---
title: "1 Fiction Reality Quotes By Frank Kermode"
description: "1 Fiction Reality quotes by Frank Kermode. Plus more from Frank Kermode and more Fiction Reality sayings from other authors."
image: "https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/5ed/frank-kermode-16485_books_literary-fiction-and-reality-towards-the_3224552.jpg"
---

> [“Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/literary-fiction-and-reality-towards-the-beginning-of-his-novel-the/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/5ed/frank-kermode-16485_books_literary-fiction-and-reality-towards-the_3224552.jpg)

## More by Frank Kermode

> [“The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-first-phase-of-modernism-which-so-far-as-the-english-language/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/it-is-already-the-fashion-to-diminish-eliot-by-calling-him-derivative/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage.”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/i-suppose-it-would-be-better-if-one-were-aggressive-contentious-and/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/when-tragedy-established-itself-in-england-it-did-so-in-terms-of/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-novel-then-provides-a-reduction-of-the-world-different-from-that/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-books-which-seal-off-the-long-perspectives-which-sever-us-from/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“the buoyancy of chiliasts”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-buoyancy-of-chiliasts/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/it-is-one-of-the-great-charms-of-books-that-they-have-to-end/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-discords-of-our-experience-delight-in-change-fear-of-change-the/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/it-might-be-useful-here-to-say-a-word-about-beckett-as-a-link-between/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised;…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-great-majority-of-interpretations-of-apocalypse-assume-that-the/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/you-sometimes-hear-people-say-with-a-certain-pride-in-their-clerical/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“Having compared the novel-reader with an infant and a primitive, one can go further and call him a psychopath; and this I shall shortly…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/having-compared-the-novel-reader-with-an-infant-and-a-primitive-one/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/i-hope-i-have-now-made-it-clear-why-i-thought-it-best-in-speaking-of/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

> [“The formerly absolute distinction between time and eternity in Christian thought--between nunc movens with its beginning and end, and nunc stans, the perfect possession…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/frank-kermode/the-formerly-absolute-distinction-between-time-and-eternity-in/)

[Frank Kermode](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/frank-kermode/)

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                        "text": "“Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he cannot ignore. How good it would be, he suggests, if one could find in life ' the simplicity inherent in narrative order. 'This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: \"When that had happened, then this happened.\" What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: 'it has the look of necessity.' But the look is illusory; Musil's hero Ulrich has 'lost this elementary narrative element' and so has Musil. The Man Without Qualities is multidimensional, fragmentary, without the possibility of a narrative end. Why could he not have his narrative order? Because 'everything has now become nonnarrative.' The illusion would be too gross and absurd. Musil belonged to the great epoch of experiment; after Joyce and Proust, though perhaps a long way after, he is the novelist of early modernism. And as you see he was prepared to spend most of his life struggling with the problems created by the divergence of comfortable story and the non-narrative contingencies of modern reality. Even in the earlier stories he concerned himself with this disagreeable but necessary dissociation; in his big novel he tries to create a new genre in which, by all manner of dazzling devices and metaphors and stratagems, fiction and reality can be brought together again. He fails; but the point is that he had to try, a sceptic to the point of mysticism and caught in a world in which, as one of his early characters notices, no curtain descends to conceal 'the bleak matter-of-factness of things.”",
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