Criticism for Frank Kermode is the articulation of assumptions, a sort of phenomenology of interpretative need. Its job, as he says in The Sense of an Ending (1967), is 'making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives'. It involves close reading, discriminations of value, a practised affection for old and new texts, but its chief quarry is the turn of a culture's mind, one of those trains of thought which Conrad thought could not be false - because even when they look horribly false they are embedded in arguments or entailments we need to believe are true. 'I thought I could see a new way of looking at certain assumptions,' Kermode says in Romantic Image (1957). He could; he did; and he has kept doing it. The world, he says at the end of The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), 'is our beloved codex':

LRB 9 May 1996 | PDF Download