Shadows over the landscape of the prosaic

GABRIEL Josipovici's What Happened to Modernism? was the most controversial work of literary criticism published last year.

GABRIEL Josipovici's What Happened to Modernism? was the most controversial work of literary criticism published last year.

Josipovici, a former Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford and an Anglo-European polymath of the old school, set out to update Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals for a new century. He argued passionately for the responsibility of artists to bear witness to the alienation that results, like some Faustian pact, from the emergence of that secular realm, freed from the dictates of God, that we call modernity.

More widely reported, however, was Josipovici's conclusion, in which he condemned what he saw as the parochial and unambitious output of leading English writers of his generation, including Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Not surprisingly, Julian Barnes also copped a serve.

"Reading Barnes," he writes, "leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner." For an academic theorist versed in the extreme experiments of European modernism, an author in thrall to the existential agonies of Kafka and Beckett, Barnes's craftsman's precision and tendency to irony was evidence of a retreat from an obligation to test the limits of art.

The author of such novels as Metroland and Arthur & George was, for Josipovici, a Little Englander peeking out from under Philip Larkin's worn old coat.

On the face of it, Barnes's third short-story collection goes out of its way to prove this thesis. Subjects explored in Pulse include the proper way to make marmalade, the dating possibilities opened up by membership of the Ramblers and a husband's illicit application for an urban garden allotment. Its settings are initially limited to various London postcodes, a dilapidated Essex coastal village, and the bracken-covered moorlands of the Peak District. The characters and concerns seem so close to home as to be hopelessly, even mockingly, provincial.

But it would be a foolish reader who underestimated the literary cunning of Barnes. Gustave Flaubert once advised fellow artists to be "regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work". These stories appear comfy, if waspish, snapshots of middle-class Anglo existence in the early years of the aughts. But note this banter from the sequence of tales At Phil & Joanna's, a breathless run of witty table talk dictated over the course of several dinners hosted by the same couple:

"You know -- I expect you'll all beat me up for this -- but there are times when it feels almost glamorous to be part of the last generation."

"What last generation?"

"The last to use Latin tags. Sunt lacrimae rerum."

"Well, looking at the human animal and its historical track record, it's perfectly possible we shan't get out of this one. So -- the last generation to be truly careless, truly without care."

These exchanges, inserted between proctology jokes and another round of Bush-bashing, are conceived on the borderline of sincerity. It is the boozy intimacy of the setting that permits combative overstatement, making plausible in realist terms the absurd connections made between the disappearance of Latin from The Times' cryptic crossword clues and the destruction of life on Earth as a result of runaway climate change that the group has been arguing over. Once the guests are gone and the dishwasher stacked, however, the sense of futility and waste embedded in that Latin tag reverberates in Phil and Joanna's suburban kitchen.

There is a terrible shadow beyond the gaiety of these exchanges; they recall Boccaccio's men and women, taking refuge from the plague in a Florentine villa and telling tales in turn, speaking of romance as a civilisation perishes.

Viewed from this perspective, the stories of love and its failure that interleave this quartet of dinner party tales -- as well as the more positive and exotic narratives that occupy the second section of Pulse -- are less local, less domestic, less banal than they seemed.

Consider the lightness of tone in Sleeping with John Updike. It is the brief account of a railway trip home from a public appearance by two ageing women writers, friends with ancient issues only partly resolved, whose feints and parries are mainly relegated to unspoken asides. And yet among the amiable badinage the following lines appear:

All lives were failures, in Alice's reading of the world, and Jane's platitude about turning failure into art was fluffy fantasy. Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamt for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.

Josipovici intimates that Barnes's mundane realism is incapable of reaching the hot spots of the human psyche. He sees it as a falling away from the negative ecstasies of the modernist greats whom he reveres. Surely though, there is another way of expressing that disaffection. Hungarian critic Georg Lukacs once described the realist novel as an "epic of a world that has been abandoned by God".

Whether it is the widower in Marriage Lines who revisits alone the Hebridean Island where he and his wife took their yearly holidays, or the divorcee in Complicity who does no more than touch hands with a lady doctor who will perhaps become his lover, it is the landscape of the prosaic -- the conventional dramas, the dull, daily rituals -- that contain "the tears of things".

Even at their bitterest and most melancholy, however, Barnes's stories do not make a fetish of alienation; indeed, several wonder at the sense of interconnectedness that stubbornly survives our secular age.

Barnes's voice may well be incorrigibly English and his particular brand of urbane ironism may seem pitched to a narrow audience. But you can hear in some of these narratives intimations of the musica universalis gravely and beautifully described in Harmony, one of the finest stories in this collection.

Yes, they suggest, our lives are destined to failure.

Yet art does not partake of life so much as conduct its chaos into intelligible concert. The author's words can sound the music of the spheres.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.