SIR FRANK KERMODE is the author of many influential works of literary criticism and has been a major presence in the critical landscape for the second half of the Twentieth Century. He talks to The Literateur about academic careers, the dubious pleasures of Theory, the role of the critic, and the end of the world.

Tom Bailey

The Literateur: Sir Frank, it’s a privilege to be here to interview you today. Thank you very much for giving your time.

First off, you have been some years outside of the academic machine now – much, it appears from your memoirs, to your delight. Broadly, how have you been spending these last few years? Have you picked up any late critical hobbies or new lines of interest?

Frank Kermode: I don’t suppose I have. I occasionally go and do a lecture somewhere, for which I have to do a little bit of reading and thinking. At the moment I’m quite busy, but that’s rather accidental – normally I am not. It’s a pleasantly lazy life. I still write articles for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books amongst other things.

TL: A couple of years ago you ran an interview with John Sutherland in which you gave firm thoughts on the state of English Literature education. You’ve also mentioned in several works your apprehension that the study of literature is being eclipsed by the study of Theory. In the 2002 publication Life After Theory you suggested that deconstructionism and other contemporary Theory will of course have its day, and will pass towards a new critical discipline. As the years have gone on, have you come across anything which might suggest what these new paradigm shifts in criticism might be?

FK: There was a major shift in the 60’s, and there’s been an immense amount of work done along those lines. But these things do come in waves. For a while the New Historicists were taking over, as it were – Steven Greenblatt replaced Derrida. But if you look at it from England (which is an important qualification) the people who are quite well-known – John Carey, Christopher Ricks – people of that calibre, they’re not theorists. But now the people who are quite well-known tend not to be theorists I think. Then again, there are people like Terry Eagleton, for instance, who’s an extremely good speculative Marxist theoretician. But the whole subject of literature hasn’t been drowned in Theory, as we all thought it was going to be. It’ll come round again, of course. I was always amazed that people would treat literary theory as if it was a brand new subject – Aristotle wrote a whole book about it. There was nothing unique about being a student of literary theory when I was an undergraduate, since we had to read Aristotle, Horace, and so on.

The particular French contribution – and it was a very valuable contribution – was narratology, as it came to be called. Narratology had some brilliant practitioners, but they were French, so that gave them an extra kind of glamour, you see. But I can’t answer for America really. The machinery is different in America. What would happen in the 1960s and early 70s is that someone would set up a course in literary theory, it would be tested and it would be liked, and would then be established. What the Americans call a ‘line’ would exist for that particular subject. And this means that, barring a big disturbance, that course is always going to be there. In America they’re never going to be short of literary theorists because the ‘lines’ were created for them 30 years ago and they’re continually being refilled. There are changes within this system, but not radical changes. In England we’ve done our usual thing in the face of any kind of philosophical thinking – get it over-and-done-with as soon as possible.


TL: How do you think the critical/ academic reception of your writing – in particular your seminal work of literary criticism, Romantic Image – has changed over the years? Might it be that, as well as being an excellent work of literary criticism, Romantic Image has survived so well because it foreshadows the later structuralist/ post-structuralist concern with discoursing about the image, particularly of writers like Barthes?

FK: No, I don’t think so. Romantic Image is about 50 years old now. I’d be surprised if a lot of people were still reading it. It’s still in print though, so it must be selling a few copies. It was a very old-fashioned book really: it had nothing to do with the kind of work that was going on only a decade later in the 60s. Another book of mine, The Sense of an Ending, did make some impact and continues to make a mark. This was much more like the French theory of the time, although of course I wasn’t much aware of the theory since it only came to England at the end of the decade. I then became more fully theoretical for a while, publishing The Genesis of Secrecy. But I was never really seduced by theory.

However, Romantic Image was astonishingly well-received when it came out. When I wrote it and started sending it around to publishers (there were more publishers then who would publish that kind of book) and was turned down. Finally Routledge took it, not because they really liked it but because they thought I could write another book – they liked the idea of it. So nobody expected it to go off with a bang or anything. But then it received a very favourable long review in the TLS and that, I think, launched it. The TLS was powerful in those days. The review was anonymous but later turned out to be by G.S. Fraser, who really went overboard for it.

TL: You’ve mentioned in some of your later writing, particularly your memoirs, Not Entitled, of the rather sudden loss of posthumous public interest in eminent literary critics – Northrop Frye, Wayne Booth and William Empson to name a few. Does the future reception of your work ever concern you?

