Respect for the World

Detail from cover

Books that rely solely on realism and assert that they "give the world as it is" strike me as false. Entrenched views about what the world looks like find themselves solidly established in much current fiction that "seldom refers to any of the literary developments of the past 20, 50 or a hundred years," as Elif Batuman said recently while discussing creative writing programs. Gabriel Josipovici's newest nonfiction book, an essential work that is highly readable and quotable, has been swarmed by waspish commentators in English newspapers for saying bad things about Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, and others. In What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Josipovici draws on Søren Kierkegaard, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and others to determine when modernism arose, what it is, and what has happened to it. After discussing Samuel Beckett's "Dante and the Lobster," in which a lobster is placed in boiling water, he writes,

Even when a story is about the limits of the imagination, it is still calling on us to imagine. It has no other recourse. You can never succeed, for each time you think you have succeeded, each time the reader says: 'Ah, I see', you have failed.... And that is why Modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism—both Tolkien and Graham Greene, as it were, both Philip Pullman and V.S. Naipaul. Not out of a Puritan disdain for the imagination or the craft of letters, but out of respect for the world.

Those familiar with Josipovici's work will recognize that respect, and the humanity underlying it. It seems an abiding concern for him to both acknowledge the unknowableness of the world while accepting that this is the way life is. That open-mindedness is shown at the end of the book where Josipovici says that his version of events is "the true one," to him, of modernism, while also maintaining that "there is no such thing as the true story...." His position is well articulated, if compressed occasionally in such a short book. His argument provides no comfort for those who think differently.

James Purdon, in the Observer, faults Josipovici for writing about modernism and not solving stubborn problems about "arts education, about publishers and prizes...," topics that lie outside his purview as much as cold fusion does, and I imagine physicists are whittling their knives. Purdon asks a rhetorical question: "Or might it [modernism] simply have gone to ground in its natural habitat: the small presses and little magazines?" This is an assertion with no proof attached; and modernism is painted as something Other (the Observer is big and mainstream).

Philip Hensher's Daily Telegraph review begins inauspiciously with this rhetorical question: "What shall we do with modernism?" He continues, "It erupted into our lives around the turn of the 20th century, forcing on us works that at first we could not understand and frankly did not like. Over time, though, we have come to enjoy quite a lot of it." Born in 1965, Hensher is nowhere near the generation that experienced Year One of modernism (whenever that may be, a topic Josipovici deals with), and he is flatly wrong when he says that people "did not like" modernist works. Yet he does validate Josipovici's remark that, from the 1950s on, "English culture was actually growing steadily less interested in or aware" of modernism. Early on, Josipovici says he regards modernism not as a period or literary movement but "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." Unaware that he has lived in the shadow of modernism, and confessing his ignorance of Josipovici's works (though his fiction began to be published in 1968, in 2010 Hensher writes that "I had not heard of any of it."), Hensher's patronizing review wants to cast Josipovici as a bad writer...