Gabriel Josipovici

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Professor Josipovici joins us now from London. Welcome to The Book Show.

Gabriel Josipovici: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: Let's start with modernism itself, and you're saying that this way of thinking about literature and writing began way before James Joyce wrote Ulysses, that it was a response to the crisis in human thinking that goes beyond even Cervantes and Don Quixote. Could you tell us how you think of modernism?

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, well you've summed up pretty well the point I tried to put across in the first part of the book. What I really wanted to do...it doesn't much matter whether one says it in the 16th century or the 17th century or the 18th century or the 19th century...is to get away from the notion that modernism has to do with certain technical tricks or technical procedures, whether it's free verse or Joyce altering the shape of the novel and so on.

And right the way back from when I was a student, it struck me that works like those of Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne...Sterne in the English tradition in the 18th century seemed to me far closer to the writing that I was interested in, those modern writers that you mentioned at the start in your introduction, than a lot of writing that might be construed as modern if one just looks for technical procedures or one says, oh, it's all about self-consciousness or that sort of thing. I was trying to get down to some of the deeper underlying causes of this outburst from the 1850s to the 1950s of what has been called modernism. And my gut instinct was that those elements were already in place, not just in romanticism that much earlier, as you say, they won't predominate, they were there only perhaps in a few perceptive spirits, but it was certainly something that those perceptive spirits were aware of and troubled by.

Ramona Koval: So really you're saying that Enlightenment thought lead to a worldview which began to lack the former certainty of artists, and writers that rose during this post-Enlightenment time expressed an anxiety of not being able to speak, not being able to write, and some of them that you quote, like Kafka complains about almost not being able to write a sentence because the words talk to each other and confuse things.

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, again, my feeling...all one can go on with these things is how one is responding, is that this is something that happened before the Enlightenment. I was very struck by the fact that while everyone seemed to think...the current conception of art history or literary history or musical history was the Middle Ages were dark ages and then came the Renaissance and the discovery of man and the triumph of the imagination and so on.

I found a lot of Renaissance art and a lot of post-Renaissance art much less interesting than mediaeval art, and, asking myself why, it struck me that mediaeval art had qualities which I think disappeared for complicated and many, many reasons, these things are always overdetermined. But I wasn't the only one to feel that way. I was emboldened or given confidence in my feelings by reading Proust...Proust had learnt through Ruskin, but nevertheless it touched something in him, but let's say Proust and Ruskin... on the contrast between the anonymous figure on a Gothic cathedral and the Mona Lisa, let's say, with the emphasis for Proust and Ruskin on the fact that the anonymous figure on Amiens Cathedral moved them far more than the Mona Lisa, and Proust explains this by saying that is because this was a figure that was created without any desire to create art, it was made for the greater glory of God, it's an anonymous art. And you can still go to Amiens, take the train and walk across the square in the rain or the sunshine to get to the place where it is still shining under the same sky, he says, as when it was first created.

Whereas the Mona Lisa he talks about as being a creature without a home that has wandered, as it were, this canvas that was created by Leonardo but has moved to the Louvre and is now gawked at by hundreds of thousands of people every year. And not just Proust but Eliot and Pound feeling that there was something in the art of the middle ages and the art of Dante, but also in the mediaeval lyrics and so on, Dante's contemporaries, that's a kind of innocence and freshness that they felt had got lost in the Renaissance, and they saw the late 19th century from which they were struggling to emerge as being like the sort of dying strands of something that had once perhaps being quite wonderful with the Renaissance. And that seemed to me a convincing sort of shape to history, although I can see it's one story, as it were.

Ramona Koval: Yes, so they are struggling in the late 19th century with their own art, with what they can say, with the instruments of language that they are using. But, as you say, readers want to be part of a realised world, we want to be part of a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world, you say. And you say the novel emerges at the point where the world has become disenchanted. So this is a bit of an anomaly, isn't it; the writers who are struggling with the language but the readers who want the writers to tell them a story.

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, I think you've put your finger on something. And what upsets me about a lot of the criticism of the book was that people weren't even willing to consider that this was a complicated and paradoxical issue, and I'm not simply trying to knock a few English writers but trying to unpack something, so let's try and unpack it in the way that you set it up.

