Frank Kermode and the Invented World The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction by Frank Kermode

Review by: Ruth Aproberts NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1968), pp. 171-177 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345267 . Accessed: 08/04/2013 19:44
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ReviewEssays
FrankKermodeand the InventedWorld
RUTH APROBERTS

All the arts in these outrageoussixties have taken a cue from the tachismeof the painters. We have theatrical Happenings and musical Happenings, random poems, cut-and-shufflenovels. Never has the random been so exploited. The price to the consumercan be the most exquisiteboredom,but there are at any rate some very interestingby-productsof the exploitation.As the element of formtradition, plot, shape, order-is reduced and yet further reduced, it can be isolated and freshly assessed. Minimal form can help us toward new definitions of minimal art. Perhapsthe most interesting thing is that the absolute random, the true art informel, seems elusive. That is, the element of form, however reduced, shrunken,slighted, ignored,suppressedor abhorred,is a terriblypersistentthing. Formwill extrude,andwe seem incapableof chaos. This is the point from which FrankKermodeconfronts the literaryaesthetic in his latest book,' profitingby contemporary researchinto minimalart to strike out in a new way toward literarytheory. The book was originally the Mary Flexner lectures at Bryn Mawr, and at that time the title was The Long Perspectives-a phrasetakenfroma poemby PhilipLarkin: Truly,though ourelementis time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at eachinstantof ourlives. They link us to our losses. Those long temporalperspectivesare vertiginous unless by creative imagination we find ways to make sense of them. Man is born in medias res, and dies-says Kermodewith nice grammatical precision-in mediis rebus, and he needs to find what plot he is in the middle of. (Whetherthere is one or not, he does find one.) The Sense of an Ending is concernedwith the nature of the plots we make up. Kermode'swork on Wallace Stevens lies behind this book, and behind that lie the ideas of Hans Vaihingerand-more remotely-of Nietzsche: "The falseness of an opinion is not ... any objectionto it." Vaihinger'stheory of fictions grew out of what he saw as the unavoidabledichotomy in the study of being; he declared faute de mieux the importanceof recognizingthe necessity and utility of acting 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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even though it is false and known to be false.2 Obviously useful fictions are those of the atom in physics, "vital force" in biology, and /-1I in mathematics. Indeed Vaihinger took a basically biological view of the utility of fictions: we need to supplement reality, and the psyche does so. When we act as if there was a body politic or as if there was a God we will be acting in ways more useful to ourselves and our fellow-men than if there were no such fiction. Religion is therefore more a mode of behavior than a set of "beliefs." Readers of Stevens will know how important Vaihinger's thought is to his poetry. Stevens' orientation was to "Ideas of Order," and Vaihinger's concept of "The ultimate fiction-the fiction of an Absolute" is especially basic to "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." ... the nicer knowledge of

Belief, thatwhat it believesin is not true.

Since Stevens' poetry is a poetry about poetry his suggestive use of Vaihinger implies an aesthetic of fictions. But it is Kermode's insight to see the larger possibilities of the thing, and his achievement to relate literary fictions to the general theory of fictions. Although Vaihinger touched on the fiction of language, he omitted aesthetics, and now indeed it appears that the fictions of literature may be the best instance of Vaihingerian fictions. Literary fictions work "for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false," says Kermode. His argument runs somewhat as follows. Since our element is time our fictions about time are the most necessary to us, and our main time-fiction in the postclassical Western world is the fiction of Apocalypse-the imagined shape of things from Genesis through Revelation. Ideas of Apocalypse have had an interesting 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 cheerfully revised, readjusted to the known facts. The Church in its "clerkly scepticism" always frowned on precise predictions, but the strength of the need for pattern shows in the ineradicable tendency to prophesy the End. (Kermode surveys the history of these disconfirmed Ends, both medieval and modern; we laugh at the absurdly naive ones and yet our own are different only in being more sophisticated, more subtly adjusted to the facts.) We still think in terms of transition, crisis, decadence and empire, all parts of the old apocalyptic thought. We incline to "centurial mysticism"; and certainly "scholars are devoted to 'epochs.'" (This is a good example for academics: the "periods" and "ages" of literature courses are useful only insofar as we recognize their fictiveness.) Fiction is different from hypothesis, for hypothesis is subject to verification, whereas fiction is known to be false and once used is disposable. Fiction is also different from myth, for myth is believed. "If we forget that fictions are fictive we regress to myth," says Kermode (making an unashamedly pugnacious value judgment), "as when the Neo-Platonists forgot the fictiveness of all fictions." Our fictions-be2 See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of 'As If,' translated from the German by C. K. Ogden (London,
1924).

