What Ever Happened to Modernism?

by Gabriel Josipovici

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.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.

Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing, and writing about other writers. What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a strident call to arms, and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Essays, Philosophy, Literature, Criticism

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 2010

About the author

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of seventeen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are Two Novels: 'After' and 'Making Mistakes' (Carcanet), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press), Heart's Wings (Carcanet, 2010) and Infinity (Carcanet, 2012).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

In short:

Engaging, very subjective, brave and even angry sometimes. His argument is even more relevant now than 10 years ago when this was written.

“Wordsworth, James, Eliot and Virginia Woolf all flourished on these shores. We need to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as a reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.”

And much longer:

While student at Oxford in the 50th, Josipovici was recommend the list of aspiring contemporary english writers by his tutor. The list included Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch. He rushed to the library but ended up really disappointed. These writers did not strike him as deep as Kafka, Mallarme or his favourite Proust. He decided to wait and in 50 years he came back to the list only to find out that nothing has changed in his perceptions. The writers from the list still did not strike any deep emotional chord with him. This time around it set him on the enquiry why it was the case. The result of this enquiry is this book.

It consists of two parts. In the first longer part tries to define what is modernism. But if one looks for a clear and generally accepted definition with related historical significance, one would not find it here. Josipovici is trying to understand and to convey to us his sense of what he feels by this term. It is interesting experience as he would consider himself as a modernist writer as well. So he tries to understand it from within.

In his view, Modernism is a broad term. It is not bound by some historical chronology. It is more defined by how the creator of this art, in Kierkegaard’s terms, “senses vividly what is lacking and then endeavours to convey a sense of the lack”. It is the art which catches “the now” and avoids illustration of so called reality. The artists realise that they cannot depict ‘the reality”. “What afflicting Mallarme, Kafka and Beckett is the sense that they feel impelled you write this being the only way they know to be true to their own natures, yet at the same time they find that in doing so they are being false to the world - imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning which it does not have and thus ultimately being false to themselves.” So their art is born on this conflicting, very narrow and subtle border. Josipovici gives a lot of examples and the passages from ‘Dr Faustus” by Thomas Mann, Kafka, Beckett and Claude Simon, but also from Muriel Sparks and Golding whom he considered only successful English post-war modernists.

He also relies on visual art and even music, to some extent to explain his view. But he struggles nevertheless as by definition it is hard to avoid an ambiguity in the explanation. I would try a shortcut to represent what he says:



This is Cezanne's painting “The Large Bathers" (Les Grandes baigneuses), 1895–1906. It does not attempt to illustrate the real life, it does not attempt to tell the story. Or at least when someone looks at it each time she comes up with a new unique story. There is no single unifying narrative; the figures are disjointed and do not interact. And, it borderlines between the symbols and something that we still might recognise as human condition.

According to Josipovici, a modernist writer understands that it is impossible to continue doing what has been done before. So each time she starts from scratch. Each time she discards her previous experience and the tradition and tries to convey something more immediate. In parallel to this essay I was reading Borges. This point reminded me a very short story “Borges and I”. “Years ago I tried to free myself from him and swapped the mythologies of the outskirts to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine something new.” Not surprisingly, Josipovici includes Borges into his Modernism though traditionally he is classified as a post-modern. In the next sentence Borges also has something to add about the condition a writer finds himself in ‘Thus my life is the flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion or to him”

In my opinion, Josipovici's attempt to define the term is meta-modernist by itself as he does not try to be historical or objective. He is is happy with his feelings, his subjectivity vividly expressed.

And, I think this approach results in the reader searching for her own definition. At least in my case, I think intuitively I am really in tune with him. For me modernism in his sense is a text that leaves a lot of space and ambiguity. The text with the possibilities left wide open, multilayered in terms of possible meanings. And the text which makes me work hard as a reader. It is about the style, but not only. It is something opposite to a narrative i follow the sentence after sentence and flip the pages without pausing as it is nicely laid out for me to digest.

The second bit is much shorter but more polemic and angry. He explains why, in his opinion, the modernism does not take its deserved place in English artistic landscape nowadays. The landscape which overpopulated and solidly occupied by mainstream storytellers. He is really saddened and dissatisfied with the situation. I was thinking hard what is the best way to write about it. And i decided to extensively quote him on that as he would say it better than I would.

He, in his turn, quotes 6 passages 3 from from 50 years ago including Powell and Murdoch and 3 more recent including McEwen, Naupal and Philip Roth. He observes:

‘They all do what they set out to do perfectly adequately: they help tell a story and create a world and characters to inhabit that world that do not flat the laws if probability. We never doubt what they telling us. What the narrator says is truth. Such narratives are easy to read. They are also illustrative: they tell the story they do not have life on their own. The smooth chain of sentences gives us a sense of security, of comfort even precisely because it denies openness, the “trembling” of life itself; the very confidence of the articulation of the narrative gives the lie to our own sense of confusions… That of course is why we read them: take us for a while out of our confusions, drawing us into a world that makes some sort of sense, that at very least can be articulated. By the same token they cannot really satisfy us since they do not speak to our condition, only makes us hungry for more…” He also says that these stories do not do more than a good journalism would not do.

But he muses, the writers write what they want. Why such writers prevail he asks. And his answer it is because that the “cultural climate” promotes them. Or in the best case scenario, it cannot see the difference.


His example Nemirovsky and Cloude Simon. “She makes “a written renunciation to all claim to be an author” in her writing. Culture when serious and intelligent and well read reviewers not to speak of other novelists and distinguished biographers, many of them studied poems of Eliot or the novels of Woolf at university, should betray their calling as to go into ecstasies over books like Nemirovsky while in their life times ignoring Perec, Bernhard or Hofmann.”

