What Ever Happened to Modernism by Gabriel Josipovici

This review was first published in Rain Taxi in the spring of 2011. I'd actually forgotten all about it, but then came across it as I was reorganizing some folders on my computer. In case it still holds some interest, here it is. (Page references are to the Yale hardcover, and were for the copyeditors to double check my quotes; they weren't in the print version of the review, but I've kept them in because, well, why not...)

One of the pleasures of Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? is that it all but forces us — dares us, even — to argue with it.  Josipovici presents an idiosyncratic definition of Modernism, he perceives the struggles of Modernist writers and artists as fundamentally spiritual, and he frames it all by describing his disenchantment with most of the critically-lauded British fiction of the last few decades, a disenchantment that he ascribes to such fiction’s attachment to non-Modernist 19^th century desires.

The only readers likely to agree with Josipovici’s general view, then, are readers who accept his terms and share his tastes.  Such readers are probably few, and they are also the readers who least need the book.  It is those of us who may be sympathetic to one or another of Josipovici’s general arguments who really need it, because it is a powerfully clarifying volume, especially in its extended discussions of particular works.

Worlds Apart

I was writing a comment in reply to Ray Davis on a previous post, and realized it might be better as a post than a comment.

Here's Ray's original comment:

Huh. The "problem that had long puzzled" Josipovici was precisely -- like precisely, except for some name-swapping which sharpens the point, like Joyce for Mann and Beckett for Bernhard -- what led me to start looking into science fiction in 1976. (And eventually led me here, of course.)

From what I've read of Josipovici, I suspect he arrived at different answers than myself.

My feelings are similar, and are one of the reasons that though my particular pleasures are different from Josipovici's, I'm sympathetic to his argument. Those feelings are also a reason why I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to arguments that pose science fiction (broadly defined) as the opposite of Modernism.  (Different, sure.  Opposite, nope.)  That's an interpretation that doesn't work for me because it contradicts my own reading life, which is, yes, a narcissistic (solipsistic?) approach to an argument, but hey, it's what I've got.  For me, science fiction and Modernism are complementary.

Catching Up, Once Again

This semester of teaching (at two schools) has pretty well kept me away from the blog here, but things are beginning to even out, and I should be able to return to my regularly irregular posting in the next few weeks.  I will probably even soon be able to reply to that email you sent me.  For now, though, some quick notes...

• Over at Gestalt Mash, my latest Sandman Meditations column finishes up The Doll's House.

• I've now finished reading Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, and will start writing a review of it for Rain Taxi very soon (I'm only about a month late on that...)  I found the book provocative, fascinating, and enlightening, but even if I hadn't, I think I'd be amazed at how stupid many of the reviews of it have been (the link is to The Complete Review's roundup; their own review is not one I agree with, but though I don't think it's up to their normal standard, it's not awful).  I won't address this in the review I write, since it doesn't seem appropriate, but I'll say it here: I don't think some of the negative reviewers actually read the book.  They certainly didn't read it carefully, and many seemed to read while having an axe in hand, ready for grinding.  Mark Thwaite addressed the problem back in September, and Stephen Mitchelmore further responded to it last month (in a blog post that I seem to need to link to at least once a week -- Mitchelmore and I are really different sorts of readers, I think, but that post alone is enough to make me grateful for the blogosphere).  When I started reading What Ever Happened to Modernism, I was ready to believe that some of the negative reviewers had misconstrued some of its arguments or maybe missed some of its subtleties, but the more I read and the more I then compared what I read to the reviews, the more I was aghast at how much was missed.  Many reviewers seemed to have read not the book but a problematic piece in The Guardian, which Josipovici has denounced.  (At least D.J. Taylor apologized, though he still called the book "horribly partial and wrong-headed", revealing himself to be both a pot and a kettle.)  It's true that Josipovici doesn't have much use for Martin Amis, Ian McEwen, Julian Barnes, and some of the other more prominent British writers of the last few decades, but his discussion of this is not a major portion of the book, and he tempers it with such statements as, "But I realise that this may be largely because of who and what I am."  He praises William Golding and Muriel Spark, he writes marvelously about music and visual art, his discussions of Wordsworth showed me ways to enjoy a poet whose wonders had previously eluded me, and he pointed me toward a book I'm now reading with wonder, Farewell to an Idea by T.J. Clark.  And now that I've written more than I intended to about What Ever Happened to Modernism here, it's time to get to work on that review...

• Josipovici's admiration for William Golding was not news to me, because he's sung Golding's praises before, but I read his latest comments on Golding at roughly the same time as I watched the Criterion Collection DVD of Lord of the Flies, with a commentary by Peter Brook that is among the most enlightening commentary tracks I've encountered.  I worship Peter Brook, so I'm biased, but though I had seen the movie quite a few times (it's one of the few cases where I love both the book and film), I'd never listened to the commentary.  It provides not just good information about how the film was made, but also, as is typical of Brook, a philosophy of art.  The additional comments of producer Lewis Allen, director of photography Tom Hollyman, and cameraman/editor Gerald Feil add context and provide a fine glimpse of Brook's working methods.

