#frank kermode

[agoodhandwriting]

“A Modern Way with the Classic” by Frank Kermode

[gourmetpunk]

"We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth; and [King] Lear is a fiction. Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus."

-Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

Getting past the initial irony of Kermode using "degenerate" here to critique myths while also noting anti-semitism as such a kind of myth, this is a great summary of how I feel about the current way a lot of people are talking about fiction; it pisses me off to no end that we (broadly culturally speaking - I'm talking about your layperson's media comprehension here, not what takes place in universities) seem to have retreated into a kind of neo-Campbellist/neo-Jungian treatment of fiction as myth by default when Kermode is basically saying the modern impulse should be to try and distinguish fiction from myth as much as possible, something that I feel like I couldn't articulate well before but strongly agree with. Basically, the "mythical" treatment is the literary equivalent of "reject modernity, embrace tradition" (which I hope everyone reading this realizes is a reactionary conservative meme, right? Because I feel like I see people sharing things with that slogan unironically at an alarmingly increasing rate these days).

[shakespeareanthoughts]

The whole idea of dramatic character is forever changed by [Hamlet]. Claudius is wonderfully rendered, but is still a guilty tyrant and usurper; Polonius is a garrulous bore, a crafty operator and spymaster, yet a respected statesman; we think we know the type or put together from experience a good idea of it, but no one much like Hamlet ever existed before... To take him as the herald of a new age is neither idolatrous nor hyperbolical... The new mastery is a mastery of the ambiguous, the unexpected, of conflicting evidence and semantic audacity. We are challenged to make sense, even mocked if we fail.

Frank Kermode on Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Language

[aranazo]

McLuhan Hot & Cool a collection of essays on Marshall McLuhan.

[echogivesnoanswer]

If there is one belief (however the facts resist it) that unites us all, from the evangelists to those who argue away inconvenient portions of their texts, and those who spin large plots to accommodate the discrepancies and dissonances into some larger scheme, it is this conviction that somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, everything will be found to hang together.

Frank Kermode - Genesis of Secrecy

[thisisntwaterstones]

Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse; and tick-tock is in any case not much of a plot [...] And what happens if the organization is much more complex than tick-tock? Suppose, for instance, that it is a thousand-page novel [...] to maintain the experience of organization we shall need many more fictional devices. And although they will essentially be of the same kind as calling the second of those two related sounds tock, they will obviously be more resourceful and elaborate. They have to defeat the tendency of the interval between tick and tock to empty itself; to maintain within that interval following tick a lively expectation of tock, and a sense that however remote tock may be, all that happens happens as if tock were certainly following.

Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending 

humans impose plot and narrative upon disorganised time and purely successive events

[loudlylovingreview]

Wallace Stevens: Sunday Morning

IComplacencies of the peignoir, and lateCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair,And the green freedom of a cockatooUpon a rug mingle to dissipateThe holy hush of ancient sacrifice.She dreams a little, and she feels the darkEncroachment of that old catastrophe,As a calm darkens among water-lights.The pungent oranges and bright, green wingsSeem things in some procession of the dead,Winding across wide…

Wallace Stevens: Sunday Morning

[ultimainocencia]

In King Lear everything tends towards a conclusion that does not occur... The world may, as Gloucester supposes, exhibit all the symptoms of decay and change, all the terrors of an approaching end, but when the end comes it is not an end, and both suffering and the need for patience are perpetual.

— The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode 1967.