And he attempts to answer this question:

First, “there is greater resistance to Modernism in England than anywhere else including America. “Britons defined themselves in the opposition to others, in particular to the large, aggressive Popish nations of Spain and France: Britons are different; Britons never will be slaves, to other nations or to the ideas of other nations. To this must be added the fact that England was just about the only country not to be overrun by enemy during the second world war, which was blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and thrown it into the arms of culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition always suspicious of the things of the mind into a philistine one. Though there is something appealing in the resolute determination not be taken in the face of European Modernism… taken as a cultural rallying-cry it is little short of disastrous.”

It was written in 2009. Now, in 2020 after Brexit and all, I can see this “ideology” has created a much wider problem that the literature. And I cannot agree more with his assessment. The sad thing, at least for me where we ended up politically. The hopeful thing that in terms of the literature per se this political situation has counter-intuitively increased the awareness and the desire to know how the others think. At least I have such an impression.

His second point: “paradoxically ours is an age which while being deeply suspicious of the “pretentious” worships the serious and “profound”, so the large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia or historical novels with a “majestic sweep” are automatically considered more worthy or attention that say P. G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinger.”

I guess he complains that the representation overtakes the importance of creation in literature. It is a big problem without an easy solution. Another related point, the one my good friend has pointed out here a few times, the artists are being co-opted into endless cultural wars and identity debates. I am sure there literature cannot be preserved for it. But currently in many cases it just stops being what we call literature in the process. There is also a less negative trend of genre blending which is not necessary bad thing. But as a reader, i really struggle to find something worthwhile between contemporary books unless i am prepared to invest a lot of time filtering through huge amount of “noise”.

And his last point : “Finally High Art and Fashion have married in a spirit. When the speakers at major literary festival are for the most part politicians, TV personalities or foreign correspondents, the books are sold three for the price of two…, we are truly arrived at the age where the art and showbiz are one and the same.”

This is an invisible hand of market. Marketing in publishing and book selling is quite aggressive under different pressures on the industry. I personally try to avoid this pressure as a customer and quite successfully. But it is getting hard to imagine a young writer getting her work published without ticking at least a few boxes in her work none of them related to the literary merit. I definitely see it when I read a successfully published work. And yes it is sad.

So this is what happened to modernism according to Josipovici. I think he went much wider in the second part. Needless to say I am greatly sympathise with his point of view. And he helped me to understand my own reservations in reading the fiction produced in England. Though I still like Naipaul and Roth. But in my case at least, I am just a reader. It is easy for me to chose what i read. It is much difficult to be “a truly modernist” writer. Thanks to anyone who has read this long story to the end:-)

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update: I now have a longish, somewhat thorough "Appreciation" of the book over on my external page: https://longform.wdclarke.org/gabriel...

An absolutely thrilling intellectual tour de force and apologia.

What Josipovici says of T.J. Clark's book Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism applies to his own:

One of the great strengths of Clark's book is the intensity with which he questions the art he is dealing with: it matters.

Some reviewers fault the author for failing to look at Joyce, or at any 19C authors besides Dickens and Balzac, but this is not a panoptic analysis of modernism by any stretch. Readers wanting that animal should begin with Marshall Berman's superb All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity and branch out from there. This book, though, takes you on a tour of those specific modernist works which have personally resonated with the author, by way of helping get at what what he feels is or should be at the very heart of the (unfinished!) modernist enterprise.

I for one was convinced by his argument, but more importantly perhaps just enjoyed the heck out of my time inside his brain, and so I would put this book up there with the Berman and with Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel , as important books on the subject in which the author has a deep, personal stake in the subject matter.

Even if you disagree with him on numerous points (as I did over Dickens, Amis, Barnes), that is something which cannot be underestimated in a book of criticism.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

Idiosyncratic to Its Own Detriment

It's difficult to assess the merits of this book. Even the title is elusive, signalling not much more than that a polemic is on its way. If you can't really define its goals, it's hard to determine whether it achieves them.

The definition and exemplification of Modernism is imprecise and idiosyncratic, to the extent that it is defined at all. Josipovici describes the works of various Modernists, rather than identifying and distilling what they have in common, at least stylistically. His analysis reads like transcribed lecture notes on specific works (especially the art and poetry), perceptive and interesting as it might be. Ultimately, this idiosyncrasy detracts from what might otherwise have been an articulate espousal or defence of Modernism.

So these questions (implicit in the title) remain unanswered at the end of the book: If it (Modernism) existed as a distinctive practice, aesthetic, approach or movement, and can be defined, did something happen to it? Has it been refuted? Did it die out? Did something or somebody replace it? If so, what and who and why?

Modernism (Sort of) Defined

In chapter 2, Josipovici rejects previous arguments that Modernism is a distinct style (like Mannerism or Impressionism) or period of art history (e.g., 1850 to 1950).

Instead, he wants 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."

The disenchantment of the world is a concept formulated by Max Weber. In his assessment, "the Reformation was part of a historical process of the 'disenchantment of the world', whereby the sacramental religion of the Middle Ages was transformed into a transcendental and intellectualised religion, which led to the disappearance of the numinous from everyday life."

So what remains when enchantment ceases? When gods are removed from the equation? When we are no longer bound to gods or churches? When we are free?

The Dizziness of Freedom

Josipovici refers to Hegel's concept of "the unhappy consciousness", which arises because "trust in the eternal laws of the gods has vanished."

In the same context, Kierkegaard suggests that "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

In the process of discussing Kierkegaard's influence on Modernism, Josipovici says:

"All Kierkegaard can do is to try and explore in every way imaginable the troubled heart and soul of nineteenth-century man, one who has been given his freedom twice over, first by God and then by the French Revolution, but who does not know what to do with it except torment himself with the sense that he is wasting his life."

