Spenser's general sense of good as genuine, usually
hidden, full of joy and motion, and of evil as static
and without energy. By confronting with honest directness each of the Spenserian characteristics which tend to disappoint a modern reader, Lewis shows that they are effective once the reader learns to discard false expectations and to look at Faerie Queene in terms of what Spenser meant it to be. It is, in spite of the letter to Ralegh, not an epic--and Lewis shows the letter to be "demonstrably untrue" in many ways. The poem is rather a Pageant of the universe, its images identifiable as Jungian archetypes. lilt is, as we say, a conunent on life. But it is still more a celebration of life: of order, fertility, spontaneity, jocundity. It is, if you like, Spenser's HYmn to Life. Perhaps this is why the Faerie Queene never loses a reader it has once gained. . Once you have become an inhabitant of its world, being tired of it is like being tired of London, or of life." --Virginia R. Mollenkott Paterson State College The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode. Oxford University Press, 1967.
New York:
Some books are read to get historical matters straight
about literature; others are read because they face directly and squarely the literature-theology encounter; and still others are read because they obliquely get at the huge questions of literature without provinciality or cheap generalization. Among the few books I would place in the last category are Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, and George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy. And one of the finest to join my list (you make yours) is Frank Kermode's Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 1965 and now published by Oxford. 19
Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015
Professor Kermode's volume has the best characteristics
of this category of book, the kind to be chewed and digested: an excellent grasp of a mUltiplicity of literary works without being pompous about it; an openness about the limitations of a huge undertaking; and most of all, an implicit awareness that when the big questions of literature are raised, theological and religious discussion is mandatory because of the very nature of literature. To put it too simply for a momen~ at times historical studies seem to think the religious dimension of a critic or an age is better left unlooked at, and sometimes, theological literary criticism forces the religious issue so artificially that it ends up as bad apologetics. But, to me, the outstanding attribute of the third kind of book is the natural way in which the historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and theological gently engage in interplay. Readability and stimulation are the direct results. Professor Kermode's subject is intriguing. His first sentence sets up his discussion: "It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are found only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives." What follows in the six chapters is the successful attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction. What are the connections between what a man or an age imagines and believes as it is found in literature and what a man or an age imagines or believes in totality? In answering that question, Professor Kermode ranges wide: a good look at the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the fiction of Sartre; a perceptive discussion of the distinction between kairos and chronos as two kinds of literary as well as Biblical time; commentary on the metaphor of the world as prison and the prison as world; and major scrutiny of the ways in which, and the reasons why, fictions of the apocalypse have always been dominant themes in the literary imagination.
20 Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015
In a rave review, one of the temptations is to comment
so effusively and so generally that the concrete particulars of the work are just forgotten. Therefore, it is necessary and appropriate to end with some quotations, and risk the matter of citing out of context, in order to convey the flavor of this extremely impressive book: Men, like poets, rush 'into the middest,' in medias res, when they are born; they also die in medirs-rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations. They fear it, and as far as we can see have always done so; the End is a figure for their own deaths. We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naive, as some apocalyptic sects still are, we do not ask that they progress towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the great age of crises-technological, military, cultural--you may well simply nod and proceed calmly to your business; for this assertion, upon which a multitude of important books is founded, is nowadays no more surprising than the opinion that the earth is round. There seems to me to be some danger in this situation, if only because such a myth, uncritically accepted, tends like prophecy to shape a future to confirm it. Read and re-read this book. gesting.
I am still chewing and di--Nelvin Vos
Muhlenberg College
21 Downloaded from cal.sagepub.com by guest on March 17, 2015