Criticism for the wilderness: Josipovici on Grimm
Regular browsers of this space will know of my enthusiasm for the
fiction and criticism of Gabriel Josipovici. Other favourite authors
of mine were often discovered following his reviews and
recommendations. I think my original attraction to his work was due to
his fascination with writing itself. He isn't ashamed to discuss the
personal confrontation with the silence of writing. When I was reading
seriously for the first time, English literary coverage invariably
rehearsed a no-nonsense attitude, dismissing any reflexivity as
`experimental' at best and self-indulgent at worst. It still does.
John Carey recently criticised the lack of English translations of
world fiction but his criticism and prize jury chairmanship has
encouraged this little Englander attitude.
Josipovici ignores fashionable concerns and writes about contemporary
writers in the light of the entire European literary tradition. One
can read about them in the same way one reads about Rabelais and
Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare. One begins to sense how similar they
all are, and how utterly distant.
I seem to remember choosing to withdraw his 1977 collection The
Lessons of Modernism from the local library because of the title of
the first essay. I'd not heard of some of the essay subjects (Walter
Benjamin, Fernando Pessoa) but the first is called An Art for the
Wilderness: Franz Kafka. I thought: here is someone writing about what
concerns me! I wasn't wrong. However, once I got to know more of his
work, I did wonder about his fascination with folk tales. I thought
this was rather too close to the simple-minded fiction and literary
criticism that had revolted me when I had started reading. (This can
still be seen in my impatience with the blogosphere's interest in
graphic novels and cod-Victorian fiction). It seemed a world away from
the ultra-sophistication of those influencing his fiction, such as
Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Bernhard, Schoenberg and Harrison Birtwistle.
(Incidentally, Book World is reading his 1994 novel Moo Pak and says
it's "astonishingly good").
In the latest edition of the TLS, Josipovici explains the apparent
opposition. He reviews a new edition of Grimm's Tales and discusses
the history of the Brother's constant rewriting of the Tales as they
became more and more popular:
[W]hat happened to the Grimm Tales in the course of their fifty years
of tinkering with them was that they were transformed from tales told
by speakers who, in one way or another, were deeply convinced that
they were true (whatever meaning one assigns to the term true) into
tales told by writers (Wilhelm Grimm, in effect) who did not believe
in them and therefore substituted scene-setting, morality and
psychology for truth. It also gives us a hint as to why a novelist
like Dickens had the effect he had on his readers (and still does): he
was one who knew `how to be a child' [a reference to a comment by
Kierkegaard]. However, it was perhaps Kleist alone among the writers
understood what was really at issue here. His great novella, Michael
Kohlhaas takes many of the elements that go to make up the Grimm tales
and stands them on their head, bidding an anguished goodbye as it does
so both to community values and to wishful thinking. But Kleist had no
successors and, by and large, nineteenth century novelists and
storytellers took the path of midrash and romance, still the staple
diet of readers of twentieth century fiction, with neither writer nor
reader quite believing in what they are doing, but under a strange
compulsion to pretend that they do.
Perhaps the fascination with graphic novels, with genre fiction, and
the wide readership of the Harry Potter series, is really the latest,
desparate gasp of those compelled to pretend that they believe in
romantic wishful thinking.
at 10:28 PM 9 comments
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