138
REUBEN A. BROWER
Caracalla became fulfilled as those vast columns lay about
in
ruins, the
great roof open to the night sky.
Mr. Silver includes in his collection pictures of all sorts .of buildings
which had to disappear for very good reason. Everybody who is old
enough may miss in it some favorite image, while yet having mixed feel–
ings about the substance of the elusive shadow. I think of the Third
Avenue El, for example; the book has a good shot of a stretch of the
Bowery, but none of those amazing double-storied and occasionally
crocketted-and-finialed express stations, with their looping rise and fall
of track. Perhaps
if
the El hadn't gone, pushing people off it might
have been a popular juvenile sport of the early sixties. And of course,
being grateful for such kinds of small favor is a measure of the despera–
tion of some aspects of hope for city life.
It
is only what happens to
those hopes which will determine whether this book of pictures
is
to
have been anything more than an illuminated
memento mori.
John
Hollander
IN DEFENSE OF ORDER
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING: Studies in the Theory of Fic:tion. By
Frank Kermode. Oxford University Press. $5.75.
Not many years ago, R. P. Blackmur, wntmg of James,
reminded his readers that "the criticism of the novel .. . has yet to reach
maturity - a lack here sorely felt; and a lack you will feel for yourselves
if you will think of the relatively much greater maturity of the criticism
of poetry." In
The Sense of an Ending,
Frank Kermode undertakes to
meet this lack, one of the few attempts in English to outline a general
theory of fiction that might serve as the basis for a more mature criticism
of the novel. Kermode is concerned with "fiction" in its most "radical"
form, in a sense that he illustrates - to take three random examples–
from Richards, Wallace Stevens and Hans Vahinger, who seems to have
had a direct influence on Stevens. The concept of "fiction," if not the
term, and the implied attitudes toward truth and belief that go with it,
are familiar to readers of James, Bridgman and many more or less
popular writers on semantics in the thirties and the forties. Definition by
citing a cloud of witnesses - the kind I have been indulging in - is
characteristic of the more theoretical chapters of
The Sense of an Ending.
Kermode's study is yet another reminder that we live in the second
great Age of Analogy, which derives indirectly from the first. It is al-
