Gabriel JosipoviciRecensioni

With the striking contradiction in the title and subtitle (Infinity, the story of a moment), Josipovici immediately indicates that this is a text that should not be taken literally. And indeed, the insecure servant Massimo's account of the life of his former aristocratic boss Tancredo Pavone constantly misleads you. An unknown interviewer questions Massimo about Pavone, although it is not clear what the interviewer's intention is. And Massimo himself constantly loses the thread, falls silent at every turn, and claims that he barely understands anything about Pavone. It is therefore remarkable that, in the meantime, while answering the interviewer's questions, he reproduces verbatim the very long monologues that Pavone has spoken to him. And with a technique that Josipovici clearly owes to W.G. Sebald – Massimo constantly quotes “he said”, sometimes four or five times on a page – he gives the impression that this is a faithful representation, while it is also clear that Massimo may not be such a reliable narrator. And another contradiction: from Massimo's words we can unintentionally conclude that Pavone was an eccentric, headstrong and very misanthropic person, but the relationship between the subordinate servant and his boss gradually seems more and more like a close bond of friendship, especially towards the end. And the self-righteous Pavona turns out to be a fragile person. And one more: Pavone spouts his bile about the evolution of Western culture, but he is a widely celebrated avant-garde music composer himself. And although Pavone swears by elitist culture and lives an aristocratic lifestyle, he seems particularly struck by the culture of the Ibe tribe in West Africa and the Buddhist monasteries in Nepal. And I could go on like this for a while. By now it will be clear that Josipovici puts the unsuspecting reader to the test with all the metatextual aspects of this slim book. Even though I'm not a fan of so much hocus pocus (hence only 3 stars), I have to admit that this is quite impressive.

This short book tells a story without a plot, and yet it entices. Josipovici’s storytelling style is not spectacular; he uses an almost careless, gently rippling tone, and many repetitive elements, but offering a richness that arises from an ingenious play of appearance and reality.
The unnamed narrator is a professional translator, a seemingly phlegmatic man with no remarkable personality, but one obsessed with the tragic verses of Monteverdi's Orfeo and the languorous poetry of Joachim du Bellay. He has settled into a sluggish bourgeois existence, with a lot of attention for the good things in life, but clearly also on the verge of depression or even over it. He is still obsessed with his late first wife, who was everything to him, but who he constantly shadowed when she returned from work and who he did not try to save when she fell into the Thames. And the marriage to his second wife seems perfectly harmonious, but their seemingly polite bickering reveals a yawning chasm between the two.
In other words, Josipovici presents an intriguing game of contradictions, in which he regularly casts doubt on the truthfulness of the above-mentioned elements and refers to the possibility of imaginary lives. He reinforces this by constantly jumping through time and place. Almost imperceptibly, we pass from the protagonist's life with his second wife in a farmhouse in Wales, to his first marriage and residence in London, to his lonely existence in Paris after the death of his first wife. This play with time and place constantly unbalances the reader. On top of that the author regularly repeats the same events and actions, but each time with small variations and an occasional sinister accent, in which death constantly comes into play. Also the male protagonist himself, almost carelessly, introduces these small variations in his story, by regularly repeating the original texts of Monteverdi and du Bellay, but each time translating them slightly differently, shifting the meaning of the verses. In this way, Josipovici seems to ingeniously link modernism and postmodernism, confusing his reader, while at the same time addressing a very rich palette of existential themes. It was my first acquaintance with this author, but it certainly won't be my last.½

I find it incumbent upon me to change 3 stars to 5 stars and to write an entirely different review in addition to the flippancy of below.

“Non sminuite il senso di ciò che non comprendete.”
G. Scelsi, Octologo

"Do not belittle the meaning of what you do not understand."
G. Scelsi, Octologo

I cannot help feeling there is a message here for both MJ and me. My post on this last week was not only flippant, but premature.

The rest of this straight review is here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/another-take-on-infinity-...

-----------------

It may be 2075. Rumours about MJ are rife. One has it that he is dead. Another that he has simply tired of the world and sits alone in a castle somewhere writing reviews he shows no one. And yet another that none of this is more than an experimental work in which he has given his characters the illusion of choice. In this one, we are not the future but the present set in a futuristic context of false consciousness. We are no more than a literary trick.

X, a journalist, or somebody who believes he is a journalist, interviews MJ’s old servant. Or not.

– He liked Josipovici?

– Yes, sir, he did.

– The books? He talked of them?

– All the time, sir.

– Give me an example.

– Well, sir. He liked to sit in Peter’s Yard, he could sit for long periods sipping a cup of tea and eating a rock of a scone crumb by crumb. It was cheaper than paying for heating and so forth at home.

– The Scottish mentality then?

– I suppose you could say that, yes.

– He paid for you too?

– I paid for myself. Out of the wages he said he would pay me.

– Give me an example of his talking about Josipovici.

Rest is here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/infinity-the-story-of-a-m...

I find it incumbent upon me to change 3 stars to 5 stars and to write an entirely different review in addition to the flippancy of below.

“Non sminuite il senso di ciò che non comprendete.”
G. Scelsi, Octologo

"Do not belittle the meaning of what you do not understand."
G. Scelsi, Octologo

I cannot help feeling there is a message here for both MJ and me. My post on this last week was not only flippant, but premature.

The rest of this straight review is here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/another-take-on-infinity-...

-----------------

It may be 2075. Rumours about MJ are rife. One has it that he is dead. Another that he has simply tired of the world and sits alone in a castle somewhere writing reviews he shows no one. And yet another that none of this is more than an experimental work in which he has given his characters the illusion of choice. In this one, we are not the future but the present set in a futuristic context of false consciousness. We are no more than a literary trick.

X, a journalist, or somebody who believes he is a journalist, interviews MJ’s old servant. Or not.

– He liked Josipovici?

– Yes, sir, he did.

– The books? He talked of them?

– All the time, sir.

– Give me an example.

– Well, sir. He liked to sit in Peter’s Yard, he could sit for long periods sipping a cup of tea and eating a rock of a scone crumb by crumb. It was cheaper than paying for heating and so forth at home.

– The Scottish mentality then?

– I suppose you could say that, yes.

– He paid for you too?

– I paid for myself. Out of the wages he said he would pay me.

– Give me an example of his talking about Josipovici.

Rest is here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/infinity-the-story-of-a-m...

Bible as Literature; stories analyszed as myth

In 1958 Gabriel Josipovici attends an Oxford lecture on contemporary English literature and subsequently reads those key authors the lecturer notes, including Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch. He is most disappointed. He writes, “They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.” Gabriel Josipovici ponders why this is the case.

He attends another lecture where a British scholar debunks and rails against Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire and Sartre. The speaker tells the audience in so many words, “These effete ninnies were all suffering from oversensitivity mingled with self-regard; what they had to say was the result of their cosseted upbringing and a sharp kick up the backside was all that was needed to bring them to their senses.” Josipovici takes exception, thinking such influential European writers offer deep insight into our modern human condition. Repeat experiences with hard-line, no-nonsense Anglo speakers and the everyday realism of English and US authors propels Josipovici to probe deeper into the very roots of Modernism.

