The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [90]
Presentism and Its Discontents
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),