The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

“Brilliant…this book should encourage more literary critics to pick up their Bibles.”—Howard Eiland, Partisan Review

The celebrated critic deciphers the cryptic passages and concealed meanings in literature sacred and profane.

In a passage from the Gospel of Mark that has spawned more exegetical disputes than perhaps any other, the disciples question Jesus about why he so often speaks in parables. “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God,” he replies, “but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand.” The ostensible meaning of this passage seems shockingly unchristian: the true sense of Jesus’s stories—their secret—is reserved for the elect, for the insiders. Outsiders be damned.

In The Genesis of Secrecy, the prolific Frank Kermode draws upon this and other enigmatic passages in the Gospels to interrogate the fraught relationship between proclaimed meaning and concealed mystery, both in the New Testament and in modern secular literature. A resolute outsider to the rules and canons of Biblical exegesis, he asks how it is that textual dislocations or contradictory narrative elements are imbued with the grandeur of secret meaning. Departing from the Bible, he also asks what the art of interpretation looks like in a secular world, when the lines separating heresy from orthodoxy have become increasingly blurred.

Moving effortlessly between Scripture, philosophical hermeneutics, narrative theory, and twentieth-century literature from Joyce to Pynchon, Kermode concludes, pessimistically, that esoteric truths of the text are glimpsed but never finally revealed. Divination begets further divination. Secrecy remains “the source of the interpreter’s pleasures, but also of his necessary disappointment.”