140
REUBEN A. BROWER
of the world," to the Garden of Adonis is obvious, although use of the
term adds little to our understanding not covered by the "kind of
eternity" inherent in "the generative cycle." On the other hand, the
account of Shakespearean tragedy is blurred rather than clarified by use
of the same concept.
King Lear,
we are told, "is the tragedy of sempi–
temity; apocalypse is translated out of time into the
aevum."
And are
we helped to an understanding of Macbeth's tragedy by the statement
that "the choice of angelic or divine time was his presumption ...
"?
For this reader
The Sense ot an Ending
wakes up and becomes a
different sort of book with the fourth chapter, "The Modern Apocalypse,"
when Kermode leaves such direct "translations" behind. The chapter
seems to belong almost to another critic, the author of
The Romantic
Image.
Kermode makes a clear and convincing distinction between "the
traditionalist modernism" that "we associate with Pound and Yeats,
Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce," and the
rec~nt
"tradition of
the New," represented by Sartre, William Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet.
As might be expected, the criticism of Yeats is most impressive, par–
ticularly of the fictions of his System. Kermode now begins to use
lan–
guage that implies some standard other than a more or less consciously
assumed fiction. He speaks with approval of Yeats's distrust of "justice,"
of the order we impose on the "irreducible" reality: Yeats "understood
very well the need for that 'moral element in poetry' which is 'the means
whereby' it is 'accepted into the social order and becomes a part of life.' "
After illustrating the " triumph" of mere novelty in recent avant-garde
novels, Kermode comes out for "the humanly needed order we call
form," and insists on the duty of the critic to stand up for it, while not
forgetting "the true nature of our fictions." In his interesting analysis
of Sartre's
La Nausee,
he characterizes it as a novel that "reflects a
philosophy it must, in so far as it possesses novel form, belie."
In other words, as Kermode gets farther away from his theoretical
or analogical chapters, he begins to talk in more traditional critical
language and
in
terms of values not to be accounted for by his theory
of fiction. Though we may grant that any verbal formulation of
experience is fictional, we also must agree that when we speak of "the
humanly needed
order we call form," (my italics ) we are speaking of
demands and satisfactions anterior in experience and importance to
fictional ordering. We are back with Yeats,
Where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
A theory of fiction, and
10
particular, a theory of the novel, must
recognize its dependence on a theory of value, if only by directly