In approaching the question ‘When does Modernism begin?’ the author details quite a bit of history of literature and the arts and proposes we reach much farther back in time then the 1850-1950 timetable usually given in answer to this question. For, as he writes, “The temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it.”

However, as he goes on - and this is key to his entire book: “The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and, therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.”

To undergird his position, Josipovici spends the lion’s share of his book providing detailed examples, from Albrecht Durer to Cervantes and Rabelais, from Casper David Friedrich and Pablo Picasso to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka to show how since the 1500s religion took an inward turn and the world became a progressively colder place. At one point we read, “It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted.” He then quotes Walter Benjamin: “The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual.” And that’s solitary individual not only in terms of the writer of the novel but also in terms of the novel being read by a solitary reader. Indeed, an entire culture of men and women, including artist, musicians and writers living, working and creating in a kind of solitary confinement – the modern world as a very alone place with no comforting communal anchors.

Again, quite a detailed and well researched book. The above quotes along with my comments are merely a taste. Since I am not a historian or literary scholar I will not offer my own judgement on Gabriel Jasipovici’s position here; rather, I urge you to read for yourself. However, there is one important point I will note: other than Jorge Luis Borges and a passing mention of V. S. Naipaul, Jasipovici’s observations are restricted to European and American literature, art and music. There are no references to authors or artists or musicians from Latin America or Africa or the Middle East or Japan or elsewhere on the globe. Since this book was published in 2010 I can’t help thinking the author’s Eurocentric approach is a bit provincial, or, in other words, I would suggest one possible answer to the question “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” could be that it has gone global. We are now one World Culture and any complete history of literature and the arts requires a truly world view, a view that would be well to include many great late twentieth century literary artists from around the globe, including the author in the photo below – G. Cabrera Infante.

Niet geheel duidelijk waar het over gaat, maar dat lijkt ook wel de intentie. Er is een voor, een na, en een verlangen naar een moment in plaats en ruimte waar het allemaal samen komt. Josipovici breng het rustig en stijlvol, in heen en weer kaatsende en langs elkaar heen schietende dialogen.

In 1958 Gabriel Josipovici attends an Oxford lecture on contemporary English literature and subsequently reads those key authors the lecturer notes, including Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch. He is most disappointed. He writes, “They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.” Gabriel Josipovici ponders why this is the case.

He attends another lecture where a British scholar debunks and rails against Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire and Sartre. The speaker tells the audience in so many words, “These effete ninnies were all suffering from oversensitivity mingled with self-regard; what they had to say was the result of their cosseted upbringing and a sharp kick up the backside was all that was needed to bring them to their senses.” Josipovici takes exception, thinking such influential European writers offer deep insight into our modern human condition. Repeat experiences with hard-line, no-nonsense Anglo speakers and the everyday realism of English and US authors propels Josipovici to probe deeper into the very roots of Modernism.

In approaching the question ‘When does Modernism begin?’ the author details quite a bit of history of literature and the arts and proposes we reach much farther back in time then the 1850-1950 timetable usually given in answer to this question. For, as he writes, “The temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it.”

However, as he goes on - and this is key to his entire book: “The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and, therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.”

To undergird his position, Josipovici spends the lion’s share of his book providing detailed examples, from Albrecht Durer to Cervantes and Rabelais, from Casper David Friedrich and Pablo Picasso to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka to show how since the 1500s religion took an inward turn and the world became a progressively colder place. At one point we read, “It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted.” He then quotes Walter Benjamin: “The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual.” And that’s solitary individual not only in terms of the writer of the novel but also in terms of the novel being read by a solitary reader. Indeed, an entire culture of men and women, including artist, musicians and writers living, working and creating in a kind of solitary confinement – the modern world as a very alone place with no comforting communal anchors.

Again, quite a detailed and well researched book. The above quotes along with my comments are merely a taste. Since I am not a historian or literary scholar I will not offer my own judgement on Gabriel Jasipovici’s position here; rather, I urge you to read for yourself. However, there is one important point I will note: other than Jorge Luis Borges and a passing mention of V. S. Naipaul, Jasipovici’s observations are restricted to European and American literature, art and music. There are no references to authors or artists or musicians from Latin America or Africa or the Middle East or Japan or elsewhere on the globe. Since this book was published in 2010 I can’t help thinking the author’s Eurocentric approach is a bit provincial, or, in other words, I would suggest one possible answer to the question “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” could be that it has gone global. We are now one World Culture and any complete history of literature and the arts requires a truly world view, a view that would be well to include one of the great literary artists of the late 20th century, the author in the photo below – G. Cabrera Infante.

mai un llibre m'havia avorrit tant!

Modernism discussed in the most thoughtful way, defined and exemplified in a sustained argument for its permanent relevance. Whether or not one agrees with when it begins, or who does or does not conform to the given definition, or whether the current writers mentioned are or aren't good in one's views, What Ever Happened to Modernism? will change the way you regard fiction -- and it's a pleasure to read just for its style.

Gabriel Josipovici has published a series of fictions centering around artists, writers, painters, musicians. This is perhaps his most opaque yet compelling work in this group of novels.

A short novel that has generated much response among serious readers, as seen about halfway down the page here,
http://gabrieljosipovici.org/news.shtml
and rightly so. A short and substantial work.

Probably a better book than I am giving it credit for, but I simply thought it was a "two-star OK". I did not really learn anything new and only the last section of four was interesting to me. Still, a good exercise in study. Reminded me of reading a required textbook though I had no need nor compelling desire to take any notes.

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/77537072041/moo-pak-by-gabriel-josipovici

There was only one bit of text from this book that I deemed worthy of snatching, clipping for posterity, and it wasn't that there was a lack of words from which to find a sampling of a nugget here and there which carried meaning as well as enough weight in which to share their additional importance as sentences go on and on my page. But anyone reading this review to the end will have read the segment lifted from this very fine book.

Between the covers there are enough references to Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett to pique the interests of the most discerning reader who holds the above-mentioned artists in as much high esteem as does the author Gabriel Josipovici. But there are numerous other literary mentionables present such as Swift, Shakespeare, Stevens, and Keats among other writers whose names do not begin begin or end with the letter S. I found in my brief critical research that the fault some critics have of Josipovici centered on his presumed pretentiousness and use of this novel as a vehicle in which to prove how smart he is and obviously well-read. I did not take this digressive work of Josipovici as anything but what it was. His main character Jack Tolenado is no doubt a brilliant man, an ex-University lecturer who became disenchanted with his work as do so many of us victimized and faced with a long drawn-out career. Things change. When we get older it becomes uncomfortably obvious that we are no longer in step with the younger generations and in fact we are loathe to change our own ways enough to climb again on board this swiftly moving train. Most of us who stubbornly persist in these unhappy situations turn into the sniveling crybaby bitches and mean curmudgeons older people too easily get branded as, guilty or not. I found Jack Tolenado quite enjoyable and I attempted to learn as much from him as possible on the many leisurely walks I shared in my reading of this wonderful little novel.

