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 To add to the complexity of looking at the Gospels as historical documents, one must consider that the Passion narrative was foretold in the Old Testament, and therefore its authenticity was a prerequisite to the supposed authority of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 Terry Eagleton's "After Theory"

[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.]

Being a theorist – cultural, literary, or anything else – could be intimidating if you’re doing it after the impressively productive years of the ‘60s and ‘70s. These were the acme years of people like Habermas, Derrida, Bourdieu, Foucault, Lyotard, Rorty, Jameson, and several others who played a major role in completely reshaping what theory means inside and outside of academic discourse. In “After Theory,” Eagleton confronts a world where many of these people’s ideas, once considered controversial, are now practically de rigueur. He also shows himself to be a very different thinker than I’ve always assumed him to be. His socialism has hardly abated, but for some reason, I always had him pegged as a staunch postmodernist, too. But that couldn’t be further from the case.

The structure of the book is a bit confused and unfocused. The first half consists of statements about the birth of postmodern theory which are true enough, but Eagleton gives you no idea of what he’s trying to establish or any point he’s trying to make. Perhaps he was trying to spell out some basic postmodern assumptions: a deep distrust of grand narratives, truth, and objectivity, and an overt focus on culture that wasn’t there in modernism. The second half quickly becomes focused and razor-sharp. He comes out to defend the idea of truth, objectivity, and the morality and ethics as theoretical pursuits. And he makes these arguments brilliantly – by showing that, if postmodern assumptions were true, then postmodernism itself couldn’t be, i.e. by showing that it’s internally inconsistent. To pick an exceedingly simple example, if truth didn’t exist, then neither could the statements of postmodernism be considered true. He ends by saying that postmodernists have a bad history of associating all of these things – narratives, truth, objectivity, et cetera – with fundamentalism, and showing why this makes absolutely no sense. 

If you’re even somewhat familiar with the overall shape that theory has taken over the last fifty or so years, and have serious doubts about some of its claims, you’ve probably thought about some of the things that Eagleton talks about here. I know I have. I just wish that I was able to articulate them so capably. There’s one major gripe that I have with the book: some of his pronouncements about American leaders and foreign policy seem grossly strident and out of place. Whether one agrees or not isn’t really the point, either: they just looked embarrassing in a book in a book that was mostly about the internal contradictions of postmodernism and critical theory. Well, that, and the slow, bumbling start that I mentioned above. But if you stick with it, he does actually get around to making some important points that really make you scratch your head as to how these ideas could have been held so uncritically by such otherwise intelligent people.