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 ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’;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 inception—‘irreligiously’, as Novalis puts it—has 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. Novalis’s essay, in fact, is already a dirge for a world that has lost its soul; no longer ‘inhabited’ by the great Christian design, his Europe has been damned to be mere matter: space devoid of sense. The ‘continent shaped in human form’ turns into the world of ‘total sinfulness’ described by the Theory of the Novel (which opens with an unmistakable allusion to the first lines of Christianity). And even though Lukács never explicitly says so, his novelistic universe, which is no longer ‘a home’ 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 meaning—the totality—upon 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 Roman–Christian universalism, which has made it polycentric and flexible.8 No point in looking for its secret in one place, or value, or institution; indeed, it’s best to forget the idea of a European ‘essence’ altogether and perceive it as a polytheistic field of forces. Edgar Morin, Penser l’Europe:
‘All simplifications of Europe—idealization, abstraction, reduction—mutilate 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.’9
Like all complex systems, Europe changes over time (especially from the sixteenth century on), and therefore, Morin again, ‘its identity is defined not despite its metamorphoses, but through them’. 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 Curtius’s ‘Romania’, with its fixed geographical centre, and the diachronic chain of topoi linking it to classical antiquity. His ‘European literature’ is replaced by a ‘system of European literatures’: 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. Europe’s 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 conjunction—Russia—understandably doubtful about its own identity. But Europe’s 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 unity—across time and across space—of 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 ‘memorable scene’ (the court), where his downfall shall take place.
From this space and hero arises however the first discontinuity with the classical heritage. The new sovereign—ab-solutus, untied, freed from the ethico-political bonds of the feudal tradition—has achieved what Hegel will call ‘self-determination’: 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 himself—writes Kierkegaard—‘of substantial determinations, like family, stage, or bloodline [which constitute] the veritable Fate of Greek tragedy’.10 And yet, this king that has freed himself from Fate has become himself his own Fate: the more absolute he is, the more energetic and self-determined, the more he will resemble a tyrant, and draw the entire kingdom to its ruin. The sovereign act which breaks with the past is a jump in the dark: Hamlet striking behind the arras, Sigismundo ruling in his ‘dream’. It is modern literature’s
