Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch
In the spring of 1991, Carlo Ginzburg asked me to write an essay on European literature for the first volume of Einaudiâs Storia dâEuropa. I had been thinking for some time about European literatureâin particular, about its capacity to generate new forms, which seemed so historically uniqueâand in a book I had just finished reading I found the theoretical framework for the essay: it was Ernst Mayrâs Systematics and the Origin of Species, where the concept of âallopatric speciationâ (allopatry = a homeland elsewhere) explained the genesis of new species by their movement into new spaces. I took forms as the literary analogue of species, and charted the morphological transformations triggered by European geography: the differentiation of tragedy in the seventeenth century, the novelâs take-off in the eighteenth, the centralization and then fragmentation of the literary field in the nineteenth and twentieth. The notion of âEuropean literatureâ, singular, was replaced by that of an archipelago of distinct yet close national cultures, where styles and stories moved quickly and frequently, undergoing all sorts of metamorphoses. Creativity had found an explanation that made it seem easy, and almost inevitable.
This was a happy essay. Aimed at a non-academic audience, and on such a large topic, it asked for a balance between the abstraction of model-building and the vividness of individual examplesâa scene, a character, a line of verseâthat would make it worth reading in the first place. Somehow, I found the right tone; possibly, because of my total reliance on the canon of European masterpieces (as a colleague pointed out, the word âgreatâ seemed ubiquitous in the essay; and it was, I used it fifty-one times!). The canon allowed for comparative analysis to take place: Shakespeare and Racine, the conte philosophique and the Bildungsroman, the Austrians and the avant-gardes . . . As the years went by, I would move increasingly away from this idea of literature as a collection of masterpieces; and in truth, I feel no nostalgia for what it meant. But the conceptual cogency that a small set of texts allows forâthat, I do miss.
This was a happy essay. Evolution, geography, and formalismâthe three approaches that would define my work for over a decadeâfirst came into systematic contact while writing these pages. I felt curious, full of energy; I kept studying, adding, correcting. I learned a lot, and one day I even had the first, confused idea of an Atlas of literature. And then, I was writing in Italian; for the last time, as it turned outâthough, at the time, I didnât know it. In Italian, sentences run easier; details, and even nuances, seem to emerge all by themselves. In English, it would all be different.
Years ago, Denis de Rougement published a study entitled Twenty-eight Centuries of Europe; here, readers will only find five of them, the most recent. The idea is that the sixteenth century acts as a double watershedâagainst the past, and against other continentsâafter which European literature develops that formal inventiveness that makes it truly unique. (Not everybody agrees on this point, however, and so we will begin by comparing opposite explanatory models.) As for examples, the limited space at my disposal has been a great help; I have felt free to focus on a few forms, and make definite choices. If the description will not be complete (but is that ever the case?), at least it will not lack clarity.
1. A MODEL: UNIFIED EUROPE
Those were beautiful times, those were splendid times, the times of Christian Europe, when one Christianity inhabited this continent shaped in human form, and one vast, shared design united the farthest provinces of this spiritual kingdom. Free from extended worldly possessions, one supreme ruler held together the great political forces . . .
