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PARTISAN REVIEW
wrapped up in the personal, we may be played by the emergent subject
matter, "what is said," as players are played by the game. The thinker
must cultivate a no doubt politically suspect readiness, must learn
to
listen. For what is said inevitably leads back behind itself, carries
implications or subtexts. The problem of language becomes the
problem of "the unsaid," and Heidegger looks
to
etymology for
revealing the budlike essences of things as they are evoked in words. In
the digging for etymons, he rediscovers an ancient originary burden
running through the most ordinary language ("figuring things out").
Henceforth no speech is without its secrecy. Word and world appear
necessarily multidimensional, and the interpreter-etymologically
akin to the peddler and the prostitute-must negotiate with distance.
Heidegger's conception of truth as
aletheia,
or unconcealment–
more precisely, a reciprocal play of Lethe and Aletheia assumed to be
more primary than propositional or mathematical truth-decisively
informs Kermode's approach to narrative. He asks whether narratives
are not always in some degree hermetically opaque and reticent, the
vehicles of "simultaneous pIOclamation and concealment." Like
dreams and riddles, they call for interpretative completion, even as they
love to hide. The text is
to
be understood as a "hermeneutic potential,"
the bundled plural meanings of which get actualized by readers who
can never know for sure if they are on the inside or the outside. A
sophisticated reading will probe beyond the literal and commonplace
"carnal" significance to one more "spiritual" -which generally
means, for Kermode, more allegorical or typological. As with
happy and unhappy families, "carnal readings are much the same
[while] spiritual readings are all different" -but this is perhaps
to
underestimate, or "forget," the varieties and depths of the carnal.
Such spiritual or antimimetic bias is usually countered in Ker–
mode's work by a native pragmatism and common sense, a confidence
in "the
lingua franca
of reality" and in the traditions of authority and
civility associated with Latin civilization, what Eliot called "the mind
of Europe. " The " provincial " and revolutionary aesthetic theology of
Nietzsche and Heidegger is accommodated into, and kept in check by, a
distinctly British institutionalism, a tacit faith in the canonical and
hermeneutic sanctions of the professional community. Interpretation
is controlled above all by a sense of propriety, which entails an
educated awareness of generic probabilities, the set of expectations
. exterior
to
a text which enabl e us
to
follow that text, whether it is a
sentence, a book, or a life." Competence in a reader is loosely predi–
cated on familiarity with literary conventions, along with instinctive
