Gabriel Josipovici

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Simple Mysteries

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SOURCE: “Simple Mysteries,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000, pp. 4–5.

[In the following review, Kermode positions Josipovici within the world of modern criticism based on the arguments on literary theory presented in On Trust.]

Gabriel Josipovici's new book [On Trust] is not a simple collection of disparate essays. It has a theme that recurs through his discussions of Genesis, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Kierkegaard, Proust, Kafka, Eliot, Beckett, Wittgenstein and others along the way. Although he attaches great importance to this theme, he must have been conscious of its dangers. His critical observation on A. W. Schlegel might be adapted to question his own procedures: Schlegel has been saying that Christianity, by bringing to consciousness “the intimation that we aspire to a happiness unobtainable here,” has ensured that ours is a poetry of desire and not, like that of the ancients, a poetry of joy. “Schlegel,” says Josipovici, “falls into all the traps of the historian of ideas, projecting a neat scheme on the complexities of history.”

Historiographical dichotomies of this kind can take many forms. One, applauded by Josipovici, is Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry (“a lucid and profound analysis of the difference between two civilisations”). His own theme is in some ways analogous: modern creative writers must work in an atmosphere of suspicion rather than trust; and having no valid tradition of craft, must search painfully within themselves, must search painfully find their own way. Homer and indeed Shakespeare had no need to brood over le vide papier que sa blancheur défend; they were makers, not thinkers, never dependent on what must be mined within. Craft obviated this torment. But in our “era of suspicion” there is no craft and no trust.

This thesis explains many historical disasters. Plato and St Paul darkened the joy and “lightness” of Homer. Having lost tragedy, we have been left with despair; losing the habit of trust, we are always dealing with suspicion. These generalizations are repeated in various ways and in various contexts, and one remembers how deeply ingrained, in the last century, was the idea of a fall, of a dissociation of sensibility or some variation on it, a nostalgia for a lost world in which thinking was not the enemy of emotion, nor doctrine the enemy of poetry—before suspicion undermined trust. The profession of writer grew less and less like that of Homer or Dante, and more and more like that of Kafka: “nothing is granted to me, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past, too.”

As always, the value of such ideas depends on what is made of them in the discussion of particular works. And it is clear enough that they have animated and directed Josipovici's studies. As a writer he would probably say his craftless, suspicion-ridden plight was closer to that of Kafka or his adored Beckett than to the heroes of trust, whose virtues lie deeper in the past which must, as Kafka remarked, be earned.

The modern “masters of suspicion,” as Paul Ricoeur called them, are Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Undermining the Enlightenment confidence that all men were essentially one, they explored “genealogies, secret histories of morals and social institutions, with the aim of freeing men from bonds to which they did not even know they were subject.” They finally liberated us from a sort of false happiness. Kierkegaard is added to the list of suspicious masters, but earlier writers are blamed for their part in the process: Descartes, Kant, the Romantic poets who offered a premature message of joy that soon turned into despair.

As an example of modern criticism deeply infected by suspicion, Josipovici considers Roland Barthes's assault on the “classic” novel. He scores some hits, but seems uncharacteristically grudging. Polemic is not really his strong suit, and on the matter of rereading, for instance, said by Barthes to be necessary if true reading is to be distinguished from mere consumption, he seems to miss the point by claiming, implausibly, that the first reading of instance, said by Barthes to be necessary if true reading is to be distinguished from mere consumption, he seems to miss the point by claiming, implausibly, that the first reading of Proust is the best one. It may have been so for him, but it isn't for most readers, unless they are so well prepared or so skilled that the first reading is virtually a second. And there are books, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier for instance, which pretty well insist on a second reading.

Still, it is as a good reader, and one suspects, a habitual practitioner of the deuxième lecture, that Josipovici triumphs. On Greek epic and tragedy he takes his cue from the admirable John Jones, who finds it “so appealingly blithe and strange.” He contrasts the lightness of Homer and the tragedians with the heavy reasonableness of Plato—another image of the fall. He himself is at his happiest and lightest on the intricacies of the Hebrew of Genesis, correcting the distortions and approximations of the Authorized Version translators and emphasizing the truth that the original “knows where to stop, not pressing for clarity beyond a certain point.” For example, we are led by translators to believe that it was in retribution for her impudence in scolding David when he danced before the ark that Micah had no child: “Therefore” is used to translate the Hebrew wa. But wa is vague and has other senses, including “and” and “but”; sometimes it merely introduces what comes next; “maybe there's a connection, maybe not.”

The translators, that is, remove mystery from the ambiguous Hebrew text (though it must be said that the AV, as Gerald Hammond has shown, was far more delicate about such matters than the New English Bible). These are the very mysteries Josipovici admires, thinking them true to life. The acceptance of life as both mysterious and simple is the quality he praises in both Greek and Hebrew literature. He is moved that the Greek heroes accept life, misfortune and death, as belonging to the order of simple, natural mystery. They could not be less like St Paul the self-tormentor, the stranger to lightness.

