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Frank Kermode has long held a distinctive place among modern critics. He brings to the study of literature a fine and fresh critical intelligence that is always richly suggestive, never modish. He offers here an inquiry--elegant in conception and style--into the art of interpretation. His subject quite simply is meanings; how they are revealed and how they are concealed.
Drawing on the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation, Mr. Kermode examines some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible--and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure. He raises questions concerning the interpretation of single texts in relation to their context in a writer's work and a tradition; considers the special interpretative problems of historical narration; and tries to relate the activities of the interpreter to interpretation more broadly conceived as a means of living in the world.
While discussing the gospels, Mr. Kermode touches upon such literary works as Kafka's parables, Joyce's "Ulysses," Henry James's novels, and Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49." By showing the relationships between religious interpretation and literary criticism, he has enhanced both fields.
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But there are many other reasons for admiring this work, which readers of all denominations of seriousness will appreciate.
There is Kermode's style, which in this book is particularly potent, with never a mismatched metaphor or an irrelevant allusion. It is fun just to watch him deal with, for instance, the interpretation of the gospels, at which he is clearly as contemporary as scholar as he is of Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens.
But equally it is his versatility that amazes: from bibical texts to Kafka to Henry Green, Kermode inspects a subject from a multitude of diverse perspectives. Kermode's work is all of a piece in never claiming to have exhausted a topic, always reserving a hermeneutical skepticism about his own results.
Like Empson, nothing Kermode turns his hand to is worthless: he always uncovers the well-hidden sores of his own profession. I am surprised that the work in question is so seldom mentioned in academic discussions (at least for the light it sheds upon the work of Kafka, which is the least of this book's concerns), not only because it is a record of a changing critical climate (Kermode is one of the first English critics to have used Barthes to any effect--to this day!), but also because it has an almost canonical sensitivity to the true value of literature. Of course, had this work been written by any other critic it would be acclaimed as a pinnacle of scholarly achievement; but since it has been overshadowed by Kermode's other books: 'Sense of an Ending' and the more recent 'Shakespeare's Language', it has been almost forgotten.
These works are classic, but do not let them rob a classic of equal merit of its due.
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