The Revelations of Frank Kermode

1.

The most versatile and the most distinguished of English literary critics since William Empson, Frank Kermode, died on August 17 of last year. Coming not from the English mainland but from the Isle of Man, he always felt somewhat alien in Britain even after he held prestigious positions at the universities of London and Cambridge. He was knighted, but did not display the Sir on his books: his autobiography was entitled Not Entitled. After six years in the navy during World War II, he was trained as a scholar of the English Renaissance, which remained his basic field, but an early book was on modernism and William Butler Yeats, and he also showed an interest in general literary theory, where he was able at times to demonstrate an amiable talent of treating with sympathy and understanding even those critical positions and schools with which he fundamentally disagreed.

Kermode worked as an adviser for several publishing houses, and I can testify to his extraordinary tact and judgment, as he supervised a short book I wrote on Schoenberg for a series that he administered called Modern Masters. He disliked the end of one of my chapters and made me rewrite it, and it became in my opinion the best thing in the book. His activity as a journalist produced many hundreds of reviews on a wide variety of subjects ranging from classical antiquity to the proletarian novels of the twentieth century. Bury Place Papers, a selection of articles for the London Review of Books, for which he wrote more than two hundred reviews, has been issued posthumously. This partially overlaps with a previous selection of essays, The Uses of Error, published in 1991, which remains on the whole more satisfactory and impressive, although the new volume contains some valuable reminiscences and reviews of William Empson—who was much admired by Kermode—this side of idolatry. (He wrote some seventy pieces for these pages.)

Entering the last decade of his life, Kermode made a grand return to the literature of the English Renaissance (in which he had worked only intermittently over the years) with a brilliant major study of the major aspect of the major figure of the period, Shakespeare’s Language, published in 2000, to which we must turn later. Of all his books, however, the one that sheds the fullest light on his critical ideals and philosophy, and was also the most ambitious and controversial, came twenty years before and arose from his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1977–1978: The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Here, Kermode’s initial concern is with the interpretation of the gospels, above all the Gospel according to Saint Mark, but his central interest is to reveal the nature of the interpretation of narrative in general.

Mark is generally agreed to be the oldest gospel, and much of Matthew that follows can be seen as an interpretation or rewriting of Mark. Examining the notebooks of Henry James, Kermode observed that the development of a novel like The Portrait of a Lady was a successive series of interpretations of an initially small idea as it becomes more elaborate and filled with a greater sense of life, just as Matthew and Luke elaborated on Mark to create new versions more convincing and of a more satisfactory dogmatic nature. Kermode’s insight was that interpretation is always a way of telling a new story. The comparison of secular and sacred interpretation of narrative was shocking to many.¹

The Genesis of Secrecy is dedicated “To Those Outside.” Interpreters are insiders and outsiders. The insiders belong to an elite, generally protected by an institution like a church or an academy, or by a consensus of scholarly opinion, which gives them authority, and they are presumed to possess the art of divination. The elite have privileges and constraints. “Perhaps the most important of these,” Kermode says, “are the right to affirm, and the obligation to accept, the superiority of latent over manifest sense.”

The manifest sense is the literal one we all grasp; the latent sense is the spiritual meaning, the secret that must be revealed by interpretation. This is true on the simplest level; there is naturally no point to an interpretation that tells us only what we all know already, what inescapably and instantly strikes the eye. An interpretation must either uncover or create a secret. For Kermode, the very existence of a text inspires interpretation, and therefore engenders secrecy.

Does the text of Huckleberry Finn reveal a homosexual relationship with the slave Jim? Do the plays of Shakespeare demonstrate that he was secretly a recusant Catholic? Does a reading of Paradise Lost convince us that Milton was really of the Devil’s party? Does The Turn of the Screw betray that the ghostly apparitions are hysterical hallucinations induced by the repressed sexuality of the governess? We can all supply many examples of notorious interpretations that have suggested something hidden from the lay reader.

The differences between the stories told in the four gospels have provoked debate and interpretation for many centuries. Even the apparent refusal of interpretation can become an interpretation. One can add to Kermode’s analysis, for example, that in the 1550s, John Calvin wrote The Harmony of the Evangels, an attempt to resolve the contradictions of the different versions. The Gospel according to Luke opens by addressing Theophilus, and since that name means “lover of God,” this was interpreted by the Catholic Church as signifying that the gospel was directly written for anyone who loves God. Like a good Protestant, Calvin will have nothing to do with this and wants to abolish all the traditional symbolic interpretations, and return to a literal sense. For Calvin, Theophilus was not a symbol of any lover of God, but must have been a real man. However, this return to the surface or manifest significance after centuries of allegorical readings became the revelation of a new interpretation.

