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What Ever Did Happen to Modernism?

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By Karen Zouaoui

What Ever Befallen Modernism? is Gabriel Josipovici’s revitalizing cry even with an excessively traditionalist scholarly custom in the UK. As both a settled scholastic—he has held the Weidenfeld Professorship of Comparative Literature at Oxford and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex—and as an author of fiction and true to life, Josipovici shouts to his peers by resounding and taking up Terry Eagleton’s leaflet Whatever Happened to English Modernism? (1982). Josipovici’s quality originates from his double commitment with writing as both a theoretician and a practician. It without a doubt empowers him to take from his own understanding, and wide-running information on European workmanship and writing, to give a genuine assessment of the improvement of ‘present day’ writing.

Josipovici reveals an entrancing insight into a wide exhibit of fine art, running from Dürer’s ‘Melencolia’ (1514) to Picasso’s ‘Violon’ (1912) and Rembrandt’s ‘Self-Portrait’ (c. 1659) or Friedrich’s ‘Vagabond Above the Sea of Fog’ (c. 1818), and accomplishes a liquid treatment of their connection with writing, from Cervantes to Wordsworth and Mallarmé or Thomas Mann, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, to cite yet a couple. It is clarified from the beginning that ‘Innovation’ won’t be taken to allude to an age, however to an ethos against whose ‘bogus companions’ (p171), that is post-war and contemporary English scholars, we are cautioned. What Ever Befallen Modernism? undoubtedly proposes its own meaning of Modernism to uncover that it is more to do with a synchronic ‘structure of feeling’, to reword Raymond Williams, than with a continuum in time. Innovation here alludes to eccentric ways to deal with craftsmanship connected together by the desire to deal with the significance of life and the estimation of language.

The title of section one, citing a letter by Franz Kafka, establishes the pace: ‘My Whole Body Puts Me On My Guard Against Each Word’. Josipovici summarizes his perspectives on innovation by alluding to Barthes’ definition: ‘If Barthes is correct and to be present day is to realize that a few things should never again be possible, at that point Cervantes is current and these scholars [Philip Larkin, Philip Roth, Iris Murdoch, Martin Amis etc.] are not’ (pp164-5). Pioneer style at that point, to Josipovici, is this experience of an impasse, or regardless of a central need our misgiving of life and its significance. Henceforth, his perusing of European writing through the perspective of Kierkegaard’s way of thinking (p80)— his battling contention being that writing must be recorded in a praxis that unites the challenges of living and composing. Henceforth additionally his depending for his hypothetical system on the rationalist of language, Ludgwig Wittgenstein. Josipovici finds in the scholar’s scrutinizing of language the way in to the innovator style, and statements him widely:

‘Certain occasions would place me into a situation in which I was unable to go on with the old language–game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game. Without a doubt, doesn’t it appear glaringly evident that the plausibility of a language-game is molded by specific realities?’ (p142)

Two of his principle concerns in regards to the advancement of writing in the British Isles are to do with the idiosyncrasies of Englishness and the inclination towards deliberation. On the off chance that Josipovici’s contention makes a brilliant read, it is, nonetheless, not new all things considered. His impugning of English philistinism has been an exceptionally normal one both in the UK and on the Continent all through the twentieth century and mid 21st century. English cutting edge scholars like BS Johnson (1933-1973) composed with incredible verve of the British impossible to miss protection from reflection and ‘genuine’ writing in correlation with their European neighbors. Perry Anderson likewise broadly scrutinized the entire of British scholarly life and the scholarly world in ‘Segments of the National Culture’ (New Left Review, NLR I/50, July-August 1968). Maybe Josipovici’s primary commitment is to be found in his synchronic investigation of the pioneer style, from Cervantes to Thomas Bernhard (whom he lauds extraordinarily in the New Statesman of 13 January 2011); a commitment which effectively highlights the troubles and traps of innovation.

