The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [89]
Up Close and Personal
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