of educated conversation (the most typical of novelistic episodes), and by the all-encompassing voice of the omniscient narrator.
Each problem stimulates a technical device, which retroacts upon it in an attempt to solve, or at least contain it. It is an effort to bridge a many-sided symbolic rupture, and to restore—through the narrative convention of individual biography—the anthropomorphism that modern history seems to have lost. And yet, in a beautiful instance of the heterogenesis of aims, in doing so the European novel invents an infinity of new stories that dismiss the narrative inheritance of antiquity, and project readers further and further into the future. A few generations later, the cost of the attempt will become clear, and we will return to it.
Uneven rhythm of literary evolution: it had taken two long centuries to collect the many ingredients of the new form; then, under the pressure of conjuncture, a generation or so is enough to create the continental unity of modern ‘realism’, where previously exceptional successes (such as Clarissa’s, or Werther’s) are replaced by a steady flow of communications. The unification that the âge classique had only accomplished for the thin layer of the very educated is thus achieved, in depth, and only a few decades later, by the novelistic revolution. And why so? Because of merely conjunctural reasons—because the âge classique had never had an opportunity such as the one offered to the novel by the French Revolution? Not really, conjuncture is a necessary ingredient of long-term change, but never a sufficient one, and the most typical narratives of the two epochs—conte philosophique and Bildungsroman—suggest structural reasons for the two different destinies. The conte’s sarcastic, nonchalant plot seems designed to frustrate narrative interest, which it thoroughly subordinates to philosophical abstraction; this is a novel by and for philosophers, almost at war with itself, where the sparkling language of criticism forces readers to endlessly question the meaning of the story. By contrast, the Bildungsroman draws from the uncertainties of youth an inexhaustible narrative potential, often in open defiance of all reflexive wisdom. Narration is here as relevant as comment, and a society overwhelmed by change wants precisely this: a worldview arising in and out of narrative structures, to be assimilated almost unconsciously, and possibly with the help of an unchallenged doxa. And then again, for the conte’s cosmopolitan nimbleness the national dimension is irrelevant, perhaps even contemptible; but Europe is inventing its nations and its nationalisms, and the socialization stories of the Bildungsroman, solidly rooted in the national community, are a much apter dispositive for the new situation.26
To sum it up in a formula, the conte philosophique had offered a (French) form for the whole of Europe; the Bildungsroman a (European) form pliant enough to adapt itself to each national space. And to represent this space, extending it well beyond the narrow centre of the court: launching a wide exploration, geographical and social—the many masters of the picaresque, the local lore of the historical novel, the phenomenology of emotions of the novel of adultery, the stages of social mobility of the Bildungsroman . . . If the novel still occasionally has a centre—Paris, ‘the city of a hundred thousand novels’, the world of extremes and melodrama—this is however no longer the rule. Apart from Dickens, English narrative draws its rhythms and its problems from the countryside, and its masterpiece—Middlemarch—bears the name of a mediocre provincial town. Germans and Italians tell of a world narrowed and impoverished by localism, while the Russian novel oscillates between Petersburg, the restless border with western Europe, and Moscow, capital of a boundless and almost timeless countryside.
Furthermore, even where the uniqueness of the capital is clearly emphasized—The Red and the Black, Lost Illusions, A Sentimental Education—its value is always of a relative kind, fixed through a wider equation; Paris acquires its meaning by its interaction with the provinces, where the young heroes have left mothers and sisters, friends and ideals—and where they will almost always return after their defeat. Paris is thus no longer an absolute space, as the court had been; it’s only the capital of a nation, and the latter’s existence can never be forgotten. Rather than working along the vertical axis, to erect the ‘Tragick Scaffold’ for the fall of princes, the novel proceeds horizontally, as a sort of literary railway, to weave the network capable of covering a country in all its extension. By the end of the nineteenth century, the task has been basically accomplished.
6. THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE
I have spoken of a polycentric Europe, of evolutionary bushes and literary relays. In a page of his European Literature, Curtius seems to be heading in the same direction:
From 1100 to 1275 (from Chanson de Roland to the Roman de la Rose), French literature and culture set the pace for all other nations . . . After 1300, however, the literary lead moves to Italy, with Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio . . . France, Spain, England are under its influence; it’s the age of ‘Italianism’. With the sixteenth century, the Spanish siglo de oro begins, which will dominate European literatures for over a hundred years . . . France liberates itself from Spanish and Italian influences only during the seventeenth century, when it again achieves a supremacy which will not be challenged until 1780. In England, in the meantime, a great poetical current had come into being as early as 1590; but it will arouse the interest of the rest of Europe only in the course of the eighteenth century. As for Germany, it was never a rival of the great Romance literatures. Its hour will come with the age of Goethe; before, German culture is often under external influence, but it never exerts its own.27
It is a very interesting passage: one of the very few where Curtius addresses the issue of the nation state. And yet—what states? France, Italy, Spain, France again; ‘Romania’ (and within it, for four centuries out of seven, France). The opening up of the model is only an appearance; from 1100 to 1780, in fact, literary hegemony never leaves the Latin world. And after ‘1780’?
The Elizabethans are already quite a puzzle for Curtius; but if it cannot be solved, it is at least possible to postpone it by invoking England’s isolation. Once it reaches the Age of Goethe, however, European Literature stops altogether, because its explanatory power has run its course. There’s no way around it, Curtius’s Europe really cannot accept the modern world, and even less the northern climate. Ours is exactly the opposite; it originates with the attack waged by absolutism against tradition; it rises to the challenge of 1789; it leaves the world of ‘Romania’ without ever turning back; it crosses the Channel, the Rhine, it spends its summers at Travemunde . . .
In this new old world, after the Thirty Years’ War, two out of three of the great Romance literatures have forever lost their hegemonic chances. Italian literature, because Italy is less than a nation, and a provincial culture, however educated, is below the new European standards and needs. Spanish literature, for the opposite reason; because Spain is more than a nation, and the empire of the Americas tears it away from European issues. When European literature again achieves a unity, it is no longer in the name of the classical and Romance past, but of the bourgeois present; novels from the north, English, French, German; later, Russian.
This geographical drift is even more visible for post-Enlightenment tragedy, especially if one bears in mind the baroque moment. Then, the influence of the Reformation in England, and of Jansenism on Racine, was largely balanced by the Jesuitical element in Spain and France, Italy and Germany; but from the mid eighteenth century onwards, the Protestant component occupies virtually the entire stage. Romance tragedy disappears, and Germany holds for over a century—Lessing, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist, Büchner, Hebbel, Wagner, Hauptmann . . . —a veritable monopoly of tragic invention. At the end of the nineteenth century, the north-eastern trend is further accentuated; it’s the moment of Ibsen, a Norwegian; of Strindberg, a Swede; of Chekhov, a Russian.28 With expressionism, and then Brecht, we are back in the German area.29
Several processes are at work here, interwoven with each other. Following wealth, literature abandons the Mediterranean for the Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic. Novelistic ‘realism’ would be much more difficult without this
