Critic of Crisis

CRITIC OF CRISIS 543 desire for literary and economic substance and staying power - that, I believe, is where its wistfulness comes from. This doubleness of desire is generally the circumstance of Stevens's writing, but circumstance only; not explanation.' This statement, which speaks of something being produced by something else, and then denies that this is an explanation, reflects the doubleness of Lentricchia's own position throughout the book: contrary to his own stated aims, he too suffers from the desire to explain everything by one thing; but he also suffers from a perhaps incompatible desire - the wish to criticize others for the systematic attempt to theorize in the first place. Critic of Crisis GREIG HENDERSON Jan Gorak. Critic of Crisis: A Study of Frank Kermode A Literary Frontiers Edition, no. 30 University of Missouri Press 1987. 106. us $7.95 paper From the historical revisionism of Romantic Image (1957) to the post-structuralist jouissance of The Genesis ofSecrecy (1979) and Forms ofAttention (1985), the works of Frank Kermode exemplify many of the significant trends in contemporary criticism and theory. As Jan Gorak suggests in this excellent study, Kermode, 'an unrepentant synthetist' with a dauntingly encyclopaedic range of interests, is above all a critic of crisis. Gorak persuasively argues that Kermode is a typologist rather than a historian of modernity, an essayist who combines the literary expertise of a professional academic with the cultural rapacity of an inveterate bookman. As readers of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction are well aware, Kermode privileges and apotheosizes fiction, yet his pervasive attitude of clerkly scepticism would seem to endorse an epistemological and moral relativism that threatens to undermine his self-conscious celebration of pluralism. Ifthe history ofthe novelis really a history ofthe anti-novel, and ifeach kind of narrative demands its own form of attention, then how can pluralism be anything but a eulogistic name for nihilism? This is not Kermode's dilemma alone; it is the dilemma of modernism and post-modernism in general. Looking at the overall shape of Kermode's career, Gorak incisively points out that 'in The Genesis ofSecrecy, Kermode looks on a world consisting ofnothing more than a network of codes and ideologies. The critic who began his career as a student of the modern by destroying the historicity ofthe myth of dissociation [Romantic Image] now sees history itself dissolve into a series of mythologies and coercive fictions.' Moreover, in Forms of Attention, Gorak goes on to say, Kermode 'allows equal validity to all perspectives that critical attention could conceivably bring,' an interpretive egalitarianism whose emphasis on diverse and often contradictory forms of attention 'removes both text and critic from history.' The progression of Kermode's ideas is thus symptomatic of developments in contemporary theory, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 544 GREIG HENDERSON but in spite of the topicality ofhis concerns, his works have spawned no disciples. He bequeaths neither a theory nor a vocabulary, just a series of dazzlingly virtuoso performances, eloquent testimonies to his central contention that crisis and schism are the root conditions of modernity. Kermode's first book, Romantic Image, is an exercise in historical revisionism. Unlike Harold Bloom, who posits an alternative tradition to Eliot's self-professed classicism, Kermode argues that the valorization of the image - propagated by Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Hulme, and others - is in fact continuous with the Romantic tradition. While recognizing the psychologicalattractiveness ofmyths of catastrophe such as Eliot's notion of the dissociation of sensibility, Kermode attacks their historical validity and questions the high valuation placed upon the imagemaking powers of the mind at the expense of its rational powers. Gorak supports Kermode's dismantling of the imagination/reality antithesis but judiciously notes that to see Wordsworth as 'an alienated image-maker trapped in the torture chamber ofhis solitary craft' is to overstate the case and to confuse similitude with identity, a tendency in Kermode that Gorak rightly criticizes. Nevertheless, Kermode's conclusion seems irrefragable. 'That the idea of cultural dissociation had its origins in the minds of poets rather than in the events of history,' Gorak writes, 'scarcely permits dispute.' As Kermode perceptively argues, well before...