Frank Kermode - RIP

Whoever mentioned him in that critics thread a couple of days ago jinxed him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/18/frank-kermode-dies-aged-90

Thought they were mentioning him because he was R.I.P.

Oh I see, there was a mention last week as well.

sorry Frank :'( when a 90 year old dies and it's properly sad and they'll be genuinely missed it's for certain that they were doing something exceptional. RIP big yin.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n24/frank-kermode/writing-about-shakespeare

Was reading his review of Vineland yesterday. It was remarkable to me and bought something 'home' about Frank's reviewing. In that review he pretty much starts off by saying he couldn't quite get the plot, and he was sorta ridiculed for missing some of the refs (a 20 year age gap between Pynchon and Kermode)...but Frank is wonderfully honest about it. He then reads through, trying to get as much out of it, not afraid to miss points and always willing to learn and respond intelligently.

A kind of model reader in my head.

Whoever mentioned him in that critics thread a couple of days ago jinxed him.

yeah sorry about that. it was me and some other dude.

"Good critics tend, like good poets, to be well-read loners and ordinarylanguage
speakers."

– Frank K

discus

*trying hard not to quote David Lee Roth on critics and Elvis Costello*

yeah sorry about that. it was me and some other dude.

prob me. soz.

I like Frank but the one detail that I remember from his memoir was about his shipmate that he hated, the ladies man who had all his teeth removed one day without putting a single speed bump in his amorous pursuits.

"Good critics tend, like good poets, to be well-read loners and ordinary language speakers."

'well-read', agree, comparison a basic and useful thinking tool for lit crit, & range helps. Can be stifling, or slip into uptight scholarliness, ie refusing to chance a statement about Porphyria's Lover unless you've read all of Browning and everything he read, and everything published in the same decade. (and doesn't apply to 'good poets' so much for me - a lot of poets I like were/are idiosyncratic or patchy readers - Shakespeare not well-read in the sense Ben Jonson was, nor Yeats in the way Eliot was).

'loners'. Dunno. Sort of springs naturally from spending a lot of time with books, implies a distinct or odd sensibility, which is often a virtue, but it's sort of hard to know - like the one time I met Christopher Ricks - who's generally taken as a dece critic - he seemed gregarious, but does that absolutely preclude lonerdom?

'ordinary language speakers'. idk what this means. Does he mean 'surprisingly unglittering conversationalists' or 'speaks their period's dominant dialect'? (ie 'when speaking language, they are ordinary' vs 'they speak ordinary language'). The latter would be a weird claim, but interests me more, because I don't quite know what to make of it.

bit contextual: he means that they don't use the 'unnecessarily ugly, affected, and self-regarding' dialect used by literary theorists

ah ok. Makes sense. Bit hesitant about that - I like personality, conversational address, natural flow in a critic's style, but wouldn't say theory is the only offender - there are other dead flat dialects from academia (eg attempts at objectivity that over-use 'interesting') & journalism can be its own world of thought-killing cliche.

What was that famous line of his about walking into the no-man's land of the theory wars brandishing cigarettes or carrying brandy and cigarettes and being shot at?

"There is a war on, and he who ventures into no-man's-land brandishing cigarettes and singing carols must expect to be shot at"

sure. he liked old-timey bros like lionel trilling and william empson. readable writers whom the theorists -- at their worst -- didn't think of as doing legitimate work at all. basically he's talking about serious writers with a readership outside academia. of course they still exist. i dunno if he considered the possibility that in time the jargon of theory would actually feed in to the 'higher journalism', even if it is only half-understood (even by a lot of people who use it).

lol @ that quote

basically he's talking about serious writers with a readership outside academia. of course they still exist.

Care to name some of them?

james wood

u cd debate whether nyrb/lrb/______ are really read outside academia i suppose

Helen Vendler would be another who's Kermode-friendly, is read a little in the lol real world. But I assume he's also talking about a kind of academic who doesn't get read much outside the academy any more (unless they pop up in the NY/LRB) - Tony Nuttall (RIP), Barbara Everett, that sort.

yeah but i'd have put cash on the first name being james wood and then ummm....

how many literary critics without reps for 'original' writing would have been well known whenever tho?

well the article i quoted was from 1998

i dunno how many people really read commentary etc 'back in the day' and he might be overestimating the size of the old 'educated general reader' audience. i don't know.

but part of what he's saying is that even academics 50 years ago wrote s.thing recognizable as english; theory dudes not so much. and i think that's about right.

I would dispute the readability of Empson!

