experience, the life of rival forms becomes very difficult. On the other hand, what language would a ‘Dutch’ novel have used? Flemish? Frisian? A German dialect? French perhaps? Or Latin, even? (On the linguistic heterogeneity of seventeenth-century Holland, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, Berkeley 1988, p. 57.)
24 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation materielle, économie et capitalisme, vol. III, Le Temps du monde, Paris 1986, part 6.
25 As in the case of industry, it is only at some point in the course of the nineteenth century that people realize that the novel is destined to stay; and that it embodies, for better or worse, the essence of a new civilization. From this point onwards, a talented young man will no longer dream of writing a great tragedy, but a great novel; and as for old men, Goethe will rewrite his Wilhelm Meister three times over forty years, to make sure that it turns out as a modern novel ought to.
26 On the novel’s contribution to the establishment of national cultures, there are some very convincing pages in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London 1983 (especially pp. 30–9).
27 Curtius, Europäische Literatur, p. 44.
28 Even the main literary war of the nineteenth century—the conflict between tragic and novelistic conventions, culminating in the great Ibsen controversy—takes place almost entirely outside of the boundaries of ‘Romania’: France and England entrenched against tragedy, Germany and Scandinavia on the opposite side, and Russia somewhere in between.
29 From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, tragedy is thus the dominant form in the only northern culture which hasn’t yet achieved its national unity. ‘Germany’, we read in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, ‘is the battleground of Europe’: in a physical sense, from the Thirty Years’ War to 1945, but even more so in a symbolic sense. In the absence of a stable political structure, and of the atmosphere of compromise which usually follows from it, all political values and anti-values of modern Europe achieve in Germany a metaphysical purity which makes their representation sub specie tragica almost ineluctable. The pitiless bourgeois honesty of Emilia Galotti and the abstract political idealism of Don Carlos; the Jacobin organicism of Danton’s Death and the intractable heroism of Herod and Mariane; the dark mythical appeal of the Ring and the inflexible Stalinism of Brecht’s Lehrstücke; one generation after another, the story of German drama is the extreme echo of the ideological history of Europe.
30 Louis Gillet, Dante, Paris 1941, p. 80.
31 ‘We have received as our inheritance’, writes the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘an ancient European land; we are here the successors to two Roman empires, and must endure our destiny, whether we want it or not . . .’ The passage is quoted by Curtius in his 1934 essay Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Calderon. Curtius is predictably in great syntony with this Roman–imperial image of Austria, and Hofmannsthal is indeed for him the most representative European author of the twentieth century.
32 Guizot, Histoire, pp. 40, 38.
33 ‘Philosophical history, the science of origin, is the form which, in the remotest extremes and the apparent excesses of the process of development, reveals the configuration of the idea—the sum total of all possible meaningful juxtapositions of such opposites. The representation of an idea can[not] be considered successful unless the whole range of possible extremes it contains has been virtually explored.’ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Baroque Drama, p. 47. As Adorno wrote in The Philosophy of Modern Music (London 1973), ‘only in such extremes can the essence of this music be defined; they alone permit the perception of its context of truth. “The middle road”, according to Schoenberg . . . “is the only one which does not lead to Rome”’ (p. 3).
34 Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, New York 1985, pp. 219–20. ‘Many variations don’t work’; today, we all know of Joyce’s stream of consciousness; yet Les lauriers sont coupées, The Making of the Americas, Berlin Alexanderplatz are already novels for specialists; and some French texts of the 1920s, written under the spell of Ulysses (Yeux de dix-huit ans, 5,000, Amants, heureux amants), are totally forgotten. If we are ever going to have a literary palaeontology, these library fossils will help us to understand why a certain technical solution was selected over others, and to have a better grasp of our cultural evolution. Like the history of life, the history of literature is a gigantic slaughterhouse of discarded possibilities; what it has excluded reveals its laws as clearly as what it has accepted.
35 The metaphor used earlier—‘division of labour’—is not completely satisfactory. In the ‘epic’ projects of the early twentieth century (Mahler, Joyce), where all sorts of ‘low’ conventions are conscripted for the edification of the aesthetic totality, mass culture and avant-garde techniques lie side by side—as Adorno put it—‘like two halves that no longer form a whole’. The proximity multiplies dissonances and irony; it radicalizes the complexity of the formal system. Their blending at all costs—quite a triumph of entropy—will be the great achievement of postmodernism.
36 It goes without saying that the aesthetic sphere had begun to move towards autonomy three or four centuries earlier. A relative security against arbitrary acts of power has thus been almost a constant of modern European literature, and must have encouraged its formal inventiveness.
37 Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy, London 1963, p. 9.
38 These many Europes arise successively, one after the other, but they later coexist for long stretches of time, and the cohabitation of diverse formal spaces within a fixed geography has induced a growing complexity in the European literary system. The form of the present essay—which does not begin with a fully given concept of European literature, but constructs it in the course of time, adding new determinations along the way—tries to reproduce the historical evolution of its object.
39 Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, New York 1899, p. 442. The textual history of Hamlet offers a lovely instance of the role of the metropolis in literary invention. The first printed versions of Hamlet are, as is well known, three; the first in-quarto (Q1), of 1603; the second in-quarto (Q2), of 1604; and the in-folio (F) of 1623. The Hamlet we read is based on Q2 and F; it’s from them that it draws its ‘strangeness’, its tragi-comic web, the enigmatic structure which has turned it into a key text of modernity. Q1, on the other hand (the bad Quarto, as philologists affectionately call it), apart from other major defects, ruthlessly simplifies everything; it gives us a one-dimensional tragedy, lacking in the heterogeneity and complexity of Hamlet. And where does Q1 come from? In all likelihood, from the sudden need to prepare a text for a tour in the provinces. Formal inventiveness, tolerated in London, and in fact rewarded with a great success, is deemed implausible as soon as the play has to leave the metropolis.
40 Nietzsche’s phrase, on Wagner and French late Romanticism, is from Beyond Good and Evil (1886); Enzensberger’s essay is collected in Einzelheiten.
41 According to a classic study by Carlo Dionisotti, the Italian literary canon (the first to be established in Europe) was entirely the product of exile: ‘the work of an exile’ Dante’s Comedy, ‘a voluntary exile’ Petrarch at the time of the Canzoniere, ‘exile in the midst of his own fatherland’ the situation out of which arises the Decameron. See Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin 1967 (1951), p. 32. Dionisotti wrote the essay in London, after Fascism had forced him too into exile. At the other end of the European development, Perry Anderson has redefined the great ‘English’ culture of the twentieth century as almost entirely the work of emigrés; see his ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review I: 50 (July–August 1968). The most ambitious overall description of the European