When I started doing research after my undergraduate career, working on Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne, it struck me that they saw themselves as the heirs to epic writers like Homer and Dante, whose single works encompass the universe. But on the other hand, they were now in the world where you could no longer talk directly to the Muses, as Homer had, or feel that you were in contact with God and were simply unpacking a highly complicated but highly patterned world which was a world that God had created but which someone like Dante could explore through the church fathers and the Bible and so on. They felt they were no longer one with that, they were writers wanting to write an epic that writing now...

Again, I think tying in to this is the rise of print, so they were suddenly reaching a much wider market but it was a very odd market in that they were writing these prose encyclopaedic works...because you could no longer write encyclopaedic works in verse...if you wrote it like, say, Spencer and Milton did, in a way you were being very old-fashioned...they were writing prose for a new audience that was interested in prose narrative but wanted to read these things that now came to be printed.

But they felt very strongly that there was something inherently absurd in that and their books (Rabelais' five books, and Cervantes' Don Quixote) explore the nature of this absurdity, what it is that make us both want to hold on to these narratives, these new epics, believe in them, and yet the writer wanting to create them but also feeling a kind of ridiculous quality, he is a single person in a room with no particular access to authority, and yet he is writing parallel, as it were, to Homer and to Dante.

Ramona Koval: And you say that as we read about the hero's obvious delusions in Don Quixote we believe that we are more realistic about the world than he is, less enchanted, because his crazy. Whereas we are of course ourselves in that very moment caught in Cervantes' web and enchanted by his tales, which Cervantes is aware of, isn't he.

Gabriel Josipovici: Exactly, that is the paradox that's so difficult to pin down, which I think Cervantes explores, and after Cervantes, Sterne, and after Sterne, Borges, as you mentioned, this peculiar thing that we are grabbed by something where we want a pattern, we want a story, and the novelist in a way is given to try and tell it but as he is driven to tell it, if he or she is a responsible artist, responsible, aware of the difference between the world and the book...so I think that the issue, as you say, often can turn into...it's just one to do with the novel, but the novel is a sort of locus where one can see this...the novel and perhaps realist art, realist figurative painting and so on, where this particular issue arises.

And there are various novelists, a novelist like Sartre who we wouldn't think of as being radical in any way but in La Nausee he has a very radical critique of the traditional novel, the kind of narrative that Cervantes or Sterne or Borges was reacting against and trying to force out into the open to make people see what it was. And Sartre talks about this man who wanders down...he says in ordinary life, you walk down the street, your life is open before you, and it is going to go on being open before you, there is no clear adventure. You'd like an adventure to take place but no adventure does. Where you start a novel, if the hero is walking down the street you know that an adventure is going to befall him. And he says that is the peculiar reason why people are so drawn, why you want to read novels in trains and so on, because it enchants us in this way. And the writers I'm interested in...I see modernism as being an attempt to free you from this enchantment, but at the same time recognising that by becoming free, art can start to do other things.

Ramona Koval: And in fact you do talk about going down the street, and life is like going down the street and then turning down another street and then turning down another street. But we don't actually want that from fiction. Although we say we want fiction to be real and tell us a story about life, it can't afford to be like that because otherwise it would be boring, wouldn't it.

Gabriel Josipovici: Exactly, and this is the sleight of hand of most traditional realist novels, that they give the impression that they are life, as it were, while of course subtly plotting the work so that there is a meaning and a resolution, that meaning is...as Sartre says, meaning is thought to have secreted from out of this apparently innocent narrative that we are reading. But it's also I think that for a writer...and a lot of this book came out of my own feeling as a writer, to me it is extremely boring simply to write a novel that is going to stick to...the only constraints are going to be the constraints of realism, you want to tell the reader about this character, so if the character goes into a room, you describe the room. Well, why describe the room? What is the point? This is a novel, it isn't life, and a novel anyway can't describe in the same way as when one enters the room where one immediately takes the whole thing in.

So another aspect, a kind of positive aspect of the modernism issue as I see it, is the sense of a new empowerment if you recognise that you don't need to do those things that realism or the traditional novel has done. Suddenly there are many other things that can be done. And I see a parallel with Francis Bacon, say, in art and his discussion of a Rembrandt portrait where he says Rembrandt lets the paint work but on the other hand he still feels that the paint has to go its own way, but in the end there is a dialogue between him and the sitter out there. And what he has against the two prevalent schools of art, as it were, figurative narrative painting, is that it's dull and doesn't give you the feel of life, and what he has against an abstraction is that there isn't a sense of attention between what the artist can do and what the world out there is like.

Ramona Koval: Gabriel, you say that the two greatest post-war English novelists were William Golding and Muriel Spark. Why them?

