CRITICAL RESPONSE:

Excerpt from "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" by Frank Kermode:

Like all sensible men I feel that to be read carefully by Denis Donoghue is a privilege rather than an ordeal; but although I am clearly to blame insofar as I allowed him to misunderstand me, I can't at all admit that he has damaged the argument I was trying to develop. I cheerfully concede most of his points, but they don't work against me in the way he thinks. Of course there is a sense in which it can be said that "there is only one story," the facts of which can be had "for the trouble of finding them." That is not in dispute; the question concerns that "trouble" and its products. For we surely mean by right reading something more than the reconstruction of events in causal and chronological order - that is what we do when we read complicated detective stories, though even then, as I have argued elsewhere, our "trouble" involves considerations of a nonnarrative order; and this is true whether or not it is the intention of the author that it should. (Incidentally, I remember lecturing on that topic a couple years ago in Dublin, again, it appears, without convincing my host and friend Denis Donoghue that even in these relatively simple cases no single right reading is possible.)

In the December issue of Critical Inquiry Denis Donoghue raised objections to Frank Kermode's "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (Critical Inquiry, September 1974). In his brief comments, Professor Kermode clarifies the issues in dispute. Kermode's other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "A Reply to Joseph Frank"(Spring 1978), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence" (Autumn 1980).

© 1975 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 3 (March 1975). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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