[In the following review, Davey outlines Josipovici's developing views on literary theory in Text and Voice.]

During the 1980s, beacons were lit in universities across the land to warn the studious that a fleet of hostile French deconstructive thinkers was under sail. Numerous Channel ports of the intellect were sealed and appeasers were duly pilloried. But the bulk of this fearful armada arrived anyway, having taken the transatlantic route. A landing was easily effected, and Derida was received into Cambridge. Every discipline has had to define its response.

As a result of his deeply sympathetic engagement with European literary modernism in The World and the Book and The Lessons of Modernism (both published in the 1970s), Gabriel Josipovici was particularly attuned to the source and the strength of the challenge. But over the next decade, in the essays now collected in Text and Voice, he increasingly dissociated his work from the “shallow radicalism” of deconstruction.

His critical preoccupations were nonnegotiable: “the need to listen to the work of art and not impose ourselves upon it; the need to make ancient works come alive for us today; the role of the body in the making and reception of art; the anxiety of modernism; and the writer's need to trust—in time, in language—as he works away in the dark, trying to bring into being something that did not exist before.”

It is ironic, but perhaps inevitable, that ten novels and seven volumes of such generous literary free-thinking resulted in a canon. For Josipovici is interested only in those writers who lack confidence in their own authority and ability to speak about the world, but who do so none the less. By definition, that seems to exclude almost everyone who wrote a novel between 1760 and 1885.

The works of Dante, Homer, Chaucer and the Bible had been written in and of a communal world that, as it had been created by God, could plausibly be expected to have some inherent, transcribable meaning. Not so the works of Defoe. But for a century and a quarter, and with a complacency ridiculed soon after its very birth by Sterne, the well-plotted realist novel mistakenly imagined that it made manifest the full meaning and experience of the modernising world.

Josipovici the reader remains unmoved until the decisive modernist crisis of confidence in the writer's authority takes place. Only then does the determination to go on writing, based on trust in the process, produce significant work by Proust, Kafka, Eliot and Beckett. In Text and Voice, only two contemporary writers quality for membership of this greatly anxious tradition.

First, Josipovici makes the surprisingly generous claim that Muriel Spark's management of our shared linguistic distress makes her “perhaps almost as great as Virginia Woolf, but more ironic, cruel, elusive.” Then, with an unforgettable shock of recognition, he discovers that all his critical concerns were actively present in the writing of Georges Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual.

Although he shares the deconstructionists' Nietzschean bent, this close attention to the writing and reading of novels is finally incompatible with their reduction of works to texts without authors. “An important half truth has here been blown up into the whole truth and as a consequence a new fallacy has been created,” he observes, deploying Proust to see off Roland Barthes.

Confidently overruling Derrida, Josipovici then celebrates the voice of the work: separate from the author, but more than the text, the voice is the tension between what can be said and what really is, the always frustrated attempt at speech adequate to the body.

At this point in their argument, critics often feel compelled to issue instructions on how to read novels properly. But Josipovici's directive on this point is tantamount to professional heresy. “It is only careless, unburdened reading that will yield the right results,” he argues. In contrast, the critical establishment has mistakenly institutionalised Luther's attitude to the Bible. We have been taught to treat books as a means of salvation, truth or knowledge. As a result, we no longer know how to listen, participate or trust in language.

In his longing for the “disappearance of the protestant image of the book,” Josipovici reveals not only his deep antipathy to the academy, but also the Judaic tradition that connects him to Maurice Blanchot and Walter Benjamin, whom he regards as the “two greatest spokesmen for the distinctively modern in modern art.” Perhaps now there are three.