Much Depends: An Interview With Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel Josipovici was born to Jewish parents in Nice in October 1940. After the war, he moved to Egypt, where his mother was born, and then to England in 1956. After graduating from Oxford, he joined the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex in 1963, where he taught for thirty-five years. He has published over twenty novels, as well as short fiction, stage and radio plays, critical works, and several collections of essays. His novel, The Cemetery in Barnes, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize for Fiction in 2018, while his first collection of stories and short plays, Mobius the Stripper, received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1975. (The award was later rescinded as Josipovici’s lack of a British passport at birth made him ineligible.)

The first book of Josipovici’s that I read was Whatever Happened to Modernism?, a passionate and erudite defence of an artistic tradition that, then as now, suffers at the hands of a proudly conservative publishing industry, as well as its ever-diminishing critical apparatus. Josipovici’s own fiction has long enacted and worked through the approach to literature explored in that book, which sees modernism as “the coming to consciousness by art of its limits and therefore its potential.” His fiction is profoundly concerned with its own limitations, pushing towards the deformations and ellipses that inevitably emerge when the assumedly ‘natural’ forms of writing are questioned, exhausted, and cast aside. His novels typically use dialogue as their driving force, bringing characters and narratives into an uneasy focus through their conversations, all the while refusing – as he himself once put it – to fill in the background.

As I’ve come to know his work over the last decade, I have found there a singular combination of style, humour, gravity, and lightness. Whether writing fiction or criticism, Josipovici has displayed the same finely tuned ear for language and its fissures. To me, the stories we tell about who we are and why we do the things we do have rarely felt more precisely examined or more urgently rendered than in his extensive and generous body of work.

I met Josipovici on a bright November afternoon at his home in Lewes, a few miles from the south coast of England. He made lunch, and we talked for several hours.

*

Ian Maleney
Why do you write?

Gabriel Josipovici
I don’t know. Always, as far back as I can remember, I have, and when I’m not writing, I’m unhappy. When it’s sort of between books and things. It’s not that it’s perpetually a wonderful thing to be doing it, but not doing it is not very nice. So that’s about as near as I can get.

IM
What is that feeling like for you, when you’re not writing?

GJ
Very frustrating. Very frustrating in the sense that you want to beat the wall or something. I’m not good at being between things. I think if you’re a poet you can sort of doodle and produce something fairly regularly. A lot of it might not be any good, but still. Whereas, I’ve tried with fiction. I mean, doing a critical essay or a critical book is different, because there there’s a project and, okay, there are times, weeks or whatever, when it’s not going so well. But there’s a fair amount of reading and thinking and jotting and putting it together and so on. You know that it’s going towards somewhere. Whereas I think the difficulty with writing fiction is that, certainly in my case, there’s no certainty, even almost up to the end, whether you’ll produce anything that’s at all worthwhile.

I’ve found that if, say, I have a wonderful idea – I mean a formal idea – that can be very exciting. But nothing comes of it. Or if I have a feeling of something I want to say, but not a form, that also nothing comes of it. Somehow there has to be a marrying of the two, of a sense of something you’re struggling with, and a way that that looks as if it might be managed. So no, it’s not comfortable.

IM
Do you find that there’s a period at the start where perhaps you have had one side of that occur, and then the second half comes later? Or do you find that they arrive in a flash together?

GJ
No, it probably isn’t a flash. But I know the negative side more. I’m more aware of the negative. I really like this formal thing, this is really interesting, starting out, and then the thing just collapses, because there isn’t really a feeling of something I want to do. Sometimes I suppose, one draws the other one. But then I always feel slightly uneasy with that—the work always seems a little bit willed or something. I felt this a bit with the last novel that I did, the one that’s just come out, Partita, where I had an idea for the form, or at least a sort of rhythm. And then I had a sort of content, but I didn’t really feel it all that much. Although people since then say, oh, but it’s so personal. Some people say, oh, it’s lovely, very jolly, your lightest book, and so on. Other people say*, oh, my goodness, it’s so dark*. So clearly, if you’re engaged on a project for any length of time, something comes through of what you’re feeling. But I didn’t feel quite at ease with it, as I have with some other books, which I’ve felt somehow just, yes, this was a joy to work on.