What you have just read are the first sentences of Christianity, or Europe, the celebrated essay written by Novalis in the very last months of the eighteenth century. As its underlying structure, a very simple, very effective equation: Europe is Christianity, and Christianity is unity. All threats to such unityâthe Reformation, of course; but also the modern nation states, economic competition, or âuntimely, hazardous discoveries in the realm of knowledgeââthreaten Europe as well, and induce Novalis, who is all but a moderate thinker, to approve of Galileiâs humiliation, or to sing a hymn in praise of the Jesuitsââwith an admirable foresight and constance, with a wisdom such as the world had never seen before . . . a Society appeared, the equal of which had never been in universal history . . .â Here, let me just point out how this intransigent conception of European unityâone Christianity, one design, one rulerâis also the backbone of the only scholarly masterpiece devoted to our subject: Ernst Robert Curtiusâs European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, published in 1948. âThis work aims at grasping European literature as a unified whole, and to found such unity on the Latin tradition,â reads Auerbachâs review.1 And thus Curtius himself: âWe must conceive of the Middle Ages in their continuity both with Antiquity and with the modern world. This is the only way to construct what Toynbee would call âan intelligible field of studyââthe field being precisely European literature.2
Onto Novalisâs spatial order (Rome as the centre of Europe), Curtius superimposes the temporal sequence of Latin topoi, with its fulcrum in the Middle Ages, which again leads to Rome. Europe is unique because it is one, and it is one because it has a centre: âBeing European means having become cives romani, Roman citizens.â3 And hereâs the rub, of course: because Curtiusâs Europe is not really Europe, but ratherâto use the term so dear to himââRomaniaâ. It is a single space, unified by the LatinâChristian spirit that still pervades those universalistic works (The Divine Comedy, Faust) which seem to establish separate ânationalâ literatures, but in fact pre-empt them. In Europe, for Curtius, there is room for one literature only, and that is European literature.
If circumscribed to the Middle Agesâwhere most of the evidence comes fromâthis model may well be invulnerable. But Curtius has something else in mind: not the delimitation of the Middle Ages, but their permanence well into modernity. The line about European literature being âintelligibleâ only because of medieval continuity leaves no doubts about it. And yet, âin todayâs spiritual situationâ, that very unity which has survived for twenty centuries is threatened as never before:
This book is not the result of purely scientific concerns; it arises out of a preoccupation for the safeguard of Western civilization. It is an attempt at clarifying . . . the unity of this tradition across time and space. In the spiritual chaos of our age, proving the existence of such unity has become necessary . . . 4
Chaos. Reviewing Ulysses in 1923, Eliot had evoked âthe immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary historyâ;5 while for Novalis, chaos was at work already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And the reason for the crisis is at bottom always the same: the modern nation state, which from its very inceptionââirreligiouslyâ, as Novalis puts itâhas rejected a super-national spiritual centre.
Historical conjunctures have certainly contributed to this hostility: Novalis is writing during the Napoleonic wars, Eliot and Curtius immediately after the First and Second World Wars. But above and beyond specific events, the distrust of the nation state is probably the logical outcome of their overall model: to the extent that European culture can exist only as unity (Latin, or Christian, or both), then the nation state is the veritable negation of Europe. No compromise is possible, in this pre-modern, or rather anti-modern model; either Europe is an organic whole, or else nothing at all. It exists if states do not, and vice versa: when the latter arise, Europe as such vanishes, and can only be visualized in the elegiac mode. Novalisâs essay, in fact, is already a dirge for a world that has lost its soul; no longer âinhabitedâ by the great Christian design, his Europe has been damned to be mere matter: space devoid of sense. The âcontinent shaped in human formâ turns into the world of âtotal sinfulnessâ described by the Theory of the Novel (which opens with an unmistakable allusion to the first lines of Christianity). And even though LukĂĄcs never explicitly says so, his novelistic universe, which is no longer âa homeâ for the hero, is precisely modern Europe:
Our world has become infinitely large, and each of its corners is richer in gifts and dangers than the world of the Greeks, but such wealth cancels out the positive meaningâthe totalityâupon which their life was based.6
The withering away of a unified totality as a loss of meaning . . . But is this inevitably the case?