Gabriel Josipovici: Again, I have a last chapter in which I say this is my view, I quite recognise that there are other views, I try to justify my view. My feeling when I first started reading the early novels of William Golding, that is the first four, Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and The Spire, was that I was in the same sort of universe as the universe of a Borges or even of a Kafka, that there was something...it seized me and shook me into a sort of recognition of the mystery of the world and gave me a sort of flashlight of awareness of that.

What he does in all these books is to lead you in to look at the world one way, and then with an extraordinary twist towards the end you're pulled out and recognise that this is actually the world inside somebody's head, and therefore the world itself is other than that thing that is inside the person's head. And this is most striking in Pincher Martin were this man is thrown up on a rock in the middle of the ocean, tries to survive Robinson Crusoe-like for a while, but gradually starts to feel there's something that isn't quite right with...I mean, not just the surroundings that are inimitable to life but that there is something peculiarly worrying about it.

And then comes the terrible shock that actually the configuration of these rocks is like that of his teeth as his tongue passes over them, that in a sense he is dying as he is drowning at the very moment that...the whole thing takes place in a moment in which he is drowning, and he tries desperately to hold on to life, and imagines this rock and everything else.

Muriel Spark in a different way I think does the same sort of thing, perhaps because of her Catholic conversion, this sense of suddenly seeing the world transformed, not as other people mostly see it, not as the novel mostly sees it. Her novels, again, are often leading to a point where we are made to see that things are not quite as we thought they were. So in one sense they are...and modernism itself is already a sort of detective story, but it is a detective story where there isn't an answer at the end.

Ramona Koval: You write about Mallarme, his poems that are hard to get, and the reader either tries and gets the thing very quickly, 'what does it mean', or decides it's just too hard and abandons it forever. You can understand that for many people, they don't want to have a big test when they're trying to read something.

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, for me too. Mallarme isn't by any means my favourite, perhaps he is too difficult, but it is an extreme of something that I wanted to explore because he becomes aware of this particular issue that Valéry parodies when he uses this phrase 'The marquise went out at five o'clock', which he sees as the kind of ghastly way of beginning a novel which you must avoid at all costs. And the reason for that is that it could be a duchess and not a marquise, it could be a princess and not a marquise, it could be six o'clock and not five o'clock, et cetera. So there must be some sort of reason for these things within the work, more than simply wanting to make it look like life. And Mallarme's poems are the most extreme concentration of...if you like, they are the sort of Mondrian or the Webern of art.

I think there was at the turn of the 19th, 20th century, there were a number of artists who perhaps pushed things just about as far as they could be pushed, and they're not my favourite artists but I think they are very interesting if one is going to try and understand this phenomenon of modernism.

Ramona Koval: You say that the task of the book was also to look at the modernists and look at the reasons for the difficulties they encountered in getting their work not just published but actually written, and if you can see the difficulties, if they are making the scars and the connections clear, it makes it more rewarding for us to read.

Gabriel Josipovici: Again, this goes back to very early experiences. The book is in one way sort of autobiographical. When I was struggling to write as an adolescent I came across the poems of Eliot or the works of Proust or Kafka, suddenly they hit me, and later on I started to ask myself why exactly. And I think it was because there were phrases within a great poem like The Waste Land, phrases like, 'On Margate Sands. I can connect nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands.' Or Marcel in A la Recherche, desperate to try and express the pleasure he is taking in this beautiful morning but he can't, he can't find the words, and all he can do is bang his umbrella on the ground and say, 'Zut, zut, zut, zut.'

And Kafka writing in his diaries about how he can't express...and suddenly I thought, my God, you know, these people have the same problems as I had, so maybe there's hope for me. They had these problems, not just...okay, in Kafka's case in diaries, but in Proust and they were there in these great works of literature. They were prepared to accept that the difficulty, impossibility, was almost a valuable subject itself for art because it was something which everybody, not just artists, encountered in their daily lives. Why should we simply cover it over?

Ramona Koval: But then you say narratives that are easy to read, they tell a story, the smooth chain of sentences gives us a sense of security or comfort even. So a lot of people, people who like popular literature, will say, well, that's what I want, why should I do something that is hard to read, that is going to make me nervous? But you say that they lack the trembling of life itself, and it doesn't really satisfy you since they don't speak to how you are, and that reading books like that makes you hungry for more.