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ing neither hypothesis nor myth-can serve us the better to find out things, to makesense of the world,just becausethey areadjustableanddisposable. Apocalypsein these latter days, as Kermodepoints out, is still extant in various forms. Marxism is an apocalyptic utopianism and implies "annunciatoryviolence": Yeats, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis in their authoritariantendencies looked forward to such a transitionalviolence. But mainly our modern version of apocalypse is our sense of crisis. "One assumes one's own time to stand in some extraordinaryrelation to the future." We have now a lack of confidence in ends and epochs, and we make our time somehowmeaningfulby thinking of it as transitionaland critical.Transitionitself has become an "age." Arnold's sense of wandering between two worlds has become our ordinary time-scheme of transition,andWastelandismand alienationhave even becomecant. Early modern expressions of this version of apocalypse-Yeats, Pound, Eliot -made new uses of old traditions,but in later expressionthere is an effort to reassert our alienationby what Kermodecalls schism, a clean break with the past. Beckett is half-way to schism: the signs of order and form are still there but always "with a sign of cancellation."Since Beckett, writers like Burroughshave sought or appearedto seek true schism, but Burroughs,insofar as he communicates anything-and he does-does not succeed in "self-abolition"or "the accident of spontaneity." "Randomness,much valued now, rejoins contrivance." All avant-gardewriting has something of traditionalorder or form, or otherwise "sinks into non-communicative triviality."And here Kermodestates his purpose: this book is devoted to the notion that there is "a humanly needed order which we call form." Apocalypticpostures continue to be useful as form in our literature of crisis. Criticsmust know our fictions for what they are, must differentiate them from myths, and must deny that they represent"some kind of surrender or false consolation."Our fictive orders are necessary; our skepticism operates to keep them suitablyrevised,answerableto our experienceof what is. The novel is now the centralform of literaryart for it is best suited to the frequent revisions of our fictions in the light of reality. From Cervantes on, the novel has been realisticin the sense that it is "the collapse of the poetic,"having to do with "the barbarous,brutal, mute, meaningless reality of things." (Here, Kermodeis quoting Ortegay Gasset.) The history of novels has been anti-novels -Cervantes, Fielding,Jane Austen, Flaubertor Natalie Sarraute,all in one way or anothereffectingthe collapseof the poeticby revisingfiction'sform. Centralto Kermode'sbook, and centralto the criticismof the novel as genre, is his analysisof LaNausee. ForLaNausee is a novel aboutnovels, it is aboutthis tension between paradigmatic form and contingentrealityof which Kermodehas been In Sartre once said, "all ways are barredand neverthelesswe must speaking. life, act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministicprocess but by magic."Kermodecomments:"The as if of the novel consists in a similarnegation of determinism.... We make up aventures."Which are forms. Roquentinin LaNausee wavers between the horrorof contingencyand the fictionof aventures.

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Contingencyis the antagonistin La Nausee; it is nauseous and viscous, unformed

matter. Roquentin experiences the horror of it without benefit of human fiction,

and the resolution is that he will make a fiction-that is, write a novel. But La Nausee, although it is about formlessness,is not itself formless. Without letting form tyrannize,without "the formalpresumptuousness of the nineteenth-century novel" (which I take to be the courtships,the happy endings, the rewardof virtue and the punishmentof vice), and without "the arrogantomniscienceof Mauriac" who is guilty of mauvaise-foiin that he manipulatesreality to the ends of his absolutes-his Catholicism, his message-and regresses into myth, the novel must be ordered by a fiction which is not fraudulent. (I would add to Kermode's analysis that in La Nausee, the Autodidact's order or fiction, the whole world in alphabetical order, is a witty example of an obviously meaningless, useless order.)

