Points of Interest in Kermode & Lewis

Although there is no connection between them that I can think of, I’d like to post about some brief comments in two different books I’ve been reading the past couple of days. The first was a rather disappointing error. At the Half Price Books 20%-off Memorial Day sale, I picked up a copy of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue, the published edition of the 1965 Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College given by Frank Kermode. Having always enjoyed Kermode’s work, I felt let down when I noticed the words ‘Greek Orthodoxy’ while skimming through and stopped to read the following: ‘The Book of Revelation made its way only slowly into the canon—it is still unacceptable to Greek Orthodoxy—perhaps because of learned mistrust of over-literal interpretation of the figures.’ [1] I guess I thought it was a matter of common knowledge that, first, Revelation can be seen as part of the Eastern canon as early as St Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter in 367, and, second, the only reason one might think otherwise is that it was never included in the Eastern lectionary.

The other thing I came across was of a happier sort. In a piece written as an introductory chapter to a book that was never completed, ‘De Audiendis Poetis’, C.S. Lewis is arguing against the view that the power of the wondrous tales—which he calls ‘ferlies’—found in Mediæval literature is always derived from primitive myths and rituals in which the tales had their origin. In response to this view, Lewis writes:

The myth or rite does not always (it may sometimes) seem to me superior or equal in interest to the romancer’s ferly. The cauldron of the Celtic underworld seems to me a good deal less interesting than the Grail. The tests and ordeals—often nasty enough—through which savages, like schoolboys, put their juniors interest me less than the testing of Gawain in Gawain & the Green Knight. In tracing the ferly’s imaginative potency to such origins you are therefore asking me to believe that something which moves me much is enabled to do so by the help of something which moves me little or not at all. If after swallowing a quadruple whiskey I said ‘I’m afraid I’m rather drunk’, and you replied, ‘That’s because, while you weren’t looking, someone put half a teaspoonful of Lager beer into it’, I do not think your theory would be at all plausible. [2]

I thought Lewis’s analogy with the quadruple whiskey simply wonderful.


[1] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford U, 2000), p. 7.

[2] C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Literature, collected by Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2008), pp. 14-5.