One paragraph was all it took Josipovici to get his message across. But the paragraph lasted for a hundred and fifty-one pages. Thomas Bernhard might even have been glad that for once another writer actually pulled the same stunt off successfully, much as Bernhard did so often himself. It is not an easy thing to do. Quite the contrary. For one, your character indeed better have a personality that can carry the bulk of the many words on every page. And of course, the writing must also be good. I found the entire experience a delight to read, though I have never been to England and had literally no frame of reference for the many parks and paths and zoos in which they were meandering through, or the many anecdotal memories Jack put forth as segments of his ongoing research of the last twenty-five years and his current ten-year attempt at finally finishing his magnum opus.

For lovers of digression and those given to enlivened activities such as listening-as-hostage to a brilliant man speak on a bevy of subjects, then this book is for you. Of course, if you already know it all, or think you know better, than this book just might not be your cup of tea. But I personally enjoyed reading this book deluged with dialogue and instruction, and I confidently knew that at any time I could shut this talking head off and return instead to that incessant egoistic monologue pressing inside my very own head.

… Most artists do not help us, he said, they hinder us, they lead us astray, they bludgeon us with noise and then leave us with nothing and less than nothing. Only a fews artists, he said, and we soon discover which ones for ourselves, have the ability to lead us inward and forward and to make us look with the eye of hope and anticipation at the world and ourselves. Left to our own devices, he said, we grow small and hard and get to hate this small hard thing and end in lethargy and despair. We need the artists who matter to remind us constantly that there are possibilities there, in the world and in ourselves, and that hard work and the deployment of energy do have their rewards.

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/77639260665/everything-passes-by-gabriel-josipovic...

If I hadn't discovered the writer [a:Ágota Kristof|134770|Ágota Kristof|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1389532281p2/134770.jpg] I would never have heard of this man. Gabriel Josipovici wrote an introduction to her short memoir titled [b:The Illiterate|19707301|The Illiterate|Ágota Kristof|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1392000681s/19707301.jpg|1231619] and I was so impressed with his comments and his style that I thought he would be a good enough writer to take a chance on reading. It is astonishing to me the number of books Gabriel Josipovici has published, not to mention the many different genres he has been involved with including both long and short fiction, plays, essays, and literary criticism. It is even more astounding to me that he is not better read and known of more widely. I believe his personal focus has been zeroed in on his own writing rather than the marketing of his good name. I respect him for this and count him as a model of professional behavior for all serious artists no matter their choice of media and expression.

On first read this slender volume of sixty pages is at once recognized as being among the highest quality of literature. Poetic, dramatic, and certainly lyrical. It is written in a manner that even seems important. Moments of dagger-like clarity bristle within a sparseness almost Beckettian in form if not also in its ambiguities. But there is something about the narrative that reminded me also of the very best of Paul Auster. Nothing in the entire oeuvre of Paul Auster even comes close to this book except for one example titled [b:Travels in the Scriptorium|454|Travels in the Scriptorium |Paul Auster|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386923599s/454.jpg|2364730] which was brilliant in its execution. Much of the same foreboding tone can be found in both of these works, but in total, Everything Passes is the far superior work.

I believe that serious readers somehow find their way into understanding a worthy text. Others of us need rather to be taught how to read and devour difficult, and perhaps ambiguous, material. My position as stated for reading literature is no different than it was during my long career regarding the use and appreciation of building materials. If the product looks good from a distance it should look even better the closer one gets face to face to it. Even a repeated and focused gaze should provide the observer with an even more aesthetic value attached to the object. If it does not, then do not buy it. Most materials do not pass this extreme test and it is a sorry fact that few people do the exercises necessary to even get to this understanding of aesthetic value in art of any kind.

On my second read, less than a day later, I indeed found the book to be richer and better understood than the first time. Names seemed to matter more to me and the characters emerged from the text with more meaning for me. I actually began to distinguish between the voices speaking. Most everything that was previously unclear to me became illuminated and the ambiguity lessened in large degrees the closer I examined the text. This type of literature is easily discounted for its brevity and lack of convention. I understand this phenomenon in a most personal way. This brevity and ambiguity is the basis of my own early work found especially in my first book titled [b:Zimble Zamble Zumble|1966801|Zimble Zamble Zumble|M. Sarki|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347445248s/1966801.jpg|1969960]. I would bet that anyone who spends an adequate amount of time with this poetry would come away carrying an attractive bundle of feeling for the text and an understanding based on what you brought of yourself to the page. It has been mentioned to me in the past by my editor that I did create entire worlds within the confines of these short poems, and for that reason he always wondered why I would ever want to change to writing a longer form of prose when I could already succeed with so much less. Needless to say, I am tooting my own horn here. But my early work is a perfect example in light of discussing the book, Everything Passes. After reading this novel multiple times now I find I am the better for it. The aesthetic value of this work will ultimately be judged by history, but it specifically needs, and has to start, with readers like me.

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/78032733427/conversations-in-another-room-by-gabri...

"A strong-willed creator lends himself far less to collective influence than a merely talented artist, whose work may easily be made the material for a mass creation that genius opposes."___ [a:Otto Rank|228940|Otto Rank|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1355099399p2/228940.jpg] from [b:Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development|704004|Art and Artist Creative Urge and Personality Development|Otto Rank|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348394457s/704004.jpg|690293]

This book basically snuck up on me. I merely went along reading the text what was perhaps too easily discounted by me as old woman's gossip and innuendo but became instead a serious treatise on dementia and truth, and if they ever can be satisfied. A thread of hope remained at the two-thirds mark for a resolution of this story, but madness prevailed, as did the dark. And the curtain remained between the closed window and reader as veil and welcome respite from the incessant noise we sometimes confuse as chatter.

Say what you will about Josipovici and you probably will be wrong. For Gabriel is foremost a writer who speaks with many voices though none of them prevail. His is a talent heretofore unseen and one that can never be reconciled to the person we have seen thinking, and even speaking, in our midst. Better to let him go on writing and just leave the man he is alone.

Just might have been a critical masterpiece wasted on me. But I "did not like it" and still rated it "OK".

One of the better books I've read on modernism, for two big reasons: first, he thinks that modernism and what you think of modernism are matters of life and death (he appears to mean this literally); and second, he's an argumentative sod who has no interest in hedging his bets. In: Proust, Beckett, Kafka, Woolf. Out: Greene, Naipaul, Roth, Morrison. He reminds me a bit of Leavis, which opinion, I suspect would either set old Jos howling at the moon in rage, or popping his collar. I liked it, in fact, despite the fact that I fundamentally disagree with his argument, which is a pretty good sign that a book is worth reading.

It's basically a polemic about literary modernism, but he spreads himself pretty thin, with discussions of painting (understandable, given that he thinks the best writing about modernism is by art-critics; regrettable, since he thinks that R. Krauss is one of those 'good' writers on modernism) and music (enjoyable, in that he dismisses Cage and name-drops Birtwhistle; regrettable in that he seems to fall very much on the Stravinsky half of the cliched Strav/Schoenberg divide). Sometimes this breadth is helpful, since the divisions in music and visual art are often easier to see (Cage v Ligeti, for instance, or Abstraction vs Bacon/Picasso) than those in lit; but I wish he'd spent more time on writers.

