Kermode on our endless epoch of transition

The Christian story of the beginning and end becomes damaged, replaced, by scientific discoveries.  Myths turn into literature.  That is how Kermode moves into the literature of his own time.

I mentioned that literary fictions changed in the same way – perpetually recurring crises of the person, and the death of the person, took over from myths which purport to relate one’s experience to grand beginnings and ends.  And I suggested that there have been great changes, especially in recent times when our attitudes to fiction in general have grown so sophisticated…  (Ch. II: Fictions, p. 35)

Kermode uses the word “fiction” broadly, including political and legal and religious fictions as well as novels.  My sense is that in 1965, when he gave the lecture, there was enough countercultural activity that he was right.  The established fictions were getting thoroughly worked over, being “seen through,” to use Orwell’s old phrase.

But Kermode is wary, and works on another fiction, the moment of crisis, or the temptation to live in a moment of crisis, a time of transition that is paradoxically unending.  Some moments of crisis are real, as is obvious enough in retrospect.  But:

Crisis is a way of thinking about one’s moment, and not inherent in the moment itself.  Transition, like the other apocalyptic phases, is, to repeat Focillon’s phrase, an ‘intertemporal agony’; it is merely the aspect of successiveness to which our attention is given…  Our own epoch is the epoch of nothing positive, only of transition.  (Ch. IV: The Modern Apocalypse, 101-2)

This describes the novel in general here, isn’t he?  There is a stable beginning, a satisfying ending, and the writer and I spend all of our time in the transition between them, the novel itself.  I enjoy the transition, am surprised and moved and perhaps learn something, all along the way.

Kermode is skeptical of the uniqueness of the feeling of crisis or transition.  Maybe this is just ordinary psychology.  It is enjoyable how much of his discussion of his contemporary literature can be transferred to our contemporary literature with only a change of authors and titles.  He spends most of the fifth lecture on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) – “This book is doubtless very well known to you” (133) – and plenty of time on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Iris Murdoch, as representatives of the new ideas.  He clearly dislikes the newest of the new ideas, meaning William Burroughs.  “[N]on-communicative triviality” (121).

But it is the skepticism that I find interesting.  How new is the new?  What are today’s avant-gardists doing that the French novelists of the 1950s had not already done?  And then, what did they do that etc., etc.

In a recent interview with Alexandra Schwartz, Rachel Cusk describes her fiction in terms that reminded me of Kermode’s discussion:

I’m trying to see experience in a more lateral sense rather than as in this form of character. Which, as I said, I don’t actually think is how living is being done anymore…

I think this is a moment in culture, generally, where people are suddenly looking again at everything that was accepted, voices that have been ringing in our ears forever, and suddenly thinking, “I’m really sick of this, and I don’t want to read it anymore.”

As I understand Cusk, “character” means something other than the representation of personality.  “How much does character actually operate in a person’s life?”  The word that jumps out is “anymore” (the first instance).  Novels used to represent reality, “living,” when character existed, but not anymore, so new kinds of representation, new kinds of novels, are necessary.

Or things have not changed that much, and one of the most stable things is the useful fiction that things have changed a lot.

Since Sartre’s Nausea was not at all well known to me, I read it, and I will save my hapless flailing on that subject for next week.

Please come back in early December for more literary criticism, Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, which will, I hope, be over my head in different ways than The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending and its great charms - time, apocalypse, crisis

Frank Kermode is thinking about literary fiction, fictions more generally, as representing reality in some way.  They do not have to do so.  But that is the argument for a different book, maybe a response to The Sense of an Ending.  I would enjoy reading that book.

In this book, though, reality is a premise.  Anyone planning to join me with Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis next year will find some useful ideas in Kermode.

So, given some interest in reality, one strange thing about fictions as expressed in books is that the books begin and even more strangely, end.

We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. (23)

I am not sure that books do have to end, exactly.  There are readers who clearly find it more of a nuisance that books end, readers for whom the endless fantasy or detective series is the ideal.  The story of Superman has been published continuously for eighty years, and is not ending anytime soon.  Maybe that book arguing with Kermode should be written by some kind of fantasy writer.

