frank kermode, pleasure & change: the aesthetics of canon — review
if readerly pleasure actually determines what goes into the canon, we're more screwed than otherwise understood
the general thesis seems like almost totally not related to the causal mechanism that impacts what works get decided to be canon or not. canonical works may cause predominantly pleasurable reading experiences across the board, but they hardly seem selected for this criteria, even if it it commonly happens to end up involving it.
the work seems to imply that there is a second order process that selects on top of the political one. but if anything that then is a meta-political process, one where, from an already extremely biased selection of pieces, an additional "atemporal general satisfaction guarantee" must be met by the work. if anything, this is an even more brutal canonization than if institutions alone ordered canonicity. the author should hope that aesthetic judgements happen before the main political process, so that at the very least certain works can "slip through" the crack. the post-political aesthetic process has a different political character than the pre-political one, if anything, there is an implied politicization of every aesthetic process that follows a general academic-student readership of canonical works, the equivalent of attempting to gain pleasure in the implied desecration of a wider literary field.
unfortunately, kermode assumes that aesthetic pleasure acts as a post-institutional filter on the canon. in fact, it can even be argued that this aesthetic pleasure process is itself not just a support of the political process but an even worse political process on its own. criteria such as "expectations that are both frustrated and fulfilled that appeal to a wider base of readers" actually indicates that the narratives proposed by canonical works arent just political in the sense that powerful entities have reasons to sponsor them, in fact, this actually seems like a far less biased lens to see it through than the idea that either certain narratives are structured in an appealing way and therefore promoted regardless of the content behind them, or that, even worse than this option, that certain narratives are appealing because of the content irregardless of the structure, where the content only contains minor total differences from a similar piece that when viewed as a totality offers a far more nuanced view.
the idea here is that when artistic value itself becomes an observable cliche or trope, it is evaluated based on a spectacular metric that, when treated almost like an object of fetish, reads like an automatically finished story that is appealing because of some unrelated tenants to the work itself, with the additional satisfaction of actually offering some more primal original satisfaction-in-detail that broader works offer. it is often said that canonical works are reduced to basic propositions or generalizations and vulgarized in the popular readership so that they can become easily digested, but there may be a bunch of secondary explanations, such as that the readership intentionally selects for narratives that can more easily be simplified or compromised, or serve as "general totems" for whole variations of similar ideas that then are packed into one work supposed to represent or stand for all of them.
what the aesthetic theory can reveal is that simultaneously the aesthetization of the works when applied demographically reveals a failure to engage with the fundamental mode-of-art of a certain work, or that the readership is biased towards treating the artworks like something that is only valuable when it achieves a very rare but arbitrary frame that is applied by-chance-of-simplicity (by chance of the work being one particular way that allows subsumption, or that produces a certain feeling that is then more easily transmissable).
not only that, but the idea that it is something that both fulfills desire and threatens to overwhelm it itself appears like it codifies what type of narrative would be accepted by this common readership, it would appear that narratives that "challenge yet reward the viewer to a degree" are successively favored, which by definition is the least possible nuanced position a piece of "literary art" can take. in fact, by definition, tension is something that is supposed to be irreconcilable rather than standardized and applied across a wide frame, it is either a domestification of tension or a pre-production of tension, one doesnt look good for the audience, the other doesnt look good for the writers.
the only positive aspect of the affective interpretation is affective range, that there are certain subtleties in the work that produce a more complex emotional response that is written into the work in the form of a subtetly, this looks like something that an author can actually work on and improve inside of irregardless of audience feedback. the "poem’s own strange atmosphere" line is also very telling, a canonical work by definition is selected outside of its broader literary inspiration and used like a fake simulacrum or goalpost to "view" that entire historical period through its general delianations.
the "strange atmosphere" argument is hard to reconcile, since we cannot definitively prove whether this atmosphere is a product of its time (one that is intentionally obfuscated) or whether its inherent characteristics drive it to attempt such an atmosphere. if the latter is the case, that is more the reason for it not to become a canonical work rather than to be heralded as the key to a certain period of time, since in that instance, if the most "curious" object is evaluated, that produces the most possible bias each time. compare this to algorithmic thinking, the logic of platforms proves the way in which selection criteria is consistently weaponized in almost every context to favor random forms and subtle choices over the actual substance of any single work.
in this sense also, kermode's use of murakovsky is quite weak. kermode writes "murakovsky was willing to take account of the changingness in time of poetic works (inevitably so, if only because the storehouse of norms and values is restocked) that continues long after their first serious readers are dead. he did not doubt that aesthetic value changed and might possibly disappear; the important point was that since its source is in the reader, it will in any case be different from one epoch to another.". yet, if political filtering is socially mediated and communally varied through generations, how can there be a seperate aesthetic experience that arises causally from the works, apparently unmediated from the social infrastructure of the time?
the solution to the problem of historicization isnt a structuralism or a biographicalism, it is a requirement that the reader manages to surpress exactly those "pleasurable instincts" that "satisfy" the reading experience as a vocation towards some type of grander or subtler inspiration compared to similar works in the same genre. the idea that sensitivity is exactly what determines canonical work, and that the dulling of sensitivity is actually surpassed by the very peculiar and hard to predict forms that particular pieces take on is very curious, but it also treats both the audience and writers as irrational agents that almost need to be "calmed" by an accidental spirit that comes in and shows them what a real literary work is.
the idea of affect in this text follows kermode's reading of barthes concept of jouissance, a proposed distinction between ordinary reading pleasure and a more disruptive experience that is supposed to impact identity. kermode only makes use of barthes very selectively, which, depending on the type of text can work, without guarantees. in this text it absolutely does not work, because the identity destabilization point literally directly conflicts with the concept of a canon in barthe's own supposed understanding of the idea, if we were to simply read it through his wider post-marxist lense.
