Aproberts, Ruth - Frank Kermode and the Invented World

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Frank Kermode and the Invented WorldThe Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction by Frank KermodeReview by: Ruth AprobertsNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1968), pp. 171-177Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345267 .

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ReviewEssaysFrankKermodeandthe InventedWorld

RUTH APROBERTS

All the artsin these outrageoussixties have taken a cue from the tachismeof thepainters. We have theatrical Happenings and musical Happenings, randompoems, cut-and-shufflenovels. Never has the random been so exploited. Thepriceto the consumercanbe the most exquisiteboredom,but there are at any ratesomevery interestingby-productsof the exploitation.As the element of form-tradition,plot, shape, order-is reduced and yet furtherreduced,it can be iso-lated and freshly assessed. Minimalform can help us towardnew definitions ofminimal art. Perhapsthe most interesting thing is that the absoluterandom,thetrue art informel,seems elusive. That is, the elementof form, however reduced,shrunken,slighted,ignored,suppressedor abhorred, s a terriblypersistentthing.Formwill extrude,andwe seemincapableof chaos.This is the point fromwhich FrankKermodeconfronts the literaryaestheticinhis latestbook,' profitingby contemporary esearch nto minimalartto strikeoutin a new way towardliterarytheory.The book was originallythe Mary Flexnerlectures at BrynMawr,and at that time the title was The Long Perspectives-aphrasetakenfromapoemby PhilipLarkin:

Truly,thoughourelement s time,Wearenotsuited to the longperspectivesOpenat eachinstantof ourlives.Theylinkus to ourlosses.Those long temporalperspectivesare vertiginousunless by creativeimaginationwe find ways to make sense of them. Man is born in mediasres, and dies-saysKermodewith nice grammaticalprecision-in mediisrebus,and he needs to findwhat plot he is in the middle of. (Whetherthereis one or not, he does find one.)The Sense of an Endingis concernedwith the natureof the plots we make up.Kermode'swork on WallaceStevens lies behind this book, andbehind that liethe ideas of Hans Vaihingerand-more remotely-of Nietzsche: "The falsenessof an opinionis not . . any objectionto it." Vaihinger'stheory of fictions grewout of what he saw as the unavoidabledichotomyin the study of being; he de-claredfaute de mieux the importanceof recognizingthe necessity and utility ofacting on the basis of fictions known to be false. An idea can work as if true,

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp.180, $5.75.

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NOVEL WINTER 1968

even though it is false and known to be false.2 Obviously useful fictions are thoseof the atom in physics, "vital force" in biology, and /-1I in mathematics. In-deed Vaihinger took a basically biological view of the utility of fictions: we need tosupplement reality, and the psyche does so. When we act as if there was a bodypolitic or as if there was a God we will be acting in ways more useful to ourselvesand our fellow-men than if there were no such fiction. Religion is therefore more amode of behavior than a set of "beliefs." Readers of Stevens will know how impor-tant Vaihinger's thought is to his poetry. Stevens' orientation was to "Ideas ofOrder," and Vaihinger's concept of "The ultimate fiction-the fiction of an Abso-lute" is especially basic to "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."

... the nicer knowledge ofBelief,thatwhatit believes n is not true.Since Stevens' poetry is a poetry about poetry his suggestive use of Vaihinger im-plies an aesthetic of fictions. But it is Kermode's insight to see the larger possibili-ties of the thing, and his achievement to relate literary fictions to the general theoryof fictions. Although Vaihinger touched on the fiction of language, he omittedaesthetics, and now indeed it appears that the fictions of literature may be thebest instance of Vaihingerian fictions. Literary fictions work "for some of us,perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because theyare consciously false," says Kermode.His argument runs somewhat as follows. Since our element is time our fictionsabout time are the most necessary to us, and our main time-fiction in the post-classical Western world is the fiction of Apocalypse-the imagined shape ofthings from Genesis through Revelation. Ideas of Apocalypse have had an inter-esting history of mutations; they have worked and still do work in peculiar ways.A literal predicted End of the World when "disconfirmed" is more or less cheer-fully revised, readjusted to the known facts. The Church in its "clerkly scepti-cism" always frowned on precise predictions, but the strength of the need forpattern shows in the ineradicable tendency to prophesy the End. (Kermode sur-veys the history of these disconfirmed Ends, both medieval and modern; welaugh at the absurdly naive ones and yet our own are different only in being moresophisticated, more subtly adjusted to the facts.) We still think in terms of transi-tion, crisis, decadence and empire, all parts of the old apocalyptic thought. Weincline to "centurial mysticism"; and certainly "scholars are devoted to 'epochs.'"(This is a good example for academics: the "periods" and "ages" of literaturecourses are useful only insofar as we recognize their fictiveness.) Fiction is differ-ent from hypothesis, for hypothesis is subject to verification, whereas fiction isknown to be false and once used is disposable. Fiction is also different frommyth, for myth is believed. "If we forget that fictions are fictive we regress tomyth," says Kermode (making an unashamedly pugnacious value judgment), "aswhen the Neo-Platonists forgot the fictiveness of all fictions." Our fictions-be-

2 See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of 'As If,' translated from the German by C. K. Ogden (London,1924).

