More on Kermode's The Sense of an Ending: Lecture the First

willjames7

Basman, the quote you selected about the Beatus tradition and King Lear is probably the most obscure passage in the chapter, and I also re-read it a couple times trying to figure out which way was up. I don't think Kermode ever tries to deliberately confuse, but he has a way of hopping from idea to idea without showing the reasoning behind the leaps.

On those occasions when I'm able to leap along with him, i.e., where I can fill in the blanks, I often find his insights to be compelling and insightful. Other times, when the trail seems beyond anyone's capacity to follow, I humbly suspend judgment and recall a wise professor's comment about Biblical interpretation: try to remember that there is always a level of symbol and metaphor at play--when it seems merely literal, it's because you're missing the metaphors.

As best as I can understand Kermode's attempt to relate tragedy to apocalypse, it has to do with the contrast that he sets up in the wordplay of imminent vs. immanent. As the notion of THE END as a historical event declines, i.e., no longer seems imminent, the contemplation of THE END in our individual lives takes on new meaning and is explored in new formats, most notably, in Shakespearian tragedy. The beginning, middle, end that was previously applied to human history becomes mapped to trajectory of the individual tragic hero. (After that, the progression into farce etc. just leaves me in the dark.)

As for your other comment regarding Kermode's failure to make the case for "archetypes" or "ur-patterns", I am inclined to let him off the hook there. Jung's argument in favor of the notion used the metaphor of "the wind in the trees". We can't see the wind, but we can observe its impact on the leaves; therefore we are justified in believing in its force despite its invisibility. For me, all arguments about anything that is not measurable, like love or consciousness, ultimately come down to this: either we limit ourselves to empirical data and go nowhere, or we accept that the phenomena are not empirically verifiable but clearly seem to exist--hence demonstrating the limitations of empirical investigation in exploring certain dimensions of human being.

The archetypal element in the apocalypse fantasies Kermode describes seems to me to be apparent in their sheer tenacity. No matter how many times the dates are proved wrong, something in the psyche does a reset. The dates are changed, but the pattern persists. To my mind, the patterns may reasonably be described as "ur-patterns" or "archetypes" in that they both pre-exist as well as survive the particular circumstances in which they are temporarily applied by meaning-seeking humans. (Reality is calling, so that's as much of a response as I can offer today...)

[I read Chapter 2 this morning with which I have some basic disagreements although I enjoyed the strenuous work-out. Until the next time....]

Me: (to willjames7)

As for your comments on immanent and imminent, and the move from prophecy to apocalypse to tragedy (to absurdist farce?) It may be that I read his argument opposite to you as I understand him and you. Apocalypse, being an eschatology, a theory of a coherent end, even though that end is comprised of overweening destruction, contemplates imminence, that which will inevitably occur. On this view, there is a disjunction, a temporal and psychological gap, between our sense of our present experience and our sense of imminence, a final fiery end. In that sense we may wish capitalize the end as THE END.

That “big E” end is a function of the magical thinking of apocalypse. What, as I read part of Kermode, that magical thinking gives way is (at least) three things: an increasingly unhistoricist notion of history (a secular thing, not bound by iron laws), a recognition of unfathomable, bottomless, unconquerable evil and our own deaths as the end, but as an end which is constituted by nothing. That transition parallels the movement from prophecy to apocalypse to tragedy to absurdist farce. In that transition we feel in every waking mature moment the sheer contingency of our existence; our existence is a continuing present of crises. Thus, as I read Kermode, imminence gives way to immanence. And, as I said in my previous note, crisis is the apotheosis of immanence.

I’ll just say again: if I’m reading Kermode correctly, I don’t know how he can speak of our constructing an eschatology in our present understanding of our sheer temporality and our failure to understand the bottomlessness of the dark pit of evil. In that, negation is ontological. In Lear, the nothing and the no, no, no, no, that resound throughout the play, are ontological negation. Which is to say, not nothing as the absence of meaning—absurdist farce, Waiting for Godot—but as the blasting of the meaning and the meaningful that derives from the good and from what we value. I don’t understand how in Kermode that comports with I take as his instruction that we can indeed and should “construct an eschatology.” (His phrase.)

