The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [88]
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.
* He was an orator at Cambridge before he became an Anglican priest.
* and through rappers like Eminem and Jay-Z.
SIX
Why Literature Is Always Contemporary
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