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RUTH APROBERTSIKERMODE

ing neitherhypothesis nor myth-can serve us the better to find out things, tomakesense of theworld,justbecausetheyareadjustableanddisposable.Apocalypse n these latterdays,as Kermodepointsout, is still extantin variousforms. Marxism is an apocalyptic utopianism and implies "annunciatoryvio-lence": Yeats, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis in their authoritariantendencieslooked forward to such a transitionalviolence. But mainly our modernversionof apocalypse is our sense of crisis. "One assumes one's own time to stand insome extraordinary elation to the future."We have now a lack of confidencein ends andepochs,andwe makeourtime somehowmeaningfulby thinkingof itas transitionaland critical.Transition tself has becomean "age."Arnold's senseof wandering between two worlds has become our ordinary time-scheme oftransition,andWastelandismandalienationhaveevenbecomecant.Earlymodernexpressionsof this version of apocalypse-Yeats, Pound, Eliot-made new uses of old traditions,but in laterexpressionthere is an effort to re-assert our alienationby what Kermodecalls schism, a clean breakwith the past.Beckett is half-way to schism:the signs of orderand form are still there but al-ways "with a sign of cancellation."Since Beckett,writers like Burroughshavesought or appeared o seek true schism,but Burroughs, nsofar as he communi-cates anything-and he does-does not succeed in "self-abolition"or "the ac-cident of spontaneity.""Randomness,much valued now, rejoins contrivance."All avant-gardewritinghas somethingof traditionalorder or form, or otherwise"sinksinto non-communicativeriviality."And here Kermodestates his purpose:this book is devoted to the notion that there is "a humanlyneeded order whichwe call form."Apocalypticpostures continueto be useful as form in our litera-tureof crisis. Criticsmust know our fictions for what they are,must differentiatethem from myths, and must deny that they represent"some kind of surrenderor false consolation." Our fictive orders are necessary;our skepticismoperatesto keepthemsuitablyrevised,answerable o ourexperienceof whatis.The novel is now the centralformof literaryart for it is best suited to the fre-quent revisions of our fictions in the light of reality. FromCervantes on, thenovel has been realistic n the sense that it is "the collapseof the poetic,"havingto do with "the barbarous,brutal, mute, meaningless reality of things." (Here,Kermode s quotingOrtega y Gasset.)The history of novels has been anti-novels-Cervantes, Fielding,Jane Austen, Flaubertor Natalie Sarraute,all in one wayor anothereffecting hecollapseof thepoeticby revisingfiction's orm.Central o Kermode'sbook, andcentralto the criticismof the novel as genre,ishis analysisof LaNausee.ForLaNauseeis anovelaboutnovels,it is aboutthis ten-sion betweenparadigmaticormandcontingentrealityof whichKermodehasbeenspeaking.In life, Sartreonce said,"allways arebarredandneverthelesswe mustact. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations betweenthings and their potentialitieswere governed not by deterministicprocess butby magic."Kermodecomments:"The as if of the novel consists in a similarnega-tion of determinism.... We makeup aventures."Which are forms.Roquentin nLa Nauseewaversbetweenthehorrorof contingencyandthe fiction of aventures.

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Contingency s the antagonist n LaNausee;it is nauseous andviscous,unformedmatter. Roquentin experiences the horror of it without benefit of human fiction,and the resolutionis that he will make a fiction-that is, write a novel. But LaNausee, althoughit is about formlessness, s not itself formless. Without lettingformtyrannize,without"theformalpresumptuousness f the nineteenth-centurynovel" (whichI taketo be the courtships, he happyendings,the rewardof virtueand the punishmentof vice), andwithout"the arrogantomniscienceof Mauriac"who is guilty of mauvaise-foi n that he manipulatesrealityto the ends of his ab-solutes-his Catholicism, his message-and regresses into myth, the novel mustbe ordered by a fiction which is not fraudulent. (I would add to Kermode's analy-sis that in La Nausee, the Autodidact's order or fiction, the whole world in alpha-betical order, is a witty example of an obviously meaningless, useless order.)None of our fictions can be a "supremefiction," and thereforewe stand indesolate need of these relative, temporary, disposable orders. Kermode collatesSartre'sstatementof our besoin, Stevens' of ourpoverty, and MurielSpark'sofour slendermeans. Novels cope with formless time by imposingpatternson it,patternsof beginningand end, ever moresubtly relatedto contingency.Proust'sresearch, his re-finding, is in time and he finds the pattern in his experiencethrough its concord with an end. In the satisfactory fictions, in the humanly mean-ingful orders we create,we encounter-in Stevens' splendidphrase-"the imag-ination'smercies."