Kermode takes the charm and strangeness of endings seriously.  He looks for endings in reality.  There is death, personal death.  There is apocalypse, the end of everything.  Apocalypses are themselves fictions, even literary fictions, particularly the ones based on the 1st century Christian fantasy novel Revelation.  Kermode is interested, in this example, in how the fiction is used in reality, how the expectation of the imminent end of the world is expressed in the world itself, the psychology of apocalypse, so much of it tied into the imagery of Revelation.

The world constantly fails to end.  Geology and cosmology pushes the beginning of things further into the past, but the apocalypticist can just shift his fiction to keep the possibility of apocalypse.  Even if the year 1000 is not imminent, or, apocalypse (not) repeated as farce, Y2K is in the distant past, the psychology of “crisis” takes over.  The disaster is off in the distance, and this, right now, is the moment of crisis.  The moment of crisis is, essentially, perpetual, which is a great part of its attraction: “the stage of transition, like the whole of time in an earlier revolution, has become endless” (101).

Roughly speaking, Kermode begins with the end, the apocalypse.  He discusses the nature of time, from Augustine on through Aquinas in the third lecture.  The third lecture is quite difficult.  Medieval Christian philosophy.  I imagine, with pity, that original lecture audience.  I doubt that Kermode adds anything to Augustine on this subject.  I doubt that anyone ever has.  This is the first half of the book.  In the second half, Kermode turns to modern literature, and to regular old novels, which greatly eases the philosophical burden, even in Exhibit A is Sartre’s Nausea, which gets most of a lecture to itself as a type specimen.

That is something like a summary of The Sense of an Ending.

Tomorrow, I will write a bit about the last half of the book – novels, the crisis, then and now.  How we love the crisis.

Beginning Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending - You remember the golden bird

My imagination was for a time haunted by figures that, muttering “The great systems”, held out to me the sun-dried skeletons of birds, and it seemed to me that this image was meant to turn my thoughts to the living bird.  (William Butler Yeats, A Vision, 1925, from Book II: The Completed Symbol, Chapter XVIII)

Funny, I know – Yeats was an odd fellow, or pretended to be – but true, yes?  Ornithologists truly love the living bird, and they indulge, express, and manifest their love by studying bird skeletons, perhaps prepared with a little more care than letting the sun take care of it.

So we read criticism because we love literature.  Unless – there are layers here – literature is the skeleton and the living bird is something else.  Life, perhaps.  Reality.  What is criticism, then?  A drawing of the skeleton?  A discussion of the skeleton?

The tragedy of the Yeats quotation is the phrase “meant to.”  Yes, of course, but the skeletons themselves are so interesting.  Just a little more time with the skeletons.  By “tragedy,” I mean “comedy.”

Tragedy, we are told, must yield to Absurdity; existential tragedy is an impossibility and King Lear is a terrible farce.  (Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 1967, Ch. I: The End, p. 27)

There is an earlier step, actually.

The end is now a matter of immanence; tragedy assumes the figurations of apocalypse, of death and judgment, heaven and hell; but the world goes forward in the hands of exhausted survivors…  This is the tragedy of sempiternity; apocalypse is translated out of time into the aevum.  (Ch. III: World without Beginning or End, p. 82)

Then comes the collapse into absurdity (or Absurdity), as King Lear and Hamlet collapse into Waiting for Godot and Endgame.  The survivors, they is us.

That’s one story Frank Kermode tells, relatively directly, in The Sense of an Ending, the move in Western literature from apocalypse to tragedy to absurdity, where we still languish, or flourish.  It is a book that sprays ideas in all directions, ideas he cannot possibly follow, a generous book.  Maybe someone in the audience picked them up.  The book collects a series of six lectures at Bryn Mawr.  What the audience possibly understood, I cannot say.  I have wondered the same thing about the lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they were not half as specialized.  “You remember the golden bird in Yeats’s poem” (Ch. I, p. 3) – uh, I can look it up.  “Sailing to Byzantium,” yes, that is a really famous poem.  But I had to look up the bird.  Curiously, it is a bird without a skeleton.

A couple more days on Kermode’s sun-dried bird.  In some ways – e.g., “aevum” – it is a difficult book.  Which is exactly what I wanted.  I had to read it twice.  Some readers might want to skip past the medieval theology to the second half, to Lecture IV or maybe Lecture V: “as soon as the subject is the novel the argument drops into a perfectly familiar context” (Ch. V, 128).  So true.