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romantic, divinatory alternative: "We cannot emigrate from our histor–
ical moment. ... There has to
be
trickery. And we interpret always as
transients ... our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a
momentary radiance.... "
This is in part a defense of the values of intensity not so different
from the position of Kermode's earlier, well known study,
Romantic
Image
(1957), which takes as its credo "a belief in the Image as a radiant
truth out of space and time, and in the necessary isolation and
estrangement of men who can perceive it." Already here truth is
conceived in opposition to scientific or discursive modes, while the
artist is seen as a kind of Dionysian priest, burdened with irreconcilable
differences. The poem is valued as a precarious "victory," in Yeatsian
parlance, over all that is loose and contingent, all battered kettles at the
heel. Arguing for a continuity between nineteenth and twentieth
century poetry,
Roma'l'ltic Image
helped to make Symbolist mytholo–
gies familiar to the clerisy.
Since then, like the rest of the English-speaking world, Kermode
has stayed attuned to continental influences.
In
The Genesis of Secrecy,
he makes use of not only a wide range of New Testament exegesis, but
also current theory of narrative (Jean Starobinski, A.-
J.
Greimas) and
modern philosophical hermeneutics (H.G. Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur).
His view of reading as conversation or
translatio,
explicitly contrasted
with the pre-eminent rationalist view of E.D. Hirsch, appears particu–
larly indebted to Gadamer's work on the problem of self–
understanding: "To understand a text is to come
to
understand oneself
in a kind of dialogue. . . . [The interpreter] must take up into himself
what is said
to
him in such fashion that it speaks and finds an answer
in the words of his own language."
The modern idea of interpretation, from Gadamer to Derrida, is
specifically rooted in Heidegger's obscure discourse about language, or
"linguisticality," according
to
which the world for each of us is always
already given in the realm of language, for we come to think and act
only in that realm. All the work of the hand, he can say, is silent
speech. Nietzsche had reasoned that for a fact to exist we must first
introduce meaning, and Heidegger, harking back to Parmenides,
considers that language is "the house of Being,"
about
it in the way
that a house is about its space, sustaining and sheltering, but also
"calling" and bodying it forth. To be is to dwell. Husserl's idea of
intention is interpreted ontologically, to the exclusion of the Cartesian
or transcendental ego, so that now, for Heidegger, "language speaks
us." A being is an expression, an articulation: a text.
If
we are not
