Review of Frank Kermode's "The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“The Genesis of Secrecy” is a set of the collected and expanded Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard during 1977-1978. In this book, Kermode announces his task to be one of a secular interpreter (or anti-interpreter, as it were), completely unencumbered, yet still highly knowledgeable, of older Biblical-critical traditions and their concomitant dogma.

Hermeneutics is the main concern here. The Gospel of Mark is the real center of gravity, but Kermode’s catholicity draws him also to James Joyce and Henry Green, with some non-canonical Gospels thrown in for good measure. In the first lecture, “Carnal and Spiritual Senses,” the act of interpretation is likened to an attempt to transition from being an “outsider” to an “insider,” that is, someone with special, institutionalized knowledge about the text at hand. Interpretation is necessarily an act that always frustrates itself if it aims to find a concrete, absolute nugget of meaning; instead, the multiplicity and indeterminacy of hermeneutic practice, and our proclivity for allegorical and elliptical readings, mean that any essentialism is textually impossible. In fact, Kermode all but says that what it means to be a narrative is to have “hermeneutic potential.” His carnal and spiritual are reconfigurations of Freud’s manifest and latent, but without all the Freudian baggage. With biblical texts, he sometimes opts for the similar “pleromatist” instead of latent.

In another lecture titled “What are the Facts?,” he discusses the role of textual facticity in historical writing. This is especially controversial, considering that Kermode has chosen the Gospels as a main focus – texts whose historical facts are hard to square, to say the least. To add to the complexity of looking at the Gospels as historical documents, one must consider that the Passion narrative was foretold in the Old Testament, and therefore its authenticity was a prerequisite to the supposed authority of the Gospels. In short, Kermode makes the dubious claim that, as a textual outsider, it is well nigh impossible to discern historical writing from any other type. 

It is uncertain whether Kermode knew exactly how close he is to poststructuralism here. It is not the case that all narratives dissolve into an incoherent semiological play of signs and signifiers when under interpretive scrutiny. Kermode’s approach results in a kind of textual nihilism. Interpretation always involves the interplay of intentionality and historical perspective, but there is no reason why that interplay must necessarily annihilate our ability to discern between genres, or what those genres are trying to accomplish. Kermode also never discusses his controversial choice of texts he uses to reach his conclusions. What would have happened had he chosen Sallust or Polybius, whose accounts can be checked against other texts and archaeological evidence? The choice of the Gospel of Mark makes Kermode’s arguments no less fascinating or thought-provoking, but it does make arguing the point much easier.

This is one of the best-known books of Kermode’s latter theory, and is indicative of a marked turn away from some of his earlier work, especially 1957’s “The Romantic Image,” which was a more traditional piece of criticism. In the earlier book, he accuses historians of applying some “false categories of modern thought,” rendering their work little more than “myth” or “allegory.” Many of Kermode’s attacks in “The Romantic Image” were driven by a call for a correspondence theory of truth between all kinds of texts – critical, historical, and literary. Unfortunately, “The Genesis of Secrecy” took a turn away from his earlier attempts at genre criticism, and toward what Kermode has elsewhere called “French utopianism.” 

This is a wonderful and interesting book, and one that everyone interested in modern criticism should be exposed to. I happen to disagree with its conclusions, but I found that it made me wrestle with some of the most fundamental assumptions I had about criticism as an act. Even considering the significant change in approach in the twenty years separating “The Romantic Image” and “Genesis of Secrecy,” Kermode never lost any of his scholarly cosmopolitanism and humane warmth, which is what draws me to read him again and again. 

Review of Frank Kermode's "The Age of Shakespeare"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I’ve found the Modern Library Chronicles books to be somewhat of a mixed bag, as another reviewer aptly put it. Hans Kung’s “The Catholic Church: A Short History” and Stephen Kotkin’s “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment,” which I’ve recently also reviewed, were very good, and full of information for people of all backgrounds. Frank Kermode’s “Age of Shakespeare,” however, I found to be written for an audience who has little to no knowledge of late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century English culture and politics. It may be the case that the varying quality can be attributed to the word limits imposed on the authors (all hover around 200 pages excluding ancillary notes or bibliographies). Many good introductory sources require a book anywhere between two and three times this long, especially when times were as complicated as Shakespeare’s were. This could have been a better book had it been on just the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England itself, but as I want to share below, Kermode chose to make much of the book about Shakespeare’s life and work instead, and I think the book suffers for it.

None of this is to say that Kermode doesn’t manage to distill some really good information in a very small number of pages. The early chapters do a superb job of emphasizing the various changes from Catholicism to Anglicanism (under Henry VIII), back to Catholicism (under Mary I), and then back to Protestantism (under Elizabeth I), and particularly how those changes manifested themselves in many plays of the time, most of which never seemed far-removed from inherently political concerns. 

Kermode is honest, admitting that most of what we know of Shakespeare’s early life is purely from speculation. Did he come to London seeking the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? Did the Jesuit (and later, martyr) Edmund Campion discreetly pass Catholic literature on to William and his father John when William was young? The possibilities are interesting to think about, but again are ultimately conjecture. He also traces the incredible rise in the place of the playwright as a subtopic in several of the book’s chapters, from the liminality of the unsavory vagabond during Elizabeth’s reign to the reverence and honor many had gained by the time of the early part of James I’s reign. Some of the best information is the background provided about the Rose, Globe, and Blackfriars theatres - their construction, the various people that were responsible for writing and producing the plays, the kinds of audiences that frequented each theatre, et cetera. 

The chapters that suffer the most are the longest, which happen to be the ones which cover Shakespeare’s plays. It seems like Kermode is racing as fast as he possibly can to write at least half a page or so on every play, which he manages to do; he spends a few pages on a couple of them. However, as I mentioned above, none of what he says sticks with the reader. Instead, we get randomly introduced tidbits, interesting though they are. He tells us that in “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare carefully interrelates the ideas of humor and social taboo; that the influence of Terence and Plautus is easily discerned in “The Comedy of Errors”; and that Bottom echoes, if not directly copies Saint Paul’s “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Corinthians 2:9) in Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV.i.204-214). There is no rhyme or reason as to why he includes what he does. Many books need not be as long as they are. This one should have been much longer.

The first half of the book is worth the introduction to the England of the time, but I would say the second half can easily be skipped. There are simply too many other good supplements to Shakespeare’s plays out including Mark Van Doren’s “Shakespeare,” Auden’s lectures, Northrop Frye, or if you’re feeling particularly reactionary, Bloom’s “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.”