The Sins of Disillusionment
The novel has no authority, Josipovici suggests. Yet novelists admire Dickens above all others, a man who wrought the world into order and narrative: like him, today’s authors are ‘being false to the world – imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning that it doesn’t have’. Josipovici singles out Dickens’s use of almost unbelievable coincidence to illustrate this point. But every human life is also a story. Story is, in fact, hardwired: we are pans narrans, the storytelling ape.
Max Dunbar reviews Gabriel Josipovici‘s What Ever Happened to Modernism?