Mystery and ambiguity extend to the representation of what we call character. Is Jacob in Genesis “a heel or a pure-hearted man”? Or can he be both, and if so, how? Is Odysseus a crafty cheat or a godlike hero? Such questions betray an impatience with things as they mysteriously are. Neatly, Josipovici reminds us that “lying and deception have never had the stigma attached to them in the Mediterranean that they have in the Protestant north”; in Greek villages, it seems, fathers still take pride in the lies their sons tell as necessary to the business of protecting the patrimony. And “in the Hebrew Bible, as in pre-Socratic Greek culture, honesty counts for little in the face of such sacramental acts as blessing and cursing.”

The author's own manner has a certain seductive lightness, which makes one feel heavy in daring occasionally to dissent. He ends his discussion of the debate between Shylock and Antonio about Laban's lambs too easily, with the explanation that Antonio is shown not to have really understood Shylock's point. But it would be just as reasonable to say that Shylock, committed to a Judaic interpretation, couldn't follow Antonio's Christian version. And this wouldn't damage the hypothesis of valuable ambiguity.

Then again, too much seems to be made (with too much unambiguous definiteness) of the scene of the ordeal at the beginning of Richard II “by portraying this transformation (from a sacramental ordeal to a royal exercise of arbitrary power) Shakespeare discovered how the death of the old order cleared a space for a secular drama.” Following Peter Brown on the subject of ordeals generally, Josipovici here inadvertently risks affirming a preference for trial by torture over more “enlightened” forms of judicial inquiry. It must have been a good deal easier for the spectators than for the accused to regard an ordeal as a fair trial. And the trust that is falsified in Richard II is not trust in the ordeal but in the sacredness of royalty.

Having done his work on trust, Shakespeare turns to suspicion. In Hamlet, the former gives way to the latter from one generation to the next. The opposites confront one another head-on in Othello, where “a culture of suspicion infects the language of a culture of trust.” Now the whole of Shakespeare seems suspended between these mighty opposites. Some of Josipovici's Shakespearean commentary is acutely perceptive, though how much it owes to the master scheme is doubtful.

His chapter on Romanticism opens with a subtle discussion of Baudelaire's sonnet “Il est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver” (“so classical, so controlled, and yet spelling out the death of classicism and control”), and then charts the Wordsworthian descent from joy to melancholy, the Romantic self-doubt that is another manifestation of the death of craft; the necessary inward turn, the loneliness of the modern, craft-less writer:

Romanticism, in its first phase, merely put flesh on the bones of Enlightenment ideas and aspirations. … [But] for a small but powerful number of artists and thinkers Enlightenment iconoclasm had destroyed far more than its advocates realised. At the same time they were perfectly well aware that it was impossible to return to the pre-Enlightenment world of hierarchy and tradition, and so could only articulate their despair in the hope that, as Kierkegaard put it, by keeping the wound of the negative open some sort of natural healing might take place.

The writer, thrown on his own resources, has a Wagnerian open wound and has to be his own Parsifal. He must also rewrite the tradition to explain why this dilemma was inevitable.

The generalizations that underlie these speculations are admittedly vast, and sometimes lead the author into surprising excesses, as in his uncharacteristically imperceptive study of “Resolution and Independence.” He is much more at home with Proust, in a fine essay that manages both a well-argued assault on Paul de Man and a defence of Proust's “lightness” and ambiguous depths. With Kafka, we are near the desperate terminus—his stories and parables of the period 1914–20 “constitute the most extensive fictional exploration of the nature and limits of trust known to me”—here, and in Beckett, we find a virtual paralysis of distrust, distrust of the very words that must be found to express it.

Beckett is credited with a discovery that long preceded him: that it was “an error to create a first-person narrator with the clarity and control of a third person.” No doubt in the explanation of how these great men were historically decisive as well as in themselves worthy of awe, some less great must be left out of account. But none of these niggles really matters when most of what is said is so keen and so intelligently expressed. “Must I not begin to trust somewhere?” asked Wittgenstein, and Josipovici agrees with that. He thinks of our time as, in Hölderlin's words, a “dürftiger Zeit,” and concurs with what Wittgenstein in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations calls “der Finsternis dieser Zeit”; but he still thinks it necessary to begin to trust. Despite all he has said to emphasize their anguish, he ends by saying that it is in these great writers that one must seek that beginning.

Thirty or forty years ago, this book would probably have been issued by a non-academic publisher and been quickly and respectfully reviewed. But now it is published by a university press, admittedly an enlightened one, and has been around for some time without attracting notice. Yet Gabriel Josipovici is far from an obscure author. He has long been well known for a series of delicate and original fictions, for his work in radio, and for an impressive range of critical writing. It may seem a little mysterious that a substantial book of his—the fruit of much learning and experience—should be received with such indifference.

One explanation is that academic criticism has now been so professionalized that it is out of touch with the intelligent non-specialist public (and, some say, out of touch with literature). Literary criticism that addressed such a public was normal enough in the 1950s and 60s, when collections of essays enjoyed a fair reception and a fair sale. Indeed, as Helen Gardner once remarked, their popularity resembled that of sermon collections in the previous century, and she predicted, with a measure of accuracy, that they would end up as the sermons did, in the basements of second-hand bookshops. Certainly a time would come when literary editors would leave them undisturbed on their desks until the moment when it seemed reasonable or necessary to get rid of them. Some may think that, all things considered, this is not a tragic situation; but the good go out with the dull. On Trust can be placed firmly among the former.

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