Reconstructing the Past?

According to Annette Kolodny, literary history is a fiction, and we can really reconstruct the past as it really was.

"But we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms. What we gain when we read the 'classics,' then, is neither Homer's Greece nor George Eliot's England as they knew it but, rather, an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretive strategies, for present concerns. Only by understanding this can we put to rest that recurrent delusion that the 'continuing relevance' of the classics serves as 'testimony to perennial features of human experience.' The only 'perennial feature' to which our ability to read and reread texts written in previous centuries testifies is our inventiveness-- in the sense that all of literary history is a fiction which we daily recreate as we reread it."
-Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield"

When discussing some of the "animating questions of Christian hermeneutics" in class, we debated whether interpretation is primarily designed to understand the meaning of a text in its original context or in our present context. Many agreed that, whether consciously or not, we cannot help but look for application in everything that we read. Whether the text that we are reading is the Bible or the Sunday paper or "The Odyssey," the way that we interpret these texts is inevitably characterized by our search for relevance or connectedness to our own lives. Is this selfish? And if so, is that selfishness avoidable? My first reaction to the question of whether or not we primarily aim to interpret a text in its original context was "yes," but after considering Kolodny's point about our inability to reconstruct the past as it was, I might have to admit that interpretation is radically shaped by our situated-ness in the present time. Perhaps even if we wanted to, we could never fully achieve an interpretation of a text in its original context because we are too far removed.

Thus, we cannot look to "classic" texts either as authoritative portraits of past societies or as indicators of the common threads of human experience because these texts are not fully available to us. Even if we read a text heavily relying upon footnotes and historical data, we can do nothing but invent and imagine the context in which the author wrote. There are too many connotations and meanings engrossed in the language and cultural references of the day that escape us... there are too many elements that compose what it means to live in a specific time and place that render classic works inaccessible to the modern reader. We can only mold historical texts by what we now know; we can only begin to understand through our present lens. But, Kolodny would argue, we must embrace that lens and not fool ourselves about our interpretive abilities. As much as we would like to believe that by reading and studying, we can be transplanted into the world of George Eliot's "Middlemarch," we must know that we cannot interpret that world as Eliot saw it or intended it. We can only translate into our present experience. I wonder if Kolodny's argument might suggest that it is best to read works written in our own cultural/historical contexts, by our contemporaries, because we are the only ones who will ever understand it to the fullest possible degree? In acknowledging where our interpretive abilities lack, what then becomes our driving motivation for reading the "Classics?"