• The Carl Brandon Society is having a fundraiser drawing to raise money for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship -- the prize is an e-reader loaded with good stuff.  Tickets are $1 each.  Go buy some!

I think I had other things to write about here, but they are slipping my mind, and time is short...

Checking In

Egads, I knew October was going to be a slow month for blogging, but this is my first post since September 24...

What have I been up to, you ask?  (Well, no you don't.  But I'm going to pretend you do.  Allow me a few of my delusions, please!  I gave up on world peace and my imaginary friends, so can't I at least have this?!?)

What I've been up to is mostly just the ordinary stuff of life, which for me right now primarily means teaching at two different schools, one a university, the other a high school, in a schedule that's leading to a bit of brain discombobulation.  A lot of preparation for next term's classes, too, particularly the Gender & Science Fiction one at Plymouth State -- all the suggestions from folks were helpful, because even in the case of things I was already considering, it's helped me focus.  I still have a week till I have to turn in book orders, so I haven't settled on much yet, but I do know I'll be using The Left Hand of Darkness, and that's a direct result of all of the comments in its favor.

I got an email recommendation of Karen Traviss's novels (not her media tie-ins), and so I picked up a copy of City of Pearl, read it, and really enjoyed it.  I'm told some of the later books in the series are even better, so I look forward to reading them, though for some reason the second book, Crossing the Line, is out of print in the U.S.  Why this is, I don't know -- the others all seem to be in print.  Weird...  For the class, if I use one of Traviss's books, it will be City of Pearl, and not only because I don't have time to read any of the others between now and when book orders are due, but because it looks like the series is the sort that really needs to be read in order.

Among the many other books I'm reading at the moment is the great Gabriel Josipovici's Whatever Happened to Modernism?, which I'm reviewing for Rain Taxi (it will be one of those reviews that's really more about an encounter with a book than any sort of critique of it -- I would be a fool to pretend I am qualified to argue with someone as well-read as Josipovici).  The response to the book in the UK has been strange, sometimes vitriolic, and often inaccurate in how it represents what Josipovici is up to, as Stephen Mitchelmore quite brilliantly shows in a recent blog post that is one of the best pieces of writing about a text that I've seen in a while.  I don't expect my own piece on the book to be either as analytical or as simpatico with Whatever Happened to Modernism?, not because I expect to disagree with the overall argument (many of the writers I most revere are modernists; I seldom write about them because I've rarely found a form in which doing so feels like anything more than pathetic groping; very little current fiction truly and deeply affects me in the way so many works by Kafka, Beckett, Woolf, and others do), but because I think I usually read for different purposes and with different expectations from Josipovici.  After all, half the time I'm reading popular fiction of some sort or another.  So we'll see...

In other topics, I made some of my students read Gary Lutz's amazing essay "The Sentence is a Lonely Place".  I don't think many of the students finished it or even got much beyond the first few paragraphs, but I keep bringing it up in class and reading little sections to them, which will probably lead to lots of course evaluations that say things along the lines of, "The instructor is insane, repetitive, and way too obsessed with sentences," but so it goes.  It's a writing class, and couldn't a writer be defined as somebody who's way too obsessed with sentences?

I expect things to continue to be pretty slow around here until about the middle of November.  Or not; it's hard to predict.

Meanwhile, because of limited time, I've been doing more with Twitter than anything else, though even there I'm not prolific.

And I probably owe you an email.

Short Notes on Various Books

One thing I love about blogs is seeing people discover books that have become so much a part of my own life that I develop the sense that everybody else on Earth has also read them, and so there's no need for me to talk about them, because we all know these are great books, right? It's nice to be reminded that this is a fantasy -- nice to see people suddenly fall in love with books I've known for a little while already.

The great and glorious Anne Fernald just posted a list of some books she's read lately with joy and happiness, and the two books on the list that I've read are ones I recommend without reservation: Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.

I first heard about Tropical Fish when I was in Kenya for the SLS/Kwani conference and Doreen Baingana was part of a panel discussion; I found her captivating. Later, a Ugandan friend (who also told me about FEMRITE) exhorted me to read the book. I did. I exhort you to do the same.

I don't remember when I stumbled upon Good Morning, Midnight -- I feel like the battered, crumpled paperback I've got has been with me for years, but I know I read it only a handful of years ago. Few other books have affected the prose of my own writing as deeply. Much of what I've written, and even some of what I've published, I could call my pre-Rhys writing -- aspiring toward a sort of lyricism that now I have little interest in. Good Morning, Midnight offers, to my eye's ear, a prose that I would rank in its stark, precise beauty with that of Paul Bowles, J.M. Coetzee, and even, to some extent, Beckett.

