The Genesis of Secrecy
Dillon, Richard J.
glowering ascetic who needs cheering up, but Kramer leaves it to the gloomy weather in the film's Washington-State locations to convey Rivard's character. Dick Van Dyke, cast in the role because...
...It's as if she were, underneath her habit, one of those little sex sprites whose cartoon figures used to decorate the pages of Playboy...
...Her performance is based on The Flying Nun and heavily influenced by Julie Andrews...
...Right at the beginning, Kermode apologizes for being an "outsider" both to the skills of professional exegesis and--so we pick up by innuendo--to the ecclesiastical institution, which hovers over exegetical studies and indentures those who carry them on...
...Have you guessed...
...One is tempted to view all this as the kind of vaporizing, of the atmosphere by which academicians, like bureaucrats, protect their jobs from public scrutiny...
...When the Sentimentalists like Kramer abuse religion even worse than nihilists like Monty Python, God is really beginning toget caught between the rock and the hard place...
...Brendan McGrath, O.S.B...
...Frederick Moriarty, S.J...
...Tl'h 7:25-8:40 PM 26 October 1979:599...
...It is phantasmagoric, this vision of so much literary creativity and caprice in a preliterary age, when reading and writing were privileges of the few, and in a Christendom which spent its early years looking for the end of the world...
...McDowell's book is a painstaking work...
...An author, as we know, cannot remain in control of the valences of his speech, so it is otiose to make his original intention the lust order of interpreters' business...
...Books: EXEGETES & ALCHEMISTS M OST of the humanities will have their transitory mystiques, and, in case you have not been watching lately, literary criticism is currently in the business of mysticizing "Narrative" (majuscule mine...
...If one bothers to go to chapter VII of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, however, one disCommonweal: 598covers, lo, Spinoza's argument has been neatly inverted...
...Daniel Levinson's work on the decades of male development in the professional literature, the huge body of writing on motherhood and the renewed interest in fatherhood led by Drs...
...Mark's individual narrative units and fleeting lateral personages are all so many tricks of an author's trade, and to see any reflexes of preliterary tradition in them only discourages entrepreneurial hermeneutics and shows an exegete's naivet6 about the virtualities of "Narrative...
...able, too, to savor narrative as "Narrative" by "declining to situate (it) in historic time" and divining all the hidden conjunctions and oppositions that are at play in the text as it stands (pp...
...No live issue will ever be touched by such probings...
...others will say, alchemy...
...When he wants us to see how attracted to her Rivard is, he shows us Rivard watching her run across the schoolyard with the children...
...i there are Gail Sheehy's Passages in the popular literature, Dr...
...How ironic it is that, whereas Martin Luther wrested the Bible from the institution's grip by rehabilitating its historical, literal sense, Kermode now stigmatizes the investigators of that sense as the same institution's mouthpieces...
...As he bounces along on his priestly rounds in his flivver, we can't help remembering him fondly from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang...
...Once a story is written, it eludes the designs and expectations of everybody connected with it: author, reader, and protagonist...
...Virginia McDowell's book is therefore in tune with the times, as it concerns people's description of their adult changes towards further maturation...
...In an appeal to Spinoza's hermeneutic that is either careless or high-handed, Kermode finds the philosopher's distinction between truth and meaning to be the license of interpretative "divinations" over and beyond a sacred author's intentions (pp...
...Richard Costigan, S.J...
...His apology is scarcely sincere, of course, because he feels an outsider is always at full advantage as an interpreter, able to approach a text without the encumbrances of institutional consensus...
...Be the merits of structuralism what they may, it is curious that its adherents come to be celebrated as the "outsiders," while practitioners of hisI torical criticism are classified as torchbearers of an institution that nervously protects the historicity of the gospels and cares little for them as literature...
...She's so full of vim, vigor, spunk and sparkle that her pumping legs show flashes of white flesh above the black stockings...
...In my opinion, it forecloses the real meaning of Mark, and of any book called a "gospel," by bracketing the traditions of belief which formed these books and emphasizing the mystical senses and aesthetic pleasures to be found in their textual configurations...
...Unprocessed data, wooly thinking I RE-CREATING TIlE EZPERIENCE OF LIFE-CHANGE AND RELIGION Vlrglnia H. McDowell Beacon Press, $9.95, 197 pp...
...Dick Van Dyke, cast in the role because his TV fame makes him a box office draw even for people who don't ordinarily go to the movies, is completely inadequate to Rivard...
...Complex evolutionary patterns in the four passion narratives derive mainly from the four evangeli,st-impresarios, not from a vigorous and highly ramified oral tradition...
...No impolite suggestion will ever be made to the "outsider" that he might consider becoming an "insider...