Nevertheless, Kermode remarks that

texts upon which a high value has been placed become especially susceptible to the transformations wrought by those who seek spiritual senses behind the carnal [i.e., behind the evident or manifest meanings], senses that may in their turn be treated as if they were carnal.

With a sacred or canonic text, it is difficult to get rid of a traditional interpretation. That is why the Freudian view of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex adheres permanently to our reading of the drama, as it is now historically built into the text. That, too, is why so many millions of Americans think that the Second Amendment of the Constitution means that our founding fathers were asserting the right of every citizen of the United States to own a machine gun, Kalashnikov, or other assault weapon. The secret meanings harden and become fixed over time.

The Genesis of Secrecy is Kermode’s most complex and difficult book. Like Spinoza (quoted by Kermode), who insisted in his pathbreaking work on the interpretation of the Bible that “it is one thing to understand the meaning of Scripture, and quite another to understand the actual truth” (this must have been instrumental in getting Spinoza ostracized from the Jewish community in Amsterdam), Kermode maintains the separation of meaning and truth. In his meditation on criticism, he does not think that the professional insider reaches truth with any greater certainty than the outsider; both are doomed to disappointment, although the insider may produce more interesting or astonishing meanings.

We might add that even when we discover something latent or implicit in a text, our interpretation is always a rewriting of the original that at least partially deforms it—a secret meaning, no matter how essential and convincing, will always fit uneasily and uncomfortably in the original text. We hope, of course, that the newly discovered meaning will turn out to be true, but Kermode remarks that the hope is almost always disappointed. I should think that even if truth is almost never certain, we might be satisfied by relevance, or a provisional enrichment of our understanding. In another book commenting on some famous lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Kermode remarks:

Often what we find to say amounts to no more than an expression of astonishment, which is of little use unless it induces an equivalent submission in our hearers; dull though they may be, they can do this, become part of the conversation that prevents such lines from becoming rubbish in the end.²

Properly practiced, in short, interpretation protects the works of the past from becoming disposable junk by astonishing the readers, making them take a second look. It keeps the past alive.

The importance of The Genesis of Secrecy is that it expresses Kermode’s profound distrust of any system of reading that is coercive. Even his distrust is hedged with qualifications as, with a few exceptions, he has an uneasy sympathy for different critical procedures. Toward the end of the book, he presents a rapid summary of critical approaches:

Some suppose that it is right to inquire strictly into the question of what the text originally meant…. Some seek to liberate texts from all historical constraint by a process of “deconstruction,” others speak of foregoing [sic] the banal pleasures of continuity with the original sense for the sake of a joy more acute, if more dismaying, a jouissance that goes beyond the pleasure principle and arises from a quasi-sexual experience of loss and perversity.

Yet all practice divination, however intermittently, erroneously, or disappointedly; most of all, disappointedly. For whether one thinks that one’s purpose is to re-cognize [sic] the original meaning, or to fall headlong into a text that is a treacherous network rather than a continuous and systematic sequence, one may be sure of one thing, and that is disappointment. It has sometimes been thought, and in my opinion rightly, that the world is also like that…. In any case, a sense of mystery is a different thing from an ability to interpret it, and the largest consolation is that without interpretation there would be no mystery. What must not be looked for is some obvious public success. To see, even to perceive, to hear, even to understand, is not the same thing as to explain or even the same thing as to have access. The desires of interpreters are good because without them the world and the text are tacitly declared to be impossible; perhaps they are, but we must live as if the case were otherwise.

In his book on Shakespeare, Kermode makes use undogmatically of some of these systems. Accompanying them all, he observes in The Genesis of Secrecy, is the belief, unprovable but held by faith, that an interpretation of a work will fit the whole, that things hang together and make coherent sense.

2.

Shakespeare’s Language describes in rich detail the changes in Shakespeare’s style, above all the gradual development of a new, idiosyncratic, and complex manner that must surely have become almost as difficult for a contemporary public to understand as for one today. Kermode reveals an author who developed an approach to words more personal and radically original than any other dramatist of his time. Shakespeare’s Language is best read along with a copy of the plays, since, in spite of the lavish quotations, it inspires a new appreciation and rethinking of the whole body of work.