The argument is that the best literature is made at the crossroads of (here's the painting analogy) abstraction and realism, where abstraction stands in for 'reflection on artistic form' and realism stands in for 'connection to the world.' So far so convincing, I've often thought the same thing. But his narrow view of literature makes this a little tendentious. Had he spent more time on writers he would have had to deal with the development of the novel more fully, rather than just writing off the nineteenth century as the century of 'realism.' The 19th c, in short, = Dickens. I can understand the polemical point here, with so many authors these days wanting the words 'Dickensian sweep' on their back covers, but it's a distortion of history. Remember Henry James ripping Trollope for breaking the illusion of realism, when he'd write things like "I'm not interested in holding you in suspense, dear reader; my heroine will never marry the villain"? This is surely at the crossroads of form and realism, but you'd never know Trollope existed from the evidence of 'Whatever Happened to Modernism?' Similarly, the only early English novelist cited is Sterne, that favorite of the abstraction/form people. But surely Fielding and Richardson, at the very least, can be read profitably at the crossroads? Fielding wrote essays to introduce each Book of Tom Jones and his preface to Joseph Andrews is fabulous. Richardson's characters spend all their time writing and he's aware of the problems with this form.

Okay. So Josipovici complains about modernism's 'false friends,' who identify modernism with realism, and fair enough. But his genealogy of modernism is just as limited as theirs: but while the false friends see modernism *as* realism, he sees it as a reaction *against* realism: modernists just are those people who come to see that there's a problem with 'realistic' depictions of reality. But realism has always been only a small part of literature. What about satire, parody, broadsides, lyric, critique, epic, essays and so on? Waugh might have complained about 'modernism,' but you'll never convince me that his jittery, ironic, absurd satires aren't modernist. He doesn't make a big deal about finding new ways to express and attack new realities, but that's what he's doing.

At the end of the day, Josipovici suggests, modernism just is coming to understand what is "no longer" possible for art: for him, that means modernism is coming to understand that realism is no longer possible. To reject that claim, given his genealogy of modernism, is to be a post-modernist who believes that everything is always possible because nothing matters. I would say against this that modernism is a fundamentally critical attitude to the world and the ways we represent it, but which holds onto traditional ideals, including that of accurately depicting the world. Jos says the most important thing about modernism is the body, and grasping that we can't come to an understanding of anything; I say it's the mind, and insisting that we can understand, although it's really hard. But really, no matter how worked up I get about this, this is a nicely written book with a clear argument about an important matter. Don't ignore it.

Books of criticism can oftentimes be rather obscure and abstruse enterprises, and this one by Professor Josipovici is no exception as it seems on first reading to wander all over the place before it comes to anything resembling a conclusion, much less an answer to the question posed in the title. Lest one should get the impression that this will be a negative review, let me hasten to say emphatically that that will not be the case. In fact, this book provides a philosophical and historical understanding of certain characteristics of Modern art and literature. So this review will attempt to highlight some important issues that the book deals with and thereby give the reader a clearer idea of where the author was trying to go. As he said, "we have to try and see Modernism not from without, as . . . the post-Modernists choose to see it, but from within. That is the task of this book."

First, it should be understood that the title of the book is What Ever Happened to Modernism? and not merely "Whatever happened to modern literature?" The scope of the book is much broader than mere literary criticism, although the author was a professor of literature at Oxford. Those of us with an interest in literature and the arts have at least a vague understanding of "Modernism" as applying generally to the post-Medieval period when all types of authoritarian regimes — whether heavenly or earthly — began to be openly questioned and scrutinized and even overthrown. Yet we understand that the period of so-called Modern Art had its inception in a very specific event that can be pinned down exactly to the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863. It turns out that "modern" is one of those words the application of which seems to perpetually move forward with the times. So in the year 2011, we view as old fashioned that exhilarating period of Modern Art between 1863 and the 1970s, when the tide turned enough to call for the naming of a new era — Postmodernism. So supposedly we now exist in a postmodern world, yet we still think of ourselves as modern. And just to put this into further perspective, let us remember that the term "modern" comes from the Latin modernus, which derived from modo, meaning "just now," dates from the fifth century and was originally meant to differentiate the "modern" Christian era from the "ancient" Pagan era. Thus, the moving sidewalk of history has carried the notion of "modern" forward with each passing year.

So we have ended up with two meanings of the word "modern," a general meaning that always is associated with the present, and a more specific meaning that relates to the period between 1863 and around 1970 which I shall refer to hereafter as "the period of Modern Art" to distinguish it from Modernism in general. Of course, Modern Art has always been a highly intellectually driven movement, and so the literary arts, including fiction, poetry, drama and criticism, all reflected many of the ideas that were engendered by the Modern visual and tactile arts. And that is the first point I want to make clear: Professor Josipovici is actually addressing both aspects of Modernism in order to help us fully understand the question raised by the title. We aren't merely being schooled in the elements of a style or the characteristics of a period in art and literary history. Being aware of this from the outset will be useful to the reader.

The second point is that in telling the reader what was going on literarily in the period of Modern Art, Josipovici cites many examples by quoting selected authors which help to illustrate his points. But he also presents enlightening discussions of the aims of painters and other visual artists and even composers during this period in order to inform his discussion of the contemporary literature. Writers and artists were on the same wavelength in terms of the abstract goals and standards they set out for themselves, and so it is fascinating to see how artists and writers and critics, each in their own way, interpreted the intellectual framework within which they were all operating. In effect, there was constant cross-pollination going on among them.

In considering the question of whatever happened to Modernism, Josipovici addresses both of these points at once. He isn't just asking, "By the way, whatever happened to Joe Smith?" in the sense that Joe Smith seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird, which the period of Modern Art eventually did in succumbing to Postmodernism. But he is actually giving us a blow-by-blow as though it were a prizefight, naming names, and explaining the progress of Modernism focusing mostly on the period since Cubism — i.e., the early twentieth century.

Two interrelated issues that Josipovici spent a good deal of time on concern a) the writer's "authority" in the context of the increasingly prevalent notion that "God is dead"; and b) the privileging of craftsmanship over the narrative and ethical or spiritual aspects of fiction. The argument goes that once there was no higher authority underpinning a writer or artist — i.e., through faith in God and church — a crisis of consciousness developed, referred to in general terms as a "disenchantment of the world." Suddenly the artist looked in the mirror and realized he carried the burden alone of the authority of his writing and in fact, perhaps he had no authority at all. The apparent conclusion of all this was in turn to question those very aspects of literature and art that had characterized novels and poetry — and art — before this earth-shattering crisis occurred. The consequence was that novelists such as Robbe-Grillet, Pinget and Claude Simon intentionally worked to strip away any vestiges of narrative and emotional content from their novels, thereby privileging craftsmanship, in the belief that by doing so they would be able to present a truer reality and "a genuine understanding of the human condition": Josipovici tells us: "What is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claims to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing."

