Weinberger vs. Josipovici
by grandhotelabyss
A friend of mine once disparagingly said that a work of academic literary criticism should be re-titled Some Books I Like, implying that the text’s argument was a sham concealing the author’s real intention: to make a set of disparate reflections about some books he found compelling.
Since then, I’ve decided that Some Books I Like is probably my favorite genre of literary criticism. It beats the hell out of the reigning method in English departments today: sociological nihilism, or the reduction of all authors and texts to chips in a simplistic game of historical explanation. This method finds its inspiration in the ubiquitous Pierre Bourdieu, a paradigmatic man of resentment whose smug scientism masks his rage against forms of enchantment and charisma that he cannot master, and finds its reductio ad absurdam in the aliterate mapmaking of Franco Moretti, a cultivated and intelligent European decadent whose fine crypto-Catholic contempt for the world and the imagination disguises itself, absurdly, as Marxist materialism. At least these two are fun to read, in their way, but their successors are truly dire.
To my theme: In the New York Review of Books (and behind their paywall), Eliot Weinberger accuses Gabriel Josipovici of having written not a book that seriously proposes to answer the question What Ever Happened to Modernism?, but instead a set of disparate reflections about some books he found compelling.
Weinberger vs. Josipovici basically represents an intra-modernist dispute between a Poundian who aspires to the unification of past and present through a poetics of the historical image (that would be Weinberger) and a Kafkan who finds history to be a ruse of authority masking the more painful existential dilemma of each individual’s radical singularity or solitude (that’s Josipovici).
I actually find both of these views persuasive on different days of the week; in general, I prefer to read criticism by Poundians, who can tell us interesting things about the Tang Dynasty, the Guelph-Ghibelline feud, the Albigensian Crusade, etc., etc., and fiction and poetry by Kafkans, who do not burden us with mere facts as they limn the raw problem that is simply waking up in the morning.
Given my pluralism, I don’t have a dog in the Weinberger/Josipovici fight. I appreciated Josipovici’s book for what it was: a series of essays on why he likes certain books and not others, in addition to an overall essay on the sorrows and pleasures of secularism. Weinberger is right as far as it goes that Josipovici’s historical explanation is overly broad and his concept of modernism overly narrow, but he can’t accuse Josipovici of not defining his terms. I think with books like this that it’s best to grant critics their premise and then take their practical critical reflections for what they’re worth, rather than quibbling about boring -ism words, which are usually impossible to define with any precision.
(I do wish, as an aside, that critics would invent more critical categories rather than just manipulating the imprecise ones that exist. It’s clear enough that Josipovici is only really interested in one current in what’s called modernism or even modernity. I would have liked the book better had he given that a name instead of insisting on his own definition of modernism, which just makes him an easy target for the historicists.)
Let’s look at two paragraphs from Weinberger. First, and most disappointingly:
Certainly the lingering reverberations from the Reformation and the French Revolution, the belief in artifice, and the questions about art and self and language are all strands. But it is astonishing that his is a Modernism without the rise of the city, with its factories, crowds, and anonymity; without the devastation of the Napoleonic and First World Wars; without the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, the thrill of speed, the new symbolic language of the telegraph, the international voices of radio, mass migrations, the representational “reality” of photographs and the collapse of time in film montage, anthropological investigations of tribal cultures, or the beauties and terrors of industrial products. His is a Modernism that has no place for one of its rallying cries, that of the enthusiastic William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”
Again, I concede Weinberger’s last point, which is that Josipovici doesn’t think certain “modernist” works are modernist, based on his special definition of the word. But who cares? This is pedantry. What I hate about this paragraph is its heap of narrow-minded historicist cliches that have grown ever more moldy since Walter Benjamin became trendy. The city! The telegraph! Radio! Cinema! Anthropology! Psychology! Spare me! This is the stuff of the New Modernist Studies, and its thesis is pretty much the opposite of Josipovici’s: it holds that people became enchanted all over again at the remarkable new stuff that the turn of the century threw at them. Modernist Studies really amounts, in my experience, to a form of techno-determinism that Josipovici, with his care for the fragile autonomy of the singular artist, explicitly rejects in his book. He insists that new media and new technology allowed for a rediscovery of pre-modern forms and pagan insights, but also that they certainly did not cause new art by making artists envy them or unconsciously but mechanically shaping aesthetic decisions. And if that is what happened, then Moretti is right: we might as well not read the greatest literary works at all.
