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thority’ necessarily destroys tradition; authority asserts.
Without consensus, the old forms were compromised,
and there wasn’t any ready-made replacement.
What fascinates Josipovici is the way Dante and
Shakespeare renewed their respective arts without denying
this change. They did not become sterile artists
asserting dead formulas, nor did they lapse into silence.
Their Romantic descendants, on the other hand, were
plagued by both sterility and silence. Even those who
did manage to create something found it was not what
they expected. Wordsworth’s major work is only the
prelude to a grander work that never got written, and
Coleridge’s most powerful poems were about the loss of
his poetic sensibility. The Great Work became increasingly
difficult to conceive, not because everything had
been done already, but because the limits provided by
consensus had disappeared, and this is a double-edged
freedom: having no limit is also a limit. It is a condition
we are still with. Wordsworth and Coleridge managed
to achieve something only in the questioning of their
authority. Josipovici shows this was done as a response
to the change, as Dante and Shakespeare had responded
before them. Implicitly, it refutes Romantic notions of
the centrality of individual psychology and biography.
Still, however, our culture assumes personal authority
to be the pinnacle of artistic achievement. So the
popular awareness of the Romantics remains one of
‘self-expression’ – the assertion of the self in response
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
to some daffodils. That ‘self-expression’ is a limited
anarchy may explain why contemporary art has lost the
respect it once had. As art strives for the greater truth,
it has to admit to its limits – words on a page – and
thereby undermine its authority. Many budding artists,
discouraged by this paradox and keen to appeal to the
newly suspicious public, accept that writing is only a
plaything, a place of escape, mitigated perhaps by social
or historical relevance. The best thinkers turn instead to
disciplines (the very word reveals its attraction) such as
science, politics and philosophy, where the truth does
not have to rely on words (so they assume). Literature
gets Irvine Welsh.
So, when Josipovici reaches the 20th century, the
pressure is at its peak. Literature has lost much of
its pre-eminence; it has been superseded by other
forms. Yet perhaps those who claim that film is the
most important art of the 20th century are right only
in the way they are right if they say that Totalitarianism
is its most important political system. Film, like
a tyrannical regime, depends on appearances. It bears
no reflexive commentary. Literature is different.
Josipovici shows how three otherwise very dissimilar
20th-century writers responded to their suspicion of
art with reflexive commentary. Now this can often
lead to a novel without narrative tension, it’s what
gives ‘experimental’ art a bad name, but what makes
Proust, Kafka and Beckett special is the tension within
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