IM
It’s surprising to me that people thought Partita was a light work or a jolly work.

GJ
On the day of the launch, my dear friend Tim Hyman died. A painter friend, we walked and talked a lot. And another friend said the last time she saw him, he was sitting on the steps of his flat in London and reading it. And he said, Oh, it’s Gabriel’s lightest book. One can never tell.

IM
Maybe some of your unease is visible in the fact that Partita doesn’t appear by itself? That it is the other side of a coin, and it is paired with this work on Kafka, A Winter In Zürau. Kafka is someone whom you’ve been writing about for so long. I think one of the early essays was for the fiftieth anniversary of his death, and that is fifty years ago now.

GJ
That was the first time I could write about him. Tony Rudolph, who ran a little press called the Menard Press – after Pierre Menard, the Borges thing – where he did a lot of translation from Hebrew and from the French. I had met him once or twice. I had a letter from him saying, I’m editing, for European Judaism, a 50th anniversary of Kafka’s death special issue. Would you write something? And I said, I’ve tried occasionally – even 50 years ago, I’d already had a go – and I just can’t. But he kind of kept at me and he kind of pushed it out of me. I don’t know if I saw the way to do it, but I did discover ways in. I went on reading him and went on feeling inspired to try and make sense of this or that bit. And then I was invited – again, commissioned – to do the introduction to and to edit an Everyman edition of Kafka stories. I wrote I think probably the best thing I’ve done on Kafka as an introduction for that.

I do think often getting commissions is a great thing. It’s a fantastic thing for a writer. You tend to be rather on your own, so even just for an essay, it’s a sort of stimulus. A feeling that somebody wants it, rather than I’m on my own. I remember when I was in the doldrums after my first novel had come out. It had sort of died a death and I was really struggling and not very happy with things. And again, out of the blue, a woman called Judith Burnley, who was editing a lovely series called Penguin Modern Writers. There were three authors in each—one established, one in the middle of their career, as it were, and one new. Somehow she must have perhaps read that first novel, and she wrote to me. Would I have something for her? And that was such a stimulus. It got me writing that short story, ‘Mobius the Stripper’. I got that letter, oh gosh, I went out, took my dogs for a walk and I had just been reading Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. And I thought it was ridiculous and hilarious and not quite my thing, but on this walk, I suddenly thought, well, maybe it would be nice to write about this. Calling it ‘Mobius the Stripper’ and doing something where the two things came together in the form of a Mobius strip. And this person who is baring all, in a kind of parody of that. That was a commission. If it hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been the sense that somebody wants it, you know?

IM
You’ve had this periodic re-engagement with Kafka, right up to A Winter In Zürau, where there is this very close attention, day-by-day focus almost, on what he’s thinking. How did that change your understanding of him as a person, as a writer?

GJ
I think as soon as I read Kafka, I suppose it was The Trial, like so many people, it just hit me. And I read the diaries, and then later the letters and just felt a kind of kinship, which was strange. But there was something there which perhaps everybody, Jewish or not, feels, why Auden said he was the writer for the modern world—as Goethe was for the Romantics, Dante for the Middle Ages, and Shakespeare for the Renaissance. There was just something I felt, yes, this is speaking to me. I kept going back and finding more. I’d been interested in the aphorisms and puzzled by them, as so many people are baffled. Some seemed very interesting and some didn’t. Some seemed very mysterious and others seemed wonderfully lucid.

I read Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography with great interest because, on the whole, I think biographies of Kafka had tended to simply give his view, but he filled it out remarkably. And then I heard that he’d published, in German, an edition of the aphorisms. When it came out in English translation, I got hold of it and it was very nicely produced. Kafka cut up these pieces of paper and numbered them and he extracted a sentence or two from the diaries he was keeping at the time, obviously with a sense of what he wanted that collection of small sheets to contain, and put them down, one per sheet. So, in that Stach edition, each page had the aphorism at the top and the blank page underneath, and Stach’s commentary on the other side.

