The world and the book: A study of modern fiction

by Gabriel Josipovici

This text questions whether the ease by which modern art has been assimilated, perhaps suggests that its radical and subversive nature has not been recognised. The book deals primarily with one branch of modern art - the modern novel - in the belief that the problems we encounter in our response to fiction are typical of those raised by any art. Following the example of the great moderns - Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot - the book questions both the foundations of fiction and the norms of the western artistic tradition, that is, the tradition of realism developed in the Renaissance and the 17th century. In the process it analyzes the work of Chaucer, Rabelais, Swift and Hawthorne, as well as that of Proust, Nabakov, Bellow and Golding, showing that these constitute what might well be called a tradition of the anti-novel, of fiction which defines itself by opposition to the naive realism of the traditional novel. The book is not intended as literary criticism in the ordinary sense, nor as a book of aesthetics, but as an exploration in discursive terms of some of the author's own central concerns as a writer, and a celebration of some of the authors he most admires. Gabriel Josipovici ha

Genres: Literary Criticism, Criticism

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1971

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

[Paul Bard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The World and the Book, or Reading as Eucharist.

The second and final chapters on "The world and a book" and "The world and the book" are the key ones to read.

The rest - as the author admits - tend towards chatter.

But what superb chatter it is! I found myself thinking many times of the experience of reading Dante as I read, how the key insights are reinforced by the Letter to Can Grande, De Vulgaris Eloquentia, and De Monarchia - as if by a public act of self-illumination these extra revelations cast a new and brilliant light on the Commedia itself. It was pretty fascinating the read the comparisons with Dante and Proust, too - how, using the same principles of design, Dante puts God at the center and Proust puts his own life at the center. Fascinating.

But the final chapter represents a Montaignean pinnacle of a kind. I say "Montaignean" because this kind of sophisticated culture-reflection is so rare and magnificent when it occurs that one can only credit it with inspiration.

Because the great dualities of non-existence and existence are reconciled in the act of reading, which is the labyrinth for the mind while the spirit exists free; and finally in the act of silence which is the precursor to reading itself.

It's kind of a love song to reading, but a resonant and beautiful apology to Modernism also.

Other highlights: I particularly like the chapter of Rabelais, which humanizes him well; the chapter of Nabokov, which was witty, and the chapters on Dante and Proust simply because I like them both as men. Chaucer - a difficult man, whose crabbed style has never really appealed to me - I also didn't much enjoy reading about, sadly.