That modernism represents one of the great seismic shifts in the history of western literature wouldn't be disputed by any literary professors who know their onions. What they find it harder to agree on is when that shift begins and what exactly it consists of – in short, what modernism, properly speaking, is. Gabriel Josipovici, former Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford and currently a star turn in the graduate school of humanities at Sussex, eschews both the definitions usually proffered by cultural historians of a Marxist bent (that it was a reaction to industrialisation or to a crisis among the bourgeoisie) and the humanist ones given by liberals (that it was an era of unbridled self-expression), not to mention the dismissive ones put out by conservatives (that it was all a bit of silliness we've thankfully got over now). In their stead he ventures, at the outset of this book-length essay, a more essential formula: that modernism should be understood as "a coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities".
Herein lie both the strength and weakness of the argument that follows. The disadvantage of such a general characterisation is that these terms apply as much to Shakespeare as to Joyce: think of the self-reflectiveness of so much of the former's work, from Hamlet's disruptive (and disrupted) play-within-a-play to the sonnets' constant awareness of form and its limits. They apply even to Ovid: what do the "Pygmalion" or "Orpheus" sequences of Metamorphoses enact if not allegories of art's fragile status and responsibilities? The advantage is that Josipovici knows this, and uses the knowledge as a cue to drag the cursor way back, tracing the tendency that comes to a head in the "high" modernist period (the early 20th century) through the Romantics to the reformation and beyond.
Thus Cervantes's Don Quixote is, both lucidly and utterly correctly, identified as a far more "modern" work than many more recent offerings – modern in the fraught relationship it maintains with its own narrative modes, the way it orchestrates a sense of disenchantment or erosion of the sacred, and, most of all, the way its main "adventure" becomes one of reading and writing. Aeschylus's Oresteia is held up – again in spot-on fashion – as a template for an anti-humanist worldview: what matters is not the individual but the house, or oikos, from which he emerges and of which he forms no more than an iteration. It's an insight that helps us to understand (although Josipovici doesn't mention him) why that arch-modernist William Faulkner delves, in Attic style, through generations of the Compson family, trawling their dwindling estate for residues of buried history. From that other Greek unit of measure, the polis or city-state, Josipovici derives a modern aesthetic of interconnectedness, of man as a diminished agent operating within systems that exceed him.
Interconnectedness is a feature of this book, providing not only one of its central themes but also its discursive method. A typical paragraph will zap us from Dürer to Mann to Flaubert to Dostoevsky in order to make a point about Kierkegaard. It can disorient at times, but the associative or digressive approach is the right one for the task. What I'm not so sure about is the overall "pitch". Josipovici is a formidable scholar whose The World and the Book I remember being a landmark text when I was studying literature. But there he was writing in academic mode, with a certain critical framework and its attendant permissions taken for granted; here, he's shifted into a more populist mode, and it doesn't always play to his advantage. Adopting the vocabulary of the middlebrow in order to legitimise the vanguard merely robs it of what animates it most. Rather than celebrate the subversive energies of Luigi Nono's opera Prometeo, for example, he tries to sell it to the Glyndebourne crowd by claiming that it leaves us "with a sense of sorrow and of wonder and, at an even deeper level, a sense of having bathed in the waters of life". The sentiment is just that: sentimental. While the impetus behind it is profound, it ends up sounding trite.
Josipovici has never been a fellow traveller of any school or fashion. His points of contact here, as in his other work, are original, at times idiosyncratic. To use Kierkegaard rather than the more obvious Nietzsche to explain the vertiginous, abyss-gazing disposition of most modernist works is refreshing. To choose Wordsworth as a historical model for what a truly modernist-inspired contemporary literature might be seems odd, to say the least; wouldn't Laurence Sterne or Gerard Manley Hopkins make much better heroes? And to trot out the old canard that equates Flaubert with naturalist realism is just wrong. The Flaubert who wrote Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which two Quixotic figures re-enact gestures from book illustrations in vain bids for imagined authenticity, before the narrative gives over to a "dictionary of received ideas" whose authorship is never clear? The Flaubert who wrote The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which phantasms shake and rivet a disintegrating consciousness that yearns "to become matter"? Come on.
What can't be faulted is the plaintive logic running through this book. In cultural terms, we live in deeply conservative times. Editors at several major publishing houses have to run novels' synopses past reader focus groups before being allowed to publish them; "literary" festivals feature newsreaders and other media personalities. We shouldn't imagine, though, that things were that different in the golden age of modernism. Ulysses was printed, in 1922, on a small, private press in Paris, in a run of 1,000; Kafka's Metamorphosis, on its small-press publication in 1915, sold 11 copies – of which 10 were bought by Kafka. Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writers of 1922 or 1915? Of course not. That alone should give Josipovici comfort.
Tom McCarthy's C (Cape) is on the Booker longlist.