And I was so disappointed by his commentary. It was a really, really uninteresting piece of work. So I began scribbling in all the blank spaces my comments on Stach, and gradually I went back to the letters that were written at the same time, to the notebooks. I’d never really, until I looked closely at it, thought much about these Octavo notebooks, which have been translated and published in English.But when I looked I was puzzled as to why he’d selected those sentences from the notebooks and not others for this little collection. Kafka wrote these so-called aphorisms when he’d gone to stay in the country with his sister Ottla to try and come to terms with the knowledge that he had TB.He stayed there for 8 months and then returned to Prague and resumed his old life. And it came to me that this is a wonderful clear demarcation, when he goes to this place and when he leaves it, and it’s the only time in his life when he’s away from Prague – apart from the travels in his early years with Brod and odd visits to sanatoria and so on – for an extended period. So I thought maybe there’s something there. It forms a neat shape of its own. And let’s just follow the thing and see if one can get a sense of the rhythm of what was going on.

And I think in the end, that’s why I wasn’t completely averse to Michael Schmidt [at Carcanet] doing the two things together. It felt to me as if it had the same shape as novels of mine have tended to have, which is that, looking back on it, I see a kind of anguished search for an answer, and at the end, the feeling that there wasn’t an answer. But somehow something has happened. The search has been important, even life-changing.. And I felt that with Kafka, the sense of clearing the decks and getting away and all the rest of it, the notion that he would finally get close to understanding what his life was about, as people often feel when faced with a death-threatening illness: Got to make sense of it. What’s it about? You’re thrown, thrust into this. Even more so with someone like Kafka, who was already so introspective, so ready to explore and to try to understand. But by the end, he seemed to have rather lost interest or felt it wasn’t getting anywhere, and to be moving back unconsciously to playing with little bits of fiction, little bits of images. And gradually he sort of leaves it behind. But his life has changed.

IM
The way you’re talking about it there, it reminds me of what you were saying earlier of the projects that maybe don’t come together. I think it is often in those moments where maybe you think, I’m going away now, I have some time, I’ve cleared my head, and I have this thing that I think I can do. And I find those things never work. That it’s too much of an idea and not enough of the feeling. So perhaps there may have been some of that going on here as well. I think as a reading experience, there’s an intensity that builds up with the closeness of your focus on the diaries. You’re watching the mind at work. And what’s quite lovely about it, I suppose, is that that’s not all that’s happening. You’re aware that he is living, you know, outside of the notebook.

GJ
I think he didn’t go with the idea of writing these aphorisms, he went to make sense of his life. And as he pared down and pared down, then suddenly at some point, he felt it required being a writer. He just had to get a form. And then like so many of his projects, it didn’t come to anything. But the larger project, as it were, of making sense of his life also—I think it’s as if he recognized that maybe one doesn’t, but one keeps wanting to, maybe the wanting to is a good thing. And that really all his other work as well had always been that in a way, every piece of fiction, all that was trying to make sense of his life.

But again, I think it then raises a question. What does making sense mean? Which he obviously never resolves in the rest of his life.

IM
That need to make sense of things through writing—pretty much every writer, on some level, that’s why they’re doing it. They have something they can’t let go of, a bone that they’re working. They have to keep at it. There’s some mirror of that in your own work where there’s looking for an answer to a question, up to and beyond the point where you know there is no answer. A lot of writing wants the answer, and is not so interested in the not knowing. Whereas I do feel like in your work, and in Kafka’s work, the not knowing eventually becomes the point. Is that an easy state to inhabit?

GJ
I think that’s how I hope the ideal reader of a novel of mine would feel. That when they come to the end, that’s when something might open up. It isn’t going to open up in the actual work. Things usually start from a feeling of something that can’t be said, rather than something that wants to be said. Of course, it wants to be said, but it can’t be said. If it could be said, then there wouldn’t be any need for art, as it were, for a construction. So if a reader would end by thinking maybe they were groping towards what that thing that couldn’t be said was, that would be what I’d like. A difficult thing to get across. It’s worked better in some cases than others.

