ABSTRACT

Why do we read works of literature? What do we hope to get out of reading a novel, for example? In an essay entitled ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, Frank Kermode writes: ‘To read a novel expecting the satisfactions of closure and the receipt of a message is what most people find enough to do; they are easier with this method because it resembles the one that works for ordinary acts of communication’ (Kermode 1983, 138). Most people, according to Kermode, read novels in the hope of reading something that adds up to a complete whole – a story with a clear structure and ‘message’. They are looking for a good storyline – something to get their teeth into on a long train journey, for example, something which has a strong sense of what Kermode calls ‘narrative sequence’. This is what is implied by the term ‘consumer-fiction’: to read a novel is to consume it. If a good novel is like a good meal, some novels are no doubt easier to chew and swallow than others. Stephen King’s The Shining would be fast food in comparison with the feast of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. Kermode is working with a very basic model: novels can be compared with ‘ordinary acts of communication’ (by which he presumably means things like successfully negotiating your order with the person behind the service counter at Burger King) and most novel-reading is as simple and as sequential as abc. There are, however, things which get in the way of narrative sequence, and these are what Kermode calls secrets: ‘secrets’, he argues, ‘are at odds with sequence’ (138). What he is referring to here is the idea of textual details, specific aspects of the language of a text, particular patterns of images or rhetorical figures that a reader may not even notice on a ‘consumerist’ reading, but that are nevertheless present and which can provoke a sense of mystery. Thus Kermode focuses

on the enigmatic, repeated but apparently superfluous references to black and white in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911).