Goldberg: Variations by Gabriel Josipovici

Review by Richard Crary
• more articles by this author
• more articles about this publisher
• Read more about: literary criticism

I.

Goldberg: Variations. Immediately the reader thinks of Bach, whose Goldberg Variations were, as legend has it, composed to help cure the insomnia of a rich patron named Goldberg. Bach’s piece had thirty variations, and there are thirty parts to this book. In the first we find Goldberg, a poet and a Jew, hired to read to Westfield, a wealthy Englishman, in order to cure his insomnia. It is around 1800. Goldberg’s task, he thinks, is to read to Westfield each night, from midnight until he begins to snore. But his first night he learns that his task is to be more complicated. Westfield, it turns out, has “read all the books that have been written”; they are tedious, and he is “melancholy.” Instead, he wants Goldberg to write what he is to read. Goldberg, needing money, reluctantly agrees, but finds it difficult to comply, and, admitting failure, says:

It may be the case, sir, that in the time of Greece and Rome, and even in the time of our glorious Shakespeare, a man of letters might have fulfilled your commission. The writers of those times might in a day have produced for you a dazzling series of variations on any theme of your choice. You would have had but to speak, but to outline, however briefly, the subject about which you wished them to discourse, and in an hour or two, or perhaps even less, they would have regaled you with the most delightful fancies and stirring sequences based upon your subject. But, alas, our own age has grown altogether less inventive and more melancholic, and few can now find it in their hearts “to take a point at pleasure and wrest and turn it as he list, making either much or little of it, according as shall seem best in his own conceit,” as an ancient writer on these matters puts it. For what we list has grown obscure and difficult to define.

This opening section has been a letter Goldberg has written to his wife; he reads it to Westfield his first night.

In subsequent parts (written and read by Goldberg?) we learn more about Westfield, his writer/reader, and other characters, or versions of them. These sections take a variety of forms: third-person narratives, dialogs, epistolary sections, a diary entry. A third of the way through the book, it appears a recognizable if unconventional novel: the non-linear narrative, told in a variety of forms, from a variety of voices.

But Gabriel Josipovici is up to something else here. The passage quoted above is a hint. Other sections contain philosophical arguments and critical analysis of literary texts and paintings. This is not just showy erudition: it is all to Josipovici’s purpose. For example, in the third of three dialogues set during a carriage ride to the Westfield estate, Goldberg thinks of another dialogue, one he has recently written between a young man and his mentor, a judge. The judge is trying to convince his young friend to get married, to choose the path he has chosen, after which he will be contented and happy. The young man resists. Why should he get married? How can he make such a choice when any other might do just as well? The judge asks, “What . . . is the basic characteristic of the fugue? The fugue is a piece of music in which there is no such thing as waste.”

Waste? his young friend says.

Waste, the other repeats. A melody may be beautiful, he goes on, but it could always be otherwise than it is. A little extra trill here, a greater degree of accentuation there, still the same melody, roughly, but only roughly. The melody is haunted by the sense that it could be otherwise, that it is only one possibility among many, and therefore that it is in a sense profligate, throwing itself into the void, into the silence, when perhaps even the silence might have been better, might have been more effective. The shadow of the arbitrary and the willful blights even its finest flowering.

Several of the sections follow the efforts of a writer–perhaps the writer of the book we are reading–to complete his book. Having struggled for decades, he is frustrated (like several of the book’s other characters) by the array of arbitrary decisions we are asked to make in order to live. The arbitrary nature of life may be a theme of Goldberg: Variations, but Josipovici has not chosen his form arbitrarily.

II.

Josipovici is perhaps better known as one of England’s finest literary critics. One of the threads running through his criticism is the loss of the craft tradition. In his critical book On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion he describes this tradition:

A craft implies a tradition into which you are inducted by a master; in which you serve your apprenticeship; and in which you in turn become a master. It implies that what you are doing when you practise your craft is, if not necessary to society, at least sanctioned by society.

While this tradition may still hold for weavers, it’s arguable that–MFA programs nonwithstanding–it hasn’t been in effect for writers for some time now. In his criticism, Josipovici explores the writings of what he calls “the masters of suspicion”–thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard–who are suspicious of the traditions. These skeptics ask questions like, Why do we do the things we do? Why, for example, do we have novels? But their suspicion offers no way out, no solution to the problem of living; for writers, this suspicion offers no solution to the problem of what to do with the blank page, how to proceed now that they cannot have trust in traditions handed down to them. We now live in the “age of suspicion,” argues Josipovici, and writers since the early Romantics have felt this suspicion as a “blight.”

Josipovici lays out this idea in On Trust when he recounts the story of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus:

Gradually [Adrian Leverkühn] realised that the only thing he really wanted to do was to write music. The trouble is that he is too clear-headed not to see the meretricious and purely subjective nature of anything he might write. Once, he feels, composers were craftsmen; they worked within established traditions, turning out what their patrons required of them while feeling themselves at the same time to be working for the greater glory of God. Some of them, Josquin or Bach, did it supremely well; others did it efficiently enough. With Romanticism the ideas of tradition and craft disappeared; they became false, outmoded, and someone like Beethoven sensed that they could no longer support him. In their place he put his fiery imagination, his hope for the future, his abounding self-confidence. Instead of working for a patron he would work for himself. Now, in the aftermath of Beethoven, what have we got? Only our own little egos, our own little fantasies. And we cannot even believe that they are ours any longer. For we are somehow too late, producing everything at second hand. Or perhaps we only imagine that, but that imagining is destructive enough.

This tension is evoked throughout Goldberg: Variations, perhaps most clearly when, late in the book, Goldberg admits that part of him “yearns to be the kind of craftsman [Westfield] believes me to be, but something else, equally deep, rejects the formulation.” He wonders, “Why do I still hold up to myself as an ideal the image of the maker, skilled and inventive, capable of coping with every challenge?”

In this light, it is not insignificant that Goldberg is Jewish. The Hebrew Bible, Josipovici suggests, does not usually offer overt moral judgments, but instead is a compendium of stories, variations in which certain patterns about the world unfold and are reinforced. In a similar fashion, Goldberg: Variations is less a cohesive narrative than a series of stories or parts of stories, narratives about narrative.

Josipovici has written a novel of ideas, but this is not a dry or academic work. Throughout, the prose is lucid, with a lightness of touch that well serves the heavy ideas at play, and Josipovici’s characters never seem to be mere containers for ideas. Structuring his fiction in a manner that invokes tradition, Josipovici effectively and entertainingly animates variations on the problem that arises when traditions have been lost: how to make the decisions we need to make in order to live.

Responses to this article