I always thought of Kermode as quite hospitable to lots of theory - didn't he invite Barthes over to speak? "Between jargon and platitudes, I prefer jargon."

does zizek in lrb mode write sthing recognizable as english

cuz he's maybe #1 'educated general reader' literary intellectual of 00s

but as we'll probably agree, that demographic's size and ardour have usually been overestimated

I always thought of Kermode as quite hospitable to lots of theory - didn't he invite Barthes over to speak?

yeah, he played a major role in bringing a lot of the french stuff over in general, in the late 1960s, early 1970s

but then uh i guess it got out of hand! speshly with the crude attacks on the canon, or rather the idea of the canon, etc

does zizek in lrb mode write sthing recognizable as english

not a literary critic though, or anything close

xxxp

guessing, but I'd say there's an odd patch in the middle of the last century when there are quite a lot of lit critics whose names would be fairly well recognised comp to today, (even if some of them did other things) - Leavis, Wilson, Trilling, Connolly, IA Richards, Raymond Williams etc. Maybe even eg Dame Helen Gardner, Cleanth Brooks? Not saying G. Wilson Knight's lectures held the crowds for the summer season at Blackpool, but a combo of Eng Lit Crit being taken seriously + limited media with Reithian impulses meant there was a space for them. But I think that situation was anomalous.

i agree. it does feel like a strange, third-programme-y [brit reference] moment.

throw in Kazin

xpost

In grad school, I was dissuaded from citing what my thesis director, not at all dismissively, called The Men of Letters (Wilson, Kazin, Trilling, Kermode, et al).

yeah that seems about right, and probably coincides (or follows shortly after) the study of modern english lit being fully accepted as an academic discipline?

In grad school, I was dissuaded from citing what my thesis director, not at all dismissively, called The Men of Letters (Wilson, Kazin, Trilling, Kermode, et al).

― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, September 2, 2010 10:46 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

jesus.

not a literary critic though, or anything close

― i am legernd (history mayne), Thursday, 2 September 2010 22:40 (12 minutes ago)

doesn't that sort of hyperactive/generalist theory take up some of the space that would have been afforded to close-reading lit crit?

An example of the "perception" game. He thought the other two profs on the committee would "have problems" with my citing them. When I asked them about it, they said the men of letters "weren't regarded seriously" by other academics. A long circle jerk, with no answers, so I gave up.

xps

Yeah, I think that's right - it rolls from the 30s New/Prac Crit transformation of English into a more teachable or cerebral discipline (presumably there's some broader education stuff about the new universities, decline of Latin, Grammar schools that I know jack about).

There's a Martin Amis thing somewhere, an essay maybe, where he laments the passing of that kind of lit crit world - describes how he & Hitchens would race out for say the latest LC Knights monograph then argue about his postion on Timon or w/e. Literary criticism, iirc, was seen as a vital activity of the civilised mind. It seemed utterly alien and quite weird to me (and I am about as sympathetic as they come to mid-century critics).

I don't at all discount professional jealousy: all these men made money and were published in weeklies or monthlies with six-figure circulations.

doesn't that sort of hyperactive/generalist theory take up some of the space that would have been afforded to close-reading lit crit?

― nakhchivan, Thursday, September 2, 2010 10:57 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'd just say it's another thing entirely. he doesn't do literary criticism. doesn't write on fiction or poetry. has no interest in aesthetics.

they said the men of letters "weren't regarded seriously" by other academics.

i often catch this vibe, but hearing it said directly...

to be fair i don't think that's true anymore, or not everywhere, not when/where i was in grad school, at least.

especially if you focus on poetry + poetics

btw this happened when I cited Wilson on U.S. Grant -- a witticism of no importance. When my director asked verbally about my secondary sources and I mentioned Wilson, he said something like "you better be careful" about citing Wilson too often.

i'd just say it's another thing entirely. he doesn't do literary criticism. doesn't write on fiction or poetry. has no interest in aesthetics.

― i am legernd (history mayne), Thursday, 2 September 2010 23:06 (0 seconds ago)

well yeah but ppl seemingly care less for aesthetics than speculative exegesis

a simple reason being that eg kermode writing about eliot is useless to ppl who haven't read a lot of eliot

Found it.

We all did. We hung around the place talking about literary criticism. We sat in pubs and coffee bars talking about WK Wimsatt and G Wilson Knight, about Richard Hoggart and Northrop Frye, about Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner and George Steiner. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilisation. Everyone concurred.

yeah. i mean i reckon matthew arnold came up with that meme a lil bit before clive james...