IM
It seems inevitable that you have to accept and welcome failure on some level. It’s a sense of keeping the question alive, despite the lack of an answer, that seems to be the project.

GJ
Yes, and I think – although I tend to go back to Proust more than to Virginia Woolf, and to feel a deeper affinity with Proust than with Virginia Woolf – what I find myself being closer to is her sense of having multiple stabs at it. Whereas Proust and Cervantes and Rabelais and so on, you feel once they’ve hit on something, they work away at it. And in the end, because they are who they are, something large and fulfilling emerges. Whereas with her, you read her diaries, she’s constantly struggling to get there, getting there, it’s done, but then the depression that she would feel afterwards. And then the feeling that you’ve got to start again, or go on, in a different vein or a different form. And that some are more successful than others. That’s more how I see things having evolved in my life.

IM
You say to go on, which obviously brings Beckett to mind. I did make note of something that you said about Beckett, which was the danger of his influence on a young writer. That he is too persuasive and too powerful. Also too Irish and too Catholic, you said. Let’s focus on the persuasive and powerful part. Whçy did you have that feeling? Do you still have that feeling?

GJ
I have a slight problem with Beckett. I think some of it is fantastic. I always remember there was a French magazine that asked writers, why do you write? And Anthony Burgess wrote three pages. Beckett said, Good only for that. And I thought that was very funny and very true and quite essentially Beckett. It’s even better in French: Bon qu’a ça. But sometimes I feel, however much he tries to get rid of the rhetoric because he associates it with ‘Irishness’ and so on, nevertheless, he can’t avoid it. And it remains a performance. I think in the late plays, which I love, and the late fiction, that sort of disappears really. I think in a lot of the earlier things, there’s this wonderful, enjoyable sense of performance, but in the end, that keeps me at bay. So I have a slightly more ambivalent attitude to it. But his letters are wonderful and always so interesting, and what I treasure in all art, I think, is a complete genuineness. He’s not going to be beholden to anyone.

Maybe I’m either more optimistic or more sentimental than him, I don’t know. But when looking at late Stevens and late Beckett, who have a lot in common – I explore that a bit in that book Forgetting – in the end, Stevens is willing to recognize a sense of joy at moments in his life. Whereas Beckett feels any sign of that is false, and wants to crush it as soon as he becomes aware of it. And I suppose I feel more at ease with Proust and Stevens on that. I feel, in my life, that is something I want to leave a space for. Beckett, for whatever reason, I think was always suspicious of it. He can’t take it. He doesn’t want it. And even in some of those late pieces of fiction where he goes back to his childhood, he then has to knock it down. As he did in Krapp’s Last Tape. So it’s always been a thing with him. Can’t allow it. Can’t allow it. That’s false.

IM
The word experimental, what does it mean to you? Do you have a relationship to it?

GJ
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I loathe it. I just think, you know, every writer who’s ever crossed out is experimenting. George Eliot or whoever, if you imagine them simply crossing something out and trying something else? That’s experiments. I just think it’s terrible. Like avant-garde, I think it’s a frightful word. All these labels are pretty terrible: experimental. Avant-garde. Nouveau roman is pretty terrible. I think writers should be taken on their own merits.

IM
There’s a Blanchot quote, that art is an infinite contestation. And that really stuck with me because I was trying to think about your work, particularly the dialogue. This contest is always going on, in terms of how things are remembered and relayed to the reader: it could be this, or it could be that. You’re arguing with yourself all the time. I do feel, in your work, that argument comes through more often than it does in many writers ;work. Do you think the dialogue plays into that?

GJ
I certainly found that when I found my voice with The Inventory, my first novel, it was when I suddenly realized, yes, I can get people talking. I don’t need to fill in their backgrounds. And I can build it up in that way. That was very exciting and very releasing. Plus, the pressure—the university had given me my first sabbatical, and I thought, it’s now or never. If I couldn’t write this, I’d just have to leave teaching because I felt it was sort of freezing me. I was becoming too self-conscious. And so under that kind of anxiety, this dialogue thing emerged. And then after three or four novels, I sort of felt something was lacking and I wrote Migrations, which is a long, more monologue type of thing, even third person, but still not much dialogue. And I think I’ve veered between the two, or a mix of the two, since then.