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, when people say, oh, this isn't a page-turner, or whatever, it all depends on who one is addressing. I find it much easier to turn the pages of a Kafka story than of a John Updike novel because I'm somehow unengaged with it. So it's not that I want to say that easy books are no good and only difficult books are any good, I think people have got me wrong or I have not expressed myself well, because I love...I think that Muriel Spark is an utterly...you can pick up a book and just not put it down until you've finished it. And the same with Golding and the same with Borges' stories and so on.

So I don't think it has to do with that, I really think that people are unduly put off or frightened, and it may be critics who should be the people who are inducting them into these things, who themselves are not doing their task properly the way that, say, a music critic would feel that it was incumbent upon them to explain a little bit about where Stockhausen or Ligeti or whoever comes from in order to help an audience to appreciate it. But literary reviewers seem to think that if the 'man on the Clapham omnibus' or whatever isn't getting it, then why should anyone else get it. So there's a sort of philistinism there which is very sad and I think is rather Anglo-Saxon in the sense of an English-language countries' phenomenon. In a way I think it is something which is the sort of thing that Patrick White was satirising in provincial Australia or whatever, or anywhere, you get it everywhere, and the greater writer is always aware of that, and I think it's trying to say no, just relax and enjoy it, open yourself up to this.

Ramona Koval: You say modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism, both Tolkien and Graham Greene, both Philip Pullman and VS Naipaul, out of respect for the world. Tell me what this horror entails. Why?

Gabriel Josipovici: Well, I think by respect to the world...I mean, the last part of that phrase is something that I touched upon when I was saying that this is not simply a clever modernist trick that springs from a desire to make the reader see that everything that can be said about the world is still going to leave a lot unsaid which is there in the world. So in a way they are trying to make you...just as much as the lyric poets are trying to make you see the world itself as it is out there, and what I was saying there was I think this proliferation of fantasies from Tolkien through to the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman and so on, is a curious sort of indication of the way in which we would rather just turn away from the world and live in pseudo myths and mythologies, and they are pseudo, they're not the real thing as they were in cultures that really had myths and really believed in them. And similarly I think straightforward realism also stops you actually recognising this mysterious thing that our lives are open, are not going to be subsumed in a narrative we can easily tell, but we are constantly going to come up against something which is much more mysterious, much stranger, much more un-inchoate than we imagine.

I was just in Paris yesterday, two days ago, doing a reading of a new novel of mine with the translator of a wonderful French poet called Francis Ponge, and the translator has taken as the title of the collection one of Borges' poems called 'An Unfinished Ode to Mud'. Of course an ode to mud has to be unfinished because mud doesn't have a beginning or an end. And in a way what Ponge, this French poet of the '30s and '40s, was concerned to do is a very modernist thing which was to make you see mud is rather an extraordinary thing. He's also written poems about soap, about a potato, about pebbles.

Ramona Koval: Well, you know, one of the most exciting books I've read this year is about sand in the world, it's a non-fiction book about sand, which I recommend to you to. So Philip Roth is often called an experimental writer because he uses Philip Roth as a character, he uses titles like Counter Life. But you say he is not an experimental writer, that people make a mistake with him.

Gabriel Josipovici: Again, in a way I didn't really want to name names, but I felt that in order to try and make the point of other things, the names and the authors I loved, I had to sort of talk about other authors who I thought perhaps had been over-hyped, Roth was one of them, the French Jewish writer who was recently discovered, Irène Némirovsky was another, and so on. My feeling was...reading Roth, I'd been re-reading a lot of Bellow and the contrast between them (you know, they are often taken together as Jewish American writers) I don't think could be greater.

There is a sort of confidence in Roth, which I think is a misplaced confidence, but a confidence that he can tell it all and in the end his narrative will convey what it is he wants to convey. Re-reading some of Bellow's shorter fiction and actually the novels, it always leads up...again, as you were saying about Golding...leads up to a point where some sort of revelation occurs, some sort of discovery on the part of the narrator. It's a simple discovery often, but often has to do with death, with a recognition of the place of death in life, and suddenly that making life much more meaningful. And to me the gap between Malamud and Bellow on the one hand and Roth on the other is absolutely enormous. But I don't want to get into a question of 'this one's good' and 'that one's bad' and so on, this wasn't really my aim and I don't think it's a very helpful...

Ramona Koval: Although in that part of your book you are very emotional towards the end of the book and you do say that reading Barnes and Amis and Ian McEwan and Blake Morrison doesn't give you the nourishment that you need from fiction. You call them prep school boys showing off. So you do call a spade a spade as you see it.