Never liked "concurred" as a word.

Richard Hoggart

*Argh, extra question mark*

i dunno if he considered the possibility that in time the jargon of theory would actually feed in to the 'higher journalism', even if it is only half-understood (even by a lot of people who use it).

― i am legernd (history mayne), Thursday, September 2, 2010 10:09 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/gabriel-josipovici-modernism-tom-mccarthy?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments

well, this is pretty much what i had in mind. this article is full of ugliness and bad/old ideas. does the highly rated mccarthy write this badly in his fiction?

he also seems str8 ig'nant

Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writers of 1922 or 1915?

er... yeah, i can? (not that the idea of the middlebrow really existed in 1915 or 1922... i guess pound's attacks on arnold bennett would count. lovely chap, pound.) don't think he knows his modernism close up.

does the highly rated mccarthy write this badly in his fiction?

I must admit I struggle ever so slightly with him in this respect, him and David Mitchell in fact. I frequently find the yoking of their sentences and rhythms slightly awkward; I don't find any particular pleasure in their cadences and certainly wouldn't describe his style as high in a Jamesian sense. But then, I'm not sure that this would be at all appropriate to either of their subject matter, McCarthy in particular, who has an almost autistic level of detail in his writing, which intrudes upon everything else (esp language) and through which everything else is understood - the awkwardness seems part of the approach to me, a frankensteinian reanimation of reality, reassessing the learnt perspectives of both perception and intellectual and spiritual understanding.

Certainly I'm enjoying C as much as anything I've read in a while (although I've hit a bit of a lull in the European spa chapters).

(Just a footnote to the above - although I said that such stylistic fluency may not be appropriate for such subject matter, I can think of at least one more or less naturalistic novel that deals in part with similar ideas, which is exceptionally wonderful stylistically, that is Beckett's Murphy, and it's telling I think that I can't imagine either McCarthy or Mitchell writing a comic novel (although Remainder is in places amusing, it is not really, to my mind, funny).

That said, I can't really imagine anyone writing a comic novel these days (which might just be to do with the fact comedy is quite a conservative form, and my perceptions are already shaped on such matters) - the Hemmingway-esque minimalism of Waugh and early Anthony Powell, and its opposite, the pathological attention to the facial and verbal represenations of psychological detail of K Amis, or indeed the whipcrack timing of his son, seem a million miles away.

Brackets, brackets.

I want to respect McCarthy for having an axe to grind re: the state of the novel - it didn't do Wolfe or Franzen any harm in the past - but he comes across as so obnoxious and superior (Sorrow and wonder! How despicably middlebrow!) that I don't want to go anywhere near his work. Hearing Paul Morley discuss C on Radio 4 was a perfect storm of theory-drunk me-so-radical posturing.

I really liked his style in Remainder, and also in C: the stiffness works for it, the obsessive recording of visual detail is great. I don't generally like his non-fiction as much. Couldn't read the Tintin book, and the newspaper stuff can feel a bit superficial or played out - he sits himself in the old high modernist camp, but then doesn't go anywhere with it. I'm not bothered by that especially, and I don't have much of a problem with this article, except, yes:

Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writers of 1922 or 1915?

This is appalling. 'waht is the middlebrow?' aside, it doesn't take a period scholar to name eg HG Wells, who is more famous than say Djuna Barnes.

rolling lit fiction bumped into McCarthy and Josipovici before btw.

I wonder what would have happened if Alfred had mentioned this name?

Hm? Don't get it.

I checked Pieces of My Mind out of the library yesterday.

he sits himself in the old high modernist camp, but then doesn't go anywhere with it

This is the impression I get.

well, this is pretty much what i had in mind. this article is full of ugliness and bad/old ideas.

doesn't seem particularly ugly, not well written but adequate for a short form review, the only notably bad sentence being

The sentiment is just that: sentimental.

although i like this lil polemic

Adopting the vocabulary of the middlebrow in order to legitimise the vanguard merely robs it of what animates it most.

doesn't foreground any crit theory memes either, it's very much echt modern sermonizing

That polemic strikes a false note with me because it assumes emotional resonance (or, by extension, characters you care about) is somehow middlebrow. The great modernist writers were (or some of them were) as strong on character and emotion as they were on language and ideas - nothing wrong with applauding those strengths.

I hate the casual use of "middlebrow" as an insult anyway - it's lazy and imprecise.

that seems to be a false dichotomy, i dunno who would think the converse about eg joyce, or who believes there are many great writers who aren't 'strong on character and emotion'

i like the formulation cuz it neatly describes that slightly awkward gushing praise eg ebert will use to describe an early godard movie, like he's not just a scary dialectics n resentment merchant, he can create recognizable human beings!

