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and indeed they have traditionally been thought of primarily if not
exclusively in this custodial role.
Yet this cosy, domestic, unexciting and unproblematic conception
comes apart in our hands as soon as we begin to examine it seriously.
As far as I know, it was St. Augustine who first observed that time is a
three-fold present: the present as we experience it, the past as a pres–
ent memory, and the future as a present expectation. Moreover, we
normally, habitually and necessarily understand the past by project–
ing the present selectively back onto it. And the great works from the
past remain alive in part by virtue of their extraordinary and uncanny
ability to masquerade as works of the present. Let me offer an illustra–
tion from my own discipline. Thirty-five years ago the critical reputa–
tion of Charles Dickens was about as sunk as it could be. The
greatest popular novelist of the last century was taken seriously by
almost no one whose opinion "mattered" and was widely regarded as
a kind of literary joke, one of those odd aberrations of Victorian
culture. Today that situation has entirely reversed itself. Dickens
is generally regarded as the greatest of English novelists and in point
of imaginative power and genius as second only to Shakespeare
among the galaxy of England's writers There is no secret about how
this drastic alteration took place.
It
took place through the media–
tion of modern literature. It took place by way of the acculturation
of Dostoevsky and Kafka, and Eliot and Joyce and Faulkner and
Beckett and other writers like them. When a generation of readers
had internalized the radical modernity of these writers, it suddenly be–
came both possible and "natural" to read Dickens anew and to see in
him things that had not been hinted at before.
(It
should also be
added that although this change among readers largely took place
within the academy it began, as most such changes begin, outside of
it.) Among the many points
to
be taken here there is one that I should
like to emphasize.
It
is important for us to note that it was precisely
Dostoevsky and Kafka, and Eliot and Joyce and Faulkner and Beckett,
and
not
Fannie Hurst or Hervey Allen or Pearl Buck who were the
agents of this historical transformation and transformation of histori–
cal consciousness. In other words, the past returns to life and retains
its life-in some degree at least-by virtue of the model from the
present that we impose upon it in those efforts of reconstruction and
re-creation that are known as understanding. A correlate of this cir–
cumstance is that the model from the present that we choose has
to
be
