In 1958 Gabriel Josipovici attends an Oxford lecture on contemporary English literature and subsequently reads those key authors the lecturer notes, including Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch. He is most disappointed. He writes, “They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.” Gabriel Josipovici ponders why this is the case.

He attends another lecture where a British scholar debunks and rails against Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire and Sartre. The speaker tells the audience in so many words, “These effete ninnies were all suffering from oversensitivity mingled with self-regard; what they had to say was the result of their cosseted upbringing and a sharp kick up the backside was all that was needed to bring them to their senses.” Josipovici takes exception, thinking such influential European writers offer deep insight into our modern human condition. Repeat experiences with hard-line, no-nonsense Anglo speakers and the everyday realism of English and US authors propels Josipovici to probe deeper into the very roots of Modernism.

In approaching the question ‘When does Modernism begin?’ the author details quite a bit of history of literature and the arts and proposes we reach much farther back in time then the 1850-1950 timetable usually given in answer to this question. For, as he writes, “The temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it.”

However, as he goes on - and this is key to his entire book: “The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and, therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.”

To undergird his position, Josipovici spends the lion’s share of his book providing detailed examples, from Albrecht Durer to Cervantes and Rabelais, from Casper David Friedrich and Pablo Picasso to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka to show how since the 1500s religion took an inward turn and the world became a progressively colder place. At one point we read, “It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted.” He then quotes Walter Benjamin: “The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual.” And that’s solitary individual not only in terms of the writer of the novel but also in terms of the novel being read by a solitary reader. Indeed, an entire culture of men and women, including artist, musicians and writers living, working and creating in a kind of solitary confinement – the modern world as a very alone place with no comforting communal anchors.

Again, quite a detailed and well researched book. The above quotes along with my comments are merely a taste. Since I am not a historian or literary scholar I will not offer my own judgement on Gabriel Jasipovici’s position here; rather, I urge you to read for yourself. However, there is one important point I will note: other than Jorge Luis Borges and a passing mention of V. S. Naipaul, Jasipovici’s observations are restricted to European and American literature, art and music. There are no references to authors or artists or musicians from Latin America or Africa or the Middle East or Japan or elsewhere on the globe. Since this book was published in 2010 I can’t help thinking the author’s Eurocentric approach is a bit provincial, or, in other words, I would suggest one possible answer to the question “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” could be that it has gone global. We are now one World Culture and any complete history of literature and the arts requires a truly world view, a view that would be well to include many great late twentieth century literary artists from around the globe, including the author in the photo below – G. Cabrera Infante.
( )

In 1958 Gabriel Josipovici attends an Oxford lecture on contemporary English literature and subsequently reads those key authors the lecturer notes, including Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch. He is most disappointed. He writes, “They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.” Gabriel Josipovici ponders why this is the case.

He attends another lecture where a British scholar debunks and rails against Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire and Sartre. The speaker tells the audience in so many words, “These effete ninnies were all suffering from oversensitivity mingled with self-regard; what they had to say was the result of their cosseted upbringing and a sharp kick up the backside was all that was needed to bring them to their senses.” Josipovici takes exception, thinking such influential European writers offer deep insight into our modern human condition. Repeat experiences with hard-line, no-nonsense Anglo speakers and the everyday realism of English and US authors propels Josipovici to probe deeper into the very roots of Modernism.

In approaching the question ‘When does Modernism begin?’ the author details quite a bit of history of literature and the arts and proposes we reach much farther back in time then the 1850-1950 timetable usually given in answer to this question. For, as he writes, “The temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it.”

However, as he goes on - and this is key to his entire book: “The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and, therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.”

To undergird his position, Josipovici spends the lion’s share of his book providing detailed examples, from Albrecht Durer to Cervantes and Rabelais, from Casper David Friedrich and Pablo Picasso to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka to show how since the 1500s religion took an inward turn and the world became a progressively colder place. At one point we read, “It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted.” He then quotes Walter Benjamin: “The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual.” And that’s solitary individual not only in terms of the writer of the novel but also in terms of the novel being read by a solitary reader. Indeed, an entire culture of men and women, including artist, musicians and writers living, working and creating in a kind of solitary confinement – the modern world as a very alone place with no comforting communal anchors.