Josipovici really want to think about what it is that occurred over the span of the twentieth century that made the inheritance of such creators as Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot evaporate. The creator takes the instance of Pablo Picasso’s vocation to ponder the procedure by which development and experimentation were overwhelmed by reflection in the main portion of the twentieth century. In a section entitled ‘Fernande Has Left With A Futurist’ (pp114-124), after a letter from Picasso to Braque in 1912, Josipovici unites the fields of music, writing, and painting trying to comprehend what happened to ‘[t]hese arrangers, who all became an adult in the years promptly following the finish of the Second World War’, and who ‘accepted that the war and the annihilation it had brought had allowed them to begin once more, it could be said, disregarding generally the customs of old style and Romantic music’ (p122). He proceeds to clarify:

However, while Cage, the American, decided on a rendition of Duchampian incredulity, the Europeans found their motivation in medieval and Renaissance music and the musics of the far East and focal Africa. [… ] Where Cage and his supporters made the determination that all conventions were dead, they started to manufacture new, increasingly comprehensive customs, however constantly mindful that their connection to them would never be what had acquired in the hour of Bach or Haydn (p122).

Josipovici states his contention against deliberation all the more mightily still in his closing section, ‘Accounts of Modernism’:

My own ‘story’, as I have attempted to display it here, finding what it was as I came, is that solitary a craftsmanship that maintains a strategic distance from the traps intrinsic in both authenticity and deliberation will be extremely alive. That is the reason I warm to the books of Perec and Bernhard more than to Finnegans Wake or the books of Updike and Roth, to the photos of Bacon and early Hockney more than to Pollock or Tracey Emin, to the music of Birtwistle and Kurtág more than to Cage or Shostakovitch (p187).

Josipovici’s signal is both strong and vague. His dismissal of the victor of innovation, James Joyce, showed by his analysis of Finnegans Wake’s preoccupation—and his refusal to join him into his investigation of the pioneer style—reveals a somewhat unexpected insight into his norms. Is Josipovici himself not yielding to the Establishment by developing a scholarly ordinance that accommodates English institutionalism and Continental avant-gardism? Why without a doubt contend, finally, against the English artistic culture and neglect to deal with James Joyce? Would Josipovici be, regardless of himself, a reluctant casualty of the Establishment? Or on the other hand is this symptomatic of a specific admiration of European workmanship? For it isn’t at all definite that La Jalousie by Robbe-Grillet is any more clear than Finnegans Wake.

It appears that what Josipovici so promptly condemns in Englishness, its insularity, is accurately what keeps him from making an extremely persuading contention. Josipovici regrets that for verifiable reasons, the English are less delicate to test and ‘current’ writing of the sort of the nouveau roman (p122) for instance and legitimizes it in this way:

As Linda Colley has appeared in her fine book, Britons, from the mid eighteenth century on Britons characterized themselves contrary to other people, specifically to the enormous, forceful Popish countries of Spain and France: Britons are unique; Britons never will be slaves, to different countries or to the thoughts of different countries. To this must be included the way that England was just about the main European nation not to be overwhelmed by foe powers during the subsequent World War, which was a gift for it, however which has left it peculiarly honest and tossed it into the arms, socially just as strategically, of the much progressively guiltless United States. This has turned a vigorous even minded convention, constantly suspicious of the things of the brain, into a philistine one (p175).

The creator adventures two different reasons why that may be the situation. Right off the bat, the book advertise is, we are told:

… suspicious of the ‘vainglorious’ [and it] loves the genuine and the ‘significant’, so huge books about slaughters in Rwanda or Bosnia, or chronicled books with a ‘superb range’, are consequently viewed as more deserving of consideration than the books of, state, PG Wodehouse or Robert Pinget (p175).

Furthermore, in light of the fact that, he asserts, ‘our own is the original where High Art and Fashion have hitched in a soul cheerfully invited by the two gatherings’ (p175). By this, Josipovici intends to pressure that ‘we have really landed at an age where workmanship and showbiz are one and the equivalent’ (p175). As such, the English book showcase has fallen prey to the ‘general public of the scene’ Guy Debord and the Frankfurt School uncovered all through the sixties.

One may wish Josipovici had made such social realism his concentration in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, for while the work exquisitely proposes its own meaning of ‘innovation’, it remains excessively ambiguous on the classification it attempts to characterize, innovation, and depends on too many clearing remarks by method for clarification.