The effect produced by this Modern type of fiction was brilliant, but empty; impressionistic, but it had no soul. The novelist's concern was for "events, not with characters or ethics . . . [or] the plots devised by traditional novelists." And looking back, Modern authors and critics viewed traditional novelists as naïve and their writing style passé. By way of explaining this Josipovici writes:

"Not having doubts is a blessed state, but it is not the same thing as having genuine authority. There is something hollow about Balzac, Dickens and Verdi compared with Dante or Shakespeare, but even compared with their older contemporaries, Beethoven and Wordsworth. It doesn't rest on their frequent clumsiness, for that is to be found in Beethoven and Wordsworth. It rests more on the very thing that is the root of their strength as artists and their enormous success as entrepreneurs: their inability to question what it is they are doing. In that sense they are the first modern best-sellers and in their work one can see the beginnings of that split between popularity and artistic depth which is to become the hallmark of modern culture."

The tension between "commercial" and "artistic" continues to this day.

A further service that Josipovici renders for the reader is to demonstrate through many examples how different Modern fiction is from the literature of the past through a brief examination of older literature from Cervantes and Rabelais all the way back to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. As he said, "Seeing the art of the twentieth century in the light of the [past] can help us to understand many things."

Eventually it becomes clear that Josipovici is writing with the British reader in mind, and he has looked at the British reading public today and finds it wanting. He gives European readers much more credit for being aware of Modernism's subtleties. He thinks British readers — and by extension its "younger" (historically speaking) American cohorts — are woefully naïve. He even labels the whole lot of us as Philistines because we don't relish a steady diet of the rather arid and contrived output of the Modern purists. Josipovici seems to want us to accept the Robbe-Grillet–Pinget–Simon school of writing as the inevitable direction that quality fiction will continue to take — even in this postmodern era.

So, what happened to Modernism? It gradually adopted the view, not only that "living and telling are not the same thing at all," and "though we as readers and viewers looking back inevitably lack the sense of what it was like to live certain moments, the historian can work to counter that, as indeed the best ones do, and when dealing with works of art we can, if we are good enough critics, get close enough to them to convey something of what their making involved for their makers and first viewers."

This raises an interesting question: By stripping narrative from fiction, did this open the door for criticism to step into the vacuum? It certainly signaled the ascendency of the critic and criticism — and theory — as almost more important than the literature or arts it was purporting to criticize. While craftsmanship was revered at the expense of narrative, technique ran the risk of being seen as "a kind of shame." The circularity and self-contradictory aspects of this wordplay are obvious. But Josipovici points out that "argument and disagreement will never end" regarding the various ways Modernism can be interpreted, and "though we might feel that they were misguided we should think twice before presuming to tell them they were wrong."

Josipovici's report to us is a very personal one, and this review only scratches the surface by attempting to cut through all the diversions in order to ferret out the main thrust of Josipovici's argument. He has strong opinions and shares them freely, calling this group Philistines and that group positivist and another group naïve, as though his is the last word, which is all very charming and amusing, unless you happen to be one or the other! Yet he admits in the end that there cannot "be a definitive 'story' of Modernism. We cannot step outside it, much as we would like to, and pronounce with authority on it." There are too many divergent points of view. He concludes by asking:

" . . . are we to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something which blinkers us or which sharpens our vision? This is, in itself, of course, a very Modernist question."

The digressions — so long as you can keep your eye on the argument — are wonderfully rich and vividly informative about important books, music and the arts in the context of Modern literary and art history. He may assert that one writer is better than another, but he will back it up with quotations and analysis. One can disagree with his conclusions about the relative merits of this artist or that writer, or one reading public or another, but one comes away from this stroll through the brief history of Modernism with a whole new understanding of what the heck it was all about.

Studying this book will inevitably leave the reader or viewer better prepared for Modern literature or Modern art. I say "studying" because it really must be read twice in order to put it all together. On balance, however, I give it 4½ stars.½

I admit that I spent much time on this book. At times, I even thought I “wasted” too much time but when an authority like Gabriel Josipovici, former Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford looks back at 50 years of critical reading, makes very personal statements on the actual status of the British literary scene, redefining and explaining Modernism in Art, “en passant” listing which books are worth reading from an artistic point of view and which ones are mere entertainment, one simply has to sit up and pay attention.

Unfortunately, I needed several readings to grasp exactly what Josipovici wanted to explain. His book gets rather confusing after some chapters, for it misses on the whole a clear structure and a logical argumentation flow. Halfway through, the essay meanders too much and too often into broader artistic subjects. Instead of clarifying things for the readers, at moments he succeeds only in confusing us more.

On the other hand maybe the “confusion” is what it is all about and was my reaction to think deeply about literary value, the only correct reaction towards this very post – modernistic essay on Modernism.

Value

The British writers that sell well today, the novels that win literary prizes in the UK, are disappointing to Josipovici because they fail to “touch him at the core of his being” ( whatever that may mean ). They are especially unsatisfying if you contrast those actual prize winning novels with what was written in the UK before the Second World War and what was and still is written today outside of the UK. Josipovici cannot find for instance in the writings of the icons of the moment, in writers like Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch, Julian Barnes or even Evelyn Waugh, the excitement he found in reading books by earlier writers like Woolf, Conrad or Forster or in the works of “contemporaries” from outside the UK. People like Borges, Robbe – Grillet and Saul Bellow. With the exception of a few writers, most notably Muriel Sparks and the early Golding, he cannot find the intrinsic qualities he remembered and enjoyed so much from the English writers from the turn of the century, the ones, we use to call the Modernist.

Instinctively we feel that the professor is onto something. Similar remarks about contemporary prize winning writers like Ian Mc Ewan regularly flare up in the discussions on literary social networks and between more knowledgeable readers. Interestingly, Salman Rushdie is not named in the dissertation. This is curious for he is one of the more interesting writers of these days. Maybe Josipovici does not consider him a British but an Indian writer?

What misses, continues Josipovici, is “Modernism”, (hence the title of his book), but Modernism not as it is usually understood as a style or a period of Art history, but Modernism redefined as “Art becoming aware of its precarious status and responsibility”. Modernism is not something which is safely behind us, but something which will be from now on always with us.

Understandably such elaboration raises questions for it is rather risky to try to make a point while redefining certain generally agreed definitions. But let us keep listening. Josipovici kicks off his argumentation about value rather confusingly and immediately unbolts a few givens.

Modernism, as such, is a response by Artists to the “disenchantment of the world”, a response to a crisis, which he names “the crisis of Modernism” and which he illustrates by quoting from diaries and correspondence by three writers, Mallarmé, von Hofmannsthal and Kafka. All three are toiling and even suffering over their writings because they have doubts about their authority as writers and about the way they are trying to represent reality in their works.

To explain this “disenchantment of the world”, ( a concept borrowed from Max Weber ), Josipovici nudges us to an earlier period of our cultural history, to that period where man was pushed out of the so called “Dark” Middle-ages into the blinding glare of the Enlightenment. While we have congratulated ourselves on what we won, freedom from superstition, freedom from the yoke and tyranny of the church, no one seems to realize, or is even interested Josipovici adds, in what we lost in the process. What we lost is Sacrality, we lost the numinous, the divine disappeared from our daily life as well as a sense of community, our togetherness which disappeared in favor of the so lauded individualism of the Renaissance.