So we are free, but troubled and tormented. Because we are now on our own, and responsible for our own happiness. Can we be entrusted with our own freedom? If not us, then who?

Josipovici relies on Kierkegaard to elaborate:

"Kierkegaard sees what Dürer and Cervantes saw, that without authority we are reduced to claiming authority for ourselves when we know deep down that we have none. But, Kierkegaard feels, our age has not only lost access to authority, it no longer even recognises the crucial distinction between one who has authority and one who only has genius."

Beyond the Transcendent

Josipovici concludes that "what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing."

In this context, Josipovici refers to "the opening up of possibilities by early Modernists." He quotes the critic, Rosalind Krauss, who believes that Picasso engaged in "the ceaseless play of meaning open to the symbol."

"Picasso grasped that what he was producing were signs or emblems for the external world, not mirrors reflecting it."

Later, Josipovici argues that "Modernism is a response to the simplifications of the self and of life which Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them..." He also refers to "the transition from privacy to subjectivity." Without the authority of gods and churches, we must rely on our own perceptions and subjectivity.

In the last chapter, Josipovici refers to Modernism as "the daily struggle of a dialogue with the world, without any assurance that what one will produce will have value because there is nothing already there against which to test it, but with the possibility always present that something new, something genuine, something surprising, will emerge."

We must explore without the certainty that we will discover anything.

Josipovici's personal view is that "only an art which recognises the pitfalls inherent in both realism and abstraction will be really alive."

He speculates (and rationalises), "That is why I warm to the novels of Perec and Bernhard more than to Finnegan's Wake or the novels of Updike and Roth, to the pictures of Bacon and early Hockney more than to Pollock or Tracey Emin, to the music of Birtwistle and Kurtag more than to Cage or Shostakovitch." Strangely, he only makes two passing references to the works of James Joyce. His Modernist taste is highly selective.

Stories of Modernism

The chapters are mostly stories of Modernism, in which Josipovici analyses the work of a number of artists, musicians and writers, whom he considers to be Modernists (e.g., Mallarmé, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Beckett, Thomas Mann, Albrecht Dürer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Wordsworth, Caspar Friedrich, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Picasso, Marguerite Duras, Duchamp, and Mondrian).

In some cases, for personal reasons, these practitioners ran out of energy or inspiration or ideas, and either ceased to practise or moved on to some other cultural practice. For example, Picasso tired of Cubism. Kafka questioned his ability to write at all. They were intimidated by their challenge and their lack of authority.



Gabriel Josipovici (born 1940) versus Martin Amis (born 1949) (Whose Side Are You On?)

Aging Young Moderns Against the Modernist Grain

In others, they seem to suffer at the hands of an external threat. Something happened, perhaps, but we don't learn what it was. Maybe, in Britain, other writers simply emerged and started to dominate the stage. Josipovici singles out Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Blake Morrison for criticism, if only implicitly. Josipovici's argument sounds a bit like sour grapes. Have these authors deprived him of the limelight? Do they detract from his efforts and accomplishments? Do they not show him the respect he (thinks he) deserves?

"Reading [these writers] leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, they will say, but 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 comes to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world...

"Clearly, their brand of writing and the nature of their vision speaks to the English, for they are among the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture, or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been both sentimental and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep-school boys showing off, which is the taste these writers leave on my tongue."

This sounds like the resentment of an actor whose place in the limelight has been threatened by the next generation (Josipovici is only nine years older than Martin Amis), whether or not the next generation has acquired its status with the assistance of publicity machines belonging to multinational publishing companies.

So Josipovici's response is to assume the mantle, and associate himself with the legacy, of the Modernist movement, as if to assert that his goals are somehow grander and more important than the efforts of these other, lesser scribblers. This is not to deny that he is a Modernist or, at least, preoccupied with Modernist concerns. Josipovici's fiction sits well within this tradition, but I don't find his criticism convincing. He pretends that he is the only Modernist surviving in England. He is alone in his allegiance.

In contrast to Josipovici, the English perception of Modernism is that it is a European sensibility, a Continental project, which cultural Brexiteers have to resist in order to assert their own sovereignty over the local market/cultural sphere. (Strangely, again, Josipovici fails to mention British authors like Christine Brooke-Rose and Gilbert Adair, neither of whom is now alive. Brooke-Rose and Josipovici once shared a publisher: Carcanet Press.)



Some of Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists for 1983: back row (left to right) William Boyd, Adam Mars-Jones, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker and Clive Sinclair; middle row (left to right) Buchi Emecheta, AN Wilson, Christopher Priest, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis; front row (left to right) Shiva Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula Bentley, Philip Norman, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, Maggie Gee and Lisa St Aubin de Terán.
[Photograph: Snowdon/Camera Press]

The False Friend of Post-Modernism Against Modernism

Ironically, there is almost no discussion or analysis of the battle waged by American-flavoured Post-Modernism against Modernism. This movement has been a concerted rebellion against, or declaration of independence from, the old Modernists [who Josipovici favours], in favour of an American Cultural Exceptionalism (Barth, Gass, Hawkes, Markson, Sorrentino, various maximalists who assemble "serious and profound...large novels...with a majestic sweep") that asserts that America must come first, and America must be made great again, even if it hasn't previously been great on the global stage.

My view is that Post-Modernism is just a tributary of the stream of Modernism, not a separate stream. It's a sub-movement, not a movement of the order of Modernism. What they share is the quest for alternatives to Realism.