I take you comments about the unarticulated primeval pattern. And I’ll think further about what you have said about that in letting him off the hook, as you put it. But wanting him to give some content to it is different from insisting that intangibility requires measurement, which is part of no claim or argument I’m making. He does in fact articulate thematic subsets of apocalyptic thinking. But what he’s referring to as the “primeval pattern”—one pattern as I read him—underlying the different songs sung by the “golden bird”, I’m not certain. Plus I read him to be asserting the existence of the “primeval pattern” as a claim about the world. I’m left very uncertain about this and tend to think that it does not square with his account of tragedy descending into farce.

Sorry for all the highfalutin verbiage. I have no business being obscure and unclear and particularly when I'm accusing Kermode of that.

I'm just saying, trying to say, that Kermode speaks on the hand of unfathomable evil and of our sense of a world without an imminent end, that, rather, we sense terrible loss and contingency in every moment of our lives--immanence and crisis.

The circle I can't square is how he talks like this on the one hand and talks about constructing an "eschatology" on the other, constructing, that is to say, "... a doctrine concerning the ultimate or final things, such as death, the destiny of humanity, the Second Coming, or the Last Judgment."

I find that an abiding contradiction running through Kermode's first lecture.

Roger:

I found the chapter very clear over-all, if a little fancy and allusive, and the only thing I really disliked was the phrase "in the middest," though I can't think of a better one.

Kermode is trying to persuade an educated secular audience which believes that it is relatively free of myths (which are reserved for the religious primarily) that their thinking is permeated by at least one myth that very sophisticated novelists try to escape, but which is, finally inescapable. One can say that one does not structure one's sense of things by stories with beginnings middles and ends but such thinking seems quite built in.

Thus the imminence-immanence idea is about how what might appear not to fit the idea that we are always making stories, what it does is to move the end to the moment. That seems very right to me. When I say, as I routinely do, that some event that is taken to be deeply meaningful should not be taken so seriously, I am usually met with something like hostility, since not taking it as a a crisis deprives it of meaning, empties things out.

So, the current economic "crisis" is just another case of people not knowing the consequences of their actions and we will make more or less satisfactory adjustments, and life will go on pretty much before but with some changes that appear significant and may or may not be. That is a dead bore, and I am uninterested in the actual historical detail, so there is nothing much left to care about. Of course there is the immediate urgency of the doing for those who are historical actors, and when something happens in my life I feel all the urgency, anxiety, etc, that goes with being troubled. But I always suspect myself and others when we try to make sense of what we do in these matters, and I try to focus on whether the action contemplated is the right one, and since that is usually determined by things I cannot be aware of (it just seems the right thing to do) there is no story.

The centrality of story to fictions is long established, and Kermode sees fictions as secular versions of myths, and I agree; they are little bits of coherence and a coherence that is understood to be fictional, instead of the big myths which are taken to be true. Kermode thus carries on the process of making us self-conscious even as he knows that we can nevef quite out-smart ourselves and give up the need for making what is contingent into something coherent.

Itzik's points:

1. I did not think Kermode was much concerned with an ur-pattern, despite the passage quoted. Does that just refer to beginning, middle and end, as the pattern, ie one without content?

2. I didn't understand this "contradiction." I thought he was trying to say that we deal more in crisis talk (like the coming mid-term election, the current down-turn, etc.) than end of the world talk (though the environmental movement has some of that).

The "cure" for such thinking when it comes to reality (not fictions where one enjoys the story), is detailed history, which always dissolves the big pictures, and makes the world seem contingent, and yet we are responsible for making it, which is very uncomfortable.

And so the lecture ends.

Roger and Me:

Me: Roger, on some of what you said:
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Quoting Roger: “Kermode is trying to persuade an educated secular audience which believes that it is relatively free of myths (which are reserved for the religious primarily) that their thinking is permeated by at least one myth that very sophisticated novelists try to escape, but which is, finally inescapable.”

Me: What is that myth? Or, perhaps, what’s an example of one of these myths. Is there some text in the lecture that makes this clear?

Roger: There is no single myth. The classic example would be the Christian story, but Marx's account of things is another. The Greek and Romans had a bunch. Secular people tend to believe that they are not under the sway of such stories in their view of things.
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Quoting Roger: “One can say that one does not structure one's sense of things by stories with beginnings middles and ends but such thinking seems quite built in.”
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Me: I’m missing this. I understand what you are saying but surely it’s not true about how we are in the world. Surely we structure our sense of things, our experiences, by thinking about the linear passing of time through them. I can’t imagine thinking about, making sense of, our experiences in the world otherwise.


