What are you reading for? A lesson from Frank Kermode

It might seem unlikely that a work of literary criticism should occasion a “eureka! moment.” However, I had just such an experience when reading Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Harvard. 1979). The relevant passages may seem somewhat arcane — on a first reading, at least. However, I think that their meaning(s) can be teased out without too much trouble. To plunge in at the deep end:

We are so habituated to the myth of transparency [in texts] that we continue, as Jean Starobinsky neatly puts it, to ignore what is written in favour of what it is written about.

When he [Spinoza] drew up his rules of scriptural interpretation in the seventh chapter of the Tractatus Theologico–Politicus he distinguished strictly between meaning and truth (what is written and what it is written about): in exegesis “we are at work,” he said, “not on the truth of passages but on their meaning.” And he expressed a particular distaste for the practice of distorting meaning “in order to make it conform with some truth already entertained.”

The pleasures of interpretation are ... linked to loss and disappointment, so that most of us will find the task too hard, or simply repugnant; and then, abandoning meaning, we slip back into the old comfortable fictions of transparency, the single sense, the truth.

I confess that I cannot — as of the moment, at least — fully comprehend the difference between “what is written and what it is written about.” However, the general conclusion I draw from the sum of the quoted passages, is that if we read in the hope of bolstering our preconceived ideas or prejudices, then we are lost. For example, if we are “fully paid up Freudians”, and read always with an eye for such ideas as will tend to confirm the theories of Freud, then we are reading with a partially closed mind. Further, if we encounter an argument — no matter how well thought out — that would tend to disconfirm the theories of Freud, it is very likely that we will not give due and deserved measure to the author’s meaning(s). Quite likely, we will “shoot the messenger”; launch an ad hominem attack; and quietly fume, to our own unassuageable discomfort.

What then, should we be looking for in a text? The answer is, I think, very clear and straightforward — no matter how difficult the task is in practice: we should be reading — quite simply [sic] — for what we can find. And what we find — assuming depth of thought in the author — will be a series of fluxional meanings. In fact, we may sometimes close a book, and feel much as we might on disembarking from a ferry after a rough passage. And for the idea of “the single sense, the truth”? There is no such thing, and it would be extremely odd if there were; odder still that it had eluded us over all these centuries. It is impossible to contemplate seriously any kind of apprehensible entity that we could label “The Truth”. It is the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. I do not see that this should worry us. The freer our minds are when reading, the better. Postmodernism has anyway already loosened all the moorings, and I do not see why we cannot read in a lighter frame of mind. We carry so much cramping mental baggage about, that it is wonderful when we allow ourselves to jettison any of it! Let us have an end to stultifying personal predilections; to unintelligent rubbishing of authors that we don’t happen to enjoy; and even of trying — too hard, at least — to get others to read our own favourites. As Emerson writes, “You have seen a skilful man reading Plutarch. Well, that author is a thousand things to a thousand persons. Take that book into your own two hands and read your eyes out. You will never find there what the other finds...” This we must learn to let be: in full content.