Again, quite a detailed and well researched book. The above quotes along with my comments are merely a taste. Since I am not a historian or literary scholar I will not offer my own judgement on Gabriel Jasipovici’s position here; rather, I urge you to read for yourself. However, there is one important point I will note: other than Jorge Luis Borges and a passing mention of V. S. Naipaul, Jasipovici’s observations are restricted to European and American literature, art and music. There are no references to authors or artists or musicians from Latin America or Africa or the Middle East or Japan or elsewhere on the globe. Since this book was published in 2010 I can’t help thinking the author’s Eurocentric approach is a bit provincial, or, in other words, I would suggest one possible answer to the question “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” could be that it has gone global. We are now one World Culture and any complete history of literature and the arts requires a truly world view, a view that would be well to include one of the great literary artists of the late 20th century, the author in the photo below – G. Cabrera Infante.

Modernism discussed in the most thoughtful way, defined and exemplified in a sustained argument for its permanent relevance. Whether or not one agrees with when it begins, or who does or does not conform to the given definition, or whether the current writers mentioned are or aren't good in one's views, What Ever Happened to Modernism? will change the way you regard fiction -- and it's a pleasure to read just for its style. ( )

One of the better books I've read on modernism, for two big reasons: first, he thinks that modernism and what you think of modernism are matters of life and death (he appears to mean this literally); and second, he's an argumentative sod who has no interest in hedging his bets. In: Proust, Beckett, Kafka, Woolf. Out: Greene, Naipaul, Roth, Morrison. He reminds me a bit of Leavis, which opinion, I suspect would either set old Jos howling at the moon in rage, or popping his collar. I liked it, in fact, despite the fact that I fundamentally disagree with his argument, which is a pretty good sign that a book is worth reading.

It's basically a polemic about literary modernism, but he spreads himself pretty thin, with discussions of painting (understandable, given that he thinks the best writing about modernism is by art-critics; regrettable, since he thinks that R. Krauss is one of those 'good' writers on modernism) and music (enjoyable, in that he dismisses Cage and name-drops Birtwhistle; regrettable in that he seems to fall very much on the Stravinsky half of the cliched Strav/Schoenberg divide). Sometimes this breadth is helpful, since the divisions in music and visual art are often easier to see (Cage v Ligeti, for instance, or Abstraction vs Bacon/Picasso) than those in lit; but I wish he'd spent more time on writers.

The argument is that the best literature is made at the crossroads of (here's the painting analogy) abstraction and realism, where abstraction stands in for 'reflection on artistic form' and realism stands in for 'connection to the world.' So far so convincing, I've often thought the same thing. But his narrow view of literature makes this a little tendentious. Had he spent more time on writers he would have had to deal with the development of the novel more fully, rather than just writing off the nineteenth century as the century of 'realism.' The 19th c, in short, = Dickens. I can understand the polemical point here, with so many authors these days wanting the words 'Dickensian sweep' on their back covers, but it's a distortion of history. Remember Henry James ripping Trollope for breaking the illusion of realism, when he'd write things like "I'm not interested in holding you in suspense, dear reader; my heroine will never marry the villain"? This is surely at the crossroads of form and realism, but you'd never know Trollope existed from the evidence of 'Whatever Happened to Modernism?' Similarly, the only early English novelist cited is Sterne, that favorite of the abstraction/form people. But surely Fielding and Richardson, at the very least, can be read profitably at the crossroads? Fielding wrote essays to introduce each Book of Tom Jones and his preface to Joseph Andrews is fabulous. Richardson's characters spend all their time writing and he's aware of the problems with this form.

Okay. So Josipovici complains about modernism's 'false friends,' who identify modernism with realism, and fair enough. But his genealogy of modernism is just as limited as theirs: but while the false friends see modernism *as* realism, he sees it as a reaction *against* realism: modernists just are those people who come to see that there's a problem with 'realistic' depictions of reality. But realism has always been only a small part of literature. What about satire, parody, broadsides, lyric, critique, epic, essays and so on? Waugh might have complained about 'modernism,' but you'll never convince me that his jittery, ironic, absurd satires aren't modernist. He doesn't make a big deal about finding new ways to express and attack new realities, but that's what he's doing.