FK: Oh, I’d be foolish to bother about that. It is an interesting and mildly astonishing fact that the really powerful people who changed the subject and the whole way of teaching it, like the people you mentioned, should disappear almost as soon as they die. I was having lunch with Cleanth Brooks three days before he died. He had had the most amazing success with a book which we don’t really use in this country, which is used in almost all American schools. He made a fortune and became very rich, he was almost as famous in America as Leavis was here. And yet just before his death Brooks was able to say that people no longer recognised him. Students didn’t recognise him in the street at Yale. He was very rarely mentioned in critical discussion.

Regarding Northrop Frye, he really had a world-beating system and was a very powerful mind. He was a man of extreme and orderly intelligence, and I admired him a good deal. As for his critical disappearance, I can only guess at an explanation – namely that when people really did begin to consider the world-beating system that he built, they began to see that they didn’t want it. He ruled out value judgements. When you do that you are reducing the interest of literature. You just have a kind of model for the whole of literature, you just have a system which places everything in the right kind of cog-hole. And also, of course, he grew more and more interested in the Bible. That shouldn’t have harmed him much in America but I think it’s fatal here, where nobody wants literary criticism about the Bible.

Empson was a kind of genius, but self-destructive. A very strange career he had, too. But there are still some very talented people about. Christopher Ricks, who is not a theorist, is a very ingenious reader, as well as John Carey.

TL: Touching on Northrop Frye and the idea of literary value, this leads into my next question. In Life After Theory your conception of literary value was covered; discussion of what literary value actually is remained, perhaps intentionally, inconclusive. But you once offered what I think is a good analogy for historical literary value – the Warburg Institute library. As you described, just as Warburg’s library traces recurring concepts throughout historic works of art, literary value can be measured by the continuity of conceptual traces that are embodied, from time to time, in art works throughout history. However literary value may be described, it seems to be central to the art of good literary criticism. But which critics that you know of or admire, besides Ricks and Carey, are questioning this literary value of works today? Might it be said that the style of what you called ‘old fashioned’ literary criticism has taken on new guises?

FK: I suppose it’s always taking on new guises. But my horizons are limited. All around the country there are people whose works I don’t know and are no doubt very good. That will always be true and I’m glad it is true, you needn’t always look to Oxford and Cambridge for success in excellent literary critical thinking. I don’t know. In the Cambridge English Faculty which critics are studied today?

There’s perhaps a strong Marxist emphasis, particularly on Adorno. Derrida is of course still widely discussed. That’s surprising, I would have thought that people would be losing interest in Adorno by now. Maybe except musically. For literature students, I think the musical theories remain quite sidelined. Adorno was a composer, you know. I don’t think you can study Adorno without studying his music.

TL: Central to your practice of literary criticism is the idea of fictiveness. I’d like to ask about this in a little more in detail. In the introduction of Poetry, Narrative, History the critic Howard Schweizer makes the following comments on your work:

“Thus, however internally consistent and historically consistent Kermode’s setting up of word against word and works against works, his fictionalist position is itself a theory of crisis or a fiction of criticism, because he cannot give a privileged epistemology to his own discourse.”

He also makes reference to “Kermode’s Nietzschean conviction that, lacking other consolations, we must live by fictions alone.”

First, if I may offer the argument, Schweizer has possibly misrepresented your idea of fiction, if I am right. In your essay ‘Freud and Interpretation’ you reiterate the claim that fictions are “consciously false”, and you borrow the term figura veritas from St. Augustine. The truth can be interpreted through a fiction, and that fictions are necessarily a part of our ‘hermeneutic’ attitude towards the world. Fictions are fundamentally part of the present, and everything we interpret can be understood to be seen through the lens of a present fiction. These fictions, of course, generate from the past and will continue in some form into the future. Could you possibly expand on your idea of ‘the fictive’ – its critical reception, and the way your thoughts on it have changed over the years?

FK: I think I agree with the way you expressed it. I was greatly taken with Vaihinger who’s not really a name to conjure with anymore. He’s a Nietzschean who wrote a book called The Philosophy of As If [1919], which was always scorned by professional philosophers. I think that’s because philosophers prefer to go directly to Nietzsche. Bernard Williams also held very similar sophisticated philosophical ideas to Vaihinger. So the Nietzschean emphasis behind the idea of the fictive was strong. But I’m not a philosopher, I don’t find it easy to debate these things with philosophers since they’re so good at pulling the rug from under your feet. On the whole, yes, some kind of theory of fictiveness, a universal hermeneutic possibility. Another thing that has never been taken very seriously by literature people in Cambridge is Gadamer, who was also an influence. His is very heavy stuff, but full of illuminating statements about the characteristics of fiction and the concept of horizons and so on. Heidegger too, I suppose. But I had my theoretical days back in the 60s and 70s.

