The Novel and Europe

Andrew Hammond

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137526267
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137526274
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book examines the ways in which fiction has addressed the continent since the Second World War. Drawing on novelists from Europe and elsewhere, the volume analyzes the literary response to seven dominant concerns (ideas of Europe, conflict, borders, empire, unification, migration, and marginalization), offering a ground-breaking study of how modern and contemporary writers have participated in the European debate. The sixteen essays view the chosen writers, not as representatives of national literatures, but as participants in transcontinental discussion that has occurred across borders, cultures, and languages. In doing so, the contributors raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiating from Europe, challenging both the institutionalized divisions of the Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently being written in Brussels.

© The Author(s) 2016

Andrew Hammond (ed.)The Novel and EuropePalgrave Studies in Modern European Literature10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Andrew Hammond¹

(1)

School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton, BN1 9PH, UK

End Abstract

The European Theme in Literature

The following collection of essays will explore the ways in which Europe has been debated in post-1945 fiction. The emphasis will be on responses to the historical conditions of the continent from the Second World War to the twenty-first century as displayed by a wide range of novelists from Europe and elsewhere. While recognising that many authors still function within the specificities of national cultures, the collection will focus on texts that explore areas of experience, belief, activity and identity which have traversed national borders and circulated through Europe and beyond, highlighting the intellectual relations between heterogeneous literary traditions and emphasising the intercontinental roots of the European imaginary. At the heart of the collection will be an interest in the literary (de)construction of Europe and Europeanness. Influenced by the work of Bo Stråth, Gerard Delanty, Luisa Passerini, Zygmunt Bauman, Étienne Balibar and others, the volume will examine Europe not only as a construct under continual revision but also as one that literature has occasionally helped to forge. At the same time, it will analyse the lived experiences of social and political transformation shared by eastern and western populations, as well as the accelerated modernity, globalisation and geopolitical conflict affecting the wider world. In doing so, the essays will raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiating from Europe, challenging both the institutionalised divisions of the Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently being written in Brussels.

In seeking to locate a literature about Europe, the volume will depart from mainstream scholarship on European literary production. Traditionally, criticism has constituted the field as a corpus of national literatures originating from and operating within geographical Europe, singling out for study those canonical authors and texts disseminated around the continent via translation. Its typical mode of exegesis, however, has tended to remain within the national context, underplaying the processes of cross-border exchange that so often typify intellectual and cultural life. As Pascale Casanova details, the emergence of national-literary spaces was integral to continental development from the sixteenth century onwards, when culture played a vital role in the creation of discrete, autonomous nation-states. Indeed, so central has literature been to the ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, that ‘when a national space emerges and demands the right to political existence and independence, it proclaims at the same time that it possesses (i.e. “nationalizes”) a cultural, linguistic, historical and literary heritage’.¹ The point is as relevant to minority cultures as it is to dominant cultures. In 1911, writing on the primacy of German over Czech and Yiddish literatures, Franz Kafka championed the ‘literatures of small people’, aware of ‘the pride which a nation gains from a literature of its own’.² It may be the case that national literature departments have started to acknowledge minority cultures, most obviously in their inclusion on courses of postcolonial writing and theory. As yet, however, little has been done to advance what Casanova terms ‘denational’ ways of analysing European literature or to theorise about what the ‘Europe’ in ‘European literature’ actually means.³ The present volume emerges from the need for a more comparative approach in research and teaching, one that draws together cultural heritages without suggesting cultural unanimity and that explores how writers have risen above the national context to debate the continent’s divisions, hierarchies, belongings and exclusions.

The failure to denationalise critical practice is linked to a second shortcoming in European literary studies, which is the tendency to privilege western Europe. As an example from the early twentieth century, Janko Lavrin’s Studies in European Literature (1929) focuses mainly on French, German and Scandinavian literatures, although includes discussion of a few Russian authors, recognising in Russia ‘one of the literary great powers’.⁴ This was unusually generous for twentieth-century scholarship. Publications by Benedetto Croce, E.R. Curtius, Herman J. Weigand, Nicholas Boyle, Martin Swales, Nicholas Hewitt and Franco Moretti select from dominant western European traditions, with only occasional forays into Kafka, Kundera or a Russian author of the Tsarist era.⁵ On the cusp of the twenty-first century, Philip Gaskell’s Landmarks in European Literature (1999) treads a predictable path through Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Montaigne, Cervantes, Molière, Voltaire, Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Ibsen, Hamsun, Zola, Proust, Mann, Pirandello and Brecht. Gaskell’s stated aim—‘to identify […] a canon of European authors’—overlooks the fact that this canon was already firmly in place.⁶ The erasure of eastern European achievement was partly the result of Cold War politics. As critics point out, the cultural campaigns of the period insisted that ‘socialist political commitment [was] inimical to the production of genuine art’ and that ‘the socialist realist works of the East were […] such ideological tripe that there was no point in reading them’.⁷ Evidence is found in Horatio Smith’s A Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1947) and Jean-Albert Bédé and William Edgerton’s Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1980). Despite being cosmopolitan in scope, the coverage of the eastern bloc is mostly limited to dissident or experimental writing that can be linked to western European traditions, with the entire corpus of socialist realism dismissed as ‘a bureaucratized, dehumanized official culture based on the threadbare myths of Marxism-Leninism’.⁸ Yet the distortion of the geographical scope of literary Europe is not only due to East-West division. What writer and historian Fatos Lubonja terms ‘[t]he reluctance of Europe to accept writers from small countries’ may be especially true of his own Albania but has also affected Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland and other western nations.⁹ Cees Nooteboom rightly views his native Netherlands as another ‘periphery’ in literary Europe, an ‘exotic land fifty minutes by air from Paris but […] with an unknown literature that is only just beginning to be translated’.¹⁰ Ironically, the literatures which fare most poorly in the European cultural marketplace are often the best for analysing literary discussions of Europe, no doubt because their authors have been obliged to think much more about its entrenched structures of patronage and prejudice.

