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Review [published October 2000]
Gabriel Josipovici: On Trust
Stephen Mitchelmore
Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian,
was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked
what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to
reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!”
He didn’t elaborate. You wouldn’t expect him to. Actually,
he repeated the phrase, perhaps impressed by the
sudden acquisition of critical acuity: “Pure escapism!”
His answer troubled me. What was being escaped, I
wondered. As it was a chat show, answers weren’t on
the agenda and the host carried on about something
else. Of course, if he had pursued the issue, the ratings
would have declined as the audience pursued “pure
escapism” on another channel. With no answer for me,
however, the problem remained on my mind.
After reading this book, I realised why I was troubled:
Tarbuck wants literature to escape words as
well as the world. This had not occurred to me. The
words allow him to suspend his bellowed belief in their
unworldliness, allowing an escape into another world.
But the possibility that words might construe his belief
in the primacy of the real world, in the same way as it
facilitates escape into the other, is not admitted. Indeed,
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
it cannot be admitted without suggesting the possible
interdependency of real and written worlds. The implications
of such a possibility, resisted by Tarbuck, has
led to what we might call the literature of suspicion,
where doubt hinders every move toward plain truth
(think of the daunting classics of modern philosophy) as
well as to the literature of pure escape. This opposition
is usually referred to as “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow”.
However, because neither wants to contemplate any
alternative, both positions are essentially the same.
Gabriel Josipovici’s new critical work suggests as
much. On Trust: Art And The Temptations Of Suspicion
is an investigation into how admitting to the unworldliness
of literature might yet still allow free range into
truth. “The problem”, the author says, “is how to keep
suspicion from turning into cynicism and trust from
turning into facileness”. Initially, the suspicion of literature
described in the book seems to be a problem
of our century’s worst events rather than Tarbuck’s
everyday psychology. After all, the mechanised slaughter
of the First World War prompted the challenges of
Modernism, and the atrocities of the Second prompted
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