 But Eliot is scathing in his own response to Coleridge on Hamlet and to a similar appropriation of the play by Goethe: “probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.” The “substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s” is something he deplores, and he caps off his paragraph of rueful scorn with a characteristic shot: “We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.”10 Eliot is zeroing in on what is sometimes called identification. He does not regard it as a literary strategy but as an extraliterary, or nonliterary, move, an abandonment of the critic’s proper business, “to study a work of art.”
It’s important to acknowledge that literary professionals, as well as amateurs and book buffs, are sometimes inclined to speak of books—and works of literature generally—in terms that if not labeled presentist are nonetheless addressed to contemporary readers. This may not mark any diminution of learning. To the contrary, it is a mode frequently found in the great generalist critics, and in scholars of any period who think of literature as speaking to the modern condition as well as to its “own” time.
The medieval scholar E. Talbot Donaldson, in his edition of Chaucer’s poetry (significantly subtitled An Anthology for the Modern Reader), offers learned accounts of the historical roles played by various types represented among the Canterbury pilgrims, but adds to that information some insights drawn from modern—or transhistorical—times. Thus, in discussing Chaucer’s Prioress, he writes that the poet “describes her in terms borrowed from the stock descriptions of heroines of medieval romance—soft red mouth, gray eyes, well-proportioned nose, and broad forehead—and makes her, inevitably, sincere and demure, ‘simple and coy.’ ” But then without a pause, Donaldson goes on to say, “Such a woman naturally appeals to a man, and the narrator’s enthusiasm for her is aroused to so superlative a degree that a superlative modifies almost every one of her qualities. Of course he never does get around to speaking about her conscience … the Prioress’s charity—a word that in Chaucer’s time connoted the whole range of Christian love—gets lost among dogs and mice.”11
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:
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.
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 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:
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.”
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.
“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,”
[T]he secrets of life belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visual arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone.37
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.