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By Root 928 0

that we read is not that of Cervantes, any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert. Each twentieth-century reader involuntarily rewrites in his own way the masterpieces of past centuries.”28 Literature is always contemporary. But is the process always involuntary? Menard’s voluntary task contrasted with the involuntary rewriting of the normative reader invoked by Maurois. But Borges, speaking through his deliberately sententious and sometimes fatuous scholar-narrator, concludes his story with a fantasy that both describes the state of the art then, and the spinoffs, adaptations, and appropriations of later decades, from Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres to John Updike’s Claudius and Gertrude:

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution.29

That is to say, the technique deployed so inventively and economically in “Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote.”

Blind Spots

I began this chapter by suggesting that literature is always contemporary because it is read by contemporary readers. Such readers can no more shake off their own time and place, however skillfully and diligently they study the past, than they can change their instinctive body carriage or their habituated sense of fashion and style. The bell-bottom trousers and sideburns of the seventies are different from their modern incarnations, however these styles may be revived and made newly fashionable. Some authors translate readily into multiple time periods, seeming to be timeless by the way they are taken up, appropriated, and understood by successive generations. Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens are clear examples of this temporal sleight of hand, which may be likened to trains that, moving along parallel tracks at similar speeds, give the illusion of standing still. Other authors and texts, as we’ve seen previously, are—sometimes deliberately (and often very effectively)—out of synch or out of time with the always moving present, so their archaism or quaintness or otherness is made, at least periodically, into a quality of difference that can itself be valued. And sometimes those difficult or distant texts can coincide with a cultural moment as in the case, perhaps, of the Gothic, which always seems, appropriately for its content, to be a revival or a revenant, disrupting the present, whether the period when it appears is the late eighteenth century of The Castle of Otranto, the nineteenth century of Poe, the Brontës, or Robert Louis Stevenson, the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and Harper Lee, or the popular Gothic romances of the mid-twentieth century, or the twenty-first century’s revived interest in vampires.

But there is one persistent exception to this capacity on the part of the reader to see with contemporary eyes, and that is when what is being read and judged is the work of the present. Contemporary literature is, apparently paradoxically, the one period of literature that can generate or elicit a critical blind spot. In an odd sense, the literature of today and of recent times is partially blocked from view by our proximity to it. As she did with the immediacy of poetry, Virginia Woolf deftly explored the problem, in this case in an essay first published in The Times Literary Supplement titled “How It Strikes a Contemporary.”

Woolf’s interest, at least initially, is in the unreliability of critics when it comes to contemporary writing.

In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same time will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-paper which, if the fire could survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics now are in agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when they discuss the