Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici's Creative Oeuvre (review)

Monika Fludernik, Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici's Creative Oeuvre. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000. xv + 264 pp.

Echoes and Mirrorings (2000) by Monika Fludernik is the first monograph on the contemporary British novelist and playwright Gabriel Josipovici. Fludernik provides an account of Josipovici's complete creative oeuvre. Her study devotes a chapter each to Josipovici's short fiction, to the novels, and to the (radio) plays. It also includes an interview with the author as well as a comprehensive bibliography.

Fludernik wishes to counteract a major misreading of Josipovici's work, that is, his treatment as a dry and technical postmodernist who is interested in experimental form for its own sake. She proposes instead to treat Josipovici's oeuvre as a late modernist venture with a moderate tendency toward postmodernist techniques and argues that, read as such, it belongs with the best writing produced in England since World War II.

Chapter 1 provides close readings of the short stories "Brothers" (1983), "The Bird Cage" (1987), "This" (1972), "A Changeable Report" (1982), "Exile" (1984), and "In the Fertile Land" (1979). Fludernik points out that formally foregrounded experimentalism occurs only rarely in Josipovici's short prose; most of the short stories employ metafictional techniques in order to adequately portray the fictional world in its abysses of disillusionment, uncertainty, and pathos. Hence, she regards the spirit of Josipovici's short prose to be modernist rather than postmodernist.

The second chapter deals with Josipovici's novelistic oeuvre. Fludernik distinguishes among three types of novels: the montage novels, for example, The Air We Breathe (1981) and Migrations (1977); the monologue novels, for example, Moo Pak (1995) and The Big Glass (1991); and the dialogue novels. She argues that all three types compensate for their unpromising settings and the lack of a traditional plot by an excess of irony, humor, and absurdity. According to Fludernik, they are notable for their conjunction of formal experimentation with a very humanist concern for philosophical issues and questions of meaning and destiny.

Fludernik devotes her third chapter to the diversity and brilliance of Josipovici's dialogue, which illustrates what a tenuous hold language has on reality, meaning, and identity construction. This problem finds its most characteristic formulation in the shape of dialogic (non)expression and (non)communication. The forms and functions of dialogue in the author's texts vary considerably. However, they do not differ significantly between his fiction and his drama. Josipovici's stage and radio texts profit from a reading that treats them as texts rather than as scripts, and the dialogue novels and dialogue short stories acquire additional interest from the dramatic perspective.

Chapter 4 deals with Josipovici's dramatic oeuvre and his radio plays. Fludernik provides detailed analyses of the plays Dreams of Mrs. Fraser (1971) and A Moment (1979) as well as the radio plays Mr. Vee (1988) and Playback (1973). The chapter closes with a discussion of the rewriting of the short story "Brothers" as Kin (1983) and the film Many Little Lies (1987), an adaptation of his novel Contre-Jour. Fludernik finds in Josipovici's oeuvre recurrent thematic and technical concerns that closely link his fiction and his dramatic work. For this reason it is to be hoped that an edition of the author's drama and radio plays will soon make these texts available to a wider public.

The close readings in chapters 1 through 4 are followed by an attempt to situate Josipovici on the general map of present-day British literature. Fludernik starts with external attempts at classification according to periodization, theme, and genre and then moves on to text-internal aspects. She pays particular attention to the narrative techniques employed by Josipovici, such as external focalization. Also, Fludernik deals with Josipovici's debt to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and compares Josipovici's texts with the French nouveau roman. She argues that as far as Josipovici's plays are concerned, he joined hands with Beckett and Pinter in...