This book addresses weighty matters, but with such urgency and clarity that it achieves something of that quality of lightness which the author ascribes to Homer and the Greek tragedians, to the Old Testament, and to Shakespeare. Yes, lightness: not a description one might readily think of applying to the blood-boltered tale of the Trojan War, to Oedipus Rex, or the Book of Job, or King Lear. "Lightness" here does not mean an absence of seriousness; quite the contrary. Gabriel Josipovici employs the term in the sense in which Nietzsche did, in his lifelong dispute with Socrates and Plato, for him degenerate figures who by their insistence on the primacy of reason undermined fatally the healthy, Edenic, "light" world of the early Greeks, a world wholly in tune with nature, and uninfected with that debilitating self-consciousness which was to turn man into what Nietzsche called "the mad animal . . . the unhappy animal".
Whether such a calmly poised arcadian world actually existed, or is merely another necessary stylisation, is beside the point; its spirit breathes through Homer, through Sophocles and Aeschylus, and is still breathing in Shakespeare and Dante, in Mozart, and even in Goethe, in whom it reaches its last gasp. What sustains all these great figures, according to Josipovici, is trust: trust in their craft, in the conviction that they are members of a guild the rules and traditions of which are the unshakeable foundations upon which they can work in a kind of blithe self-forgetfulness. Shakespeare, says Josipovici, was firmly embedded in a craft tradition . . . an artist whose mind was stocked with examples both linguistic and existential from the tradition, and who thought of himself as a maker, not a thinker, a craftsman whose primary allegiance was to the production of a play on time and for a particular occasion. In this he was like Bach, Mozart or Haydn, and unlike Beethoven and Schoenberg.
That absolute trust in a sustaining tradition was shaken by the Enlightenment, and all but destroyed by the Romantics, who, sickened by among other things the failure of the French Revolution, turned away from the community in favour of a tortured examination of the inward self, thus becoming, in Paul Ricoeur's words, "masters of suspicion".
Josipovici, a novelist as well as critic - he is professor in the Humanities Graduate Research Centre at the University of Essex - is as self-conscious as the next modern man, as he ruefully acknowledges, and his book is in part a personal quest, being, as he admits in his opening sentence, "an attempt to make sense to myself of problems which have been present to me, in a half-conscious sort of way, for all my writing life". These problems spring from the predicament in which all post-Enlightenment artists are caught, whether they fully realise it or not. There are no rules any more; the guild is gone; now it's every man for himself. Nor are these difficulties confined to artists: we are all bound upon the rack of indecisiveness and bad faith. When the tablets of the law are broken, the golden calf must be fashioned out of the base metal of our inadequate individual selves.
Schiller fixed clearly on the problem for the modern artist in his distinction between "naive" and "sentimental" poetry. The naive playwright or poet, such as Shakespeare or Goethe, accepts the world as it is, and deals in the here-and-now rather than seeking vainly after transcendence; his sentimental brother, however, is incurably tentative, baffled in the face of an incoherent reality, and dependent solely upon a self which he knows to be entirely suspect. The distinction is, of course, not so clear-cut as Schiller's essay suggests. Certain pivotal figures, such as Shakespeare and Mozart, stand Janus-headed between tradition and the new.
I think that what is so remarkable about Shakespeare, as about Mozart, and what gives their work its special tone, is that at the same time as they were exploring, as no-one had explored before them, the breakdown of trust and the corrosive effects of suspicion, they nevertheless trusted completely in the craft tradition in which they were working. That is why they are so different both to Milton and Beethoven who came after them, and from Homer and Bach who came before.
The frustrations of the position Josipovici finds himself in chafe and burn everywhere in these pages. On the one hand he laments the breaking of the guild and the collapse of traditional rules of composition, which makes the writing of fiction, for instance, so problematic in our time - he quotes Kafka in his diaries on the writer as a person who "dies (or rather . . . does not live) and continually mourns himself" - but on the other he is rightly sceptical of those contemporary critical pieties which are merely a mask for cultural nostalgia.
Many today - especially in England - would rate Verdi and Dickens above Wagner and Melville, insisting that their essential naivety allowed them to tap resources closed off to more self-conscious artists such as Wagner and Melville. I have some sympathy with this position. But I think our love affair with the tremendous unself-conscious energy of the great mid-nineteenth-century artists, a love affair not confined to readers but frequently expressed by writers as well, is merely an index of our society's nostalgia and innate conservatism and - to put it in blunt Nietzschean terms - of its basic ill-health.
It is invigorating to be present when a critic of Josipovici's seriousness and eminence takes a flying kick at such pillars of our museum culture as Verdi and Dickens. Nor is he afraid of tackling the sore topic of high art versus low art. "It is only our sentimental and Romantic age that thinks Hemingway's language is more `real' than that of Henry James, that Trainspotting is closer to the stuff of life than The Ballad of Peckham Rye. The truth is, that all four are equally far from reality, that all are equally made up of words." In the last third of the book, after some chapters of splendid close readings of the Bible, Dante and Shakespeare, Josipovici adduces three modern examplary writers who demonstrate how the breakdown of trust can actually be incorporated into work that acknowledges suspicion and yet achieves authenticity: Proust, Beckett and Wittgenstein. (He also considers Heinrich von Kleist, only the prose, however, and lamentably briefly; surely Kleist in his drama managed a melding of Greek lightness and Shakespearean mundanity that is as moving and profound as anything in Mozart - one of the great unwritten dreamworks would be a Mozart opera with a libretto by Kleist.) Beckett, of course, the "Devised deviser devising it all for company", is living proof that an art which "lets in the darkness", which plumbs the deepest depths of negativity, can still be luminous, can still be positive.
Are matters really as black as Josipovici paints them? Is it not possible that our modern malaise, which seems terminal, might be only a passing thing, something that is "going around", a dose of intellectual 'flu? - take a glance back to 1900 and you will find an almost identical phenomenon. Josipovici pities the individual artist labouring under the "burden of choice", but even Homer, Shakespeare and Mozart, borne up as they were by the rules of the guild, had to face the blank page every morning, in the full realisation that no matter what guidelines from tradition might be available, there is always an infinite number of ways in which to utter a line of verse or a phrase of music. Perhaps the burden that we moderns must bear is also the appalling gift bestowed on us in recognition of our refusal to accept the state of permanent childhood that was offered to us, by the real Tempter, in the Garden of Eden. Josipovici is not on the side of the angels, but of men:
We must not forget our roots, forget the earth on which we stand. Our roots, though, do not lie in this or that spot on earth, in this language or that; they lie in our common, vulnerable humanity.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times