ABSTRACT
Reading will always be informed by current needs, dreads, preoccupations, pleasures. The cultural conditions within which we receive the texts will shape the attention we bring to them. Literary history, like all history, starts now. We shall read as 1989 or, with luck, 1999 readers, but we need not do so hauling without noticing our cultural baggage. The encounter with the otherness of earlier literature can allow us to recognize and challenge our own assumptions, and those of the society in which we live. In order to do so we must take care not to fall into the habit of assuming the evolutionist model of literary development, so often taken for granted. In this, texts are praised for their ‘almost modern awareness’ or for ‘being ahead of their time’. This presentist mode of argument takes now as the source of authority, the only real place.Engaging with the difference of the past in our present makes us aware of the trajectory of our arrival and of the insouciance of the past - their neglectfulness of our prized positions and our assumptions. To do this, we need to learn the terms of past preoccupations. We may then experience the pressure within words, now slack, of anxieties and desires. To focus such enquiry we can observe how writers interpret the past of their personal and communal culture. We can use this awareness, if we will, to gratify our sense of our own correctness, ‘an almost modern understanding’ - but that leaves out too much text. Rather, the study of past writing and past reading can disturb any autocratic emphasis on the self and the present, as if they were stable entities. It can make us aware too of how far that view continues despite postmodernism.1We never read only ‘in our own person’. The writing is there before us; its words, its syntax, its narrative sequences organize our entry 1
into the text and order our roles within it. We may understand ourselves to be free agents as we read, but the range of our freedom is extended by the written work - and limited by it too. The writing characterizes our performance: Jane Austen makes us witty as we read. The effect may not persist. The passionate compunction we discover as we read George Eliot will ebb as we close the book. The readerly wariness that Beckett induces may not much inhibit our attachments. The ungainsayable commitment that Coetzee makes us know is hard to sustain beyond the time of the text. Humanist criticism was mistaken in assuming a straight translation possible from reading-self to socialized self. Reading is a sequestered activity; it is hard work to render its effects communal, and that work demands a series of vigorous displacements, not straight enactment.Whereas in the theatre we take part in an openly communal experience, the process of reading is nowadays solitary. However, the intermitted reading of long narrative means that it broods within all our other current life-activities. These other activities - and landscapes also - may come to form part of our repertoire of memory when we look back on the text. Particularly is this so when the work has made a profound impression: the plains of Yugoslavia and the bleak clangour of Tottenham Court Road slide past my eyes again when I think of Anna Karenina. Each reader introjects landscapes, rooms, and faces into the text to form an entirely personal residuum of reference, not available to others. But, as readers, we share also a communal T , which is that unspoken second person of the text. As Georges Poulet puts it, ‘Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an /, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself.’2 This I/other is a figure scattered among, as much as composed from, the many discursive positions offered by the writing, athwart the positions the reader occupies in current history.Our encounter with the work is sprung upon the linguistic resources it offers, and our resistance to it as well as our immersion in it cannot refuse its terms. But these terms are not invariant; words on the page do not have fixed limits. They reach us doubly freighted with debate: the arguments, engagements, and estrangements within which they were embedded at the time of the work’s production, the arguments, estrangements, and engagements within which we read now. All the essays in this collection, written over several years (and one long ago), read, in present terms, prose writers engaging with past writing and past reading. The writers respond not only in debate but in affection,
riding the rhythms of past prose, as Richardson does with Sidney even as he redisposes the class questions Sidney did not see as questions. The last three essays concern Virginia Woolf, whose internalization of past writing and past persons gets under the guard of the parody she deploys. Her work fictionalizes the modernist claim to a new start, undermines it even as it proposes it.The concept of the dialogue with the past, developed particularly by Habermas and Gadamer, but there from antiquity, emphasizes the expanding and corrective interaction of present reading with past writing. ‘Understanding begins’, writes Gadamer, ‘when something addresses us. This is the primary hermeneutical condition.’
