Hermetic Art, or the Holy Spirit and US: Narrative Sense or Secrecy in the Hermeneutic of Frank Kermode

Abstract

As a professor of literature whose primary premise for that profession is D.S. Savage's conviction that "the word has meaning only in relationship to the Word," I have found Frank Kermode's recent preoccupations with the relationship of biblical modes to secular literary genres (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford, 1966) and to current theories of interpretation, or hermeneutics (The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979) both encouraging and disappointing. What has encouraged me I would like to acknowledge briefly in a.preliminary assessment of Kermode's contribution to the narrowing of the gap between "Christian" and "secular" critics of literature; what I have found disappointing prompts the argument of this paper.While Kermode would ultimately "set the word against the word" both in his theory of fiction and in his theory of interpretation, arguing that the forms of fiction give the lie to the reality they reflect and the interpretation of narrative is doomed from the first by the impenetrable secrecy of the text, the Christian critic and interpreter of fiction must begin from a different premise.That premise is that interpretation of the story--or discovery of its "sense of an ending"--cannot happen before resurrection, or before the story has first collapsed on all fronts, b~en crucified, dead, and buried but finally raised from disintegration into coherence by the "co-inherence" of that which "seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us" as interpreters.Let me elaborate my metaphors briefly before moving on to more specific considerations of Kermode's critical and hermeneutical Essay / 64 by guest on July 28, 2015 cal.sagepub.com Downloaded from