With thatphrase,Kermodeconcludes.The book is, he himself says, suggestiveratherthan conclusive;but it is so suggestive that it goes a long way toward aworking theory of fictions.Anyone in sympathywith new movementsin criti-cism, especially of the novel, will, I think, find himself expanding and corroborat-ing Kermode'snotions. Kermode'sessential justificationof form as a humanlyneeded orderingof things and his conceptthat this form-or plot, or fiction-isall the more useful for ourknowingit to be fictive constitute an aesthetic that ap-pearsto be workablefor a vast rangeof literaryphenomena.It is an aestheticallthe more secure for its accordwith some importantstrains of modern thought.Perhapsthe largest perspective s indicatedin these words of Ortega y Gasset,wordsnot quotedby Kermode,although heymighthave been:

The activity of knowing used to seem to consist in an effort to reflect, mirror,or copy in our mind the world of real things, but it turns out to be just the op-posite, namely the invention, construction, or fabrication of an unreal world.In art, the emphasis accordingly shifts from mimesis to the creating imagination,and the nature of "the invented world." Vaihinger's appreciation of our fictivepowers accords with what we feel to be the great importance of art in our lives.And this in turn relates to that very seminal thinking of our time-the languageideas in the later work of Wittgenstein. Language does not represent actuality,and logic in language is illusory. "To discover the meaning of a statement is notto discover what it may describe or refer to, but to discover its use." Language it-self is a Vaihingerian fiction; Vaihinger did not explore it to any great extent,

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but he did indeed anticipateWittgenstein."Abstractions,"he said, "area neces-sary aid to thought and meet a practicalneed, but they furnish no theoreticalknowledge.... We confuse fact andfiction,means and end, if we attemptto de-duce anything from such linguistic aids." C. K. Ogden was Vaihinger'sfriendand translator,and he himself had a clear apprehensionof language as fiction.Ogden referredVaihingerback to some words of Bentham:"To languagethen-to languagealone-it is that fictitiousentities owe theirexistence;theirimpos-sible, yet indispensableexistence." Again it is Sartrewho is marvellouslyclearon this in La Nausee. We rememberRoquentin'snightmareexperienceof theblack of a black root without the blackness,without the word that creates thefictive abstraction.Without it, there is nothing but the awful fulness of contin-gency, la nausee.It is the imagination'smercythatwords, like ourlargerfictions,have "theirimpossible,yet indispensableexistence."As we have to collaboratewith the known falsity of language,so too we have to collaboratewith time-fic-tions. Vaihingersaid of his theory of fictions that it was different from prag-matism,but not much.Both acknowledgeheuristicideals.Yet, he said, it cannotbe calledskepticism; t is rathera relativism,denyingthe possibilityof absolutes.This, we may add, is true of post-Wittgensteinlinguistic thought on the moststrictlyphilosophic evel, andit is also true of the new theologyon the most prac-tical-or ethical-level.But these are only suggestions of the larger relevanceand stability of Ker-mode'sthought.In the morespecialized ieldof criticismof the novel he answersa very specificneed.Ledby WayneBooth,we have lately acquired he couragetodeclare the inadequaciesof old criticalbiases, and to reject Jamesian,Joycean,and Marxianapproaches.Useful as they were, they have all been tyrantsto somedegree. New approachesare special desiderataright now in a field that seemswide-open.We are short of criteria.The "sense of life," the freedomof charac-ters, the love for characters,have been proposed.But they are slight and tenta-tive comparedwith the embracing,original, and well-supportedtheory of TheSense of an Ending.There is very little that is negative in it; Kermodedoes notfeel obligedto be anti-formalistor anti-symbolist.He does argue againsthis oldand respectedadversaryNorthropFrye;for the myth, he is sure,has nothing atall to do with the realismof the novel. He does rebel against the excesses ofartinformel:"Thecritical ssue,"he says, "isno less thanthe justificationof ideasof order."But he has profitedfrom the researchesof random art: his title, "TheSense of an Ending," s a properlymodest-or minimal-statement of minimumform.He justifies deasof order,but they cannot be those of the old formalismofFlaubertandJames,nor can they be the formalismof the messageor propagandaor a philosophicalidea. Sartre found such designs "dishonestly determinate."Kermodewould say with Sartre,"It is by the negationof such formalism hat wemake literature a liberatingforce." Similarly,he would say with Iris Murdochthat we must not falsify realitywith patternstoo neat or too inclusive. It is asthough we requirean atonalityto suit our uncertainty.It does indeed seem thatthe novel, being as Gide said the most lawless of genres, is the best vehicle forour necessarilyflexiblefictions.Kermodecould have found much to supporthis

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thesis in Gide and his Faux-Monnayeurs, which is another novel that is aboutthis tension between form and reality. But he probably did well not to refer to thenarrow professionalism of Gide, but rather to the wider thought of Stevens-andSartre, whose aesthetic in La Nausee has its base in the most comprehensive andinfluential philosophical thinking of our time.