Before, Man was simply part of a watertight world of myth and ritual, of agreed-on hierarchies and implicit understandings, of embodied places and an ordered world, of community and family. Now he stands outside, looking in, aware only of what has been lost. Man and of course also the Artist, who have cast away their old Gods now fully realize that they have from now on to take responsibility for their own deeds.

And, according to Josipovici this is still a problem today.

Now, the crisis of Modernism if I understand Josopivici well, for again, never are the different points clearly linked to each other, the crisis of Modernism is a result of this disenchantment of the world. Michael Sayeau in his review of Josipovici’s book rephrases better what the professor means: “the crisis of Modernism”, which comes in the wake of the “disenchantment” is “a complex of certain perennial artistic problems and the various responses that artists down the centuries have offered to these problems”.

First, the writer has to assume, especially if he wants to write “serious books”, the responsibility this newly found authority brings about. Secondly, he has to decide what he is going to write, from which point of view and how he has to overcome certain artistically, philosophic and technical hurdles which will appear when he wants to depict reality in order to shed light on our Human condition.

The seven chapters that make up the core of Josipovici’s argumentation explain this crisis and the suffering of writers who are trying to turn their novels into Art. The hurdles and pitfalls are aplenty and not only restricted to writing Literature, but also valid for Painting, Sculpture and even Music.

If we follow Josipovici’s reasoning then “Great” books, the books that “touch him at the core of his being” are those books where we see Modernism at work, where we see the intelligent creative skills the writer – artist or craftsman displays to avoid the pitfalls and hurdles which the questions around authority and reality representation bring about.

Is this sufficient to qualify the books we read? Of course not. Would this be the case, then only experimental writings, sometimes as obscure as Finnegans wake, would make it into the canon.

It is Bakthin who reminds us that literature is more than a set of clever formal devices. In Bakthin’s view, literature should not only contain great ideas, but also discover or uncover them. A display of craftsmanship is only a part of what makes up a great book.

We should also not forget that we need a story in the Forsterian sense, a narrative that pulls us through the pages. We need a poignant entertaining narrative, uncovering a plethora of emotions, well written, with an intelligent word choice, developed characters and an exciting syntax. What would the Karamazov book be for instance without the backbone story of the parricide? What would Golding’s Inheritors mean without the clash of the species?

The “craftsmanship”, ( which comes at the expense of conventional narrative ), to which Josipovici seems to restrict high Art is according to me only a part, an important part I agree, the part that best shows the skills of the writers, but insufficient on itself as a rule to value books. It could be, and again this is not clear, that Josipovici finds a good story and a philosophical core as too evident for any book worth reading to mention it.

The crisis of Modernism

This said, the development of the topic of “the crisis of Modernism”, this “Art becoming aware of its precarious status and responsibility” which Josipovici develops subsequently is the most interesting part of the book. It is the first time I have read about this topic in such details and it made me go back to earlier readings and reviews because I got a better understanding of what is at stake.

It is interesting that Josipovici not only describes the problem, but also holds it against the light and compares it with some philosophical point of views and against other arts, like music and painting. The other Arts face the same problems.

Lets go back to how Michael Sayeau rephrased Josipovici’s words: “the crisis of Modernism”, which coming in the wake of the “disenchantment” is “a complex of certain perennial artistic problems and the various responses that artists down the centuries have offered to these problems”.

Josipovici opens his dissertation with quoting from a number of writers’ private journals and correspondence: von Hofmanstahl, Mallarme, Kafka, Becket. All these writers confess in a same way, that they intellectually suffer to the extreme, when looking for responses to the problems of authority and a depiction of realism.

Let’s start with the problem of Authority.

In a world where nobody tells you what to do, where there is no church or any other order to guide your creative urge, if in other words external Authority has been abandoned, even in the shape of genre, then where does the writer gets his authority? Evidently from inspiration or experience of the novelist himself. Who confers this authority upon him, No one but himself. And let’s not forget that the readers also have an option. They can either agree with the authority the writer has given himself or not.

Now imagine you want to write a “book with meaning” and you have nothing more than your self declared Authority, then you have two possibilities, either your Authority is undermined by self-doubt or you have no self-doubt at all and between these two extremes there is a whole spectrum of mixed levels.

Josipovici explains this with some examples. Two writers could not believe their luck when they could write whatever they wanted, but still dampened their claim to authority with humor and a wit: Cervantes and Rabelais. Cervantes already understood that without authority one was reduced to claim authority for ourselves, when we know deep down we have none. Regularly this awareness surfaces in his great book and he turns his narrative inside out as if to make sure that his readers are aware of this too. The fact that both Rabelais and Cervantes used humor to cope with the problem of authority gives them these strange modern feeling.

On the other side you have writers who notoriously have no doubt at all about their authority. People like Dickens, Balzac and Victor Hugo. While enormously successful as entrepreneurs, they are never able to question what it is they are doing. That is the reason, according to Josipovici, that these books however entertaining that they are still have an aftertaste of being naïve and hollow.

Josipovici at this level introduces Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard says that in our age, we confuse a genius or a great writer, with an apostle, someone who speaks with true authority. Strangely, while I would think there are no Apostles left after the “disenchantment”, Josipovici finds but does not explain why, that both Shakespeare and Dante can claim true authority.

More interesting in Kierkegaard, is his theory of the “last part”.

By writing a last part of a novel, a conclusion, the novelist gives his work and live a meaning, a meaning real life has not. He makes by this an error because, says Kierkegaard “ though it is indeed by writing that one justifies the claim to be an author ( with authority ), it is strangely enough by writing that one virtually renounces this claim”. Great writers must be aware of the inappropriateness of a concluding ending.

The adagio “Si tacuisset, philosophus manisset”( had he kept quite he would have remained a philosopher) brings to mind my review of Gogol’s “ The Government Inspector”. Gogol, unhappy by the unforeseen political mess his play had caused, tried to explain and rewrite his work. In this case his authority was not accepted. It was Bielinski who in his famous letter voiced the general opinion: “Gogol should have remained a Genius – Artist instead of the “Thinker” he was not prepared to be…”. Bielinski, with these words, saved both this theatrical masterpiece for posterity as well as the reputation of the writer.

Are not all great novels open ended? Is it not a blessing that neither Dostoievski nor Gogol could write a sequel to their masterpieces? Is not the strength of the Magic Mountain the the question about the lesson of life remains open? That there are no conclusions to be made?

Says Kierkegaard: “To find the conclusion it is necessary first of all to observe that it is lacking and then in turn feel quite vividly the lack of it”.

Besides the problem of authority, there is another important challenge for the Modernist writer: How to render reality, how to bring real life into the pages of the novel? Real life, with its unpredictability, its lack of meaning, its butterfly-effectish string of occurrences. It is, Josipovici shows us, a never-ending quest. There comes a moment when Artist grasp that their writings are not mirrors reflecting real life but that what they are producing, are mere signs of emblems of the external world.

