Criticism: What happens when we read fiction? How stable is the text if no two readings can be the same, if we each skip different bits, as Roland Barthes insisted readers of Proust must do, and if words and what they signify work on our unconscious in ways we can neither control nor understand? Colm Tóibín reviews Frank Kermode's Pieces of my Mind: Writings 1958-2002
What the writer means hardly matters now; what a text means or even what a text does are questions long finished with. The result of the wonderful instability which has thus been created around the act of reading is that the complexity of the act is best rendered almost silently, and if not silently, then paradoxically. As Jacques Derrida says in a recent book of interviews, life.after. theory: "You invent the rule when you read the text in a way which produces another rule responding to the text, or countersigning the text." If words must be used at all in interpretation, then they should be at best abstract and strange, full of "poetico-metaphorical abundance", in Habermas's phrase, or at least ambiguous, open-ended and alert to their own vulnerability. The "rhythm matters more than what I say", to quote Derrida again.
Enter Frank Kermode, who is learned, humble and in possession of a sparkling and sly intelligence. He is prepared to allow the literary text to be various in its effect, to be closer to light on water than a primary colour. He knows that deliberation on theory is a game, sometimes a serious one, and he exults in strangenesses and untidiness. He loves poetry more than he loves anything, which sets him apart from others who are interested in theory. He is also, as a critic, mischieviously full of self- unimportance. In his contribution to life.after.theory, he points out that the history of criticism in universities is mostly "the history of certain people, usually men, who make themselves immense reputations and get a considerable following, and then go out like lights".
Kermode also stands apart from other literary theorists whose work he admires because he believes that certain things are demonstrably true or false; being a sceptic rather than a cynic, he also believes in knowledge and value, while remaining agnostic on most other matters. He also writes well, being a military strategist of some note in the war against cliché.
"Cliché is a disease which must be stamped out," he writes in his review of Martin Amis's The War Against Cliché, "it infects the mind and even the heart; it makes it impossible to be honest, and that, for Amis, is an unquestionable duty of authorship." Kermode, unlike Amis, is often gentle and rather amused at others' failures, chiding Amis rather sweetly for the "rare instances" of "himself catching a dose of the disease".
This book is a second collection of Kermode's greatest hits, if you will excuse the cliché, containing mostly longer pieces, mainly lecture-length; his earlier collection, Pleasing Myself, first published two years ago, contained shorter pieces, mainly reviews. Pieces of My Mind displays his identity as a fox, interested in many small things, on the verge of becoming a hedgehog, concerned with one large thing. It displays also his steely tolerance, his low-key distaste for the settlement of any question, his enjoyment of ambiguity and error and his interest in matters French. Also, as he broods on questions of textual exegesis and interpretive exigency, there is a constant feeling that he is about to splutter with laughter at the good of it all.
The large question here is the relationship between the theory and the text and then between language itself and the reader. Kermode spent several years involved with the Bible and its surrounding scholarship; he did so not for religious reasons, but because of the quality of the work being done by others and the questions it raised. His essay here, 'The Man in the Macintosh', examines the strange appearance of the boy in the linen shirt in Mark's Gospel and the even stranger appearance of the man in the macintosh in Ulysses, both figures quite unnecessary to the mechanical unity of the text, but perhaps essential, more than we know or the author intended, to its organic unity. Kermode is careful not to push the connections or the conclusions too far, but his essay is a fascinating piece of work on the need for strangenesses and mysteries in a text and the pleasures of trying to unravel them.
Kermode is at his most gravely withering on one of the heresies of modern literary criticism, which has, for example, most disabled some contemporary Irish criticism - its distrust of the poem and the poem's autonomy, the insistence, as Stephen Greenblatt would have it, that "poetry . . . is not the path to a transhistorical truth", but "the key to particular historically embedded social and psychological formations". Kermode has no difficulty professing his love for Wallace Stevens, who puzzles and irritates those who view his poems as examples of brash, decadent and dandyish conservatism at the heart of mid- century American capitalism, rather than constructs of pure and lonely beauty, gladness of the best, in George Herbert's phrase, which should be read only on their own terms.
The tone of these essays is mild and wise. Kermode remains interested in historical context and literary history, including, for example, the influence of Heidegger on Stevens, even allowing for the fact that Stevens never read him, and the influence of Louis Agassiz on Hawthorne, something no-one else has noticed.
He writes as well about dance, music and painting as he does about forgotten novels and memorable moments in the growth of literary studies. He has a well-stocked mind and a serious grounding in the detailed study of Shakespeare, but, perhaps most important, he writes with a tone of his own, which is clear and stylish and addressed to all of us outside the academy. That alone makes him an international treasure.
Colm Tóibín's recent books are Lady Gregory's Toothbrush and Love in a Dark Time
Pieces of My Mind: Writings 1958-2002. By Frank Kermode, Allen Lane/Penguin, 467pp, £25