To the extent Post-Modernism results in or advocates experimentalism and innovation (thus, co-opting distinctive features of Modernism), it's just what the critic T.J. Clark might call a "false friend" of Modernism. On the other hand, its claims to distinction are disingenuous. It's not doing anything new or different, or from a different point of view, or with a different motivation (apart from the desire for prominence and financial success). It just wants attention for its proponents. It wants its time in the sun or the limelight. Yet, Modernism most needs to be defended from Post-Modernism, especially of the American breed, more so than English populists like Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, whom Josipovici seems to feel might have cast a shadow on him. Modernism will survive as long as people embrace it rather than cheap American imitations and forgeries.


SOUNDTRACK:

The Clean - "Anything Could Happen"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tf1w...

The Clean - ..."At the Bottom"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llbda...

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

Densely packed and wide ranging, this is another one that requires a second reading. Basically, Josipovoci takes a view of Modernism that opens it out as a mindset rather than a particular historical era. He sees it, in Max Weber's term, as the 'disenchantment' of the world, an awareness of the loss of authority, knowledge that each individual is their own point of reference, and that we cannot ever return to a naive belief in a fixed set of values imposed by an institution that takes its absolute authority from a transcendental source.
Josipovici has little respect for the kind of writer who continues to write without questioning what it is they're doing. Although on one hand I agree that there is a certain quality to such writers as Kafka, Borges or Woolf that elicits an incomparable visceral response, and that these were the writers who saw their own subjectivity as problematic, and although I certainly agree with his assessment of Némirovsky's Suite Française as "run-of-the-mill middlebrow narrative, given poignancy by the subsequent history of the author and the manuscript itself" and share his bewilderment at how it could be fêted as truly great literature, and although I tend to agree that a lot of British novelists come across as just cockily clever, like schoolboys showing off, nevertheless I wonder how we would survive on a diet of the truly experimental. Sebald, for example: he's truly innovative, but it's not quite what you'd read on the bus to Tooting.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is a gadfly. Controversy is a required element. The idea of Modernism is a hyperobject, to coin a philosophical fad. It isn’t that I’m disagreeing but I note the tension between utility and fashion. I’m very Tractatus here: there are no ethical facts, so we move on (insert Godot reference).

My proof for success in these endeavors is whether they excite me to return or discover certain works and authors. Consider this a victory by that metric. Perhaps a word or a thousand on the peculiar zeal of the author, how quick he’s to savage other surveys of Modernism. It was dismantling of certain authors Julian Barnes most notably that I found rather unusual. This was compensated by a fawning attention to other obscure authors and critics. It all seemed vividly personal.

I’m also interested in his antithesis, perhaps a clumsy approximation, although I don’t think we can say Peter Gay is a nemesis as such. I will explore.
3.4 stars rounded up

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I honestly think it’s pointless to write any sort of review that travels the same ground as W.D. Clarke’s recent GR and extended reviews (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). I agree with everything said there and enjoyed the act of reading his review as much as that of reading Josipovici.

So maybe it’s best if I merely jot down a few extra thoughts I had while reading and after a few days of ruminating.

I really appreciated Josipovici’s viewpoint that Modernism is a realization and a stance, along with a project to adequately try (even if impossible, ultimately) to portray our state of being in the Modern Age. And by that I think he means the age after “God is Dead” and religion loses all its authority, so even with progress and our scientific advances and newly earned freedoms, we feel a yawning gap beneath us as everything that previously held us up and together now has vanished like the trailing tails of a fog that has already passed us by. Not a distinct style (although we’ll come back to that) or a set period of time, but a specific act of art (writing, poetry, music, painting, etc.) and the attempt to find methods and techniques to express what is no longer there, or what can no longer be easily described just because we throw words or paint or musical notes at it.

That all leads Josipovici to two interesting conclusions:
1. That Modernism in art started much earlier than most people give credit for, and
2. Modernism never ended and should still be very much alive.

The first few chapters were beautiful and mind expanding and really had me hoping he was going to tackle the greater theme of Modernism itself. Midway through the book I realized that the author really only wanted to examine the artistic choices made in style by authors, artists and composers/musicians in their attempt to convey their feelings about Modernism. Which is fine. Great actually. He does a beautiful job at this, and introduced me to works that I will now seek out.

If I have any disappointment, it is based on my misconceptions, on the gap between what the book set out to do and what I hoped it was going to do. So really I’m probably being very unfair in picking nits. And yet, if not nits, I do have a few unrealized desires and thoughts to bring up.

Similar to how Josipovici moved back in time to show a much earlier start to Modernism (and truly, his continual use of Kierkegaard is quite brilliant) I really wish we would have had at least a short chapter on authors from the last 50 years who are still writing Modernist novels. To take just one example, even though Pynchon is often considered a postmodern author, I find his heart and sentiments to be quite close to the Modernist project. As Josipovici himself says, just because postmodernism has come on the scene it doesn’t mean that Modernist authors have vacated the building.

I also have an itching feeling that in the end maybe Josipovici gets a little too locked into the style aspect of the artists he’s exploring and that this might blind him or others of cases in which Modernist art is being created but in more straightforward ways. It seems to me that this is at least possible, but by the end of this work I really did get the strong feeling that at the very least this might be a dangerous trap to be aware of.

Overall, if I’m feeling these small itchings it’s only because I enjoyed and respected the book so much that I just wanted it to be more of what it already was. It certainly sparked all sorts of thoughts in my own head related to various personal interests such as Lacanian theory, my interest in melancholia, Kristeva’s Black Sun, philosophy’s exploration of the “thrown” nature of our existence and what I see on my TV on any given night.

A book I would certainly want all my friends to read if only so we could discuss it at great length!

