Kermode on Transformation and the Young Critic
Re: last post, just came across this from Frank Kermode on page 118 of The Sound on the Page:
"I became a critic late in life, at twenty eight," he says. "I was anxious to make my way. I needed to write a book, and that led to a certain amount of strain in the writing – I pushed too hard at the ideas. When you’re young, you’re writing for your life. You tend to be rather grandiose. Eventually I learned to relax."
Quoting literary critic Edmund Wilson: "Art has its origin in the need to pretend that human life is something other than it is, and, in a sense, by pretending this, it succeeds to some extent in transforming it,"
Kermode follows with this: The transformation of the world, as Wallace Stevens remarked, is the transformation of overselves, and we do it with reason and imagination. What needs to be transformed, how transformations have historically occurred, and what is wrong with present attempts at transformation, are the legitimate and exhausting tasks of criticism. Wilson has worked at them as no other critic in his time."
From an essay in his book Continuities.
Pretty relaxed for 1966.