Gabriel Josipovici: I suppose, yes, now you press me...I suppose it's your job to press me...for all my writing life I felt one shouldn't comment critically about one's contemporaries, because in a way that is self-defeating. What one should do is praise the works one likes and gradually people will see their value. I suppose I was being unduly idealistic and I felt that I was only talking to the converted, as it were, and I wanted just for once to actually make people sit up a little more and to let out in print what I have said and talked about with friends, this feeling that English culture had become this thing that was rather mean and dispiriting, aided and abetted not just by...it wasn't just something in the writers but it was something in the whole culture, aided and abetted by successful critics like John Carey as well as by the writers. I thought it was a way that had seemed to have triumphed among the book reading public in a way that distressed me.

Ramona Koval: Although John Carey has just devoted his time to writing a biography of William Golding, and I think he admires the books that you do for probably the same reason.

Gabriel Josipovici: I don't know, I was mainly thinking of books of his which stress the, as he sees it, the pretentiousness of phoney modernism, and seemed to me to have a very strongly philistine element. He sees it also as a class thing, and of course we must show that all these toffs like Virginia Woolf and so on really were quite hollow. And perhaps coming to England from outside it, landed on English shores at the age of 15, this has never seemed to me a class thing...

Ramona Koval: Because you were always an outsider?

Gabriel Josipovici: Well, yes, although I've lived in England for a long time, I don't feel any more...

Ramona Koval: But isn't it hard to be assigned a class when you come from outside?

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, quite, and that's why...and in one sense of course one is not in touch with the culture fully, but in another way perhaps one can see things that people embedded in the culture can't see.

Ramona Koval: Just before I forget, that books that I was trying to think of is by a geologist Michael Welland, it's called Sand: A Journey through Science and the Imagination. But just talking about science too, because I was thinking about this idea of experimentalism and the return to a different form, after modernism people returned to the storytelling form. And I wondered whether they had learnt the lessons of the experiment while not forgoing the ease of expression that ensured a wider range of readers.

It's sort of like the difference between pure science and the technologies that we get after the science has been worked on by the pure scientists. We use the technologies...like we all use the computer and we love the computers, but we don't actually understand what's going on behind it, but there are people who do. We don't all have to understand the theory, we don't all have to do write as if we are aware of the problem between life likeness or reality and the reality effect.

Gabriel Josipovici: Yes, I have two points. One is I think that, as I was saying about the high modernism and this kind of extremity perhaps of Weber and Mondrian and Mallarme, and that there is a next generation which, again, I very strongly don't want to say post-modernism because my contention there is that modernism is with us to stay, it doesn't have an end and we have to face up to the problems. But that there is, if you like, a second generation where some of the battles or one feels that many of the battles have been won and one can be a bit more relaxed about it so that Golding and Muriel Spark can write novels that are shorter, simpler, perhaps in one way less ambitious than Proust or Thomas Mann, and the same with the artists, an artist like Hockney doesn't need to go through the whole Picasso experience, Picasso has done it.

So I think there is that which is quite separate from your point about the high science as opposed to technology, and what I say about that is only just a footnote really which is that I'm in the process of reading a book by a man called Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, he calls that the divided brain and the making of the Western world. He was an English student at Oxford and had been a pupil of my own favourite tutor Rachel Trickett who already said to me that man is absolutely marvellous. He then was a fellow of All Souls and wrote a book on the Romantics and partly about Wordsworth, and then decided to re-train totally as a neuroscientist. So he speaks with authority, both about neuroscience and about literature. I find that there's much that he says there that fits in with my argument in my book, and I want actually to point this out to one or two people who said to me, 'Oh well, but I'm a scientist so I can't possibly go along with your anti-scientific views about the wonders of an enchanted world,' which I think totally misunderstands what I was trying to say.

Ramona Koval: Yes, hear hear for the renaissance person. Gabriel Josipovici, thank you so much for speaking to us on The Book Show today.

Gabriel Josipovici: Thank you, thanks very much.

Ramona Koval: Gabriel Josipovici is an English novelist, literary theorist and critic. His new book is Whatever Happened to Modernism?, it is published by Yale University Press.

Gabriel Josipovici http://www.gabrieljosipovici.org/

Publications

Title: Whatever Happened to Modernism?

Author: Gabriel Josipovici

Publisher: Yale University Press