in some ways, barthes point does strongly cohere with kermodes, which points to the idea that kermode did indeed account for barthes entirely into his narrative, even if he is only mentioned twice. barthes makes statements such as "it is not the reader's "person" that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire", as well as "and yet: it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives"
yet, in the very same work, "the pleasure of the text", barthes makes sweeping statements such as "no significance (no bliss) can occur, i am convinced, in a mass culture (to be distinguished, like fire from water, from the culture of the masses), for the model of this culture is petit bourgeois" as well as "what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss. culture thus recurs as an edge: in no matter what form." these sentiments entirely dispose of the concept of a canon, even if barthes believes that "grand narrative" texts on their own can contain an experience of bliss that is similarly defined to kermode's uses of it.
if the author was so brave as to actually argue something like this through wordsworth, it would be a far more courageous and forgivable pursuit than this much more lukewarm presentation. also, literary works on average and their reading requires downloading certain "language packs", and by this i don't mean there are certain gnoseological or pedagogical requirements, but rather, the very act of encoding a text into your memory or coming to understand its wording is not predisposed to an organic "meeting" with the text but rather shows how the cost of entering the "private language" of any work in regards to memory is always equal, and as such, the potential satisfaction derived from it cannot be possibly linked directly to the structure of the text as if seperated from the very intentional sacrifices we make to our own epistemology whenever we come to terms with any single text.
there is one more cruical thing to notice about the wordsworth section. other than the fact that it appears entirely out of nowhere and taints the epistemological certainty previously found with a four-page study that only at the end manages to explain how it connects to the central argument rather than during its unfolding, the example that is being used by kermode to exemplify the way in which certain poems cause a feeling of joy yet anguish simultaneously, is actually a thematic example rather than a posteriori structural feature of the affective experience of the poem. kermode argues that maybe certain works of wordsworth did have political contexts, but that these specific poetic examples don't contain such elements, yet, the elements they do contain actually are the worst possible elements to prove his point, since the poem quite literally is about exactly what kermode is trying to argue rather than a structural effect of the consequence of what kermode finds so important in canonical literature.
take a look at the example, a quote directly from wordsworth about his own piece "wordsworth himself insisted, in that strangely agitated letter to sara hutchinson, that the poem is about ‘‘a young poet… overwhelmed by the thought of the miserable reverses that have befallen the happiest of men, viz. poets’’ and about the ‘‘inter position of providence’’ that gave him a measure of resolution and independence, the strength to contemplate a future poverty". and then, once more, the poem itself: "as high as we have mounted in delight / in our dejection do we sink as low.". now, either kermode selected this poem intentionally, in which case his ability to discover something that so neatly fits his narrative so effortlessly is applaudable, or, more likely, he read the poem first, and then essentially arrived at his conclusive narrative by simply directly taking his inspiration and arguing on top of it as if it is his own concern.
the other points of analysis, such as the example where wordsworth intentionally avoids a political controversy surrounding the poem, pointing to the idea that he values the art of sublimity and doesn't want to weigh it down, are much more productive to what kermode is talking about than the actual example itself. otherwise, kermode should at the very least have to boil his argument all the way down to a very selective criterium "a few particular de-politicized poems (instead of all literary works) make their way into the canon, if already attached to an iconic figure, and if the controversy or social discourse surrounding them doesn't manage to outweigh their supposed cultural benefit", an argument much more fair to the point
it must however be noted that kermode is offering a weak phenomenological observation about readerly experience, but he quietly lets it slide toward a stronger explanatory claim about canonical value. since he is suggesting a property many canonical works seem to share, it is not necessarily the case that kermode is trying to unlock the base causal mechanism behind canonical formation itself.
yet, at the same time, the structures of text definitely does determine which text can be considered satisfactory in nature, take the words of the introduction of this very same work, where robert alter critiques kermode's point in this very obvious yet necessary manner "the obvious problem is that not all canonical works are expres sions of the sublime. two large categories of literature that include many eminent canonical texts have very little to do with the sublime and cannot be linked with the experience of loss or dismay except by a long interpretive stretch". alter goes on to mention jane austen and her social criticism, and then goes on to mention particular comedies that are unlike joyce's ulysses or more reverant work, but rather, ones that produce a mood that isnt "synthesized in its tension" the way kermode describes. what is odd here is in fact that the most obvious example, theoretically advanced material (with its "late sublimity") is never described as the much obvious anti-sublime yet intellectually profound option.
the idea that abstractions can destabilize your identity if you contemplate them or reflect on them well enough and if they're built for the task in a way that actually works suggests that any work can produce this effect as long as it doesn't confirm your own perspective biases, which is never actually required by canonical works, most of which tend to in fact resemble either the most painstaking and intentionally tame collections of thought throughout history, or ones that are intentionally librarian instead of adventurous, making it seem as if political selection has far more to do with which works are contemplated over which other ones.
in all cases, a canonical work must be powerful and representative in its very existence, and as such, not only does it have to be a fetish object (as discussed previously) but even if its epistemology must conform to a linear narrative progression, since epistemologically tricky works or ones dealing with particulars in extremely advanced but non-iconic ways will naturally be diminished, which are usually the works that are least opportunist and paradoxically most stable in most genres. there is only one idea that contests this narrative, and it appears towards the start, the idea that as literary genres evovle and expectations and boundaries settle, the work requires much more complicated angles to achieve the same basis of pleasure-producing capacity. yet, as discussed earlier, this pleasure-producing capacity is so far off from the average adventurism actually expected in this context that most of the time its likely that a work is selected precisely to be the one that was opportunistically crafted in such a way as to appear that it is creating the confrontation even if its least likely to have actually influenced what can be considered a real counter-impact in its own vicinity.