But dialogue releases you from this feeling of having to narrate, which I can’t accept somehow. Physically, I can’t do it. It goes against the grain. This need to narrate, this need to describe all these kinds of things, how can you do without it? And yet it seems terrible to do it well. I can’t accept it in some way, which is in itself a very powerful sort of motivator too. If you don’t let it stop you, what happens then? What sort of deformation will come out? I think Proust felt this when he wrote a thousand pages of Jean Santeuil in a kind of Jamesian manner, third person narrator, etc.and couldn’t go on. And I think Blanchot is wonderful on that, on how this was a big thing in his life, a big ethical dilemma, an existential dilemma. Everyone around him, his family and his friends thought he was brilliant and they all expected great things from him. He would disappoint everybody – and himself – if he just puts a thousand quite good pages away. But he did. And if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have written A La Recherche, because there’s elements of that in this one. And he then had to drop it all and forget about it and write criticism, write about the Middle Ages and translate Ruskin and all that, before finding his way to doing it.

IM
I do find with the dialogue in your books, often there’s someone speaking and there’s someone listening. The one who is listening is the active one in a way, that they’re drawing something from the person who’s speaking. And sometimes the person who’s speaking is the one who’s more active and that they’re confessing, or trying to impart something. How do you feel about those different dynamics? Can you see them developing in your work as they come through?

GJ
That’s very acute. One of the two or three books I’ve really been happy with was Infinity, because I found a way of doing exactly that—letting somebody simply ask a few questions and then allowing the other person to meander on. And so it didn’t feel fraudulent, as Partita does perhaps. It felt completely right. I think that often I have found one person is prodding the other to go on. You have to push the thing forward, reluctantly sometimes, but only then can things start to happen.

So yes, I’ve been very, very interested in that, even if originally that dialogue in The Inventory and so on was simply a way of escaping from a narrator, first person or third person. Then it becomes something that I suppose I did start to think about and focus on more as the dynamics of it in a book like Infinity. But again, you can’t replicate these things. So you will find another way. I guess the nice part about conversation is that each one is somewhat different as they come along. In a way, I think about it as getting away from some of the downfalls of narrative or description, or to a certain extent characterization, which then nonetheless sort of reappears simply through the dynamics of speech and of conversation. So there’s no getting away from it. These are nonetheless people still speaking.

That’s what I love about the biblical narratives, and why I wanted to write about them. You just get bald facts and then people talk, but you feel a whole hinterland of what can’t be said. The beauty of the dialogue is that that’s just one possible way. Whereas certainly the classic novel suggests the narrator’s explanation or description is the right one. And that’s it. Whereas if there is dialogue, it’s leaving it to the reader and leaving this hinterland. I think it only works if one has really felt the characters and therefore feels the hinterland. It’s not just disparate voices talking.

IM
There is also a kind of distancing effect to dialogue in those books, where there’s no access to a definitive, narrated truth. There are these layers of reported speech and thought between the reader and what’s being said, or what has happened. In a Hotel Garden is perhaps one of the great examples in your work of that, where that hinterland is so present and yet it’s never looked at directly. One of the things that I really like about that book is that it does feel like it’s getting at these events, which are essentially unrepresentable. Things we want to say, but are unsayable. That book seems to be really going at that in such a beautiful way. Is that one of those books that you feel like it worked?

GJ
To some extent, yes. Even though I was slightly, again, worried about even mentioning the Holocaust and feeling it was sort of, you know, one always feels one’s taking advantage somehow. Piggy-backing on something too serious to do that to. I know Deborah Levy. I quite liked her first book, Swimming Home. But I said to her, you don’t need the Holocaust in there. You can leave it. Why motivate it in that way? It cheapens it. And she absolutely wouldn’t accept that. And that’s my beef with Sebald’s Austerlitz as well. I felt from the beginning, I know where this is going. It’s cheap.

