purejuice

Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/18/frank-kermode-dies-aged-90

I would like to dip the flag in honor of the passing of the literary scholar and critic Frank Kermode. He introduced, in the 1960s, French theory to Anglophones, and thus arguably all the Afro pomo homo jargons which disfigure American academic discourse to this day.

While Kermode (and the rest of the Brits) moved on from theory, in a 1980 memo the Americans seem not to have gotten, American academics seem to have found in its lost-in-translation-Frenchie-perplexities, the perfect expression of pomposity that their strange practice of identity politics seems to require. I don't know what it is, but American academics are notorious in other academic quarters for their provincial, not to say Kingfish-ian pomposity, their shitty education, complete lack of good pedagogical manners, an over-familiarity with theoretical rhetoric which renders their writing and speaking styles absolutely impenetrable, and -- that odd jargon which is one manifestation of, I think, the identity politics demeanor which requires real narcissism. A Spielbergian I'm ready for my close up appears to be the subtheme even of the extremely brilliant and heroic but strangely clueless academics like Judith Butler, famous for sniggery drag king journalism on the side, who is perhaps America's number one academic star.

Kermode was not of this ilk. On the side, he founded newspapers.

The son of a storekeeper and a farm girl, in a society where this matters so deeply he was given a knighthood, Kermode wrote or edited 50 books in as many years. He helped found the progressive and erudite London Review of Books, to which you should subscribe in honor of his death. The NYRB is dreck compared to this. If you are a fan of real Marxist criticism, which I am, because it is smarter than me, and full of what Bob Woodward calls holy shit! news, you owe it to yourself to read the LRB. Kermode was a founder, and wrote for it very frequently in a perfectly accessible fluid and demotic English that was completely uncondescending and yet communicated with precision very sophisticated and complex insights into a wildly democratic range of subjects. He is not the perfect stylist, perhaps, but the perfect teacher, or literary journalist, with that enviable British manner of writing as if it were his native tongue. Yes. I think it was Kermode, in his edit of the Riverside Shakespeare, of which, if you wish to understand the language we share which divides us, you also owe yourself a copy, who notes that where Racine employs a vocabulary of 3,000 words, Shakespeare has 27,000. Long story short, it's for reasons like this -- Anglo Saxon plus Latin, a mongrel mix forbidden by the French Academy -- from MacBeth II, ii:

57 Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
58 Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
59 The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
60 Making the green one red.

Kermode was possibly the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the 20th century, including the anti-semite T. S. Eliot, who was also a brilliant scholar of Shaespeare; the demotics found one another and the warmth of their understanding honors both of them.

RIP, Frank Kermode. With your friend Shakespeare.