Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005
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Kermode, Frank. Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon. Ed. Robert Alter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0-19-517137-3. hardback: $16.95.
Reviewed by
University of Tulsa
Although we reference the literary canon daily—for purposes of syllabus construction, conference papers, essays, and class discussion—canon formation remains an elusive process. How do we decide which texts possess more value than others? Upon what principles do we measure this value? And, why are those texts necessarily more valuable? These are the questions that Frank Kermode attempts to answer in Pleasure and Change, “a record of [his] Tanner Lectures presented at the University of California at Berkeley in November 2001” (intro, 3). Kermode’s basic premise is that the canon is formed and reformed due to three basic components: pleasure, change, and chance. In addition to Kermode’s lectures, the book contains three comments from Geoffrey Hartman, John Guillory, and Carey Perloff, followed by a brief response from Kermode.
Drawing on the Czech critic Jan Mukařovský, Kermode attempts to describe the role of pleasure in his first lecture, simply titled “Pleasure.” Mukařovský’s notion of aesthetic pleasure held that “the poetic object might be studied with formalist severity as artifact, but that its aesthetic purpose is achieved only by the action of the responsive reader” (19). And, because the reader’s response is influenced by social norms and by that which he or she finds pleasurable, pleasure derived from the act of reading “is likely to lie in the power of the object to transgress, to depart, interestingly and revealingly, from the accepted ways of such artifacts” (19). Kermode further notes that Mukařovský’s assessment of pleasure necessarily accounts for change; for a work to possess aesthetic value it must be both pleasurable and “new” (19). Finding that Mukařovský is not sufficient for establishing what pleasure is, Kermode then moves to Roland Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte, which he uses to show that pleasure is similar to jouissance, but that jouissance “always involves a loss” and “is indeed closer to pain” (22). With this distinction, pleasure becomes that which is enjoyable because it allows a reader to identify with his or her own cultural standards. The remainder of the essay takes up the example of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Change” which illustrates the balance between pleasure and jouissance described by Barthes. He concludes by arguing that despite the problems of authority, transmission, and even fallibility with the canon, “the cause is a good one” because “pleasure is at the heart of it” (31).
The second lecture, “Change,” discusses the roles change and chance play in canon formation. According to Kermode, changes in the canon arrive in a variety of forms: texts are added, texts are removed, and texts are continually “subjected to new commentary” (38). In other words, each new interpretation of a text within the canon impacts our understanding of it: “each member of [the canon] fully exists only in the company of others; one member nourishes or qualifies another, so that as well as benefiting from the life-preserving attentions of commentary, each thrives on the propinquity of all” (33). The power of the critic to shape the canon leads Kermode to a discussion of Matthew Arnold and the notion of “touchstones.” Arnold’s presentation of touchstones falls short because they “cannot, for all time and for everybody, bear the broad cultural significance he claims for them” (41). Rather, Kermode argues that the canon is predicated on its ability to change, and its changes are necessarily reinforced (while simultaneously renewing) the pleasure derived from reading those texts.
Although one would find that pleasure, change, and chance are key factors, Kermode’s attempt to corral their functions in forming the canon is at times confusing and somewhat circular. Pleasure informs the way that the canon is changed. Change is what allows reading the canon to be pleasurable. And, both arise due to chance occurrences within a particular socio-cultural moment. That the book contains three commentaries on Kermode’s lectures helps unpack this circular relationship between pleasure and change. The first of these, Geoffrey Hartman’s “The Passing of the Canon,” questions the role of pleasure set forth by Kermode. He takes issue with the use of the term “pleasure,” calling it “descriptively poor when thematized this way” (58). Arguing that a more specific term would provide a more useful avenue for the discussion of the canon, Hartman criticizes Kermode for “skirt[ing] the political impasse that presently makes literary criticism, not only literature, a troubled mirror of our culture” (64).
In “It Must Be Abstract,” John Guillory begins with the things about which he agrees with Kermode: that criticism is “curiously troubled” and that this is “related to the ambivalence that academic literary critics seem to express toward the object of their discipline” (65). That is, Guillory argues that discussions about canon formation too often gloss over the process of evaluation, a problem exacerbated by the movement in literary work to cultural studies, which “simply transferred to another domain of culture the claims historically made for the work of art, and for the critic” (69). Like Hartman, Guillory complains that Kermode’s description of pleasure lacks specificity and cannot be a universal term applied to both the acts of reading and interpreting, which he sees as distinct experiences. He concludes by arguing for a “retreat from attempting to make the connection between the quality of pleasure and the judgment of canonicity” (74).
Carey Perloff begins “The Artist and the Canon” by noting that her experience with canon formation comes not from a critic’s “academic expertise,” but from “a theater artist and . . . artistic director” (77). What makes Perloff’s response to Kermode more enjoyable than the other components of the book is her practical, hands-on approach to the use of the canon. She explains, “I wrestle with questions of the canon on a daily basis as I decide how to program the work that we do” (77). Perloff takes up the issue of who is the driving force behind canon formation—a topic from which Kermode, Guillory, and Hartman shy away. She asserts that the changes referred to by Kermode stem from the artists of a given period “who bring certain works back into focus through their own creative reaction to, or influence by, those works” (76).
Kermode’s response, “On the Comments of the Discussants,” opens with an expression of gratitude to Hartman, Kermode, and Perloff for their remarks. He then attempts to answer the questions each of them raised, noting that his reference to Arnold’s touchstones seems to have been taken out of context, for he does not agree with Arnold, but was merely using Arnold to show that the canon is subject to change. Asserting that both Guillory and Hartman are uncomfortable with pleasure, Kermode closes his remark with one of his central concerns about reading texts from the canon: “But why should it not also give pleasure?” (91).
The issue of canon formation is one in which those of us in the field are heavily invested. Like Perloff, we consult the canon daily and use it to shape our understanding of literature and how we teach and interpret it. While Kermode seeks to offer a potential answer for how the canon is formed, Pleasure and Change, as a whole, remains less definitive about this process, instead raising a number of issues for scholars to ponder, including concerns with authority, cultural value systems, the trajectory of canonical change, and psychological reader response. While the text is most accessible to advanced graduate students and those embedded within the field of literary scholarship, it could be used as a supplement in courses on the canon to show students that not only is the canon itself continually debated, but also the process through which the canon is constructed is a rich area for inquiring minds.