[MJ Nicholls]

A dithery and unfocused essay with some excellent things to say about modernism (NOT limited to the literary variety) and a copiously generous amount to say re its origins. Did not tune in for part two, alas, but you may.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is going to be up there for one of my favorite books of the year. josipovici’s charm lies in his ability not only to hone in on a much earlier notion of modernism beginning in the 1500s (modernism as a mode of thought rather than a historical period) but to also point out the things i had never been able to recognize that i love about certain writing (and hate about others). I may continue to love abstract expressionism even after his brutal attack, but he’s extremely convincing. some of the most enjoyable criticism I have read

[AC · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing. I don't find his handling of the evidence in the least persuasive. I'll have to look elsewhere for an explanation of Modernism.

J. himself comments (p.5) on how there are very few good books on Modernism, which seems correct. His simply joins the list.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the last 10 years, T. J. Clark's formidable Farewell to an Idea has been perched on a high shelf, regally regarding my room, with only a few of its mighty pages read and re-read. Last week I picked up Josipovici's shorter book on (roughly) the same subject. If nothing else, it's inspired me to tackle Clark's masterwork again.

Josipovici comes off as a curmudgeon, grumbling about the philistines (which include, regrettably, even "false friends" of modernism like Adam Thirlwell and incompetents like Peter Gay). I never quite grasped why he was so grouchy, at least until I came upon a statement that earned a triple set of exclamation marks (a marginal crime I haven't committed since my more easily scandalized undergraduate days). Here's the apothegm: "What is certain is the truth of Barthes' remark that 'to be modern is to know that which is not possible any more.'"

I should have thought, if nothing else, that Modernism entailed a certain skepticism about certainty, especially if advocated by M. Jouissance himself. What seemed certain to me, however, by the time I'd finished this tract, is that what artists actually do and what critics claim artists are doing (and why they're doing it) have only a tangential and perverse connection to each other. This includes also artists who explain themselves - with the possible exception of Francis Bacon. I'm grateful to Josipovici for alerting me to David Sylvester's book of interviews with Bacon. And - although it was quite odd – I was delighted by the polemical use he made of Kierkegaard (a genius misfit who, like Nietzsche, should be re-read every year for his style alone).

In sum: although Josipovici is a tad cranky, I enjoyed his ramble, but I'm still in the dark about whatever happened to Modernism. Something, apparently, ended, again. With a whimper.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

[This review first appeared in the British journal New Walk in Spring 2011. It represents my finest hour as a published writer: in the journal, which is laid out in two columns, my review begins in the second column of a page where the first column contains the end of a review by J. M. Coetzee. Good company! I recently saw a mention of—and subsequent brief argument about—Josipivici's book on social media and thought it worth revisiting. At the end of my review, I refer to Josipovici's desire to "shift the status quo" and make the denizens of the literary world rethink "their political self-congratulation for ignoring difficult art." Has any cultural battle been more decisively lost in the last decade? Already in 2010 Josipovici—a scion of Continental and Levantine Jewish emigrants to England—was anticipating that he would be called a proto-fascist, though he was plainly expecting that line of attack from the neoconservatives of the time, not from the left, which is where it would come from today. Now any work of literature that is not an unambiguous YA moral tale is considered prima facie fascist. All the more reason, then, to reacquaint ourselves with an intelligent counterargument. I have lightly edited the review's text, mainly to Americanize the spelling and punctuation.]

Novelist and academic Gabriel Josipovici, a veteran of the British avant-garde, found himself in the Guardian in the summer of 2010 on the basis of a handful of sensational but relatively contextless quotations from his new book, What Ever Happened to Modernism? The most provocative passage comes late in this quiet manifesto, and we might as well get it out of the way now: "Reading [Julian] 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. […] All of them ultimately come out of Philip Larkin’s overcoat."

Josipovici’s assault on some of the big names of British literary fiction—and their poetic forebear, Larkin—make clear that he does not deal in the criteria of literary evaluation that dominate newspaper book pages, namely, the ability to reach a mass audience, the use of readily-understood language, and social relevance. In place of these moralized standards, Josipovici argues instead that readers, writers, and critics approach art on its own terms. In support of this, he makes a far more complex case than can be summarized in a headline, for What Ever Happened to Modernism? is largely a philosophical and historical account of how the arts have developed over the last several centuries.

Consequently, Josipovici’s modernism is not entirely confined to the early 20th-century highlights of Woolf or Eliot, though it includes them too. Instead, he sees the stirrings of the movement as far back as Rabelais and Cervantes. The essence of modernism for Josipovici comes with an artwork’s self-consciousness about its own limitations in the face of reality. Of Don Quixote, for instance, Josipovici writes that instead of being about "an impoverished country gentleman in the backwoods of Castile (we can easily imagine a nineteenth-century Spanish novel of this kind)," its metafictional gambits make it "something much stranger and more arresting, an exploration of the nature of novels and their ontological status." Such reflexiveness prevents readers from growing complacent in the illusion that truth is just a well-made plot or a well-turned phrase away. Josipovici perceives a self-satisfaction in language’s power to control the world in the realist fiction of McEwan et al., as well as in the fantasies of Tolkien or Philip Pullman, whom he also singles out for disapproval.

In pursuing this aesthetic narrative, Josipovici presents a compelling, if controversial, argument for why the signs of modernism began to appear in Renaissance novels, accelerated with self-interrogating Romantic poetics, and came to dominate the arts in the 20th century. Following Hegel and Max Weber, Josipovici lays the blame on "the disenchantment of the world." This phrase made famous by Weber refers to those events—the Reformation, the rise of experimental science, the growth of technology, urbanization—that broke apart the organic societies of the ancient and medieval periods. In the pre-modern worldview, "there is a profound link between groups of human beings and between the living and the dead." Humanity, nature, and spirit formed a unity—a unity now in ruins.