Kermode is, for once, aggressive in his rejection of many of the most fashionable recent scholarly approaches to Shakespeare, exposing his distaste frankly in the preface:

There are modern attitudes to Shakespeare I particularly dislike: the worst of them maintains that the reputation of Shakespeare is fraudulent, the result of an eighteenth-century nationalist or imperialist plot. A related notion, almost equally presumptuous, is that to make sense of Shakespeare we need first to see the plays as involved in the political discourse of his day to a degree that has only now become intelligible. These and other ways of taking Shakespeare down a peg seem, when you examine them, to be interesting only as evidence of a recurring need to find something different to say, and to say it on topics that happen to interest the writer more than Shakespeare’s words, which are, as I say, only rarely invoked. The tone of these novelties is remarkably self-confident….

On the other hand, the various forms of idolatry against which doctrines of this sort are over-reactions must also be deplored. There is no reason why we should not find passages and even plays that are routine and relatively uninteresting….

Then there are those who refuse to value one text over another, a play by Shakespeare over an ephemeral contemporary pamphlet, or to see reason to offer the one a different form of attention from that accorded the other. The question of intrinsic or attributed value is admittedly a difficult one…. As I believe in the value of Shakespeare and, without ignoring historical issues, regard the plays as being about more than such issues, I shall not pay much attention to what are nevertheless the prevailing modes of Shakespeare criticism.

Kermode is clearly anxious that the plays be seen as plays and not as historical documents, that they be read and viewed for dramatic and poetic experience and enjoyment and not for a demonstration of social and political change. He does not, indeed, ignore historical considerations, but uses them incidentally to elucidate the literary significance.

In only one instance, I believe, does he mistakenly neglect the historical background. It is true, as Kermode maintains, that the importance of Jacobean colonialist policy for The Tempest has been exaggerated and that is not what the play is about for most of its action; rather it is a Renaissance Italian type of tale of revenge and forgiveness. Nevertheless, at one crucial point, the idea of Jacobean colonialism adds extraordinary significance. Of the indigenous inhabitants of the island taken over by Prospero, Caliban is a slave and a subhuman brute. Taught to speak by Prospero, he glories only in the ability to curse, and has mainly one interest in life—to rape Prospero’s daughter Miranda. However, this almost wholly unadmirable being is given a speech of startling poetic character, which Kermode quotes:

Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d
I cried to dream again.

Kermode comments beautifully:

He has learned language for other reasons than to curse. The pleasing sounds happen often enough, and some are especially remembered; hence the switches of tense [give, will hum, had wak’d, would open, cried]…. Sleeping, dreaming, waking, sleeping: the rhythm is of a child’s rhyme, and the “riches” are of another world, a richer world than Prospero’s.

However, he misses the ethical dimension that requires us to reflect on the habitual or traditional contempt for the indigenous population of a colony. Shakespeare does not idealize Caliban but for one moment he gives him a fully human aspiration. This parallels his treatment of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, which is relentlessly anti-Semitic except for the one famous passage where Shylock protests his humanity. Both scenes instruct us on the nature of Shakespeare’s sympathy.

This speech of Caliban’s, moreover, is a magnificent witness to one of Kermode’s most important points. The later Shakespearean technique has forgone the traditional routine academic rhetoric for a new and supple style that follows the movement of a mind. Caliban is striving little by little to recall the music he has heard and his experiences of the different sounds, hence the switches from future to present to past tense, to which Kermode calls attention, but it all wonderfully hangs together as a single sentence, in which one line subtly spills over into the next—it is not merely the memories that enchant us, but the continuous movement from one to another, the dazzling vision and the sudden drop into the wakened reality. In the main, Kermode is right: it is the art and not the political background with which we must end to get the full measure of what Shakespeare could accomplish. No book elucidates Shakespeare’s art so convincingly as Shakespeare’s Language.

Kermode had a sure sense of what to quote. I am deeply grateful to him for his recalling the lines of Prince Florizel in The Winter’s Tale, replying to Perdita’s famous speech about her garden:

She draws from Florizel lines of equal virtuosity: “When you do dance, I wish you/A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do/Nothing but that, move still, still so…” (140–42), where the rhythm mimics the rise and fall of a wave.

