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their work. Josipovici argues that this is the tension
between extreme suspicion and the miraculous trust
of each writer in the act of writing.
In the first essay, he makes this point in exhilarating
fashion by showing how Paul de Man, a famed modern
deconstructor of literary pretension, misread Proust to
such an extent that Proust becomes the deconstructor
of theoretical pretension to come. What De Man disapproves
of is Proust’s openness to change, traced over
the 3,000 pages of In Search Of Lost Time, when he
should be demanding single, certain truth. De Man is,
Josipovici persuades us, an unwitting Romantic who
has mistaken disillusionment for truth. Proust, it seems,
is the true realist, helping us to see the overall shape of
life, where change and death are central, obscured only
by our everyday abstractions of reality. “In our daily
life, we are too busy, in too much of a hurry, to respond
fully to people or places”, Josipovici writes. “It takes
death to jolt us out of our abstractions, to make us realise
what the person really was in the fullness of their being.
Death or art.” This reminds us of his reading of Homer.
But whereas in ancient times such jolting gravity came
lightly, as it was internalised, with Proust and the other
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
Modernists it had to be achieved, like a game already
lost in advance; something we resist instinctively.
The essays on Kafka and Beckett are equally illuminating.
In each, Josipovici makes close readings to
show how their work moves forward without lapsing
into cynicism or facileness, or if it does, how each writer
learns from it. It reiterates Joyce’s words about mistakes
being the portals of discovery, at least to a genius.
But perhaps they are geniuses because they learn. And
perhaps true learning requires an element of trust, an element
of self-sacrifice. This would complicate applications
of, say, evolutionary psychology to the production
of art. Still, one might see this term “trust” representing
the author’s hesitation before commitment in that it is
a nebulous term, and also Romantic. Plato and St Paul
would then have good reason to be suspicious. Perhaps.
But at least it follows its own logic in not prescribing
a certain kind of art and instead leaves future artists to
find their own way. In the meantime, On Trust helps us
toward to the space where this rare art might emerge, a
place that turns out to be not one of mystical revelation,
but as ordinary as life and death itself, and perhaps all
the more revelatory for that. �
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