`The Greatest Otherness of All'

In a review of new books by two young poets published at Contemporary Poetry Review, Adam Kirsch, after taking well-deserved swipes at the unreadable Anne Carson and Jorie Graham, makes the following claim:

“Putting new wine in old bottles is better than shattering the bottles, but it brings us no closer to an authentic experience of the past. Few periods have been less interested than our own in escaping the provincialism of the present; despite all our reflexive praise of the Other and otherness, we are shy of history, which is the greatest otherness of all.”

Kirsch refers specifically to the imaginative use of the past by poets and other writers, though I think his point is more inclusive. Those mired exclusively in the present, which is a very small place and in no sense a culmination, are indeed provincial. For them the past is nonexistent or so forbiddingly foreign as to be terra incognita, yet the past has never been so present. Though our technology offers effortless access to virtually anything we wish to read, look at or listen to, the gifts of the past go squandered. This, too, is nothing new: The present has traditionally regarded the past with arrogance, as youth does the aged.

In 1963, Flannery O’Connor wrote an essay, “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade,” prompted by parental protests against the novels students were assigned to read in O’Connor’s native Georgia. The writers in question were earnest mediocrities -- John Steinbeck, John Hersey – though O’Connor doesn’t address their lack of literary merit directly:

“In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.”

Of course, things have gotten worse than even O’Connor could have imagined, and English majors graduate from universities without having read Shakespeare or Milton. Books are quaint artifacts, literary daguerreotypes. O’Connor continues:

“No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane [we can quibble with the names; I certainly quibble with Cooper’s inclusion], and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.”

No perspective, indeed. To know the past is not to be enslaved but liberated by knowing the best and worst we have accomplished. A present without a past feels at once claustrophobic and vertiginous, like falling forever in an empty room. Here’s the conclusion of O’Connor’s essay:

“The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

“And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”