Meanwhile, much like Anne, I've been reading a lot without writing about it. I've felt like I either didn't have much to say about what I've read, or what I'd have to say has already been said by plenty of people. Here, though, are some quick thoughts on some of what I've read over the last few weeks:

I was looking forward to Jedediah Berry's first novel, The Manual of Detection, with so much excitement that I may have slaughtered it with expectations. Some of Jed's short stories are among my favorites of recent years, and I had high hopes for the novel, but those hopes were never quite met. It was a brisk and sometimes exhilarating read, but ultimately felt whispy to me, especially in the last third, from which I ached for much more. Much more what? I don't know. But more.

Similarly, I think Brian Evenson is one of the better contemporary American writers, and so my hopes for his new novel, Last Days, were unreasonably high. It's an interesting and sometimes harrowing book, but again I wasn't satisfied with it in the last third or so. (Matt Bell has written a comprehensive and thoughtful take on the novel here.) It's not that I didn't like either The Manual of Detection or Last Days -- I read them both, and neither ever really felt like a slog to get through -- but both left me unsatisfied, yearning for more complexity and depth and nuance and implication.

Then one day the mail brought both The Letters of Noël Coward and The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. I wondered what the mail gods were trying to tell me (one friend replied, when I mentioned the coincidence: "I think it means you are either: an absurd gayist ... or a flamboyant abusrdist. Possibly both." I'll try for both). The Coward was a review copy, the Beckett a book I splurged on for myself. I tried reading the former for a bit, because I do have a certain weakness for good ol' Noël, but the letters are presented amidst a narrative of Coward's life, and I found it annoying, so couldn't continue.

The Beckett is a masterpiece of editing, a feat of scholarship, and utterly fascinating. I devoured half of the big book in only a few days (then stopped, ready to go again on the second half very soon). Gabriel Josipovici reviewed it, so I have nothing else to say.

Partly because of my "Murder, Madness, Mayhem" class, I happened to read some Robert Aickman stories and became obsessed. I had last read Aickman when I was about 17 or so, and I had hated his stories. I thought they were the most boring, pointless things ever written by any human being ever, ever, ever. Ahhh, youth! "The Hospice" and "The Stains" are now stories I am simply in awe of. I quickly hunted up the only two relatively affordable Aickman collections available on the used book market: Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils. They are full of exactly what Aickman says they are full of: strange stories. Beautifully, alarmingly strange stories.

Someone should publish an affordable paperback of Aickman's selected (or, be still my heart, collected!) stories. Tartarus Press published a two-volume collected stories, but it's going for at least $700 these days, and though I love Aickman, I can't spend $700 on him. Thus, I implore the publishing world to relieve my yearning and reprint a collection or two or eight of Aickman's stories in inexpensive editions! Someone? Anyone? Please? NYRB Books, I'm looking at you right now.....

Wanting to read some nonfiction about Aickman, I borrowed S.T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction from a library and read the fairly astute chapter on Aickman. But I have to admit, my first thought on reading various parts of Joshi's book was, "What crawled up this guy's ass and died?" I know some people have thought the same about things I've written, so I didn't hold it against him. I was curious how Joshi is perceived within the horror community, though, because his rants against writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub seem so over-the-top to me that they actually work better as humor than as criticism, and he sometimes seems to get angry at writers for not fitting into his own narrow categories, for not agreeing with his (Lovecraftian) view of the universe, for not being more, well, Joshian. He has some fascinating things to say, but also ... not. Is he the Ezra Pound of genre criticism? The Cimmerian quotes Joel Lane (whose short stories I like quite a bit):

[Joshi's] Lovecraft biography is a serious classic. Joshi’s recent book The Modern Weird Tale is a mixed bag, highly idiosyncratic and unfair, but full of good insights. His new book The Evolution of the Weird Tale, despite its grand title, is basically a collection of review articles; but it’s enormous fun and less narrow than some earlier Joshi stuff. The Weird Tale, published in 1990 and covering the weird fiction genre from Machen to Lovecraft, is ambitious and dynamic but heavy-handed and too fond of extreme statements. Behind the veils of academic objectivity, Joshi can be seen to be a volatile, short-tempered, aggressive and highly intense young man. He has mellowed a little since, though his sarcasm can still wither at forty paces.

As I prepared my class to watch an episode of Dexter, I read around in Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis, Jr. and Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture by David Schmid -- both well worth reading, rich with insights.

Nowadays, I'm mostly doing research about British imperialism and its connection to mystery and adventure fiction. Fascinating stuff, which will, I hope, bring a new project to fruition...