“The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity, is to an incalculable extent a history of error.” So writes Frank Kermode of a history to which he has contributed many luminous pages. This book is a record of Kermode’s “error,” his wandering through literature past and present. He notes that “in thirty-odd years I have written several hundred reviews, an example I would strongly urge the young not to follow.” From these hundreds Kermode has selected the pieces he treasures most, and they provide an example that indeed will be difficult to follow.
The Uses of Error contains some of Kermode’s very best writing. Again and again he proves himself to be more than a commentator or chronicler; he is rather a creator of cultural value in his interaction with the texts at hand. The appeal of this book is broad. Everything is here from Augustine to Aries on death and dying, from Wilde to Woolf and writer’s block, from Joachim of Fiore to Flaubert’s Parrot. In a phrase or an aside on any of these subjects Kermode can open a vista, wither a reputation, or spotlight an intellectual mantrap.
The core of the volume is a group of essays on the central figures of modern English literature. Kermode tells more here—about Tennyson, Shaw, Forster, and Eliot—than most people could in twice the space. His brief, vivid, and sympathetic writings extol the range of British writing and mark out the difference between an interest that is solely academic and the richer view of one who writes from inside the culture and shares a common experience with its interpreters.
There is also Kermode the man. He saves a set of autobiographical essays until the end, and they are a veritable dessert for those who read the volume straight through. But they will stand first in the reader’s memory afterward, because they give body to the mind so clearly in evidence throughout the book. Kermode shows us the means by which he gained the perspective to become a transnational critic—not a critic on the margin, but one who shows us where the margins are. For anyone who is not yet familiar with Frank Kermode’s work, this is the place to begin. For those who are already acquainted with it, here is the chance to see the pattern of the whole.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
I
Augustine
Joachim of Fiore
Deciphering the Big Book
The Lattimore Version
Sacred Space: Christian Verse
Beethoven at Home
II
Fighting Freud
Freud is Better in German
Work and Play
Sic Transit Marshall McLuhan
Philippe Ariès' Bumper Book of Death
Paul de Man's Abyss
Talking about Doing: The Deconstructionists and the New Historicists
III
Frances Yates and Imperial Secrets
Roy Strong: Policy and Pageantry
Protestant Poetry
How Do You Spell Shakespeare?
Shakespeare for the Eighties
IV
Grandeur and Filth: The Victorian Cities
Tennyson's Nerves
Victorian Vocations: Frederic Harrison and Leslie Stephen
Squalor: On George Gissing
A Little of this Honey: Oscar Wilde
Georgian Eyes are Smiling: Shaw and Conrad in Their Letters
V
Wells's Ladder
Forster and Maurice
Yes, Santa, There is a Virginia
The Feast of St Thomas
Poetry à la Mode
On William Gerhardie
The Essential Orwell
Half-Way Up the Hill: The Young John Betjeman
Connolly's World
Oldham to Blackheath: Roy Fuller
Remembering the Movement
Obsessed with Obsession: Julian Barnes
Losers: Anita Brookner
The Horse of the Baskervilles: Umberto Eco
VI
The Faces of Man
The Men From Man
My Formation
A Stroll Around the Block
On Being an Enemy of Humanity
The Uses of Error
