Frank Kermode is thinking about literary fiction, fictions more generally, as representing reality in some way. They do not have to do so. But that is the argument for a different book, maybe a response to The Sense of an Ending. I would enjoy reading that book.
In this book, though, reality is a premise. Anyone planning to join me with Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis next year will find some useful ideas in Kermode.
So, given some interest in reality, one strange thing about fictions as expressed in books is that the books begin and even more strangely, end.
We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. (23)
I am not sure that books do have to end, exactly. There are readers who clearly find it more of a nuisance that books end, readers for whom the endless fantasy or detective series is the ideal. The story of Superman has been published continuously for eighty years, and is not ending anytime soon. Maybe that book arguing with Kermode should be written by some kind of fantasy writer.
Kermode takes the charm and strangeness of endings seriously. He looks for endings in reality. There is death, personal death. There is apocalypse, the end of everything. Apocalypses are themselves fictions, even literary fictions, particularly the ones based on the 1st century Christian fantasy novel Revelation. Kermode is interested, in this example, in how the fiction is used in reality, how the expectation of the imminent end of the world is expressed in the world itself, the psychology of apocalypse, so much of it tied into the imagery of Revelation.
The world constantly fails to end. Geology and cosmology pushes the beginning of things further into the past, but the apocalypticist can just shift his fiction to keep the possibility of apocalypse. Even if the year 1000 is not imminent, or, apocalypse (not) repeated as farce, Y2K is in the distant past, the psychology of “crisis” takes over. The disaster is off in the distance, and this, right now, is the moment of crisis. The moment of crisis is, essentially, perpetual, which is a great part of its attraction: “the stage of transition, like the whole of time in an earlier revolution, has become endless” (101).
Roughly speaking, Kermode begins with the end, the apocalypse. He discusses the nature of time, from Augustine on through Aquinas in the third lecture. The third lecture is quite difficult. Medieval Christian philosophy. I imagine, with pity, that original lecture audience. I doubt that Kermode adds anything to Augustine on this subject. I doubt that anyone ever has. This is the first half of the book. In the second half, Kermode turns to modern literature, and to regular old novels, which greatly eases the philosophical burden, even in Exhibit A is Sartre’s Nausea, which gets most of a lecture to itself as a type specimen.
That is something like a summary of The Sense of an Ending.
Tomorrow, I will write a bit about the last half of the book – novels, the crisis, then and now. How we love the crisis.