Frank Kermode
THE NEW APOCALYPTISTS
((
. after us, the Savage God
..."
-w.
B.
YEATS
There must be a link between the forms of literature and
other ways in which, to quote Erich Auerbach, "we try to give some
kind of order and design to the past, the present and the future." One
of these ways is crisis. When you read, as you must almost every pas–
sing day, that ours
is
the great age of crisis-technological, military,
cultural-you may well simply nod and proceed calmly to your busi–
ness; for this assertion, upon which a multitude of important books is
founded, is nowadays no more surprising than the opinion that the
earth is round. There seems to me to be some danger in this situation,
if
only because such a myth, uncritically accepted, tends like prophecy
to shape a future to confirm it. Nevertheless crisis, however facile the
conception, is inescapably a central element in our endeavors toward
making sense of our world.
It
seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking
about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in
an
extraordinary relation to it. The time is not free, it is the slave of
a mythical end. We
think
of our own crisis as preeminent, more worry–
ing, more interesting than other crises. Mr. McLuhan, to take one
instance of importance to students of the arts, places us at the
interesting moment of what he thinks of as a galactic interpenetra–
tion. Auerbach found the driving force for his powerful synoptic phil-