...Does he imagine that his votum in favor of'the priority of "what is written" is emancipating when it comes fully seventy-five years after the work of exegetes Wrede Wellhausen, and twentyfive years after even the Belgian Benedictine, Jacques Dupon t, presumed such priority as first principle of a resurrection-narrative study...
...The reader, on the other hand, is always prey to passions for order and sequence that make him pursue the "comfortable fictions" of "transparency, the single sense, the truth" in a story, instead of divining its various modes and possibilities of "Meaning" (majuscule mine again...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...MW 4:35-5:50 PM Religion and Politics in Christian History Rev...
...136-137...
...Does Kermode know nothing of the modem warfare between leading exegetes and the churches...
...Divination," he says...
...119, 129f...
...Richard J. Dillon Testament gospels, and the one to which Martin Dibelius gave that oxymoronic label, "the book of secret epiphanies...
...Although he accepts the broad consensus of gospel criticism which holds the literary priority Of Mark among the Synoptics, he is not influenced by the irreversible gains of form criticism, nor does he show any acquaintance with the discussions of Mark's "messianic secret" that have been led by the Germans...
...MW 6:00-7:15 PM Moral Teaching of the New Testament Rev...
...Whereas Spinoza located "meaning" in the author's intention, disclosed by his words and their total context, while "truth" was the validity of what he said under the sovereign judgment of reason, Kermode's "truth" is the moot issue of the author's intention, and his "meaning" is the blue yonder of patterns and associations that appear when interpretation really begins...
...Narrative seems to be taking flight as a transcendental concept since it can hardly be circumscribed any longer by a single category of function or finality...
...As Luther well knew, however, the alchemists will serve the institution better in the long run than the miners of the historical sense ever could...
...And pity the poor protagonist, for various sources of "opacity" take him quickly out of sight in any interpretation, and "transparency on events" is absolutely the last thing one cati expect from "Narrative...
...TTh 4:35-5:50 PM Christian Spirituality: Histo/'y Rev...
...l-rh 6:00-7:15 PM Grace and Person Sr...
...Just the kind of ulterior perspective that Spinoza wishes to exclude from the research of intended "meaning" returns with a vengeance in Kermode's divinations...
...Kraft's book concerns opportunities for adult psychological and spiritual development, focusing on the sexuality of the celibate...
...It is already clear that Kermode subscribes to the current fashion of "structuralist" exegesis, which is committed to analysis of a text's immanent features and mostly disregards its historical setting and genesis...
...Munder Ross and Alan Gurwitt...
...She has an opening chapter on GRADUATE THEOLOGY PROGRAM SPRING SEMESTER BEGINS JANUARY 14, 1980 ENDS MAY 2, 1980 Psalms and .Wisdom Literature Rev...
...Kermode's style 6f interpretation is not mine...
...Does he misunderstand historical criticism as criticism concerned primarily with the "historical" basis of narratives ("what is written about...
...Sister Rita is of course supposed tO be Rivard's cheererupper...
...The evangelists are portrayed as "midrash" specialists--a shibboleth on the rampage!--each with a stylus in one hand, a biblical codex in the other (apparently already in economical "Gideon" format), playfully transferring narrative motifs from the Jewish books to the story of Jesus...
...SEXUAL DIMENSIONS OF TEE CELlBATE MFE William E. Kraft Andrews and McMeel, $12.95, 215 pp...
...Rosemary H. BaLsam N THE PAST several years there have been more and more books in the psychological field stressing the fact that the crises of adolescence are in no way statically "resolved" when a person becomes an adult...
...In a psycho-social way she looks closely at the individual lives of nine people...
...YOLA UNIVERSITYOF CHICAGO 25 North Sheridan Road icago, Illinois 60626 We are an equal opportunity educat(x/employ...
...To mention but a few, Study THE.0LOG at Loyola of Chicago For application or information contact: MaW Peter McGinty, C.S.J...
...Our author's apology for limited acquaintance with mainline exegesis should have been more sincere since his information seems to come mostly from conservative British and American works...
...Frank Kermode bids for a respectful hearing, however, by undertaking to illustrate these "disappointments" of the interpreter's trade in the narrative of Mark, earliest and briefest of the New THE GENESIS OF SECRECY On The Interpretation of Narrative Frank Kermode Harvard, $10, 169 pp...
...Juan Lozano, C.M.F...
...When Kramer wants us to understand how much Father Rivard suffers over Sister Rita, he cuts to shots of the Stations of the Cross...
...Of c0urse, if one renounces all responsibility to the historical circumstances of a text's formation, any discomforts caused by such a vision can be left to the exegetes de m$tier in their musty cloisters...
...Mary Peter McGinty, C.S.J...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