Kermode's theory may well be as broadly useful as it is broadly based. Wemay think, for a trial of it, of how it would affect the critic's problem of the func-tion of the narrator. James's old bogey of the "intrusive author" becomes benefi-cient, for that intrusive author may be the artist reminding us of the fictivenessof his fictions. When in a performance of Twelfth Night we hear the line: "If thiswere play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction," welaugh at a magnificent joke; but it is also a profitable joke-the dramatic fiction isthe richer for our being reminded of its falsity. The narrator of a novel has like-wise much artistic advantage if he "intrudes" to remind us of himself. Does henot set our stance toward his story, and show us the relation of his fiction to ac-tuality? Fielding, by pretending to write a "history," makes us acutely aware ofhow Tom Jones is different from history. Sterne, pyrotechnically telling us allabout writing his novel while he writes it, obliges us to consider the relation ofform to the flux of life. Thackeray, with his "puppets" that are more lively thanlife, enriches his story infinitely by reminding us of the proscenium arch of thepuppet theater. It is remarkable how many of the important novels make a playon the convention of storytelling, and flaunt the convention as convention. EvenCarlyle found that by means of the outrageous fiction of Sartor Resartus hecould manage to display a most distinctive view of life, something that plain dis-cursive statement could never do. Les Faux-Monnayeurs, with its novelist writingthe novel we are reading, is a rich study of the varieties of counterfeiting, or mak-ing fictions. Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, a long neglected novel nowseeming to come into its own, is another virtuoso piece. Its narrator declares at aliterary party that "a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham" and that"characters should be allowed a private life, self-determinism and a decent stand-ard of living." The narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds is writing a novel about anovelist called Trellis whose characters turn out to be so self-determining thatthey conspire to keep Trellis under sedation and produce a novel of their own-directed at the horrible and vengeful annihilation of Trellis. This is all supremelyfunny, and-I feel sure-no less important for being funny. O'Brien's "self-de-termination" of characters anticipates Iris Murdoch's "opacity" of characters, andO'Brien's is surely the better term. In the novel as "self-evident sham" we recog-nize our principle of the fiction-known-to-be-false. Then La Nausee, as we haveseen, with its protagonist who at best feels "like a character in novel," is really afine statement of the nature of the human predicament. All these books are aboutthe central human problem just because they are about fictions. They deal with theways we can accommodate our ideas of order to the raw stuff of actuality. Thenovel about itself is, then, a central and key work. Kermode quotes Stevens, saying"the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life / As it is." And the theory of the novel,



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of fiction, s also the theoryof life; the novel aboutthe novel is about how we sur-vive.There is a point in Kermode's book where he takes issue-needlessly, I think-with the concept of "spatial form." He feels it is "questionable," and says wemust be careful to remind ourselves that it is a metaphor. Certainly it is all rightto be so reminded,but it may be that any orderingof time is a metaphor,andperhapsnecessarilya spacemetaphor.The years inevitablytake on a shape; forsome of us they are circles with Christmas at the top, and so on to Yeats's gyre.The conceptof apocalypseitself, with all its variations,is surely a shape givento time, and hence a space metaphor.Diagramsand paradigmsof time are allspacefigures.It may be impossibleto think of our elementpure.If we could,wemight achievethe impossible-the supremefiction.Time is, ultimately,inelucta-ble. And seldomhas thatpointbeen bettermadethanby Kermode'scommentaryonLearandMacbeth n thisbook.We come,by way of the insights of Kermode'scommentary, o the test of histheory. It does work. Eachliteraryexhibit he calls up to serve his thesis is inturn servedby that thesis-illuminated, I think, in a radicallynew way. The ex-hibits rangefrom Spenser'sMutabilityCantosto Wordsworth's"ResolutionandIndependence,"romPamelato LaNausee.The patternsor fictionsby which lit-eraryworksimposeorderon life perform nvaluableservicesto ourhumanselves,and performthem the better for being "untrue," ictive,provisional.Take, for aconclusive nstance, hiscommentKermodemakes on Lear:

We arenever in dangerof thinkingthat the deathof KingLear,which explainsso much,is true. To the statementthat he died thus and thus-speaking thesewords overCordelia'sbody,callingfor a looking-glass, umblingwith a button-we makean experimentalassent. If we makeit well, the gain is thatwe shallnever quite resumethe posture towardslife and death that we formerlyheld.Of courseit may be said that in changingourselveswe have, in the best possi-bleindirectway, changed heworld.

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