However, I haven’t really noticed any change in the way the idea of fictiveness has been received. I don’t think I really have any critics in that sense, I don’t think people much bother with me now. I’m getting old, you see, I’m going to be 90 soon, so it’s very hard for me to take part at the level of the 40-year olds.

You were talking of continuing fashions and of course you see these periods come and go. If you lived through the Leavis era, you’d know what it was like for a whole doctrine of literature to be created, defended and lost. There are very few Leavisites now, as you know. There was a time when every grammar school had a Leavisite English master.

TL: Schweizer’s second assertion is that your writing, since it is concerned with the comparison and elucidations of fictions alone, has no underlying epistemological foundation. Although it is clear from your writing that you are highly aware of many different kinds of reading and many different contemporary ideologies – indeed, you have been credited with first engendering engagement with these continental theories at UCL – you choose not to orientate your criticism within any particular ideology: Marxist, New Historicist, etc. Perhaps with the dominance of Theory, there is a pressure an all critics to approach a text with a strong ideological agenda. But rather than seeing a lack of orientation with a particular ideology as a deficiency, do you think that the essence of literary criticism is that it deliberately remains detached, fluid, somewhat aloof, elusive as a discourse, even somewhat reticent in its treatment of the variety of artistic objects?

FK: I think that part of the answer is that when you shift the focus of interest to literary theory, you’re creating a new subject. Someone once said that when you start finding out all the rules (or what I.A. Richards called the philosophy of rhetoric), you get another subject on another level. That level is not higher because its more valuable, it’s higher because it’s more abstract. It’s like having a specialist in concrete, a man who is interested in the stresses of the material, but who is no longer interested in the building. And yet he’s got a very important subject which lends itself to certain kinds of analysis which are different from other levels of analysis. I.A. Richards was extremely important because he tried to speak on both of these levels, and did them really quite well. Empson did it quite differently. He very sensibly said something along the lines of: ‘Let’s not bring in theory at the wrong stage of the affair. Let’s trust our noses when we’re reading, and only bring in other speculations only when we need them.’ It’s a strange thing for him to have said when he wrote so much that looks like theory – The Structure of Complex Words, for instance. But that was the way he worked.

I’ve been reading a lot of E.M. Forster’s criticism lately (which I don’t think is any good really), but he had this idea that literary criticism was not an art, but that you must make it as pleasant as possible. I’ve also just been reading De Quincey, who I’ve not really read before. He’s a marvellous writer. You read what he has to say about Coleridge not that you’re going to do a thesis on Coleridge, but because his awareness of Coleridge’s faults and virtues are so lucid, and for the manner in which it is written. He was a good writer: I see no reason why literary critics should not be good writers. If I had to give you my principles, that would be one of them. I can’t stand ill-written criticism; it’s a kind of insult to literature. But our methods of teaching and training people conduce just that kind of trouble. I can remember, when I was still supervising PhD candidates, that I could never break them from this habit of thinking that there are two stages of operation in preparing a PhD. One is amassing a lot of facts, which takes a couple of years. Then you sit down and start worrying because you’ve got to write it all. But I used to say to my students: ‘Write something every day, it doesn’t matter what, you can always erase it. But do something, don’t lose the habit of writing. But if they don’t do this, the PhD student gets to a kind of crisis, a situation when they have to write it all up, and then this parched PhD English takes the place of good writing. You have to let people loosen up a bit. Otherwise we get the worst kind of literary criticism.

But of course Forster was not really writing for PhDs, he more or less wrote to please himself – tea party talk and all that. (We don’t want that sort of thing in PhDs either). But I think a certain severity of tone is what is required.


TL: That’s interesting you mention severity of tone; I want to ask more about the role of the critic, in particular your ideas about criticism. In Romantic Image you write of Matthew Arnold as a “disengaged, anti-didactic critic; still seeing widely and steadily, but talking of society, not so much the poet in society, seeking to end rather than analyse that problem by reform of society; dealing, at any rate, in life, not in art, but being.”

