• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 845 0

World Is Burning”) was included in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, so at the time of that collection’s publication, 1919, it was canonical and respected enough to merit selection and inclusion. We might consider this an example of the non-contemporaneity of literature (who today reads Ebenezer Jones or would cite him as an example in a general discussion of the poet as “always our contemporary”?), but Woolf’s tone is confident: Jones’s poetry, like that of the Jacobean playwrights and the Romantic poets, offers the reader an opportunity “to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into characters as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff and Lear; his power to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.”17

Once and forever. This treads perilously close to “timeless and universal,” and yet Woolf’s invitation and injunction to the reader is to compare these passages, not merely to respond to them. Taste, she says, can be trained and developed, allowing the reader to find commonalities—she suggests—between, for example, Lear and the Agamemnon: “Thus with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination.” And so on to the reading of critics as well as writers, critics like Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, whose own “rules” and taste may challenge that of the reader but whose views should not turn readers into sheep who lie down under their authority. “They are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading.”18 It is the act of questioning, of finding questions, rather than the determination of rules or answers, that is the real literary activity. But as Woolf is at some pains to point out, this is, again, not the same thing as “I know what I like” or “Anything goes.” The further and rarer pleasure is the pleasure of discrimination, distinction, comparison, analysis, interpretation.

The last paragraph of Woolf’s essay directly addresses the central preoccupation of this book, the use of literature. “Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable?” she asks, not entirely rhetorically. “Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them?”19 Both “pursuit” and “practice” seem important concepts here. A pursuit is both an occupation and a pastime; to practice is, similarly, both a method and a regimen.

Deliberate Anachronism

Every great author, wrote Wordsworth, has the “task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed; so it has been, so will it continue to be.”20 This utterance immediately became so famous that it was regularly parodied. Thomas de Quincey, for example, begins his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” with a satirical praise of the murderer John Williams, whose attention “to the composition of a fine murder” had, “as Mr. Wordsworth observes, ‘created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.’ ”21 But the sentiment had staying power—for the art of murder as depicted in subsequent crime fiction, indeed, as well as for more conventional poetry, plays, and novels—and if it seems a truism, that does not mean it is not a truth.

We might compare this to a remark made over a century later by Jorge Luis Borges. “The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”22 Where Wordsworth looked ahead to successor generations, Borges describes something more uncanny: the alteration of the past. Long before Photoshop, image manipulation, or Zelig, literature had developed techniques, theories, and practices that transformed and rewrote past works by the act of reading them.

Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, the Author