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 StrĂ„th, Gerard Delanty, Luisa Passerini, Zygmunt Bauman, Ătienne 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 âimagined communityâ, in Benedict Andersonâs phrase, that âwhen a national space emerges and demands the right to political existence and independence, it proclaims at the same time that it possesses (i.e. ânationalizesâ) a cultural, linguistic, historical and literary heritageâ.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 âliteratures of small peopleâ, aware of âthe pride which a nation gains from a literature of its ownâ.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 âdenationalâ ways of analysing European literature or to theorise about what the âEuropeâ in âEuropean literatureâ 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 continentâs 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 Lavrinâs Studies in European Literature (1929) focuses mainly on French, German and Scandinavian literatures, although includes discussion of a few Russian authors, recognising in Russia âone of the literary great powersâ.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 Gaskellâs Landmarks in European Literature (1999) treads a predictable path through Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Montaigne, Cervantes, MoliĂšre, Voltaire, Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Ibsen, Hamsun, Zola, Proust, Mann, Pirandello and Brecht. Gaskellâs stated aimââto identify [âŠ] a canon of European authorsââoverlooks 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 âsocialist political commitment [was] inimical to the production of genuine artâ and that âthe socialist realist works of the East were [âŠ] such ideological tripe that there was no point in reading themâ.7 Evidence is found in Horatio Smithâs A Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1947) and Jean-Albert BĂ©dĂ© and William Edgertonâs 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 âa bureaucratized, dehumanized official culture based on the threadbare myths of Marxism-Leninismâ.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 â[t]he reluctance of Europe to accept writers from small countriesâ 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 âperipheryâ in literary Europe, an âexotic land fifty minutes by air from Paris but [âŠ] with an unknown literature that is only just beginning to be translatedâ.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 movementsâromanticism, realism, modernism, post-modernism and the âliterature of political engagementââthat spread across the continent from the late eighteenth century. While admitting that his research still âserves to privilege certain nationsâ, Travers determines âto broaden the national base of these cultural formationsâ, challenging the âliterary great powersâ with work on Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian traditions.12 A more pronounced challenge came with Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusaâs 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 âtransnational cultural echo-chamber in which Europeâs many different voices come together [âŠ] and form a networkâ.13 The contribution by the Serbian author Dragan VelikiÄ, for example, describes how his textual world âis built from Cervantesâ humor, Italo Svevoâs tensions, James Joyceâs circular routes, Danilo KiĆĄâ Pannonian remembrances [and] Hermann Brochâs sleepwalkingâ.14 Similarly, the imagination of Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Ăzdamar has been formed from childhood readings of Flaubert, Defoe and Dostoyevsky, and later, as a student travelling âbetween the Asian and the European side of Istanbulâ, from readings of âKafka, BĂŒchner, Hölderlin, Böll, Joyce, Conrad, and Borchertâ.15 The volumeâs notion of a âcultural echo-chamberâ was reinforced by Theo Dâhaen and Iannis Goerlandtâs edited Literature for Europe? (2009). The editorsâ intention is to analyse âthe relationship between literary studies and âthe matter of Europeââ and to elucidate the ways in which âliterary texts, genres, and forms [âŠ] shape ongoing processes of European self-understandingâ.16 While often successful in this aim, the volume also reveals the potential perils of the approach. As Dâhaenâs 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 âliterature as a possible policy instrument for Europeâ.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 âimagined communityâ 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:
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 JosĂ© Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus, Herm...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 [âŠ] 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