Whatever happened to Modernism?

What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici – review

This is a generous, inclusive look at the livelier side of literary criticism

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 November 2011 09.00 GMT

N. Lezard


Early Modernism? Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Good question. Last year it looked as though the literary establishment might have been on the point of recognising the influence of Modernism: Tom McCarthy on the Booker shortlist, this book making a bit of a splash ... and then this year it all went wrong again, with Booker speeches about "readability". Last week, I saw this remark quoted in a review of Richard Bradford's, by all accounts risible, biography of Martin Amis; insofar as it means anything at all, it can be considered fairly representative of the mainstream British view: "Pure modernism is among other things an escape route for the stylistically untalented or aesthetically apathetic."


What Ever Happened to Modernism?
by Gabriel Josipovici

OK, let's get to work, mentioning only in passing that Amis – for whose writing I have a lot of time and respect – is bewilderingly and depressingly dismissive of Samuel Beckett, who could be said, if you were in a real hurry, to be Modernism's most fêted disciple. (It was a passing mention of Amis that contributed to this book's emergence in the limelight last year.) When someone as smart as Amis maintains such a position – and it's clear, from his comments about the writer in The War Against Cliché, that he does so from a position of relative ignorance – it becomes less surprising that this country still considers one of its greatest authors to be JRR Tolkien. Josipovici puts it like this: "Modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism – both Tolkien and Graham Greene, as it were ... not out of a Puritan disdain for the imagination or the craft of letters, but out of respect for the world."

So here is another rather less asinine view of what a "purist" notion of Modernism might be, taken from the New York art critic Clement Greenberg some decades ago, and quoted by Josipovici: "The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticise the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." In other words, the opposite of what Bradford thinks. When Beckett ends Molloy with the words "It was not midnight. It was not raining", he does so out of honesty to the craft.

So this is a generous and inclusive book, its sideswipes at contemporary British philistinism notwithstanding. (And even then we are not using the term in which it is commonly understood. There are a few moments where it looks as though Josipovici is trembling on the verge of including Wodehouse in the Modernist canon, which I think is marvellous.) The Modernist project has been around for far longer than you might think: from Euripides, looked at one way; or from Rabelais, looked at another; certainly since Cervantes. "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember ..." is how Don Quixote begins, and it is as if the rest of the book is itself a huge piss-take of the very idea of narrative, a healthy scorn for plodding literalism. When Duchamp – he of the urinal in the art gallery – was asked in 1922 for his views on photography, he replied thus: "Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don't feel like writing. You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are." Josipovici notes the "very Beckettian style" of this (pre-Beckett though it may be); and it reminds us that the Modernist avant garde is by no means without a sense of humour.

Although this book has been published by a university press, and does engage with serious aesthetic issues from a position of deep knowledge, it is nevertheless very readable. (Some critics have suggested this might undermine its authority. I'm not so sure, but I can see their point.) It is personal, engaged, sometimes a bit nuts – Wordsworth a proto-Modernist? Flaubert, the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, a realist? – but consistently eye-opening, honest with its terms and, amazingly for a work of literary criticism, hugely quotable and never dull.

My Gabriel Josipovici moment:

As a drama student at Hull University, I assisted with the set construction and stage management on the late Anthony Minghella's musical adaptation of GJ's short story "Mobius the Stripper", a dual narrative about a male stripper and a writer written respectively on the top and bottom of each page. (Minghella's staging reflected the same spatial divide).

It's not difficult- the preoccupation with FORM being dominant in "Mobius the Stripper"- to understand Josipovici's interest in Modernism. What he'd written was, of course, a prose "Mobius Strip": an "impossible" piece of origami.

The production, in which Tony Minghella himself played the writer (named Gabriel, of course) was great fun and a great success.

Our stage manager Graham rang Mr Josipovici to ask whether he'd like to attend a performance of this adaptation of his work, but the great man (very posh voice, noted Graham) was otherwise engaged that night.