Literature gets Irvine Welsh. So, when Josipovici reaches the Twentieth Century, the pressure is at its peak. Yet perhaps those who claim that film is the most important art of the Twentieth Century are right only in the way they are right if they say that Totalitarianism is its most important political system. Film, like a tyrannical regime, depends on appearances. It bears no reflexive commentary.
Literature is different.
Josipovici shows how three otherwise very dissimilar Twentieth Century writers responded to their suspicion of art with reflexive commentary. Now this can often lead to a novel without narrative tension, it's what gives 'experimental' art a bad name, but what makes Proust, Kafka and Beckett special is the tension within their work. Josipovici argues that this is the tension between extreme suspicion and the miraculous trust of each writer in the act of writing. In the first essay, he makes this point in exhilarating fashion by showing how Paul de Man, a famed modern deconstructor of literary pretension, misread Proust to such an extent that Proust becomes the deconstructor of theoretical pretension to come. What De Man disapproves of is Proust's openness to change, traced over the three-thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time , when he should be demanding single, certain truth.