In

Le Mans

for Sherwin.

 In the London Review of Books:

"One is struck by Kermode’s determination, early on, to find a path between the formalist scepticism of Barthes and Robbe-Grillet, and the ‘naive’ humanism of the English tradition. Crudely put, he saw that Barthes was right about the way realism functioned as a code, a piece of cunning artifice, an ideology of verisimilitude (fictions which just stay the same, Kermode writes, congeal into myth); but the realist in him also insisted on fiction’s ability to be about something more than itself, insisted on its contaminated but victorious description of the world (what Ian Watt called ‘the literal imagination’). In beautiful words, he writes that if fictional forms

…Only last year, Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures at Harvard employed Schiller’s terms to argue that the novelist must be both naive and sentimental, both traditional and radical: he must be naively confident in describing the world, and sentimentally self-conscious about how that description operates – in Kermode’s terms, at once innocent and guilty."

***

I’ve often had trouble with Kermode. I find his use of words maddeningly obtuse. For instance:

If fictional forms appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them.

What is he talking about when he says ‘forms’? The novel? The short story? The poem? Or is he talking about fictional characters, or scenarios, or what? I presume, because none of the former ‘forms’ can really be called ‘preposterously false’ that he’s referring to the latter. But then he talks about the act of reading a novel as being a tacit acceptance of ‘them’…again, is he talking about the content, or the mode of presentation? …but ‘they’ change with us…what the form of the novel?

"If they ruin our innocence…" If ‘they‘ – the new forms of novels(?) -  burst our bubble of suspended disbelief, our escapist pleasure, by drawing attention to the tricks that are being played…this somehow makes us smarter…pointing out what before we never knew? An outed illusion? A loss of innocence?

Then it gets even denser…or I, the reader, reveal the depths of my density… If ‘they’ – the new novels – make us guilty - of what, knowing and seeing how we are being manipulated and deceived? – "they enable us to submit, as we must, the show of things to the desires of the mind."

…perhaps I’m tired. Perhaps after a good night’s sleep.