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.
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