ABSTRACT
It is one thing to acknowledge that a displacement of environment inevitably occurs as time passes and that the meaning of literary works is changed as a consequence, but another to suppose that anything can be done to compensate for it. Critics are resigned to the fact that the environment of the primitive epics can only be guessed at; should they not acknowledge that similar irretrievable damage has been done to their understanding and appreciation of all past works of literature and make whatever they can of them, treating them as different from primitive epics in degree but not in kind? Our answer to this question will probably depend both on our awareness of the extent to which displacement of environment changes the meaning of a text and on our view of the possibility of recovering knowledge of the environment that has been displaced. 1
Sceptics who dismiss the likelihood that such knowledge can be usefully recovered have to acknowledge that a modicum of it is inescapable for any experienced reader. Even a casual acquaintance with the literature of the past provides us with information about the environments in which it was written, and we learn very early to distinguish between contemporary books and books that were written before we were born. We accommodate ourselves effortlessly to the concerns and assumptions of, say, Shakespeare's plays in much the same way that we accommodate ourselves to the obsolete language in which they are conveyed. Ignoring the pastness of past works of literature is possible to conceive of but impossible to do. The choice is really between reading with a sense of the past that is derived casually and unreftectively and reading with a sense of the past that is arrived at deliberately and methodically .2 Or, to put the matter in another way, the choice is not between reading past works in the
light of the past or in the light of the present, but between reading them in the light of a very inaccurately imagined past or in the light of a less inaccurately imagined past. Neither alternative may seem very satisfactory, but one seems less unsatisfactory than the other.
