Getting back to Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending: Lecture the First

I just finished reading the first lecture. Generally, it's either me or Kermode. Strongly suspecting the former, I'm not, probably, up to the range and depth of his thought. So I struggle with him, sometimes thinking I'm getting him, and sometimes feeling at sea amidst his ornate prose and many scholarly references. I do admit to feeling, not a little, that he's talking a lot of incomprehensible nonsense. But as I say, I, and I'll, presume it's me, not him. I'll want to test that out but first the following.

I'd put Kermode's argument in his first lecture as something like this:
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…………………………...What Kermode wants to do is understand the more extreme ways we make sense of the world--"making sense of making sense." Apocalyptic thinking, even though it changes, has a very long tradition. That change is dynamic even dialectical, as newer modes of apocalyptic thought build on the older and contain within themselves, in confronting changing facts, the seeds for the development of new modes emerging out of them. Within the frames of that developing thought reside the changing ways we see the world--the changing "laws we prescribe to nature and... to time." We take those frames, and within them those laws, to be true. When the facts of the world overwhelm them, we deal with them--the frames and the laws-- by locating their truth in art and by seeing them as analogues for the marked points of our historical experience. As Kermode argues:

"The apocalyptic types--empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe--are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the world from where we stand, in the middest."

But with an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the world comes an increasingly subtle texturing of these themes of apocalypse. In that texturing, prophecy become apocalypse amalgamates with tragedy. In that amalgamation, there is a kind of aestheticization and secularization of the end as Revelation: "the humble elect survive not all kings of the earth...but the one king whose typical story is enacted before them." But eventually tragedy itself gets demystified: the end of tragedy loses its own apocalyptic finality; the tragic we now see as immanent and not imminent. Crisis is the apotheosis of that immanence. And behind crisis lies the bottomless, dark pit of the unknowable. In art, that apotheosis shows itself in the radical cutting against any deterministic patterns of form, theme, time itself and the order and certainty derived from the “strict concordance between (sic) beginning, middle and end.”

We can, still, however, construct an eschatology; and we can do so out of more than the regretful and lonely condition of our lives. We have a storehouse of stronger materials than those for that construction. But the dynamism here is that we build only for ourselves, who will die. In that building we adapt and alter the materials so that the modes of what we construct must change but always the ur pattern will be the foundation. And, always, there will be a necessary relation between those continuously being constructed modes—ways of making sense of the world—and the art we make and how we respond to the art already made...……………………………
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I struggle to understand this and to the extent that I do I think I disagree with it.

I'll just make two points:

1. Talk of an ur pattern is incoherent here; and it’s Kermode’s, as yet unfulfilled, burden to give content to the “primeval pattern” that underlies all modes. That is to say, “the golden bird” which "will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes.”

2. It is a massive contradiction to speak as Kermode does, on the one hand, “…of when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time…..”, of living in a world of crisis “…which may or may not have a temporal end” and of thinking “…in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends…” and of the jettisoning of any deterministic pattern in art by radical disconfirmation and radically reversing expectations as in the novels Kermode cites by Robbe-Grillet, and, on the other hand, to even speak of constructing an eschatology, of an underlying primeval pattern, of “artifices of eternity”, and of the utter conflation that I read in the following:

“The apocalyptic types…are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense of the the world from where we stand, in the middest.”

Lastly, to try to test for wisdom or nonsense, consider this:

“…this was the moment when the terrors of apocalypse were absorbed by tragedy. The Renaissance equivalent of the long Beatus tradition…is King Lear. And the process of sophisticating the paradigm continues. Tragedy, we are told, must yield to Absurdity; existential tragedy is an impossibility and King Lear is terrible farce. It would be interesting to see what… Francis Bacon…might make of the Beatus types; they might have terror enough, but the paradigms would be, one feels, deeply submerged.

In the nature of the case this must be so…”

I’ll stake out a position here and say that this is all high toned gibberish that doesn’t evince a sustainable, linear line of reasoning, let alone the fatuity of its content. I’d be more than happy to be taken apart on that position and be shown the error of my arrogant, presumptuous ways.

In a nutshell: have regard to Philip Rahv's essay The Myth and the Powerhouse. For Rahv the "Powerhouse" is an unhistoricist notion of history. He poses a strict and analytical opppostion between the two. Never their twain can meet. Kermode is all over the place sometimes keeping the two separate and too often conflating them.