None of our fictions can be a "supremefiction," and therefore we stand in

desolate need of these relative, temporary, disposable orders. Kermode collates

Sartre'sstatementof our besoin, Stevens' of our poverty, and Muriel Spark'sof our slender means. Novels cope with formless time by imposing patterns on it, patterns of beginning and end, ever more subtly related to contingency.Proust's
research, his re-finding, is in time and he finds the pattern in his experience through its concord with an end. In the satisfactory fictions, in the humanly mean-

ingful orderswe create,we encounter-in Stevens' splendid phrase-"the imagination'smercies." With that phrase,Kermodeconcludes.The book is, he himself says, suggestive rather than conclusive; but it is so suggestive that it goes a long way toward a working theory of fictions. Anyone in sympathy with new movements in criticism, especially of the novel, will, I think, find himself expanding and corroborat-

ing Kermode'snotions. Kermode'sessential justificationof form as a humanly needed orderingof things and his concept that this form-or plot, or fiction-is all the more useful for our knowing it to be fictive constitutean aestheticthat appears to be workablefor a vast range of literaryphenomena.It is an aesthetic all the more secure for its accord with some important strains of modern thought. Perhaps the largest perspectiveis indicated in these words of Ortega y Gasset, wordsnot quotedby Kermode,althoughthey mighthave 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 opposite, 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 fictive powers 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 language ideas 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 not to discover what it may describe or refer to, but to discover its use." Language itself 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, "are a necessary aid to thought and meet a practicalneed, but they furnish no theoretical knowledge.... We confuse fact and fiction, means and end, if we attempt to deduce anything from such linguistic aids." C. K. Ogden was Vaihinger's friend and translator,and he himself had a clear apprehensionof language as fiction. Ogden referredVaihinger back to some words of Bentham: "To language then -to language alone-it is that fictitiousentities owe their existence; their impossible, yet indispensableexistence." Again it is Sartrewho is marvellously clear on this in La Nausee. We rememberRoquentin's nightmare experience of the black of a black root without the blackness, without the word that creates the fictive abstraction.Without it, there is nothing but the awful fulness of contingency, la nausee. It is the imagination'smercy that words, like our larger fictions, have "their impossible, yet indispensableexistence." As we have to collaborate with the known falsity of language, so too we have to collaboratewith time-fictions. Vaihinger said of his theory of fictions that it was different from pragmatism, but not much. Both acknowledgeheuristic ideals. Yet, he said, it cannot be called skepticism;it is rathera relativism,denying the possibility of absolutes. This, we may add, is true of post-Wittgenstein linguistic thought on the most strictly philosophiclevel, and it is also true of the new theology on the most practical-or ethical-level. But these are only suggestions of the larger relevance and stability of Kermode's thought. In the more specializedfield of criticismof the novel he answers a very specificneed. Led by Wayne Booth, we have lately acquiredthe courageto declare the inadequaciesof old critical biases, and to reject Jamesian,Joycean, and Marxianapproaches.Useful as they were, they have all been tyrants to some degree. New approachesare special desiderataright now in a field that seems wide-open. We are short of criteria.The "sense of life," the freedom of characters, the love for characters,have been proposed.But they are slight and tentative comparedwith the embracing,original, and well-supportedtheory of The Sense of an Ending.There is very little that is negative in it; Kermodedoes not feel obliged to be anti-formalistor anti-symbolist.He does argue against his old and respectedadversaryNorthrop Frye; for the myth, he is sure, has nothing at all to do with the realism of the novel. He does rebel against the excesses of art informel:"The criticalissue,"he says, "is no less than the justificationof ideas of order."But he has profitedfrom the researchesof randomart: his title, "The Sense of an Ending,"is a properlymodest-or minimal-statement of minimum form. He justifiesideas of order,but they cannotbe those of the old formalismof Flaubertand James,nor can they be the formalismof the message or propaganda or a philosophical idea. Sartre found such designs "dishonestly determinate." Kermodewould say with Sartre,"It is by the negation of such formalismthat we make literaturea liberating force." Similarly,he would say with Iris Murdoch that we must not falsify reality with patterns too neat or too inclusive. It is as though we requirean atonality to suit our uncertainty.It does indeed seem that the novel, being as Gide said the most lawless of genres, is the best vehicle for our necessarilyflexible fictions. Kermodecould have found much to support his

