The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative

By Frank Kermode

Book Overview

"Brilliant...this book should encourage more literary critics to pick up their Bibles."--Howard Eiland, Partisan Review

The celebrated critic deciphers the cryptic passages and concealed meanings in literature sacred and profane.

In a passage from the Gospel of Mark that has spawned more exegetical disputes than perhaps any other, the disciples question Jesus about why he so often speaks in parables. "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God," he replies, "but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand." The ostensible meaning of this passage seems shockingly unchristian: the true sense of Jesus's stories--their secret--is reserved for the elect, for the insiders. Outsiders be damned.

In The Genesis of Secrecy, the prolific Frank Kermode draws upon this and other enigmatic passages in the Gospels to interrogate the fraught relationship between proclaimed meaning and concealed mystery, both in the New Testament and in modern secular literature. A resolute outsider to the rules and canons of Biblical exegesis, he asks how it is that textual dislocations or contradictory narrative elements are imbued with the grandeur of secret meaning. Departing from the Bible, he also asks what the art of interpretation looks like in a secular world, when the lines separating heresy from orthodoxy have become increasingly blurred.

Moving effortlessly between Scripture, philosophical hermeneutics, narrative theory, and twentieth-century literature from Joyce to Pynchon, Kermode concludes, pessimistically, that esoteric truths of the text are glimpsed but never finally revealed. Divination begets further divination. Secrecy remains "the source of the interpreter's pleasures, but also of his necessary disappointment."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674345355
• ISBN13: 9780674345355
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A literary look at the Gospel of Mark

Kermode makes no bones about the fact that his interest in the Gospel of Mark is literary--not doctrinal, historical, or theological. These lectures from the late 1970s are still fresh and insightful. And they are as much an exploration of what it means to interpret a literary work as they are an examination of the Evangelist's text and methods. To do so he takes side-trips into Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, as well as into a little-known novel by Henry Green ("Party Going"). These are not idle excursions; Kermode's lectures are eloquent and tightly reasoned. In the end, his position is philosophical rather than aesthetic for he asserts that to live is to interpret. "We glimpse the secrecy through the meshes of the text; this is divination, but what is divined is what is visible from our angle.... When we come to relate [the] part to the whole, the divined glimmer to the fire we suppose to be its source, we see why Hermes is the patron of so many other trades besides interpretation. There has to be trickery. And we interpret always as transients--of whom he is also patron--both in the book and in the world which resembles the book. For the world is our beloved codex." And like all good philosphical writing, Kermode's lectures are worth studying closely and reading over and over again.

A Man for All Seasons

This is a brilliant work on the narrative complexity of the Gospels--brilliant in both its hermeneutics and semiotics. What is especially valuable is the level of comprehension. Kermode does not resort to lofty diatribes to further enshroud the delicate polemics of biblical narrative, but instead relies on varied and astute scholarship which he communicates clearly to almost any reader. A wonderful resource for narrative theory in general to understand how meaning is related and hidden.

A Great Resource

Kermode's book has the rare trait of combining academic insight with easy accessibility. Unlike much modern criticism, it asks why we interpret texts rather than merely describing how we (should) do it. The examples are clear and appropriate. The secular view of scripture may put off some, but Kermode's insight into the narrative structure of the Bible will prove useful even to those who don't share his views. The chapter comparing Mark's gospel to James Joyce's Ulysses is a classic, and is especially useful for use in beginning literature classes