The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [92]
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”).
“The Poet Is Always Our Contemporary”
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