Metaleptic Variations

Gabriel Josipovici’s latest fiction is varied, ranging from parody, light comic fiction, in Only Joking and Making Mistakes, to more serious, ontological and personal concerns. In a short novel, Everything Passes, and in a major novel, Goldberg: Variations, the reader is made to question the mysterious nature of reality, which is, too often, accepted indisputably by numerous novelists of the realist school. A dazzling array of techniques such as hyperrealism, Gothicism, mise en abyme, mise en fantaisie, intertextuality, to name but a few, construct and deconstruct the illusion of the represented world and threaten the whole foundation of fiction writing. The different variations and the use of a remarkable device, the metalepsis, in Goldberg: Variations, enable the writer to reflect on his own scenography and idiosyncratic activity. Josipovici provides a phenomenological, self-reflexive metacommentary on the writer’s condition and acknowledges the limits of fiction writing, while recognizing the fleeting, evanescent presence of the artist who passes “through the world”, exemplified by the figure of the artist represented on a postcard, a reproduction of The Wander-Artist by Paul Klee, with whom the narrator closely identifies