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thesis in Gide and his Faux-Monnayeurs, which is another novel that is about this tension between form and reality. But he probably did well not to refer to the narrow professionalism of Gide, but rather to the wider thought of Stevens-and Sartre, whose aesthetic in La Nausee has its base in the most comprehensive and influential philosophical thinking of our time. Kermode's theory may well be as broadly useful as it is broadly based. We may think, for a trial of it, of how it would affect the critic's problem of the function of the narrator. James's old bogey of the "intrusive author" becomes beneficient, for that intrusive author may be the artist reminding us of the fictiveness of his fictions. When in a performance of Twelfth Night we hear the line: "If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction," we laugh at a magnificent joke; but it is also a profitable joke-the dramatic fiction is the richer for our being reminded of its falsity. The narrator of a novel has likewise much artistic advantage if he "intrudes" to remind us of himself. Does he not set our stance toward his story, and show us the relation of his fiction to actuality? Fielding, by pretending to write a "history," makes us acutely aware of how Tom Jones is different from history. Sterne, pyrotechnically telling us all about writing his novel while he writes it, obliges us to consider the relation of form to the flux of life. Thackeray, with his "puppets" that are more lively than life, enriches his story infinitely by reminding us of the proscenium arch of the puppet theater. It is remarkable how many of the important novels make a play on the convention of storytelling, and flaunt the convention as convention. Even Carlyle found that by means of the outrageous fiction of Sartor Resartus he could manage to display a most distinctive view of life, something that plain discursive statement could never do. Les Faux-Monnayeurs, with its novelist writing the novel we are reading, is a rich study of the varieties of counterfeiting, or making fictions. Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, a long neglected novel now seeming to come into its own, is another virtuoso piece. Its narrator declares at a literary 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 standard of living." The narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds is writing a novel about a novelist called Trellis whose characters turn out to be so self-determining that they conspire to keep Trellis under sedation and produce a novel of their owndirected at the horrible and vengeful annihilation of Trellis. This is all supremely funny, and-I feel sure-no less important for being funny. O'Brien's "self-determination" of characters anticipates Iris Murdoch's "opacity" of characters, and O'Brien's is surely the better term. In the novel as "self-evident sham" we recognize our principle of the fiction-known-to-be-false. Then La Nausee, as we have seen, with its protagonist who at best feels "like a character in novel," is really a fine statement of the nature of the human predicament. All these books are about the central human problem just because they are about fictions. They deal with the ways we can accommodate our ideas of order to the raw stuff of actuality. The novel 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,is also the theory of life; the novel about the novel is about how we survive. 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 we must be careful to remind ourselves that it is a metaphor. Certainly it is all right

to be so reminded,but it may be that any ordering of time is a metaphor, and perhapsnecessarilya space metaphor.The years inevitably take on a shape; for The concept of apocalypse itself, with all its variations, is surely a shape given to time, and hence a space metaphor.Diagrams and paradigmsof time are all space figures. It may be impossibleto think of our element pure. If we could, we might achieve the impossible-the supremefiction. Time is, ultimately, ineluctable. And seldom has that point been better made than by Kermode'scommentary on Learand Macbethin this book. We come, by way of the insights of Kermode'scommentary,to the test of his theory. It does work. Each literary exhibit he calls up to serve his thesis is in turn served by that thesis-illuminated, I think, in a radicallynew way. The exhibits range from Spenser'sMutabilityCantos to Wordsworth's"Resolutionand from Pamelato La Nausee. The patternsor fictions by which litIndependence," eraryworks impose orderon life performinvaluableservicesto our human selves, and performthem the better for being "untrue,"fictive, provisional. Take, for a conclusiveinstance,this commentKermode makeson Lear: We are never in dangerof thinking that the death of King Lear,which explains so much, is true. To the statement that he died thus and thus-speaking these words over Cordelia'sbody, callingfor a looking-glass,fumbling with a button -we make an experimentalassent. If we make it well, the gain is that we shall never quite resume the posture towards life and death that we formerly held. Of course it may be said that in changingourselveswe have, in the best possible indirectway, changedthe world.
some of us they are circles with Christmas at the top, and so on to Yeats's gyre.

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