At this point, one can almost hear someone like Ian McEwan or John Carey crying out that pre-modern European society rested on a foundation of slave labor, priestcraft, and the subordination of women. Josipovici anticipates the objection: "Some will dismiss all this with the boo-word 'Hegelianism' and accuse me […] of nostalgia or, worse, of proto-fascism." But he insists that our presentism has baleful consequences of its own: in failing to realize that we have lost transcendent sources of meaning and value, we put in their place a desire either to control reality by summing it up neatly or to fly to some imaginary world of plenitude, whether in political ideologies, realist novels, or fantasy fiction. As Josipovici puts it in explaining Kierkegaard’s philosophy, "only those who do not understand what has happened will imagine that they can give their lives (and their works) a shape and therefore a meaning."

But the disenchantment of the world presents an opportunity as well as a cost: one might responsibly shoulder the burden of our terrible freedom, and Josipovici claims that this is what modernist art does. Hence, it persistently reflects upon its own limitations in evoking reality, even as it continues to attempt that impossible task. Josipovici now charts the rise of modernism, and those who expect him to go on smashing English icons will be surprised to find him identifying William Wordsworth as the fount of the modernist tradition in English letters. Josipovici admiringly writes that, "Wordsworth’s best poetry […] is not about this or that but is rather the encapsulation in words of an event which has filled him with wonder and which remains—for him and for us—mysterious, incapable of being absorbed into any system." In other words, Wordsworth, like the modernists to come, refuses to assimilate experience to pre-determined schemes. Conversely, the villains of Josipovici’s study, Dickens and Balzac, naïvely go on believing that artists can contain the world in their books.

Having established this historical background, Josipovici moves forward in time. The middle of What Ever Happened to Modernism? contains a set of essays reflecting on some of the major figures of the movement proper: Picasso, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett, Eliot, Stevens, Duchamp, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, and others. Those fearing an academic involution that only adds to the difficulty of already difficult texts will be pleasantly surprised by Josipovici’s powerful prose, and moreover, by his refusal to wear the impersonal mask of the scholar. Believing that modernists put everything into their art to avoid reducing reality, he attempts to do no less with his essays. For instance, he writes of an especially recondite Mallarmé poem and its relation to novels by Poe, Melville, and Mann that it takes place in a "world of chance and necessity, of shipwreck and illumination, a world where the blank page or the whiteness of the whale or of snow is both the ultimate illumination and the ultimate disaster." Such a blend of dialectical sophistication with haunting prose is rare in scholarly writing today.

Josipovici also shows himself to be admirably non-doctrinaire in his commitment to modernism. He surprisingly names Muriel Spark and William Golding the greatest post-war English novelists. Furthermore, he has little patience for the excesses of the historical avant-garde, dismissing Futurism, Cubism, and the more programmatic aspects of the nouveau roman as fearful flights from modern Godlessness back to speciously rule-bound art. There is something of the old-fashioned Existentialist about Josipovici: an artist who refuses the responsibilities of our freedom, he suggests, can only produce cowardly work, however superficially pleasing it may be.

Here the reader may begin to quibble with some of Josipovici’s judgments. Though he insists that a respect for reality underlies modernist art’s self-limitation, one comes away with the impression that only bad faith can lead a writer to address reality without simultaneously reminding readers that language is inadequate. The authors who fail to meet this fastidious standard comprise a grand company, well beyond such contemporaries as Philip Pullman. The list includes Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and even Euripides.

But Josipovici’s choice of figures to derogate can be contested even on his own terms. His treatment of Dickens is particularly egregious: he cherry-picks for his examples those admittedly boring and conservative chapters of Oliver Twist where Dickens sentimentally dwells on middle-class life, but never even mentions the phantasmagorical passages of the same novel that detail Bill Sykes’s guilty flight from the law or Fagin’s sleepless, stream-of-consciousness night in prison. One would never know from this study that Dickens inspired modernists like Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot with his nearly Gnostic hallucinations of the modern city as abandoned cosmos.

As for poetry, Josipovici hardly bothers to justify his hostility to Larkin, which may reveal some of his larger blindspots. For don’t we know that Larkin was just a Little Englander stewing in suburban resentments? But this hardly does justice even to so brief a lyric as the devastating "Myxomatosis," which compares with anything by Wordsworth or Stevens in its vision of life struggling in the indifferent snares of nature. The antidote to provincialism is not a reactive contrarianism, however cosmopolitan. As Kafka might be the first to remind Josipovici, otherness begins at home.

Nevertheless, a writer can be forgiven some rhetorical excesses when trying to shift the status quo. If Josipovici gets some literary journalists or academics to rethink their assent to unadventurous realism and fabulism, or their political self-congratulation for ignoring difficult art, then it will have been worth a few exaggerations. Perhaps most importantly, his book might well persuade those who aren’t literary professionals to try something new and strange. Here is Josipovici’s most decisive riposte to those who champion current literary fiction in the name of accessibility or easy pleasure: his eloquent, moving, and jargon-free essays demonstrate that the human stakes of modernism can be made clear and even urgent to ordinary readers.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Ever Happened to Modernism? reiterates what has been said about Modernism already: namely, that it is art produced in reaction to a disillusionment with old forms arising from a disillusionment with the natural order of things. This creative weariness is said to have originated with the Industrial Revolution and crystallized with the discoveries of Darwin and Einstein which effectively demolished the old humanocentric universe. As H.P. Lovecraft memorably said, the consolidation of this new knowledge "will one day open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." He was also famously overwrought and possessed of a fantastic imagination, but his perception of a vast universe beyond human comprehension was shared by many in the early twentieth century.

Read more.

[Sir Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

In order to get anything out of the book, you have to put aside any reservations you might have about the existence of a unitary thing called Modernism. Put aside thoughts about the radical differences between individual writers. Josipovici (Jos) is seeking a kind of high-level sameness-of-response to the Situation writers around this time found themselves in.