Elsewhere, you have offered the more temperate proposal that criticism can remain a civilizing, enriching and enlightening force, especially in the wider public sphere. Broadly, how have your ideas about the ability of criticism to provide reform and civility changed over the years?

FK: It’s absolutely no use going in for literary criticism if you don’t like literature. That seems like quite an elementary point to begin with. But one must take great pleasure in it. One of the things we tend to forget when we professionalize literature, as we’ve done, is just that: It’s meant to give pleasure. To read well gives you an enormous kick. That, I feel, is the first necessity.

I don’t think I’ve ever believed that being a good critic, or being a good poet, makes you a good man. Let’s not get that mixed up. Milton said you had to be a good man to be a good poet, and Samuel Johnson said it too. Of course what ‘good’ means is a whole other topic. Was Rimbaud a ‘good’ man, for example? But what I’ve always said is that I don’t want any easy connection between aesthetic pleasure and moral virtue.

TL: Following the publication of The Sense of an Ending you have been called a ‘critic of crisis’. This made me think of Walter Benjamin’s more extreme Marxist-Kabbalist notion of historical criticism, that it must invoke a sense of historical crisis to engender fundamental socio-political change. In relation to apocalyptic criticism, Christopher Norris has written of the ‘apocalyptic tone’ of some of Foucault’s writing and Derrida’s later work, such as The Gift of Death. Yet throughout, the range of your criticism it seems that you rarely indulge in critical pessimism and rarely write with the rhetoric of apocalypse. Do you at all subscribe to this label of ‘critic of crisis’?

FK: I suppose that I do. There was a time when I wrote a lot about apocalyptic literature. The Sense of an Ending was written in 1965, not necessarily a traditionally apocalyptic time – not near the end of a century or something. But when you start studying crisis and the ideas of ‘end-time,’ things like that, you do find yourself going back to the Book of Revelations, which is a kind of paradigm that informs how we think about crisis.

But the idea of perpetual crisis is bound to come up before long. It’s no longer possible in the modern world to escape the sense of crisis. We’ve lived under nuclear threat for half a century, and now with the ecological crisis. We go from one critical point to another. But we also think of our own lives in crises; it’s a natural habit.

The history of apocalypse and the developments that it has undergone are very interesting. The craziness that it has engendered is quite important. We perhaps laugh at these sects in America – although not always, as some are very violent and destructive. There is mass attendance, of which we hear nothing about, at these meetings of apocalyptic sects. Absurdities like this business about the faithful being ‘snatched’ from whatever they’re doing, so that aeroplanes might crash because the pilot has been taken to heaven. These people are guilty of a very elementary reading error. They need a good literary critic. They need a commentary on the Book of Revelations that is actually sane – which is of course possible, it’s been done many times.

TL: Your idea of the fictive as ‘consciously false’ is promoted in direct opposition to the unreflected-upon myth. Although you’ve touched upon it already, what are the myths of today, if any, from which you think we need to awake, become conscious of?

FK: Well, we’ve mentioned one of them, as well as the ecological crisis. It is interesting that we’ve managed not to be blown up by nuclear weapons, and we’ve managed to live without the genuine terror of them that we all had in the 1950s, where we really thought that the war has ended and the next thing would be a total wipeout. And in 1961 the actual confrontation of the Americans and Russians over Cuba, that was a very close encounter. Everybody thought they were going to be dying in the next day or two. The interesting thing is that we forget those fears, we even forget the bombs. We live in a terrible world, everybody knows that. You could say it’s the application of a myth of crisis to certain facts, but that doesn’t help. The remarkable thing is that we’re still here to discuss it.

TL: Returning to the specifics of your work, an holistic idea of the monadic individual completeness of a work of art was discussed in Romantic Image. To briefly recapitulate , quoting A.W Schleigel, the work of art,

“creating autonomously like nature, both organised and organising, must form living works, which are first set in motion, not by an outside mechanism, like a pendulum, but by an indwelling power like the solar system.”

This biologist analogy with literature is an idea with which you seem to have stuck with, most recently in Life After Theory, in which you talked further of the need to approach works from the attitude of organic wholeness, or at least, expansiveness. Yet near the close of Romantic Image you write of the impossible task of the critic of symbolism, who “cannot ever expect to achieve finality in his own work; he is doomed to be limited, even if he remembers the symbolic origin of the discourse he is extracting.”

