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The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

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Kermode's book has the rare trait of combining academic insight with easy accessibility. Unlike much modern criticism, it asks why we interpret texts rather than merely describing how we (should) do it. The examples are clear and appropriate. The secular view of scripture may put off some, but Kermode's insight into the narrative structure of the Bible will prove useful even to those who don't share his views. The chapter comparing Mark's gospel to James Joyce's Ulysses is a classic, and is especially useful for use in beginning literature classes

Kermode makes no bones about the fact that his interest in the Gospel of Mark is literary--not doctrinal, historical, or theological. These lectures from the late 1970s are still fresh and insightful. And they are as much an exploration of what it means to interpret a literary work as they are an examination of the Evangelist's text and methods. To do so he takes side-trips into Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, as well as into a little-known novel by Henry Green ("Party Going"). These are not idle excursions; Kermode's lectures are eloquent and tightly reasoned. In the end, his position is philosophical rather than aesthetic for he asserts that to live is to interpret. "We glimpse the secrecy through the meshes of the text; this is divination, but what is divined is what is visible from our angle.... When we come to relate [the] part to the whole, the divined glimmer to the fire we suppose to be its source, we see why Hermes is the patron of so many other trades besides interpretation. There has to be trickery. And we interpret always as transients--of whom he is also patron--both in the book and in the world which resembles the book. For the world is our beloved codex." And like all good philosphical writing, Kermode's lectures are worth studying closely and reading over and over again.

This is a brilliant work on the narrative complexity of the Gospels--brilliant in both its hermeneutics and semiotics. What is especially valuable is the level of comprehension. Kermode does not resort to lofty diatribes to further enshroud the delicate polemics of biblical narrative, but instead relies on varied and astute scholarship which he communicates clearly to almost any reader. A wonderful resource for narrative theory in general to understand how meaning is related and hidden.

"The Genesis of Secrecy" is a set of the collected and expanded Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard during 1977-1978. In this book, Kermode announces his task to be one of a secular interpreter (or anti-interpreter, as it were), completely unencumbered, yet still highly knowledgeable, of older Biblical-critical traditions and their concomitant dogma.

Hermeneutics is the main concern here. The Gospel of Mark is the real center of gravity, but Kermode's catholicity draws him also to James Joyce and Henry Green, with some non-canonical Gospels thrown in for good measure. In the first lecture, "Carnal and Spiritual Senses," the act of interpretation is likened to an attempt to transition from being an "outsider" to an "insider," that is, someone with special, institutionalized knowledge about the text at hand. Interpretation is necessarily an act that always frustrates itself if it aims to find a concrete, absolute nugget of meaning; instead, the multiplicity and indeterminacy of hermeneutic practice, and our proclivity for allegorical and elliptical readings, mean that any essentialism is textually impossible. In fact, Kermode all but says that what it means to be a narrative is to have "hermeneutic potential." His carnal and spiritual are reconfigurations of Freud's manifest and latent, but without all the Freudian baggage. With biblical texts, he sometimes opts for the similar "pleromatist" instead of latent.

In another lecture titled "What are the Facts?," he discusses the role of textual facticity in historical writing. This is especially controversial, considering that Kermode has chosen the Gospels as a main focus - texts whose historical facts are hard to square, to say the least. To add to the complexity of looking at the Gospels as historical documents, one must consider that the Passion narrative was foretold in the Old Testament, and therefore its authenticity was a prerequisite to the supposed authority of the Gospels. In short, Kermode makes the dubious claim that, as a textual outsider, it is well nigh impossible to discern historical writing from any other type.

It is uncertain whether Kermode knew exactly how close he is to poststructuralism here. It is not the case that all narratives dissolve into an incoherent semiological play of signs and signifiers when under interpretive scrutiny. Kermode's approach results in a kind of textual nihilism. Interpretation always involves the interplay of intentionality and historical perspective, but there is no reason why that interplay must necessarily annihilate our ability to discern between genres, or what those genres are trying to accomplish. Kermode also never discusses his controversial choice of texts he uses to reach his conclusions. What would have happened had he chosen Sallust or Polybius, whose accounts can be checked against other texts and archaeological evidence? The choice of the Gospel of Mark makes Kermode's arguments no less fascinating or thought-provoking, but it does make arguing the point much easier.

This is one of the best-known books of Kermode's latter theory, and is indicative of a marked turn away from some of his earlier work, especially 1957's "The Romantic Image," which was a more traditional piece of criticism. In the earlier book, he accuses historians of applying some "false categories of modern thought," rendering their work little more than "myth" or "allegory." Many of Kermode's attacks in "The Romantic Image" were driven by a call for a correspondence theory of truth between all kinds of texts - critical, historical, and literary. Unfortunately, "The Genesis of Secrecy" took a turn away from his earlier attempts at genre criticism, and toward what Kermode has elsewhere called "French utopianism."

This is a wonderful and interesting book, and one that everyone interested in modern criticism should be exposed to. I happen to disagree with its conclusions, but I found that it made me wrestle with some of the most fundamental assumptions I had about criticism as an act. Even considering the significant change in approach in the twenty years separating "The Romantic Image" and "Genesis of Secrecy," Kermode never lost any of his scholarly cosmopolitanism and humane warmth, which is what draws me to read him again and again.