And yet, it has to be noted that his continual use of this weighty, capped Substantial is seemingly at odds with some of his snarky comments: “. . . .those very different writers who came into prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s and were bundled together by clever publishers and lazy journalists into one entity, the nouveau roman.” This entire book bundles centuries of writers, composers, and painters under the umbrella of Modernism, and yet a label applied to a handful of mid-century French writers irks Josipovici.

And paragraphs like this, where capitalized entities wreak havoc on history, are a little much:

“Protestantism got rid of the old superstitions while Humanism gave the individual the freedom to express himself—that at least is the myth that was perpetuated by both Protestantism and Humanism, and one that in its simplicity and self-evidence still shapes the popular imagination. Throughout the last century, though, and often under the impetus of Modernism itself, this picture has slowly been eroded.”

But nonetheless, just accept that the word Modernism can be useful in broadly talking about art and you’ll be happier when you read this book, and you might even be a little happier in general.

But another problem is, What is Modernism? Jos acknowledges that this book is his personal vision of Modernism. He clearly favors a gloom-and-doom version of Kafka over Joyce, for example (Joyce is only mentioned twice in this book, whereas Kafka is all over the place). I think Jos thinks there is currently a prioritizing of “hard-headed realist” Anglo-American literature over more off-kilter continental literature (Jos does not leave Europe in his literary excursions). It’s current English writers and the “pragmatic no-nonsense English worldview” that is Jos’s main target.

His is a nostalgia once removed. He argues that modernism stems from nostalgia for the “age of faith,” in which work was embedded in tradition and there was no panic over the rightness of a given person’s endeavors. The modernist response is one of panic and yearning for this time, but also an acknowledgement that there’s no going back. Jos wants us to feel this panic again, he’s nostalgic for how we used to be nostalgic. But how do you convince yourself to feel something? And why should this modernist outlook be the prevailing one 100 years on (or hundreds of years: Jos at times seems to think that everything from the 16th century on is “Modernism,” and that only English authors of the last two generations are betraying this)? Aren’t such cultural outlooks continually shifting things, and that what we call modernism was really, and continues to be, the product of an ongoing dialectic? Artists nowadays don’t respond to their situation like the modernists did because they don’t live in the same world as those artists.

Anyhow, for Josipovici, Modernism is not to be discussed as if it’s just another period in art. Rather, Modernism encapsulates “a century of pain, anxiety, and despair” on the part of artists. (Josipovici is prone to melodrama, which I guess this is very Modernist of him. Later in the book, he criticizes a cultural historian’s view of Cubism because it does not “signal to us that at every moment choices were being made, decisions taken, lives being ruined or saved.” It might take you a moment to recover and realize he’s just talking about some painters’ decisions.) The disenchantment of the world, the loss of the numinous age of sacramental religion, “this sense of somehow having arrived too late, of having lost forever something that was once a common possession,” will always be with us. And yet, this sense of loss doesn’t seem to be with us as much as it used to be. So, again, Jos seems to be feeling angst over the loss of this angst.

The final chapter of the book is a charmer. His real battle is over, and Josipovici comes out in a friendly manner to shake your hand. He notes that the disagreements we have with each other about literature are in itself valuable. Each of us has a stake in the story of Modernism, or how we see the world, but none of our stances should be fixed. “They could persuade me or I them, or further reading or viewing will persuade me, that I need to rethink.”

He then notes that a definitive outlook on Modernism is not possible: We’re all in this, after all. The overall effect is that the aggression of the diatribes earlier in the book comes of less combative and more life-affirming.

[Marc Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you come to this book looking for a clear definition or explanation of Modernism you won't find it. Nor will it deliver what the title suggests through an explanation why Modernism disappeared, though the author does suggest that it was never really a co-ordinated artistic movement which is probably fair since it never dominated literary output, but Modernism is a widely held critical term so there must have been something to it.

The book is not without its merits, being particularly good on Cervantes as an antecedent of modernism (yet omits "Tristram Shandy"), excellent on Wordsworth and on books by Muriel Spark and William Golding. But no mention of Joyce and no mentioning of the stream of consciousness that was a significant part of key modernists texts and the very embodiment of the subjective that the author suggests was a main thread of Modernism. At best he suggests that once art turned away from reiterations of existing traditional styles, there was a crisis of confidence in artists about the truth of their work because there was no authority to verify it thus, twinned with artists realising the artificial nature of their art. I don't agree with this, since although a writer like Samuel Beckett was clearly aware of the limitations of knowledge and the means to express experience, his humour about it all does not suggest any crisis of confidence in him. Rather he revels in our inabilities and yes, makes an art form of it that is utterly self-aware.

A bit of a disapppointment really.

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

When Josipovici is attending to the details of texts and exploring the range of potential (and resistant) relationships between art and reality, he holds my interest. A third of the way in, it was feeling like a four star book. But the deeper I got into it, the more irritating it became. One of the reasons is near-endemic to mainstream academic narratives of modernism: his test world extends no farther than continental Europe and his intellectual points of reference are overwhelmingly British, witness his absolutely absurd obsession with correcting the taste of the group he considers the acolytes of Philip Larkin. He spends more time on a disfavored critic's university mentor than he does on James Joyce. I'm used to critics who don't pay attention to Langston Hughes or Salman Rushdie or Doris Lessing (mentioned only to dismiss her appreciation of Suite Francais), but Joyce? Yeats? Those cats are part of the story.

Anyway, if you can block all of that out, you'll probably get something from the book. Josipovici's interesting when he focuses on visual artists and musicians; his discussion of the Greeks as precursors of certain modernist ideas, is fascinating.

But he's so damn sure he's right about everything and that if you don't agree that's because you're stupid that I felt like I might as well be at an English Department retreat.