What perhaps characterises your work is its absence of rigorous ideology, its reticence from outspoken argument and firm conclusions. Unlike more dissecting, deconstructive critical works, do you think that there appears in your writing a will to preserve this whole, this holistic, self-contained object of criticism?

FK: The quote of Schleigel is very familiar, it’s part of our literary atmosphere since the time of Coleridge, coming up with these contrasts of the organic and the mechanical. And very useful they’ve been, so they’ve passed into ordinary parlance. People will still talk about the organic quality of some work without realising the whole epoch of philosophy behind it. But we’ve got to approach it with a conscious notion of the fiction of biological organism. It’s a kind of metaphor really, that’s proven so successful that people have stopped distinguishing between its tenor and vehicle. It’s a metaphor that’s hugely important to modern literature from Coleridge on. If you want to make the intellectual effort to read without the application of even the slightest notion of some organic idea, then you are going to have quite a difficult task in front of you. We don’t like extreme forms of mechanism like the rule that a play must have five acts.

There was a Racine play in Cambridge the other day. What you saw, for all the originality of his mind, was that Racine did know that there were rules that he had to keep – there had to be five acts, and so on. We were always glad that, in the Anglo-American tradition, we always knew of the five act system that went back to Horace and so on, but we’re much looser about these rules. Shakespeare of course wrote in five acts, but if he didn’t fancy it he didn’t have to do it, he just wrote a play with a lot of scenes. The English have been much more opposed to Aristotelian attempts to impose rules for tragedy. Mechanical approach to literary form is something that the English have always disliked. We have a very different literature from the French by consequence.

TL: In Romantic Image, you quote J. B. Yeats, who wrote: “The artist, out of his pain and humiliations constructs for himself a habitation…” In your eloquent essay on Wallace Stevens in An Appetite for Poetry you talk more extensively about ideas of poetic dwelling. It is perhaps clear from your book of memoirs, Not Entitled, that you are more settled in Cambridge, specifically outside of the academy, than you have been since leaving the Isle of Man. I wanted to ask you more about matters of dwelling. You mentioned in your memoirs that the statue of Diana at the end of your garden is a “household God or Goddess to assure me that I was at home”. It resonates with the description you made of Wallace Stevens who lived, as you wrote, among the “fortitudes of earth that solace us and make a world, or, like the Tal-Coat painting that hung in his house these years, an angel of reality.”

Is it possible that you are now, in old age, dwelling poetically, or anything near what Stevens wrote of?

FK: No, I think that was just a kind of terminal flourish I was doing there. I don’t live in that house any more, but the statue you mention is outside in the garden here. I was perfectly prepared when I bought that house to live in it for the rest of my life, but then personal reasons intervened: it was more manageable for me to have a flat. These are more prosaic reasons, nothing to do with the complexities of the German word for dwelling.

TL: You have written movingly, in Not Entitled, of the remorse you feel at leading a peripatetic life of endless flight. I wanted to return to William Empson, a critic who pops up here and there throughout your work. There is a verse in Empson’s Autumn on Nan-Yueh which struck a resemblance to your own thoughts on escaping academia.

“And it is true I flew, I fled,

I ran about in hope, on trust,

I felt I had escaped from They

Who sat on pedestals and fussed.”

He then goes on to ask:

“But is it true one ought to dread,

This timid flap, that shirk, that lust?”

I lastly want to ask following this – looking back on it, what might be the virtues of a life of flight, of obeying to this impulse to move on, of experiencing a variety of life which poetic dwelling cannot provide?

FK: One of the differences between people of your age and mine is that you’re much less likely to be shoved-about than we were. When I was an undergraduate it was useless for me to plan to dwell because I knew I was going to be called-up and spend the next six years doing the stuff I didn’t want to do. In a sense that pressure gave one a sense of irresponsibility towards dwelling places, and also towards authority. So it’s got a very complicated effect. People getting worked up about A-levels now: they think they’ve got a monumental task ahead of them, which perhaps they have. Although they’ve got to go and find work, nobody is going to put them in a uniform and send them to Burma, which of course did happen in the past.

But all that Heidegger stuff really got to me at that time. In a long life, you’ve really had time to see many changes of fashion in your own head. The poems that you secretly recite to yourself are not the same ones that they probably were fifty years ago. Some would be. In my case a lot of Yeats would be. We’re never one stable personality.

TL: Sir Frank, it’s been a great pleasure to speak with you. Thank you.