In five chapters Josipovici makes a tour of the artists who have been probing the extremes of what is possible in their Art. Josipovici switches for several chapters to a discussion about the works of artists like Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and the great Marcel Duchamp. He does not analyze their works himself but he relies on the writings of Art-critics he trusts: Rosalind Krauss for Picasso and Thierry de Duve for Duchamp. While all this is very interesting, Josipovici, is in fact unnecessarily straying from his subject. Fortunately he comes back to his topic and presents us extracts of writers who are sticking to that redefined Modernism and who have explored the limits of what can be done in literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Malarmé, Nathalie Sarraute, Raymond Roussel, Marguarite Duras and Claude Simon. None of them British… Modernism concludes Josipovici, is not a consequence of the crisis of the Bourgeoisie, but it may be a product of the general European rootlessness in the wake of the French and industrial revolution.

The Scandal

In the last two chapters, as if he too suddenly realizes how far he has led his readers astray, Josipovici comes back to the central subject. It is these last chapters that have caught the attention of the media. Thanks to a misunderstanding by a journalist in the Guardian, the book’s final reception will be that of a rant against contemporary writers. Josipovici finds himself suddenly in the role of “l’enfant terrible” of British literature.

What does he say?

“Reading Barnes, like reading so many of the other writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian Mc Ewan, Blake Morisson, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner”.

The fear of opening itself to the world has effectively cut the British literary community from the foreign, especially the European influences which could have kept British literature at the level where Golding and Sparks left it.

Josipovici identifies three reasons for this barrier: First, fear and distrust towards what is not British, has turned the public's opinion from an earlier healthy pragmatism into a general suspiciousness of things of the mind in Art and Literature. General philistinism is the result. Secondly, while people seem to be suspicious of intellectual pretentiousness, they love the so called “serious and profound”. Historical novels about Rwanda and Bosnia are more worthy of attention than for example a Woodehouse and Pinget. Finally High art and Fashion have married in a new spirit of commercialism. Books and the whole circus around it is nothing more than business.

And who is to blame?

“ Writers of course only do what they can”, he says condescendingly. The problem is the middlemen, the critics, the academics, the people in the prize – discerning committees. “Critics and cultural analysts have to do better”, for they are the ones who are knowledgeable enough to separate art from the mere entertaining and they have the responsibility to say so. It is only they who can nudge the interested readers to better prose. It is only they who can lift the quality standards to higher levels.

Conclusion

In his analysis of what is wrong with the books that get the attention nowadays, Josipovici embarks on a cultural grand tour, identifies the symptoms, uncovers the root of the problems, redefines Modernism and points to the culprits. His essay tackles much more than just Modernism, it is a also a reflection on his general unease with many contemporary writers, but most of all it is a statement on Artists and Art.

Polemical as he sounds in his opinions about good and less good books, fine and not so fine writers, intelligent and less intelligent literary reviewers and art critics, Josipovici warns the reader that his opinion is just an opinion and its validity worth no more but certainly no less than any other opinion on good and bad books.

However his definition of value might be too narrow according to me, I appreciated his development and explanation of the “Crisis of the Modernist Artist”, the problems of authority and realism.

These “aspects of the novel” will certainly help me to better formulate my own opinions on what I admire and what not. I might even go back to my earlier reviews and rewrite some parts. It certainly will sharpen my choice in what I want and do not want to read and I am certainly going to review my TBR list.

While it is a main shortcoming that Josipovici does not point to which promising contemporary authors, one should look, interesting titles from post WWII writers litter the book. While, Josipovici utters not a word about American post-modernism, Asian writers or even Salman Rushdie, the books he advises us not to forget are plenty.

As far as I am concerned, Gabriel Josipovici’s “What ever happened to Modernism” is an interesting book. True, maybe not for everybody, but for those, like you and me, who are curious about what makes certain novels compulsive reading and others just simply entertaining.

When this book was published last year, it received a surprising amount of attention from mainstream press for a work pondering the extent of modernism's reach. And this occurred, I believe, as a result of some slightly misleading marketing:

"The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing - a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why."

And the press picking up on a an inflammatory section of the book that does not occur until page 174 of a 187 page book.

"Reading Barnes, like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, but they will say, that is just what we wanted, to free you of your illusions. But I don't believe them. I don't buy into their view of life. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world."

The book also quietly raised eyebrows in smaller press and in some academic circles as representing a lesser version of Josipovici's typically brilliant work because it seemed to be an unusual hybrid of academic writing and a slight examination of modernism intended to appeal to a broader audience than might typically pick up such a title. I find all of these things to be a disservice to a very engaging book that presents itself initially as "a personal book, an attempt, fifty years on, to clarify the unease I felt in those early days in Oxford, which has only grown in the intervening years. I hope, however, that it says something not just about myself but about our world, about artists, and about art," and then near the conclusion as the author's own "story," discovered as he went along, that only "art which recognises the pitfalls inherent in both realism and abstraction will be really alive."

So what actually takes up the bulk of the text before the dismissal of contemporary English authors near the very end is Josipovici's push to examine modernism not within the widely accepted hundred year window between 1850 and 1950, not confined to the conveniently organized but facile delineation in Peter Gay's The Lure of Heresy that defines modernism in two ways - "a desire to shock the bourgeoisie and a desire to express subjectivity." Josipovici instead traces the evolution of modernism from a "disenchantment" with the world beginning post-Protestant Reformation as a response against cultural uniformity builds as increasing secularism leads a formerly ordered world of community into an increasingly fragmented existence of liberal individualism.

Josipovici admits in several instances that his choices of pivotal works and writers and artists are not the only ones which could have been utilized to illustrate the evolution of modernism as he sees it. In fact, his attachment to certain exemplars can prove down right annoying and repetitive in a few parts. Dare I mention that I thought I could see similarities between this and the children's series of books Where's Waldo? Except this would be called Where's Kierkegaard? The big K is referenced that often. But the joy of reading this is to jump into the conversation as the suggestion of examples invites you to insert ones of your own. Fundamentally, I agreed with Josipovici because, as he suggest in several instances, my world view is very similar to his own. And he recognizes the genius of Muriel Spark. And I view the insouciance, the boredom in many examples of contemporary literature with the same sigh I hear here. And this is an erudite and deeply personal and engaging invitation to value the impossible - a reconciliation of "romantic beliefs and the world's reality" so that we do not fall into the same trap as the denounced contemporary English authors here where "love is not about stars in your eyes, it is about the itch of sex; death is not a consummation devoutly to be wished but a dingy and degrading experience; art is there not to make you rejoice but to rub your nose in the dirt." This struck my forcefully. Don't laugh. It is not trite. I believe it. The world view thing.