[Grig O' · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. G. Josipovici seems to be a man after my humble heart: loves Kafka, mistrusts irony, has little time for traditionalists. He's also incredibly erudite, so it's great fun to follow him across time and space from book to book, poem to picture, composer to author.

It's much easier to agree with Josipovici when he dismisses old pompous Brits who don't get Sartre's doom and gloom than when he starts to hate on Adorno and abstract expressionism with seemingly the same superficiality as the aforementioned upper-class twits.

Still, once you get past the occasional curmudgeonity this is an excellent read that I got a lot out of, not the least being a whole bunch of books added to the to-read shelf (see my josipovici-modernism tag)

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without clarifying what Modernism exactly is, Josipovici traces its evolution in the arts, highlighting the ebb and flow of disenchantment with the world, reflected in the likes of Dürer’s engravings, Don Quixote, the unsentimental, Kierkegaard as a spokesman for Modernist sensibilities, Wordsworth, and Picasso. An opinionated and engaging glimpse at the cultural movement.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elegant, enjoyable read if you like literary criticism. I found it pretty convincing, though I can see that there are plenty of criticisms that could be leveled aginst this book. I happen to agree with him and share his tastes, so he's preaching to the converted with me.

[Charles Beauregard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable book, but it doesn't represent literary Modernism as I see it. This book is very good at knocking down absurd notions about Modernism though, and usually done in a provocative style.

This book did help me understand Duchamp better which I appreciate.

[Martin Henson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Josipovici, with wonderfully limped and scholarly prose, leads us up his personal mountain, a journey that requires a great deal of stamina, and points out some of the views as go (we notice others and feel the need to glance …) until we reach the pinnacle. Breathing at last, we see we’re on one of many sharp-teethed peaks, others close by, yet others dissolving into the mist.

Our guide knows he’s been partial. After keeping us close by, and ensuring our safety on his preferred track, once we reach the summit he is happy to point out the other paths and the nearby peaks.

And it is a narrow peak we are on. Even if we’re happy with the terrain at the top, there were definitely casualties on route and a longing for other view from different mountains.

This is Josipovici’s strength and his confidence: to be clear, bold, and precise, both to explore and capture his own views but to challenge a reader to similarly rigorous work.

Just as William James approached philosophers and their thought, relating this to their temperament, Josipovici raises, at the end of his long essay, the ways in which charting the past and the various ways this might be conceptualised, is conditioned by the ongoing predilections of the reflecting agent. It’s particularly interesting in connecting serious cultural criticism and analysis to the unreflecting and ultimately otherwise uninteresting assessment as a matter of personal taste.

There are minor gripes, nonetheless: there is an occasional rush to conclusions, for example, in contrasting Haydn’s prolific symphonic output against Beethoven’s meagre nine, as resulting from the latter’s needing to start each again from scratch. Yes, maybe: but, with Mozart, the (disastrous) intermediate case, Haydn was effectively an employee, while Beethoven was able to control his own labour more effectively. This is a kind of materialist dimension that is easily missed if you think that a Marxist explanation is always as crude as a "crisis of the bourgeoisie".

The other, which has been picked up by other reviewers here, is the relentless focus on a (picture of the) western tradition. He’s not the only cultural/literary critic that suffers from this. The excellent Terry Eagleton (e.g. in his book Hope without Optimism) also has a similarly restricted perspective. But this is quite unfair: both authors are staggeringly encyclopaedic as it is - requesting more is unreasonable. And it is, of course, up to us to supply what’s missing; to ask to what extent disenchantment, which figures so centrally in Josipovici’s story, will be seen as reductive against an even broader canvass; whether his disinterest in, say, John Cage, is connected with other modernist attitudes that relate art to an experience of the world, through traditions that are outwith the western canon (and that would not be straying too far afield, after all). Though unexplored in detail, these possibilities are at the very least acknowledged.

This is a wonderful book, by one of our treasured writers.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Josipovici takes Modernism theorists to task, not only questioning where we should look for its origins, but also what was all about, and then concludes with an attack on the current literary scene in the UK and US. I am no expert in this field so really can’t judge the theories, but it is a fascinating read, and I love when someone questions something I had always accepted as being unquestionably the case.

[Caomhghain · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting half-attack on the concept of modernism and half-defence. Josipovici's principal thesis is that 'modernism' is a long established literary and artistic mode, related to Romanticism perhaps, but first appearing at least in Don Quixote.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Name-dropping king

[Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tried it again, this time out of order, and this time it worked for me (though few of the ideas felt that new to me). Passages like this I liked: "What is afflicting Mallarme, Hofmannstahl, Kafka, and Beckett is the sense that they feel impelled to write, this being the only way they know to be true to their own natures, yet at the same time they find that in doing so they are being false to the world -- imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning which it doesn't have -- and thus, ultimately, being false to themselves."

[René López Villmar · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing journey through art history to find out what is the true meaning of Modernism, why it is as important and pertinent today as it was four hundred years ago, and why today's artist need to step up to the challenge of keeping Modernism's project alive.

Very tough read. You end up constantly checking up on other sources and reflecting on the densely packed ideas you find on each new paragraph, but in the end it's a very rewarding book that anyone with a serious interest in today's artistic developments should read and ponder.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes brillant and insightful and others times cantankerous, Josipovici is at least staking a position against the modern "literary" novel. There were some blind spots, especially in his treatment or lack there of of genre fiction and he ,perhaps, created a rather loose means of evaluation. Still, a great read and introduction to Josipovici's underrated criticism.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

One author’s look at the Modern writers he has loved as he traces the development of Modernism in art and literature and how it fell out of favor and why that has been disastrous. He asks in the introduction: “But what should be the focus of a book like the present one? At times it seems to be nothing less than life itself.”