nowhere; and if Johnson aimed at including the entire planet, the Académie proceeds by contrast to erase all national states. ‘To aim at the good of mankind’, writes Leibniz, ‘the cosmopolitan will have to be indifferent to what characterizes a Frenchman, or a German.’20
But what may ‘mankind’ mean, in the concrete context of eighteenth-century Europe? Fatally, it will be the idealized version—abstract and normative at once—of a national literature of unique power and ambition. Isn’t the République des Lettres after all the legitimate heir of the Res publica Christiana, just as French is replacing Latin as the sacred language of the spirit? ‘The classical age’, writes Paul Van Tieghem, ‘coincides with the literary hegemony of France: it begins with it, it ends with it . . . The French spirit embodies to such an extent the classical ideal that, in several European countries, classical and French will become synonyms.’21 French literary hegemony, then; nor literary only, as the Napoleonic wars will point out. It’s the last attempt to make Europe one, imposing upon it the same uniformity of national cultures which Benjamin Constant denounces in his tract on the spirit of conquest. The attempt does not succeed, obviously; but it is nonetheless interesting that it was still possible to conceive it, or more precisely: that it was possible for France to conceive it. Because France plays indeed a unique role in the cultural history of Europe. Erich Auerbach:
The preponderance of Romance materials in Mimesis is due to the fact that—on a European scale—Romance literatures are in the great majority of cases more representative than Germanic ones. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the lead is undoubtedly France’s, and Italy’s for the two following ones; during the seventeenth century it returns to France, and it stays there for the following century and for the nineteenth century as well, at least for what concerns the genesis and development of modern realism.22
One may disagree on details here, but hardly on the general picture. A great national mechanism, engaged in ‘civilizing’ its interior, and brilliant cosmopolitan enterprise, read and imitated everywhere, French literature has indeed played a unique role in European history—because it has played with unique brilliance (and luck) on the continental chequerboard. The reason for its success, in other words, lies less in what France ‘is’, than in what it is in respect to others. Because France is a great nation state, first of all, and this gives it an edge over Italy—its closest rival during the Middle Ages—and over the German territories. As for Spain and England, it is more populated than they are, and its language has a wider currency: it has a wider audience—and a wider audience means more space, more life, more inventiveness, more forms. And then position, decisive when books and ideas move still very slowly: France is right there, at the centre of the great western ‘X’. To go from Spain to Holland and Germany, or from England to Italy, one must cross it, let it know of all new ideas, and spread its influence in the opposite direction. Then again, a literary tradition unencumbered by a Dante or a Shakespeare, a Goethe or a siglo de oro: free from the weight of unrepeatable models, French literature is more agile than others, it plays on more tables, always ready to place its bet on the novelties that crop up in the European space. And finally, a great nation state, yes, but never hegemonic in the political or economic arena; this eternal second best, always under pressure, may well have overinvested in the realm of culture, in the hope of finding there the extra stimuli necessary to succeed in the European rivalry. There is then still another reason, and I shall return to it soon.
5. THE NOVELISTIC REVOLUTION
Where does the European novel begin? In Spain, with the explorations of the picaros and the irony of Don Quixote . . . In France, with its brilliant anatomy of passions . . . In England (and Germany), with the sober simplicity of spiritual autobiography . . . In baroque adventures, which abound in Italy and elsewhere . . . Or maybe in Holland, in the luminous, lively everydayness of Vermeer, or the serious, withdrawn visages of Rembrandt . . . 23
Where does the European novel begin? Behind this question lies a view of literary history as a sort of ‘ladder’, with steps that follow each other at a regular distance. But we should borrow a different metaphor from evolutionary theory, and think of literary development as a large bush: branches that coexist and bifurcate, that overlap and at times obstruct each other—but that, whenever one of them withers away, are ready to replace it with an ever thicker and stronger organism.
Where does the European novel begin? Who knows, who cares? But where it managed to survive and to grow, this is relevant, and this we do know: in Europe. In the European archipelago: a space discontinuous enough to allow the simultaneous exploration of widely different paths. And in the European bush, with the thickly woven network of its national literatures: where each new attempt immediately circulates, no longer running the risk of being forgotten for centuries. At this point, diversity joins forces with interaction, and after Hallam’s paratactic Europe, and the French Republic of Letters, it is the turn of the European literary system in the proper sense. Neither European literature, nor merely national ones, but rather, so to say, national literatures of Europe.
The development of the European novel as an evolutionary bush, then. Fernand Braudel:
All sectors are interconnected here, and they are all so developed that there is no danger of jams or obstructions. Whatever the chosen direction may be, or the concrete opportunity, the European novel is ready to take off . . . and its growth will take the form of slower runners catching up with the leader of the race.24
The European novel? Not exactly, there’s a little trick here; Braudel is describing the mechanics of the Industrial Revolution, and the subject of his sentences is, of course, ‘the English economy’. But the overall pattern holds true for the sudden surge of the novel in the late eighteenth century. In twenty years, with a striking rapidity, all the forms that will dominate Western narrative for over a century find their masterpiece. The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, for the Gothic; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1796, for the Bildungsroman; Elective Affinities, 1809, for the novel of adultery; Waverley, 1814, for the historical novel. In another fifteen years, with Austen and Stendhal, Mary Shelley and Pushkin, Balzac and Manzoni, almost all the main variations on the basic forms are also in place.
It’s a spiral of novelties—but of lasting novelties, with long-term consequences: hardly an exaggeration, in fact, to speak here of a veritable ‘novelistic revolution’.25 Like the economy, literature has indeed developed, by the end of the eighteenth century, the necessary precondition for its take-off: a (largely) new writer, the woman-novelist, and a quickly growing audience; a complex of national variations, well known to each other, and an Anglo-French core of great morphological flexibility; a new system of distribution (the circulating library), and a precocious, recognizable early canon. And then, chance enters the historical scene, offering the novel the right opportunity at the right moment: the French Revolution. But don’t think of a mechanical universe, where the ball of politics hits the ball of literature and passes its own spin over to it. This is rather a living system, of stimuli and responses, where the political sphere creates symbolic problems for the entire continent, and the literary sphere tries to address and to solve them. In the traumatic, fast-moving years between 1789 and 1815, human actions seem to have become indecipherable and threatening; to have—quite literally—lost their meaning. Restoring a ‘sense of history’ becomes one of the great symbolic tasks of the age: and a task uniquely suited for novelists, because it asks for enthralling stories (they must capture the explosive new rhythm of Modernity), but also well-organized ones (that rhythm must have a direction, and a shape).
The very difficulty of the historical scenario acts thus as a great chance for formal renewal, at all levels. The enigmatic quality of the new times, for instance, is channelled within the techniques of suspense, and reduced by the retrospective meaningfulness established by the narrative closure. The political and social struggle, transformed into an emotional conflict among concrete characters, loses its dangerously abstract nature (and it doesn’t rule out a happy ending).