It is only in recent years that traditional scholarship has been contested by a more internationalist approach.¹¹ An indication of change came in the work of Martin Travers, who in two studies from 1998 and 2001 defined European literature as a collection of movements—romanticism, realism, modernism, post-modernism and the ‘literature of political engagement’—that spread across the continent from the late eighteenth century. While admitting that his research still ‘serves to privilege certain nations’, Travers determines ‘to broaden the national base of these cultural formations’, challenging the ‘literary great powers’ with work on Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian traditions.¹² A more pronounced challenge came with Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusa’s landmark collection, Writing Europe (2003). Composed of essays by creative writers themselves, the volume presents literary Europe not as a circumscribed, divided, tiered terrain, but as a ‘transnational cultural echo-chamber in which Europe’s many different voices come together […] and form a network’.¹³ The contribution by the Serbian author Dragan Velikić, for example, describes how his textual world ‘is built from Cervantes’ humor, Italo Svevo’s tensions, James Joyce’s circular routes, Danilo Kiš’ Pannonian remembrances [and] Hermann Broch’s sleepwalking’.¹⁴ Similarly, the imagination of Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar has been formed from childhood readings of Flaubert, Defoe and Dostoyevsky, and later, as a student travelling ‘between the Asian and the European side of Istanbul’, from readings of ‘Kafka, Büchner, Hölderlin, Böll, Joyce, Conrad, and Borchert’.¹⁵ The volume’s notion of a ‘cultural echo-chamber’ was reinforced by Theo D’haen and Iannis Goerlandt’s edited Literature for Europe? (2009). The editors’ intention is to analyse ‘the relationship between literary studies and “the matter of Europe”’ and to elucidate the ways in which ‘literary texts, genres, and forms […] shape ongoing processes of European self-understanding’.¹⁶ While often successful in this aim, the volume also reveals the potential perils of the approach. As D’haen’s introduction details, its underlying aim is to endorse EU attempts to use cultural production as a spur to Europeanness (a process discussed below), testing the notion of ‘literature as a possible policy instrument for Europe’.¹⁷ The more inclusive account offered in the present volume has no connection to EU integrationism. The critical approach being sought is one that does not homogenise, does not service political or economic goals and does not seek to recreate the borders, boundaries, hierarchies and exclusions of the ‘imagined community’ on a supranational level.

The achievement of this fuller account, however, requires more than a repositioning of marginalised eastern and western European literatures. As a second development in contemporary criticism, there is an increasing awareness of how migrant and diasporic writing is unsettling received notions of Europe and Europeanness. In the twentieth century, scholarship on literary migration tended to focus purely on intra-continental mobility, a not inconsiderable phenomenon that certainly helped to shift attention from national to international currents. Reflecting on the subject, Nooteboom insists on the vital contribution that exiles have made to discussions of the idea of Europe:

James Joyce in Trieste, Marcel Proust in Venice, Rilke in Muzot, Kundera in Paris, Couperus in Florence, Orwell in Catalonia, Diderot in Amsterdam, Seferis in London, Stendhal in Rome, Strindberg in Berlin: our discussion […] is bound to be derivative, based on thousands of similar discussions of writers with themselves, writers with others, in the present and the past.¹⁸

Although the list seems suitably internationalist, it is limited to solely male western European authors residing in western European locations. Such exclusivity tends to emerge in all accounts of how writers have engaged with Europe, which highlight José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus, Herm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Traumatic Europe: The Impossibility of Mourning in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
• 3. Ágota Kristóf’s Europe: (Un)Connectedness and (Non-)Belonging in The Third Lie
• 4. Between Yearning and Aversion: Visions of Europe in Hilde Spiel’s The Darkened Room
• 5. The European Origins of Albania in Ismail Kadare’s The File on H
• 6. Images of Conquest: Europe and Latin American Identity
• 7. Sissie’s Odyssey: Literary Exorcism in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy
• 8. European Fiction on the Borders: The Case of Herta Müller
• 9. Borders, Borderlands and Romani Identity in Colum McCann’s Zoli
• 10. A Betrayal of Enlightenment: EU Expansion and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s Border State
• 11. The Dilemmas of ‘Post-Communism’: Elizabeth Wilson’s The Lost Time Café
• 12. Minorities and Migrants: Transforming the Swedish Literary Field
• 13. ‘My Dream Can Also Become Your Burden’: Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Poetics of Self-Determination
• 14. Blowing Hot and Cold: Georgia and the West
• 15. Becoming Black in Belgium: Chika Unigwe and the Social Construction of Blackness
• 16. Undivided Waters: Spatial and Translational Paradoxes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn
• 17. Amara Lakhous’s Divorce Islamic Style: Muslim Connections in European Culture
• Backmatter