The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [96]
Readers seek guidance, writers seek appreciation. The inability of critics to offer definitive judgments disconcerts both “the reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary literature” and “the writer who has a natural desire to know whether his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters or, on the contrary, to put out the fire.” But even the great critics of the past—Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold—were hardly impeccable in their judgments of new work. “The mistakes of these great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to be worth recording.” Woolf has her own views about her own contemporaries: “Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness, but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm, in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages of Far Away and Long Ago [a memoir of W. H. Hudson’s childhood] will undoubtedly go to posterity entire. Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”31
How have her predictions fared over time? “Mr. Lawrence” is D. H. Lawrence. That memorable catastrophe, Joyce’s Ulysses, has been subsequently regarded, together with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—as perhaps the greatest novel of its time. Hudson, the author of Green Mansions, is a supporting player rather than a lead actor in the estimation of the period. Woolf, herself both a writer and a critic, hopes that “the critics whose task it is to pass judgment upon the books of the moment, whose work, let us admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often distasteful,” will approach their work with generosity, but at the same time be “sparing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt to get awry, and fade, and make the wearers, in six months’ time, look a little ridiculous.”32 She enjoins them to “take a wider, a less personal view of modern literature,” and above all, to ignore the tempting byways of historical gossip (“that fascinating topic—whether Byron married his sister”) and instead to “say something interesting about literature itself.”33
Contemporary literature after Woolf’s time has continued to pose this same set of dilemmas. At Harvard in the early 1980s undergraduate English majors were not permitted to write their senior theses on writers who were still living. I’m not sure why—perhaps the idea was that the critical verdict had not yet been definitively rendered on these writers, since their careers were still in motion, or that there was not sufficient critical writing (essays, critical books and articles, reviews, etc.) for a young scholar to consult and assess. But times have changed. These days there are so many students who want to write about living or recent authors that the “older” writers are neglected in favor of the new. From an institutional point of view, we might say that contemporary writing, which was in some sense always literary, has now become literature—the inside rather than the outside, or the boundary or limit case. What is acknowledged, both tacitly (in the lifting of this interdiction, one that no present-day student would imagine as reasonable) and explicitly (through the teaching of the work of living writers and their periodic visits to campus), is that literature itself is a work in progress and in flux. Literature, that is to say, is itself a literary artifact.
Seeing the Mountain Near
“You cannot see the mountain near,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson about the difficulty of critics’ experience in perceiving the stature of a contemporary. “It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.”34 Emerson’s mountain metaphor