At the end of the day, Josipovici suggests, modernism just is coming to understand what is "no longer" possible for art: for him, that means modernism is coming to understand that realism is no longer possible. To reject that claim, given his genealogy of modernism, is to be a post-modernist who believes that everything is always possible because nothing matters. I would say against this that modernism is a fundamentally critical attitude to the world and the ways we represent it, but which holds onto traditional ideals, including that of accurately depicting the world. Jos says the most important thing about modernism is the body, and grasping that we can't come to an understanding of anything; I say it's the mind, and insisting that we can understand, although it's really hard. But really, no matter how worked up I get about this, this is a nicely written book with a clear argument about an important matter. Don't ignore it. ( )

Books of criticism can oftentimes be rather obscure and abstruse enterprises, and this one by Professor Josipovici is no exception as it seems on first reading to wander all over the place before it comes to anything resembling a conclusion, much less an answer to the question posed in the title. Lest one should get the impression that this will be a negative review, let me hasten to say emphatically that that will not be the case. In fact, this book provides a philosophical and historical understanding of certain characteristics of Modern art and literature. So this review will attempt to highlight some important issues that the book deals with and thereby give the reader a clearer idea of where the author was trying to go. As he said, "we have to try and see Modernism not from without, as . . . the post-Modernists choose to see it, but from within. That is the task of this book."

First, it should be understood that the title of the book is What Ever Happened to Modernism? and not merely "Whatever happened to modern literature?" The scope of the book is much broader than mere literary criticism, although the author was a professor of literature at Oxford. Those of us with an interest in literature and the arts have at least a vague understanding of "Modernism" as applying generally to the post-Medieval period when all types of authoritarian regimes — whether heavenly or earthly — began to be openly questioned and scrutinized and even overthrown. Yet we understand that the period of so-called Modern Art had its inception in a very specific event that can be pinned down exactly to the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863. It turns out that "modern" is one of those words the application of which seems to perpetually move forward with the times. So in the year 2011, we view as old fashioned that exhilarating period of Modern Art between 1863 and the 1970s, when the tide turned enough to call for the naming of a new era — Postmodernism. So supposedly we now exist in a postmodern world, yet we still think of ourselves as modern. And just to put this into further perspective, let us remember that the term "modern" comes from the Latin modernus, which derived from modo, meaning "just now," dates from the fifth century and was originally meant to differentiate the "modern" Christian era from the "ancient" Pagan era. Thus, the moving sidewalk of history has carried the notion of "modern" forward with each passing year.

So we have ended up with two meanings of the word "modern," a general meaning that always is associated with the present, and a more specific meaning that relates to the period between 1863 and around 1970 which I shall refer to hereafter as "the period of Modern Art" to distinguish it from Modernism in general. Of course, Modern Art has always been a highly intellectually driven movement, and so the literary arts, including fiction, poetry, drama and criticism, all reflected many of the ideas that were engendered by the Modern visual and tactile arts. And that is the first point I want to make clear: Professor Josipovici is actually addressing both aspects of Modernism in order to help us fully understand the question raised by the title. We aren't merely being schooled in the elements of a style or the characteristics of a period in art and literary history. Being aware of this from the outset will be useful to the reader.

The second point is that in telling the reader what was going on literarily in the period of Modern Art, Josipovici cites many examples by quoting selected authors which help to illustrate his points. But he also presents enlightening discussions of the aims of painters and other visual artists and even composers during this period in order to inform his discussion of the contemporary literature. Writers and artists were on the same wavelength in terms of the abstract goals and standards they set out for themselves, and so it is fascinating to see how artists and writers and critics, each in their own way, interpreted the intellectual framework within which they were all operating. In effect, there was constant cross-pollination going on among them.

In considering the question of whatever happened to Modernism, Josipovici addresses both of these points at once. He isn't just asking, "By the way, whatever happened to Joe Smith?" in the sense that Joe Smith seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird, which the period of Modern Art eventually did in succumbing to Postmodernism. But he is actually giving us a blow-by-blow as though it were a prizefight, naming names, and explaining the progress of Modernism focusing mostly on the period since Cubism — i.e., the early twentieth century.

Two interrelated issues that Josipovici spent a good deal of time on concern a) the writer's "authority" in the context of the increasingly prevalent notion that "God is dead"; and b) the privileging of craftsmanship over the narrative and ethical or spiritual aspects of fiction. The argument goes that once there was no higher authority underpinning a writer or artist — i.e., through faith in God and church — a crisis of consciousness developed, referred to in general terms as a "disenchantment of the world." Suddenly the artist looked in the mirror and realized he carried the burden alone of the authority of his writing and in fact, perhaps he had no authority at all. The apparent conclusion of all this was in turn to question those very aspects of literature and art that had characterized novels and poetry — and art — before this earth-shattering crisis occurred. The consequence was that novelists such as Robbe-Grillet, Pinget and Claude Simon intentionally worked to strip away any vestiges of narrative and emotional content from their novels, thereby privileging craftsmanship, in the belief that by doing so they would be able to present a truer reality and "a genuine understanding of the human condition": Josipovici tells us: "What is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claims to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing."