Roger: Kermode and I disagree. We structure things with stories. The people in your divorce cases had conflicting stories about what happened. I don't think of time passign through my experences, time is just the dimension in which stories occur. (However, sometimes when things happen in a certain way, we say, "I feel like I am in a movie," meaning, I think, that normally we don't feel like part of a plot and it feels unnatural when that happens. That should modify Kermode's claim that we always see ourselves inside a story.
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Quoting Roger: “Thus the imminence-immanence idea is about how what might appear not to fit the idea that we are always making stories, what it does is to move the end to the moment. That seems very right to me.”
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Me: This is unclear to me. I’m not sure of what you are saying. Apart from me not getting clearly your point, my understanding of the imminent/immanent distinction for Kermode is that when we know no longer believe in magical ends, like the Apocalypse, we lose our sense of imminence, of the End, of the lesser importance of our lives in relation to the End, and given the terrible, impossible-to-take-in, evil of our world, and our understanding of our temporality, and our contingency, we experience our lives as a series of crises, every moment a kind of end, hence the move from imminence to immanence.

Roger: I think the point was (and I do not defend it) that the sense of crisis is a sort of mini-version of the sense of apocalypse, ie apocalypse now. It is the typical modern version of apocalyptic thinking. The day after the crisis we move on to the next one, just like people are undaunted by the fact that the end did not come when predicted. So crisis is a present apocalypse. (Now not about to me, immanent not imminent.)
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quoting Roger: “When I say, as I routinely do, that some event that is taken to be deeply meaningful should not be taken so seriously, I am usually met with something like hostility, since not taking it as a a crisis deprives it of meaning, empties things out.” So, the current economic "crisis" is just another case of people not knowing the consequences of their actions and we will make more or less satisfactory adjustments, and life will go on pretty much before but with some changes that appear significant and may or may not be. That is a dead bore, and I am uninterested in the actual historical detail, so there is nothing much left to care about. Of course there is the immediate urgency of the doing for those who are historical actors, and when something happens in my life I feel all the urgency, anxiety, etc, that goes with being troubled. But I always suspect myself and others when we try to make sense of what we do in these matters, and I try to focus on whether the action contemplated is the right one, and since that is usually determined by things I cannot be aware of (it just seems the right thing to do) there is no story.”
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Me: Well, I get what you routinely do and what bores you, though I’d think some of that might depend on things like the event, who’s affected by it and how. But whatever you routinely do, you do. In any event, though, this, as I just tried to note, doesn’t seem to me to be what Kermode is talking about concerning crisis. If you mean that it is, might you point me to some clarifying text?

Roger: On a personal level: My wife and I have a fight, I have a story about why I am angry, she has a story about why that is not justified. Neither can be proven, but we need them. But. what matters is how we manage to get beyond the story battle, and restore good relations. If we get trapped in the stories there is no resolution. I think many people think about poltitics as conflciting stories and they engage in endless different accounts, but what matters is how the community manages to live together, the laws, which make it possible to move on and not fight about who is right. This is me not Kermode.
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Quoting Roger: Itzik's points

1.I did not think Kermode was much concerned with an ur-pattern, despite the passage quoted. Does that just refer to beginning, middle and end, as the pattern, ie one without content.”
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Me: Gee, I thought he was quite concerned with it. In fact I thought it underpinned his entire lecture, the notion of the primeval pattern underlying the golden bird’s notes. I don’t have his book open now but doesn’t he start his first lecture by quoting the poem that has the golden bird singing? Also why need we guess at what he takes the "primeval pattern" to be? Can’t he just spill those beans?

Roger: “2. I didn't understand this "contradiction." I thought he was trying to say that we deal more in crisis talk (like the coming mid-term election, the current down-turn, etc.) than end of the world talk (though the environmental movement has some of that).”

Me: Well, what does he mean by saying we have the means to—and I think he’s saying we should— “construct an eschatology”? Again, I have a different understanding of what he means by crisis, and still don’t know how we construct that thing when we have, as I read this lecture, foregone any understanding of a theory of ends.