ARTS
Standing the test of time
Michael Tanner believes that repeated scrutiny of the classics ensures their survival Everyone agrees that there is some- thing called the test of time, but it is not easy to say exactly what it is, still less how it operates. During the long reign of the clas- sical tradition and its aftermath, the idea was that like-minded people, from genera- tion to generation, would read more or less the same set of texts, look at the same paintings, and listen to the same music, and that some of these texts etc., would survive repeated scrutiny, while others would fall by the wayside. The rationale for this pro- cess is given its most succinct and confident statement in the opening paragraph of Dr Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare: `Noth- ing can please many and please long, but just representations of general nature.' Nowadays we are very dubious about the existence of anything deserving to be called `general nature', especially if it is meant to suggest, as it obviously was by Johnson, human nature. Nor are many people keen on the idea of 'just representations', since that expression suggests the possibility of a single correct fix on the world; in particu- lar, once more, on the human world. Despite which reservations, it is not to be denied that the test of time is still invoked and found to be operating.
We certainly need it or something that fulfils the same function, and for several good and obvious reasons. The first is that the available quantities of work being pro- duced are ever more formidable, so that the sheer idea of getting on familiar terms with much of the art at our disposal is merely absurd; and even if we could much of it would be a mere waste of time. The second is that we are faced with the simul- taneously wonderful and terrifying fact of the preservation of virtually all of this prodigious output, together with the preservation of what used to be by defini- tion evanescent, namely the performance of music, drama and so forth, much of the `aura' of which was contingent on the uniqueness of the occasion. In one sense we do live in a 'museum culture', but new rooms are being opened virtually every hour. Those of us who have been brought up in the age where almost anything that happens can be reproduced happening, so long as it can be seen or heard, find it incredibly difficult to imagine agreeing to the suggestion that it is a pity that this rev- olution, which will eventually be, if it isn't already, a revolution in our way of experi- encing anything, ever took place. Yet it is making the sifting process not only ever more difficult, but certainly much more necessary. In fact, we have got to the stage where it is clear, as in a way it always should have been, that time by itself effects nothing: we do the testing which has been disingenuously credited to, or conceivably blamed on, time. But we seem to be losing confidence in our powers of discrimination just when they are most needed. They are needed so badly because we will otherwise simply disappear under the accumulated weight of our heritage. There are indica- tions that we are already heading that way, and not too reluctantly. It seemed as if time itself was the sifting agent during that whole period when what still happens to some things, for example decent but not noteworthy novels, was liable to happen to anything. Now the main forces of obsolescence in the arts and entertainment are commercial, the mere necessity to get something off the charts so that something else can be got onto them. Not that a comparable process to that hasn't happened before: we are often reminded that the sheer idea of a canon of works which is enduring and in some way definitive is a recent one. We are partly scandalised, partly proud that the works which we venerate were often intended as nothing more than that season's novelty, to be succeeded the next year by another work which we now hold sacred. Yet the reminder itself shows that the processes by which things survive are more complex than the nourishing simplicities of 'recep- tion theory' suggest. For whatever the intentions of the creators and impresarios of the great works of our culture, they self- evidently have survived. The audiences which were eager for new things still found themselves wanting to hear some of the old things again, and so did their successors. Perhaps it is a reassuring fact about human I see they've called in Harold Pinter.' nature that they did, even a testimony to its existence. It may even be one of the most powerful arguments for a persisting set of human characteristics that we are still so affected by works which were created in circumstances which have so little, superfi- cially, in common with ours.
There is a pat answer to that. We are told, and it can sound plausible if we con- fine our attention to literature, that the works we respond to now are not the same as those the original readers or listeners experienced. Not only do words change their meaning, sometimes in ways we can't recover, but the whole framework of assumptions and attitudes in which particu- lar works of literature were conceived determined what they meant, and the works we respond to are therefore differ- ent. My feeling about that view, a view which has been around long enough that it may well be about to go out of fashion, is that it was an excellent thing that it should have been aired, but that it was taken still is, in some quarters — self-refutingly far. To make an embarrassingly obvious point first: the confidence with which our world-view is contrasted with that of a work's contemporaries shows that we are able to grasp what they thought, at least up to a point. If certain works survive, other than as objects in libraries or vaults, despite drastic changes in the cultures which appreciate them, it would seem to be no more than an incredible coincidence that they are still valued if those changes lead to their meaning something quite dif- ferent. I have seen it argued that the very notion of 'the classic' reveals that in the first place such a work is tolerant of hugely varying interpretations, which once more comes to something very much like saying that it becomes a different work; and sec- ondly that it can emerge from one culture into another and still be appreciated, from which one can only draw a similarly bizarre conclusion.
These rather random considerations are intended to point in a single, if rather vague- ly delineated direction. Works stand the test of time because they are constantly subject- ed to the scrutiny of succeeding generations, even though there is sometimes a consider- able lapse between them; and although their significance will vary diachronically as much as they do synchronically for different read- ers, spectators etc., there will be, because there must be, large areas of agreement, if only about the importance of the subject- matter with which they deal. The basic point is that if we had no classics, we would be far less entitled than we are to believe that we have fundamental qualities in common with one another.
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