The effect produced by this Modern type of fiction was brilliant, but empty; impressionistic, but it had no soul. The novelist's concern was for "events, not with characters or ethics . . . [or] the plots devised by traditional novelists." And looking back, Modern authors and critics viewed traditional novelists as naïve and their writing style passé. By way of explaining this Josipovici writes:

"Not having doubts is a blessed state, but it is not the same thing as having genuine authority. There is something hollow about Balzac, Dickens and Verdi compared with Dante or Shakespeare, but even compared with their older contemporaries, Beethoven and Wordsworth. It doesn't rest on their frequent clumsiness, for that is to be found in Beethoven and Wordsworth. It rests more on the very thing that is the root of their strength as artists and their enormous success as entrepreneurs: their inability to question what it is they are doing. In that sense they are the first modern best-sellers and in their work one can see the beginnings of that split between popularity and artistic depth which is to become the hallmark of modern culture."

The tension between "commercial" and "artistic" continues to this day.

A further service that Josipovici renders for the reader is to demonstrate through many examples how different Modern fiction is from the literature of the past through a brief examination of older literature from Cervantes and Rabelais all the way back to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. As he said, "Seeing the art of the twentieth century in the light of the [past] can help us to understand many things."

Eventually it becomes clear that Josipovici is writing with the British reader in mind, and he has looked at the British reading public today and finds it wanting. He gives European readers much more credit for being aware of Modernism's subtleties. He thinks British readers — and by extension its "younger" (historically speaking) American cohorts — are woefully naïve. He even labels the whole lot of us as Philistines because we don't relish a steady diet of the rather arid and contrived output of the Modern purists. Josipovici seems to want us to accept the Robbe-Grillet–Pinget–Simon school of writing as the inevitable direction that quality fiction will continue to take — even in this postmodern era.

So, what happened to Modernism? It gradually adopted the view, not only that "living and telling are not the same thing at all," and "though we as readers and viewers looking back inevitably lack the sense of what it was like to live certain moments, the historian can work to counter that, as indeed the best ones do, and when dealing with works of art we can, if we are good enough critics, get close enough to them to convey something of what their making involved for their makers and first viewers."

This raises an interesting question: By stripping narrative from fiction, did this open the door for criticism to step into the vacuum? It certainly signaled the ascendency of the critic and criticism — and theory — as almost more important than the literature or arts it was purporting to criticize. While craftsmanship was revered at the expense of narrative, technique ran the risk of being seen as "a kind of shame." The circularity and self-contradictory aspects of this wordplay are obvious. But Josipovici points out that "argument and disagreement will never end" regarding the various ways Modernism can be interpreted, and "though we might feel that they were misguided we should think twice before presuming to tell them they were wrong."

Josipovici's report to us is a very personal one, and this review only scratches the surface by attempting to cut through all the diversions in order to ferret out the main thrust of Josipovici's argument. He has strong opinions and shares them freely, calling this group Philistines and that group positivist and another group naïve, as though his is the last word, which is all very charming and amusing, unless you happen to be one or the other! Yet he admits in the end that there cannot "be a definitive 'story' of Modernism. We cannot step outside it, much as we would like to, and pronounce with authority on it." There are too many divergent points of view. He concludes by asking:

" . . . are we to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something which blinkers us or which sharpens our vision? This is, in itself, of course, a very Modernist question."

The digressions — so long as you can keep your eye on the argument — are wonderfully rich and vividly informative about important books, music and the arts in the context of Modern literary and art history. He may assert that one writer is better than another, but he will back it up with quotations and analysis. One can disagree with his conclusions about the relative merits of this artist or that writer, or one reading public or another, but one comes away from this stroll through the brief history of Modernism with a whole new understanding of what the heck it was all about.

Studying this book will inevitably leave the reader or viewer better prepared for Modern literature or Modern art. I say "studying" because it really must be read twice in order to put it all together. On balance, however, I give it 4½ stars. ( )