2. ANOTHER MODEL: DIVIDED EUROPE
1828. A generation has gone by, and the German catholic Novalis is countered by the French protestant Guizot:
In the history of non-European peoples, the simultaneous presence of conflicting principles has been a sort of accident, limited to episodic crises . . . The opposite is true for the civilization of modern Europe . . . varied, confused, stormy from its very inception; all forms, all principles of social organization coexist here: spiritual and temporal rule, the theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, democratic element; all classes, all social positions crowd and overlap; there are countless gradations of freedom and wealth and power. Among these forces, a permanent struggle: none of them manages to stifle the others, and to seize the monopoly of social power . . . In the ideas and feelings of Europe, the same difference, the same struggle. Theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, popular convictions confront each other and clash . . . 7
For Novalis, disparity and conflict poisoned Europe; for Guizot, they constitute it. Far from lamenting a lost unity, his Europe owes its success precisely to the collapse of RomanâChristian universalism, which has made it polycentric and flexible.8 No point in looking for its secret in one place, or value, or institution; indeed, itâs best to forget the idea of a European âessenceâ altogether and perceive it as a polytheistic field of forces. Edgar Morin, Penser lâEurope:
âAll simplifications of Europeâidealization, abstraction, reductionâmutilate it. Europe is a Complex (complexus: what is woven together) whose peculiarity consists in combining the sharpest differences without confusing them, and in uniting opposites so that they will not be separated.â9
Like all complex systems, Europe changes over time (especially from the sixteenth century on), and therefore, Morin again, âits identity is defined not despite its metamorphoses, but through themâ. This polycentric Europe, decidedly accident prone, no longer shuns disorder, but seizes upon it as an occasion for more daring and complex patterns. In the field of literature, this implies a farewell to Curtiusâs âRomaniaâ, with its fixed geographical centre, and the diachronic chain of topoi linking it to classical antiquity. His âEuropean literatureâ is replaced by a âsystem of European literaturesâ: national (and regional) entities, clearly different, and often hostile to each other. It is a productive enmity, without which they would all be more insipid. But it never turns into self-sufficiency, or mutual ignorance: no deserts, here, no oceans, no unbridgeable distances to harden for centuries the features of a civilization. Europeâs narrow space forces each culture to interact with all others, imposing a common destiny, with its hierarchies and power relations. There are resistances to the establishment of this system, as with Russian literature, which splits between westernizers and slavophiles, in a beautiful instance of the geographical reality of Europe: of its being not really a continent, but a large Asian peninsula, with the area of conjunctionâRussiaâunderstandably doubtful about its own identity. But Europeâs attraction is too strong, and from Fathers and Sons to The Brothers Karamazov, from War and Peace to Petersburg, the dramatization of the uncertainty becomes in its turn a great theme not only of Russian, but also (as in Thomas Mann) of European culture.
National literatures, then, in a European system: and among them, what relationship? According to many, the rule lies in a sort of duplication, with national cultures acting as microcosms of Europe; thus England for Eliot, France for Guizot, Italy for Dionisotti, Austria for Werfel . . . There is some truth, of course, in this discovery of common European features in all great continental cultures. But when a hypothesis is always on target, it stops being interesting, and here I will propose a different model. Literary Europe will be in the following pages a kind of ecosystem that defines different possibilities of growth for each national literature. At times its horizon will act as a brake, pre-empting or slowing down intellectual development; at other times, it will offer unexpected chances, which will crystallize in inventions as precious as they are unlikely. Let us see a first instance.
3. BAROQUE TRAGEDY, EUROPE OPENS UP
Nothing conveys the idea of a polycentric Europe as sharply as the genesis of the great baroque tragedy. In the mid sixteenth century, one still encounters figures such as George Buchanan: a Scot, who works in London and Paris, and writes his tragedies, in Latin, on well-known biblical subjects: an excellent instance of the lasting unityâacross time and across spaceâof European drama. For cultivated tragedy the model is almost always Seneca, while medieval traditions, rooted in popular religion, tend to be very similar everywhere. Shared by all of western Europe is also the figure of the tragic hero (the absolute sovereign), and the âmemorable sceneâ (the court), where his downfall shall take place.
From this space and hero arises however the first discontinuity with the classical heritage. The new sovereignâab-solutus, untied, freed from the ethico-political bonds of the feudal traditionâhas achieved what Hegel will call âself-determinationâ: he can decide freely, and thus posit himself as the new source of historical movement: as in the Trauerspiel, and Gorboduc, and Lear, where everything indeed begins with his decisions; as in Racine, or La Vida es Sueno. The new prince has unburdened himselfâwrites Kierkegaardââof substantial determinations, like ...