I hate the casual use of "middlebrow" as an insult anyway - it's lazy and imprecise.

since he sincerely believes in the existence of a (small, by necessity) VANGUARD it follows that there has to be a lot of middlebrow

so in a way he's being more taxonomic than pejorative, like son i don't hate you or anything but yr not displaying enough reflexivity/doubt/formalism, yr gonna have to go nextdoor but honestly you'll prefer it there

My point is that the false dichotomy is McCarthy's, or at least it seems to be given the example he's used. But then I don't see the problem with trying to draw as many people as possible towards a work of art which perhaps has a misleadingly forbidding reputation. McCarthy seems to want to make his "vanguard" clique as small as possible, sneering at the general reader, and then complains when publishers don't want to put this stuff out.

does mccarthy think emotional resonance (or, by extension, characters you care about) is ~automiatically~ somehow middlebrow?

"with a sense of sorrow and of wonder and, at an even deeper level, a sense of having bathed in the waters of life" = 'While the impetus behind it is profound, it ends up sounding trite.'

not that he doesn't allow nono does those things, but it negates the specific formal achievements of promoteo (which i haven't heard in years but it's not an obvious sell to the glyndebourne crowd)

after all couldn't all great works be praised in those terms?

doesn't seem particularly ugly, not well written but adequate for a short form review, the only notably bad sentence being

yeah it ground a few of my gears, just lil words and mini-memes, so mini they may not be memes. i think the whole point of the vanguard -- if we accept these elitist constructions for a moment -- is that it, well, explores the territory that the middlebrows -- if we accept these elitist constructions for a moment -- then cotton on to. if there is *no* attempt to open up what's new for people who aren't finger-snapping vanguardists like, uhhhh, lots of dead writers from 90 years ago, then you're basically just masturbating in print.

i guess it means ppl will buy his books in order to feel like authentic vanguardists, so i can respect his game there.

the guy he's reviewing sounds like a bit of a blowhard from other reviews i've read, but the bit where t-mac quotes him being all heartfelt and says THIS IS MISERABLE SENTIMENTALIST TOSH (sounding like ilx poster bamaka, y/n) makes you wonder who the real blowhard is.

since i haven't read any of his actual books i'm wary of typecasting him as spitflecked modernist throwback who abhors the heartfelt, however silly his equation of seniment and sentimentality

i was amused when the times rated the booker longlist (/5*) for summer holiday readability and poor old tom got the solitary 1* rating ('why would you read this shit? yr on holiday ffs')

and i guess not many other ppl read his books (modernist authenticity assured) so they're going on stuff like this, or that excellent zadie smith NYRB essay comparing remainder and netherland which made the former sound drily impressive but forbidding

But he explains, fairly superficially ok but that's the form, a tradition of stuff he's interested in, and the reasons for his interest: it's barely vanguardism, more like he's sketching a history that he feels to be neglected; he's trying to sketch it honestly so that if sounds like your kind of thing, you can engage, and if not, whatevs. That tradition isn't just 7-copies-sold vanguardist - Faulkner in there, Sterne a popular success, Aeschylus a prize-winning public dramatist - but doesn't really depend on mid-brow adoption. It's just a kind of art that has had a persistent attraction for a class of readers (and writers); some of it is difficult, and to deny that is to get away from how it works for its adherents.

xp lol C was my holiday read.

drily impressive but forbidding

I have to say I found Remainder and am finding C both extraordinarily rich and not at all difficult to read. Remainder is helped by considerable reserves of dry humour (I know I said it wasn't funny, and I'm not sure it is, but there's a sort of sustaining updraft of amusement throughout). C has some of the great virtues of Pynchon, for instance, in that it delights in richness, in play, in the material effects of the world, and in structural analysis that wants to have fun, make patterns, draw parallels. It feels like the best sort of imaginative exploration of all sorts of things. I'm finding it tremendously enjoyable. I'll stop saying that soon.

that all sounds great, i have read a kinship sketched between musil, gadda and pynchon who share a tendency to anatomizing structures, material complexity and paranoid (or parodic) system-building (they were all trained engineers)

Tom McCarthy can't complain about the terms in which Prometeo is praised and then write for the Guardian/a newspaper about the book like that.

He should be make it in a modernistic style, otherwise he's just some booker longlist guy.

just some booker longlist guy = cold, lol