I will try to write about Moo Pak without descending into one long, uninterrupted stream of block-quotes, but let me tell you, it will be a challenge. Because if there's one word to describe Gabriel Josipovici's critical-essay-cum-novella, it's "quotable." A bit surprising, really, seeing as this story of friendship between two men—Jack Toledano and Damien Anderson, talker and listener, writer/philosophizer and chronicler—takes the form of a single 151-page paragraph, with not a chapter heading or line break to be found. Jack's speech, or his different speeches, pieced together by Damien from memories of over ten years of walks and conversation with Jack, flows with seeming effortlessness from one subject to the next and back again, from Kew Gardens to Hampstead Heath, and the reader is swept along in its wake. (The style, which presents Jack's thoughts as seamlessly integrated with his actions and the sights he sees, reminded me incredibly strongly of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own—although, interestingly, Woolf was one author Jack never mentions.) And yet, despite its all-of-a-piece nature, the text has a surprisingly excerpt-able quality about it, to wit:

The trouble with me, he said, is that I have classical aspirations but a romantic temperament. I not only like but believe in the notion of regular daily work, of there being no question without an answer, no problem without a solution. But when it comes to it I cannot work unless I am fired by a belief in what I am doing, and there are many questions to which I have not been able to find the answer, many works I have started with high hopes and then been forced to abandon because I was unable to find the right solutions or even to decide what such solutions might be like if I should find them. But that is what we have to live with, he said, and got up abruptly and we left the lake and plunged once more into the birchwoods.

[On a personal note, I'll just say Oh! how I relate to this passage.]

In their ten-plus years together, the dueling legacies of Classicism and Romanticism is just one of Jack's many subjects; he discourses, too, on the religious remnants in a secular society; on the role of art in life; on the relative eccentricities of literature, music, and visual art; on the lives and work of Kafka, Swift, Proust, Eliot and Eliot, Stravinsky, Wodehouse, Mozart, Klee, Beckett, and many others; on the perceived degeneration ("Americanisation") of modern society; on gardens as symbols of continuity; on what it means to be a Sephardic Jew from Egypt living in England; and, perhaps most intriguingly, on his magnum-opus-in-progress, the epic work he calls, at different times, Animal Languages, or Moor Park.

[Swift's] anger and despair, he said, lay in this contradiction, that he could only speak with ease when he donned a mask and yet he hated the thought of hypocrisy and cowardice and wanted to tear the mask off as soon as it was on. Why I thought of Moor Park as a title, he said, is that, like Animal Languages, it is a contradiction in terms, and I like titles like that. A park is precisely what is not a moor, he said, what has ceased to be moor, nature, and has become park, civilisation. A moor, he said that day in Epping Forest, is nature without boundaries. A park, on the other hand, is precisely the imposition of boundaries, it makes human what was once natural. All books, he said, are moor parks, whether they realise it or not.

There is so much to discuss here, so many different directions in which to go, but I think the above quote expresses one of my favorite elements of Moo Pak, which is Josipovici's treatment of contradiction. I'm a huge fan of the idea that contradiction, even paradox, is a defining trait of the human experience, and that the only thing to do is find a way to accept that fact, even if we can't always celebrate it. Whitman's "I contain multitudes," and all that. But most expressions I've come across of this notion merely say it in words; Moo Pak manages to illustrate it structurally as well. As an example of what I mean: in the first twenty or so pages of the book, I was completely enamored of Jack's voice (as edited by Damien); he seemed smart and wise and interesting, and was talking about so many things that are important to me as well. I was underlining like mad, passages such as:

A decent conversation, he says, should consist of winged words, words that fly out of the mouth of one speaker and land in the chest of the other, but words that are so light that they soon fly on again and disappear for ever. We don't formulate a thought first and then polish it and finally release it, he said. If we did that we would never get to speak at all. We let it fly, he says, and sometimes it draws something valuable in its wake and sometimes nothing.

Then, for the next sixty pages or so, I started to get the sneaking suspicion that Jack might be a bit of a blowhard. He spends an awful lot of time kvetching about The Kids These Days, and how England is nothing like it once was, and how everyone has lost touch with what's important. Readers don't read in the "proper" way anymore (fatally, he implies that there is One Right Way), and the populace worships false gods. He starts to sound like some combination of crotchety Harold Bloom and someone's querulous, passive-aggressive great-aunt:

Forster and Greene were bad enough, he said, but if their art is not up to much at least it has integrity. Today in the majority of cases our writers have substituted self-righteousness for integrity, they flow with the filthy tide and talk of subversion and risk. It is laughable, he said, to hear them talk on television and in newspaper interviews about how they are vilified and silenced and how the authorities deny them a voice.

This kind of talk is sort of ridiculous to me. I don't believe for a minute that Shakespeare, for example, would have failed to take advantage of the modern publicity machine had it been available to him, or that Beckett is necessarily a better writer because he was a recluse. Nor do I believe that the level of greed, cupidity, banality, or selfishness of "the young" or "humankind" is significantly higher or lower now than it ever has been. I was disappointed in old Jack, I must say, and in his author. Why would someone with capacity for such brilliant passages spend so much time on mediocre complaining? Jack seemed more or less a simple mouthpiece for Josipovici, and I wasn't digging what was being trumpeted through him.

Then I started to notice certain details. Certain contradictions, cracks in the joint between Josipovici and Toledano. I didn't begin to catch them until about two-thirds of the way into the book, but then they started piling on. Jack complains, for example, about all his English friends who moan about how much they hate England and fantasize about moving elsewhere; yet later on, he himself goes on about how "London is indeed becoming a most horrible place," and how he has considered moving to the country. Little things. He criticizes those who use other people as an excuse to monologue, and yet the reader's entire experience of Jack himself is as one long mediated monologue via Damien. I began to have hope of more distance between Josipovici and Jack than I had at first realized, hope that Jack was sometimes supposed to seem irritating or less-than-inspired.

Shortly thereafter, Jack himself acknowledges the importance of acknowledging contradictions, in passages like the one about moor parks above, or like this gorgeous snippet:

But what we have to do, he said as we fled from the Park and the cries of the caged animals and birds, is to live out the contradictions and to see what can be done with them. What I am after, he said as we waited at the bus-stop, is a work which tries to be generous to all contradictions, to place them against each other and let the reader decide. Even that, he said, is the wrong way of putting it. The reader too can only live out those contradictions, cannot adjudicate between them.

Ah, I thought. Maybe I'm starting to get what Josipovici is doing here. I as the reader must put Jack's annoying side next to his inspiring side, what he said last week next to the contradictory argument he made today, and accustom myself to the dissonance. Live through the contradictions, just as Jack himself talks of doing with all the different manifestations of the Moor Park estate in his epic history-in-progress.

But THEN! I don't quite know how to put this (and it's odd that such a plot-less book would have a spoiler), but the last few pages really took this whole dialectic of living through contradictions to a whole new level for me. It's as if Josipovici is saying to the reader "You think you're accommodating contradiction now—just you wait." What are we to make of the final pages, my friends? To what extent to they change our perception of what came before? Do they invalidate the rest of the monologue, or not at all? And what do we do with the fact that, in the last few pages, the usual interjection changes from "he said" (referring to Jack) to "he wrote" (referring to Damien)? Who is the real author here, and what is the real art?

I don't have answers to these questions yet, but I'm very much enjoying thinking about them. Moo Pak (despite the parts of it that contradict this statement) was a beautiful, thought-provoking read.