And then reading Carole Angier’s biography of Sebald,turned me off it even more. Because one of the stories in The Emigrants, the last one, is about this painter who is based on Frank Auerbach. And apparently in the original German edition, he’d actually used some Auerbach images. And when it was being translated suddenly an editor at Harvill goes, Hold on, has he got permission for this? And they approached Auerbach, who was incensed, and of course got them to remove that. And when Carol Angier was writing the book, she wrote to Auerbach, thinking he’d never reply about the incident. But he did and he said, This man had the cheek to go and make use of these things for his own nefarious purposes. You don’t do that and you don’t make use of somebody’s life and experiences to further your own ends. And it turns out, in Sebald, there’s a lot of that, and of making use of people without their consent and so on. And that somehow turned me off him rather. But he had his own voice certainly. A cut above most of his contemporaries in Germany or Britain.

IM
We’re probably at a point now where lived memory of World War II is beginning to disappear and we will be left with records and things like this. I think it’s an interesting moment, as these hugely consequential events can no longer be faced – or soon will no longer be able to be faced – with memory, but something else. And I wonder how that might change our relationship to those events? And maybe it becomes easier to make use of it in the way that I think you’re trying to avoid.

GJ
One of the motivating factors behind Forgetting was my physical dislike of Landesman’s Shoah and the sense of him bullying people into remembering. I’m not sure I got it right, but I certainly felt deep unease and I was amazed that my historian friends would use it in tutorials and seminars and swore by it and thought it was absolutely wonderful. But it always seemed to me that there was something profoundly suspect about it.

Then again, what does one person’s memory mean? My sister-in-law is an oral historian and she interviews survivors. She’s done a lot. She did her PhD on the Jews of Salamanca, the few who survived, and talked to them. And she’s very good at eliciting things from people, and getting their life stories and so on. What you’re after is how they saw it. But we have these huge amounts of testimony. How you put them together is the problem. And I think it was a problem from the end of the war on. It isn’t the fact that all the survivors are dying out, or have died out. It’s a question of what is there and what isn’t. What is real, what isn’t.

IM
From listening to you just now, and I guess through reading things that you’ve said in the past, there does seem to be quite a sort of anxiety about autobiography, or accepting at face value this kind of testimony. Do you still have that anxiety about it? That sense of needing something other than just the plain facts of biography in order to get going.

GJ
On biography or autobiography, I do think I’ve changed. I still feel private life is private life, but I can talk quite easily about my past because somehow it seems to belong to somebody else. I can feel that I can refer to things. I have felt more at ease, I suppose, since my mother died. And so feeling it was important to talk about some of these events and they might have resonance for other people in different ways.

I think that the thing has to be open. Reading again recently Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben’s remarkable book was very interesting, because I had just re-read Greene’s The Power and the Glory. I always feel that Greene is a fine writer, but he’s a kind of B-plus writer, not in the A class, because he always takes the easy way out and he finds the plot sort of takes over and then you lose what obviously motivated him. Rosalind has a wonderful opening, to Dreaming of Dead People, set in Torcello, that island in Venice, where the narrator has gone to look at the Virgin there on the wall. And she feels there a kind of desiccation in the landscape and there’s a woman in a back garden slitting the throat of a chicken. And as you walk up into the hinterland of the little island to get to the church, there’s a few odd farms and things around.

And the opening paragraph of The Power and the Glory is amazing. Mr. Tench comes out and he sees this vulture sitting there, but it’s just sort of a set piece. You feel he’s doing the Greene thing. He’s doing it brilliantly, but you could see him sort of sitting back and saying, yeah, that’s good. You never feel that with Rosalind. You always feel that she’s only trying to get it right. She’s just trying to go on, and to go forward with it. And I suppose I do like that. That’s why I like Bernhard very much. You feel that with him, that he’s struggling all the time to get it right. And he managed to get that struggle into the books. With Greene, not enough kind of depends on it. I think what’s powerful with Duras and what I find powerful with Rosalind and with Bernhard, is you always get this sense that a lot depends on it. A lot depends on it. And yet to describe it, outside of its own being, it sounds slight. It sounds small. And yet the smaller it gets, the more sort of grave it gets as well. That’s the trick of it, I suppose.

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