(To digress, there’s also the problem of specialization. I’ve noticed that modernist experts are often going on about the newness of the city–think of Mrs. Dalloway or The Waste Land. But then so are Victorianists–think of, well, Dickens. And Romanticists talk about the newness of the city too–or haven’t you read Blake’s “London”? But then again, your eighteenth-century experts can produce Moll Flanders or some Swift poems to show how new the city was in the Enlightenment. Wait, though, because your early modern specialists start talking about city comedy and coney-catching ballads and other indications of new Elizabethan urbanity. Come to think of it, I once read a review of a new translation of the epic of Gilgamesh that talked about how that very ancient poem was all about the novelty of city-living. It appears that the city never gets old.)
Another paragraph:
In fact, these supposed hallmarks of the Modernists may be found at almost any moment in history. If his worldview were not so obstinately Eurocentric—even the entire Western Hemisphere has only two exemplars: the faux Englishmen Borges and Eliot—Josipovici would have found China, to name only one, full of his kinds of Modernists. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, 2,500 years ago, were talking about the inadequacies of mere words, of a language beyond words. Classic novels such as Golden Lotuses (The Plum in the Golden Vase) or The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber) played games of illusion and reality with the reader as complex as any in Cervantes. And the innovations that he finds in Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich—placing the observer in the scene of nature, and the realization that “vision is always vision at a particular moment, from a particular place, and that though vision may be the goal it does not subsume life but is only one moment, one experience, within life”—seem applicable to nearly the entirety of Chinese poetry and landscape painting.
This rhetorical ploy is really getting old: anybody European or American or “white” or “western” who doesn’t mention any or every other human culture is Eurocentric, and so is implicitly racist and imperialist. Such a standard is rightly never applied to writers understood to be outside “the West” (when will these Chinese writers stop writing about Chinese people and Chinese history and Chinese literary traditions?). Thus I could turn it around on the accusers: they assume a kind of Euro-supremacy wherein the western writer is a universal subject, potential master of all traditions. Moreover, note Weinberger’s eminently Poundian choice of foreign culture to adduce here: China. His Sinophilia is as American as apple pie. Finally, it never occurs to good cosmo-liberals that this desire to always be going abroad, seeking out new frontiers, is itself one manifestation of the imperial mentality. Why should Josipovici be ethically, politically, or argumentatively required to mention Chinese literature and painting? Its influence on the European traditions that matter to him was relatively negligible. Josipovici writes about the history and culture of Europe because he lives there and not in China. Is this so unreasonable? In any event, Josipovici does not treat Europe or the West as a unified or continuous culture. His study emphasizes the modernists’ rediscovery of occluded western traditions in the classical and medieval periods, traditions that in their anticipation of modernism were as foreign as Chinese civilization to a Londoner of 1910.
To conclude: I like Weinberger’s essays, but this one is banal, cliched, and moralizing. While I would have preferred to see Josipovici frame his book less polemically, since I don’t think his historical and artistic generalizations are all that tenable, it nevertheless performs the work of good criticism: it gives the reader an intellectual and affective impression of what it would mean to appreciate the works the critic appreciates. Of course, the reverse works too, when the critic persuades the reader to disesteem the work; but Weinberger’s critique of Josipovici is too pedantic to be so effective.
For more on Weinberger’s review, see This Space and Conversational Reading. This Space also has the best summary review/defense of Josipovici’s book online. My favorite negative review, though it was quite controversial, is Amelia Atlas’s; I agree with her detractors that she’s unfair to Josipovici, but, at the end of her piece, she makes the best possible case for the realist tradition in the novel, a tradition I too esteem equally with what Josipovici calls the modernist.
