[In the following positive review, Cardinal explains the historical events on which Josipovici built his novel The Big Glass.]

Reminiscing in 1946 about the origins of his masterwork “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even,” (commonly known as “The Large Glass”), Marcel Duchamp acknowledged the inspiration of Raymond Roussel, whose curious play Impressions d'Afrique he had seen performed in 1911. “The Large Glass,” that legendary synthesis of calculation and Dada nonsense, begun in New York in 1915 and “definitively incompleted” in 1923, may thus be supposed to draw at least in part on the principle of transposition d'art. “I felt,” Duchamp recalls, “that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter.”

Gabriel Josipovici's novel [The Big Glass] turns a neat mirrortrick by carrying “The Large Glass” back into the verbal medium, thereby continuing a practice that dates back to his homage to Pierre Bonnard, the triptych, Contre Jour (1984). The mode of transposition Josipovici favours is distinctive; rather more than a verbal commentary on the visual work, but not quite a fictionalized biography. What he does first is dip freely into the pictorial motifs, critical readings and biographical data associated with the original work of art, using especially the notes Duchamp himself provided in the Green Box of 1934; he then arranges these borrowings within an entirely new frame, displacing the facts of Duchamp's eight years' toil in New York with the story of an artist named Harsnet who initiates his so-called “Big Glass” in a Clapham studio in July 1967.

As though to ensure it will not be taken too literally, Josipovici signals the fictional nature of his text in a manner reminiscent of such earlier experiments as his split-level story “Mobius the Stripper” (recently reprinted in Steps: Selected Fiction and Drama). The Big Glass is a tale jointly told by two narrators. The artist Harsnet kept a personal notebook during the period of fabrication of his “Glass”; an associate, the critic Goldberg, now transcribes this text on an Olivetti portable, fulfilling what he sees to be a “sacred trust.” These narratorial antics throw up irresistible echoes: of Max Brod publishing Kafka's secrets; of Sartre's fictive editors annotating Roquentin's confessions, of the Chinese-box structure of Thomas Bernhard's Gehen, a similar experiment in reported speech. Every now and then Harsnet's voice gives way to that of his amanuensis as the latter interpolates his Goldberg variations in the form of marginal notes or letters to Harsnet, which set up a secondary perspective on events. The ornate textual packaging invites us to spot the shifts of voice, watching for faults or refractions of meaning, collating insights into Harsnet's private self at the same time as we monitor his creative stratagems.

The artist of this portrait emerges as a cold-hearted fellow, who humiliates his bride by hiring a lookalike to show up at the registry office in his stead and inserts insulting remarks about Goldberg in the very document he knows the critic will read. A quirkiness reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's monologues comes across in Harsnet's asides, about mundane incidents in the local launderette, or about his making an inventory of the entire contents of his jacket pocket in 1959. Such trivia offset the high earnestness of his commitment to “The Big Glass.” The novel is the epic tale of this work, seen less as an artefact of glass, metal and scratched silver than as a property of its maker's mind. Harsnet's nightly notations are a spiritual diary, The Big Glass a mirror of his intense aesthetic and metaphysical ponderings.

Harsnet thus equates to that modern type which Jean Starobinski has named the “cerebral hero”; he tenaciously affirms his lucidity, rejects all compromise, strives for an act of radical refusal, some ultimate Dada gesture. Fantasizing about his work as an icon of moral rigour, Harsnet imagines its multiple symbolic impact: the two transparent panes are a “mirror of reality,” then a crystal ball, finally a corrosive challenge that will annihilate all museum art. An aura of fanaticism steals up. Harsnet seems scarcely to sleep in his efforts to sharpen his anti-cultural critique, and the implication is strong that he has in mind to kill himself once his magnum opus has been exhibited.

Josipovici's fiction both mimics and caricatures history when, unpacked at the Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the panes are found to be smashed. The “advent of the unexpected” triggers off an unlikely zest in Harsnet, who welcomes the chance to play again with the broken toy he had affected to disown, and to participate in its last minute leap from the cerebral into the emotional. He is overwhelmed by this final, unplanned symbolism: “Only by being shattered could the glass come alive.”

Despite some infelicities, such as the awkward entry into the fiction of such real-life figures as Saul Bellow and John Cage. The Big Glass merits respect for its measured treatment of the theme of creative transcendence, and its moral and aesthetic lessons about the lifting of emotional taboos and the limitations of rigid planning. It remains an open question whether Marcel Duchamp, that ironic iconoclast, would have relished its overtones of redemption; he would probably have enjoyed the book's dour prose, in which cliché is constantly stripped bare by a caustic terseness.