The Use and Abuse of Literature (26 page)

Outside of the classroom poetry is often a specialized interest, what consumer guides call a niche product. But in recent years audiences have been drawn to two kinds of in-person cultural performances: the poetry reading and the poetry slam. The former typically takes place in a bookstore, café, or college auditorium. The speaker is a well-known poet or several—often, but not always, appearing in connection with the publication of a new book. The slam features individuals or teams who speak within a strict time limit (three minutes) and are awarded points by a judge for their performance. Participants in poetry slams are usually young, often influenced by hip-hop or dub poetry, and sometimes connected to youth poetry organizations. Although in both formats—the
reading and the slam—poets occasionally recite works by others, the characteristic mode is personal performance of one’s own work.

Responses to slam culture have, predictably, been varied.
The New York Times
reported that Harold Bloom called poetry slams “the death of art.”
²⁹
Still, it’s undeniable that poetry has attracted new enthusiasts, younger participants, and high energy in recent years, in part through this medium of performance.
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The Renaissance lyric gained popularity through the performances of troubadours and the global phenomenon of Petrarchism, so it’s not so unlikely that a new generation, for whom downloading songs on iPods and other MP3 players is second nature, should make the connection between song and poem. The word
lyric
dates back etymologically to a time when a poem was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and has, since the end of the nineteenth century, also meant the words of a popular song—surely the most common use of the term today.

Despite the occasional gloomy prognosis, poems and poetry are alive and well today—in the classroom, the poetry magazine, the writing workshop, the lecture hall, the bookstore, on the Internet, and in the streets. The death of art is always being predicted somewhere, and is perhaps a necessary pronouncement to ensure the tangible edginess, the sense of delighted transgression, that comes with practicing a living and changing art or craft.

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.”
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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 noted
³
,) 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.”
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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
,”
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they might seem to be bringing the text forward into the present day.
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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.”
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