Frank Kermode (1919–2010)

The late Frank Kermode was one of the leading scholars in the field of Shakespearean studies, and this book clearly displays his ability to address complex technical issues in a clear and readily accessible manner.

Shakespeare’s language provides copious scope for debate. The full, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary provides illustrative quotations to show how the meaning of a word has developed over the years, and has more words whose definitions are supported by quotations from show more Shakespeare as the first recorded use than for any other single writer: he inherited an already copious and rich language, and bequeathed it a host of words of his own devising.

Kermode addresses this aspect of the Bard in detail, but he also looks more closely at the style of language that Shakespeare employed. He was, after all, writing for entertainment, and he adapted the flow and pace of his characters’ speeches to reflect their respective stations in life.

At the simplest level, Shakespeare showed marvellous dexterity at varying his characters’ language to suit their station in life. Noble characters deploy a far more venerable level of speech than the ‘ordinary’ citizenry. Similarly, Polonius, chief administrator and fixer for the usurping Claudius in Hamlet, comes across as ponderous and obfuscating, almost like his administrative descendant Sir Humphrey, whose discourses are intended to obscure rather than illuminate the machinery of government.

Kermode takes his analysis much further than this. Not only did Shakespeare have an acute ear for social distinctions within his characters’ speech, but his own use of language developed as he grew older. It is all too easy to resort to a quantitative approach to the study of literature, without uncovering anything particularly illuminating. One intriguing metric that Kermode highlights, however, is the differing proportion of prose and verse in his plays. There was a far greater preponderance of prose in his earlier works, sometimes rising almost to 40 per cent, whereas, once he hit mid-season form around 1600 onwards and embarked upon his later, great plays (Julius Caesar, King Lear, Hamlet), the proportion of the plays written in verse was far higher.

The first third of the book is given over to an analysis of Shakespeare’s works (including the sonnets) in general, while the rest of the book looks in detail at some of the individual plays. Kermode’s depth of knowledge about, and love for, his subject matter shines through at every stage.

Shakespeare’s mastery of the written word has never been in doubt, but this book shines a light on the mechanisms and artistry that underlie it. This is accessible scholastic analysis of the highest order. show less

You might, as you read Frank Kermode’s famous book, imagine yourself in the audience at Bryn Mawr College in the autumn of 1965 as he delivered the Mary Flexner Lectures of which the book consists. Perhaps even in that first lecture, titled “The End,” you would have surreptitiously looked about the hall to see how many of those present were taking it in. A fair number would have nodded at mention of Yeats, or murmured at the quotes from Wallace Stevens. I might have felt comforted by show more an Aristotle name check. But would they all be smiling sanguinely when the talk moved on to the eschatological, on to Apocalypse, Revelation, and the end of things? And would they have been any more comforted when Kermode’s hermeneutical insights were applied to fiction in the form of Robbe-Grillet? My guess is that a lot of those in the hall would have been like me, relieved that Kermode’s lectures would later be issued in the form of a book so that they could go over the content again in their own time. Having read through the text in its entirety, however, like me you may still be in the position of firmly believing that it will all make sense on the next pass.

Kermode’s erudition is breathtaking. The six essays draw on texts from philosophy, religion, theology, fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and sociology. His argument is at once far-reaching and subtle. Recurrent apocalyptic movements, he might argue, are manifestations of our in-built need for the conferral of meaning, the consonance of meaning conveyed through the sense of an ending. This demand is as much an aspect of our religious and theological thought, as it is constitutive of our literary endeavours. ‘Tick’ anticipates ‘Tock’. The gap between those two serves as the model of narrative form and the source of our contestable relationship with time.

That’s a glancing shot at best at one of Kermode’s key points. The book as a whole, slim volume though it is, is filled with both philosophical or narratological insights (not all of which the reader may wish to take up) but the real treat is their application to the business of criticism. Kermode is a marvel when he reads Spencer’s Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare’s Lear, or Sartre’s La Nausée. Or maybe it was just that in those bits I imagined his audience perking up with the thought that here at last was something they could get their heads around.

I haven’t finished with this book. But I feel certain that another couple of reads will solidify its central points for me. I always feel that way, no sense that the ending is yet in sight. Always worth another read. show less

t's taken me a long, long time to finish this book of six essays, originally delivered as lectures by the academic literary critic Frank Kermode. I initially came across it when I was researching the Julian Barnes novel of the same name, and there is a strong relationship between them; Barnes clearly set out to write a novel exemplifying the simplest understanding of Kermode's ideas, that awareness of the end informs the preceding events.

There's a lot more. Basically, Kermode identifies the show more idea of a beginning and and end of the world, or existence, as having a profound effect on both literature and philosophy. Living as we do in a society where most of us have casually assumed the idea, along with our own (usually shuttered) awareness of our own eventual end, the opposite idea may not have occurred to us, the idea of a circular unending time. The early Church philosophers were intensely occupied with this eschatology, and of course influenced the expanding Christian world. The author goes over, in sometimes excruciating detail, the various points at which the end of the world was prophesied and eagerly, or not so eagerly, anticipated, and how he feels that the existentialists, all those years later, were in some ways the logical if rebellious extension of that thinking.

Or at least I think that's what the author was saying. It's a very dense book, which I read with my trusty online dictionary at hand. I will be reading it again, I'm sure, because as dense as it is, it is equally fascinating to see how our modern fiction as well as our modern society embodies these ideas. show less

his is a monography on the poet Wallace Stevens by the reknowned scholar Frank Kermode. It is a bit tricky to buy a critical work on a poet with whose work I am unfamiliar, and may likely not be interested in. However, this is a short work of almost essay-like length of just 126 pages.

Kermode makes some poignent observations about the role and nature of reality as seen by Wallace Stevens that struck me and stuck with me.

reality is what you see finely and imagine fully from where you are and show more as what you are. 'The Gods of China are always Chinese' is one of the fundamental ideas of Wallace Stevens (p.11). "I am what is around me" (p.35).

At least in his poetry, Stevens creates a divide between reality and the world of the imagination, effectively cutting himself off from life. To most people life is an affair of people and not of places. Instead, he says, life is an affair of places, and elsewhere Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling.

This culminates in the horrific observation that reality is in fact unbearable to us, that we cannot truly face it, and that we can only live with it through the overlay of our imagination. In The Snow Man "winter" is a metaphor for a "pure abstracted reality, a bare icy outline purged clean of all the accretions brought by the human mind to make it possible for us to conceive of reality and live our lives." In winter, things are seen as they are. (p. 31).

In the same context, Stevens wrote: "No doubt there is nothing more morbid in itself, more inimical to nature, than to see things as they are.... The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously .... O, Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is ... " (p. 32) from Stevens' introduction to Valéry's Dance and the Soul.

The imagination is described as a power to transform the environment and ensure comfort and survival. " Poets, with this power, once made gods and myths, but these are irrelevant to modern reality. Now the same power must be our defense against the poverty of fact" (p. 36) (Italics are mine).

This bleak view that pits the harsh world of Darwinian biology against culture as a soft blanket to delude ourselves by shying away from harsh reality is incredibly convincing to me.

I did not much care for the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but believe Kermode provides an excellent introduction to Stevens' overall output, mainly poetry, and dedicates one chapter to his prose works. To me, reading the critical sections underlying Stevens ideas was what made reading this book so valuable to me. show less