For Kermode, the new capacity to create a style that follows the process of thought, with all its hesitations and convolutions, begins with Richard II. He finds a parallel in the work of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne, and a similar willingness to write sometimes in harsh verse that would be difficult to take in at first hearing or reading. (One should add that of all the lyrics of the time, the works of Donne were often close to the style of the stage, many of his poems having the manner of spoken dramatic verse.)

Kermode does avoid idolatry. He refuses the recent attempts to defend the second half of Measure for Measure, which is, indeed, a mess, although, like almost everyone else, he finds the first half to be among Shakespeare’s greatest achievements. A few lines may show how far Shakespeare was beginning to go in testing the ability of the public to follow his thought. The judge, Angelo, is planning to condemn Claudio to death for fornication, and is justifying his decision to Claudio’s sister, who has come to plead for him. Angelo claims that pardoning a fornicator is worse than pardoning a murderer:

…fie, these filthy vices! It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stol’n
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image
In stamps that are forbid. ‘Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made
As to put metal in restrained means
To make a false one.

The comparison of fornication and murder is made, as Kermode comments, “in crowded language” with an elaborate metaphor drawn from counterfeit money. Almost all the expression is oblique. A murderer is “him that hath from nature stol’n/a man already made,” while to “coin heaven’s image/In stamps that are forbid” is to create a bastard. “Falsely to take away a life true made” is illegally to kill a victim properly born in wedlock. The image of counterfeit money is reinforced by describing fornication as “to put metal in restrained means to make a false [life].” This is clear enough on reflection, but was the meaning instantly communicated to the average groundling in Shakespeare’s time? And as Kermode insists, later in Shakespeare’s career, the style can become even more puzzling. He writes on a speech in Coriolanus:

What we feel, even before we start to unpack the language, is its pace, its sudden turns and backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can grasp them. We recognise the representation of anxious thought, a weighing of possibilities….This kind of thing was now being done in verse for the first time.

In unpacking the language, Kermode is deeply indebted to Empson’s studies of the way poets can bring to the fore the subsidiary meanings, the connotations of words, to enrich the texture. In the above quotation from Measure for Measure, the words “false” and “falsely” are used ambiguously to signify both counterfeit money and being born out of wedlock, and “remit” suggests paying back as well as pardon. He also borrows Empson’s demonstration of the way that Shakespeare sometimes concentrates throughout a play on one word, like “honest” in Othello, exploiting all its possibilities of signification.

Of course, Kermode remarks, the public could follow the gist of a play through the gestures, as, indeed, one of Shakespeare’s characters (Volumnia in Coriolanus) observes:

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant
More learned than the ears.

Still, as he writes:

But in Shakespeare’s plays, especially after 1600, the life of the piece, of the whole business of personation, is in large part not in the gesture but in the linguistic detail; we want to understand as much of this as we can. We don’t want just to hang on to the general sense as if we were watching an opera in Czech.

No critic has done more than Kermode in revealing the secrets of Shakespeare’s work in ways that enhance our joy in reading the plays.

3.

In homage to Kermode, we should finally mention the brilliance of much of his journalism and book reviews. The conclusion of his review of a biography of Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, a well-known literary magazine, from 1939 to 1949 will give a taste of Kermode’s extraordinary bravura:

It was almost by accident that Connolly became the most influential figure in English writing in the 1940s. He gave it a coloring derived from a former time, from the world of Waugh’s early novels, and Anthony Powell’s, with a dash of Elizabeth Bowen—upper-class refinement, a rather weary vice, a snobbishness appealing and appalling. It was remarkable that such a coloring could survive that awful decade, but it did. It has still not quite faded [in 1989], though doubtless it will soon be gone for good, like Connolly’s own taste for the refinements of Latin poetry, for the high pleasures of Paris, for women who are both intelligent and submissive.

It is so long since most writers had the necessary education, or could afford the pleasures and find the women, that if they were made available we should hardly know what to do with them. But looking at my own battered, surviving copies of Horizon, I remember that among the myths that animated me in those years was that perhaps someday I should possess and know how to value that douceur de vie, even if it meant being rather deliciously sad for quite a lot of the time. If anybody enjoys it now, he or she doesn’t edit a literary journal, and almost certainly has very little interest in what used to be called, in all innocence, literature.

The rich combination of comedy, nostalgia, admiration, and contempt—with even a touch of self-contempt—almost obscures the way these final paragraphs delicately communicate a sense of the changing social, cultural, and economic history of a past decade and its souvenirs. For vitality, complexity, and range of intelligence, Frank Kermode had few peers.