‘Serious imitation of the everyday’, reads Auerbach’s celebrated formula; and one thinks of the unadorned cheeses of Dutch still lifes, which resurface—appropriately saved from the shipwreck—on Robinson’s island. It is Lotte’s bread and butter in Werther, Hjalmar’s bread and butter in The Wild Duck, Toni Buddenbrook’s bread and butter (and honey) on the morning of her engagement. It is the discoloured furniture of the Vauquer pension, the slightly superfluous furniture of Flaubert’s pages, the dark furniture of Ibsen’s drawing rooms . . .
But this poetics of solidity (great keyword of the bourgeois ethos) has its price: losing the Mediterranean, European literature also loses adventure. Its security robs it of the unknown. In the Mediterranean ‘civilizations had overlapped by way of their armies; myriad stories of adventures, and of remote worlds, had been circulated in this space . . .’30 Very little of this up in the north, where wonders will have to wait for magic realism; works written in Spanish, in Portuguese, and often mediated by France. A new continent entering the literary scene, to be sure: but perhaps it is also the revenge of an imaginary still loyal to the internal sea.
A differently shaped, slightly wider Europe, where the silence of some Romance cultures—those most plagued by economic decline and religious reaction—is balanced by the productivity of the north. But there is one literature for which at bottom nothing changes, because it is at home in both worlds, and the great northward drift, which eliminates a couple of traditional rivals, does in fact even strengthen its position within the European system. This is French literature: the only survivor of ‘Romania’, because only in France has the Romance past—which, by itself, would have never been enough—joined forces with the logic of a great modern state (and the result is the tragédie classique), with a capitalist economy (and it is nineteenth-century realism), with a metropolis which is a true palimpsest of history: and it will be, with Baudelaire, modern poetry. Only in a Janus-faced city could this creature be born, itself a double, ‘laughable and sublime’, crudely contemporaneous and defiantly classical; where ‘unhealthy demons / Heavily awake, like so many businessmen’, and an old hunchback is also the phoenix, just like a barren stretch on the outskirts of town is the plain of Troy. ‘New buildings, scaffolds, stones / Old suburbs, all for me turns into an allegory . . .’
Movement towards the bourgeois north. Permanence of France (and of Paris). Finally, the European system puts into words its lack of a centre. This is the great theme of Austrian literature, facing an imperial catastrophe which duplicates on a smaller scale, and several centuries later, the destiny of Europe as a whole.31 Loss of the centre, in the Hapsburg Empire—where well into the nineteenth century Latin is still the official bureaucratic language, to be later replaced by a spectral German—loss of the centre means, first and foremost, a breaking apart of language. For Hofmannsthal’s Chandos, it’s the discovery of the gaps between signs and things; for Malte Laurids Brigge, the anxiety of a hidden meaning lying in ambush behind every word; for Schnitzler, the crazy discrepancy between aggressive drives and the impeccable style of good manners. In The Radetzky March, it’s the incomprehensible insults in Hungarian which greet the news from Sarajevo; in The Man Without Qualities, the pompous nonsense of that ‘collateral campaign’ which longs to reunify the many languages of the empire; in Kafka, the desperate exhaustion produced by the too many, and too different, meanings of the Scripture.
What this literature is saying is in fact experienced throughout Europe. We should abandon the metaphor of the continental relay, where the torch of invention, although moving from hand to hand, is nevertheless always one. With the twentieth century, the time of polarization has come: simultaneous and conflicting attempts, which radicalize the technical potentialities of each form, and don’t come to a halt—‘consequentiality which spurns any compromise’, in Adorno’s phrase—until they have reached extreme results. One of the cornerstones of Guizot’s Europe, its inclination to compromise, here comes to an end:
Unable to exterminate each other, it was inevitable for conflicting principles to coexist, and to tacitly agree on some sort of mutual accommodation. Each of them implicitly accepted to develop only in part, and within well defined boundaries . . . No trace, here, of that imperturbable boldness, of that ruthless logic, which characterize ancient civilizations.32
No trace of boldness? True, how true for realistic narrative. But for modernism?
7. NEW SPACES OF AN OLD WORLD
Polarization . . . James Joyce and Franz Kafka; the two greatest innovators of the twentieth-century novel. Does this mean—as in the decades of the novelistic revolution—that they are proceeding in the same general direction? Not in the least. Unknown to each other, they do indeed begin to write their masterpieces in the very same months; but Ulysses opts then for the noisy freedom of polyphony, while The Trial tells the story of a secret, monological Law. In the one, the omnivorous euphoria of the stream of consciousness; in the other, the wary subtlety of scriptural interpretation. The total irony of pluristilism—the terrible seriousness of allegory. The private space of a metropolitan psyche—the public, hieratico-political space of the law court . . . And if we move from the novel to poetry, The Waste Land and the Duino Elegies, both published in 1922, repeat exactly the same configuration. Fragments from all ages piled up in a super-language endlessly meaningful, in Eliot; in Rilke, the renunciation of all evocative seduction, in the hope of finding the sober language of the present. There, a thousand words, and no voice to utter them; here, a voice very close by, looking in vain for the few right words.
The pattern of polarization may be followed within the visual arts (Picasso and Kandinsky; Chagall and Klee); the idea, after all, was first expressed in The Philosophy of Modern Music, organized around the opposition of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But rather than multiplying examples, let us ask ourselves: why is all of this happening? What is the reason for this sudden, insistent repetition of the same technical configuration? Are there at work here—as Benjamin and Adorno suggest—the laws of historical dialectics?33 But if that were the case, polarization ought to be the rule in literary history; whereas it’s a very unusual exception, and clearly circumscribed in time. Should one then invoke the truly unique radicalism of the artistic world at the turn of the century? Fine; but what is the reason for that radicalism? Perhaps, the best thing is to turn once again to evolutionary theory, which, when it has to account for extreme forms, does not investigate ‘the intrinsic character or meaning of the extreme values themselves’, but rather the conditions, and behaviour, of the system as a whole: ‘When systems first arise they probe all the limits of possibility. Many variations don’t work; the best solutions emerge, and variation diminishes.’34
When systems first arise; and this is fine, for we are discussing the beginnings of modernism. But then Gould adds that the ‘early experimentation’ is more varied and extreme the more ‘empty’ the given world is. And how can this specification apply to twentieth-century Europe, which has already been for centuries, in Braudel’s formula, ‘a world filled up’? Sure, we may say that not all of Europe is equally full, and that modernism sets in motion atypical and relatively empty areas, such as Joyce’s Dublin, or Kafka’s Prague; capitals of states that don’t exist. But this novelty may be explained just as well (and probably better) with the general tendency towards a wider Europe—from ‘Romania’ to the first nation states, from the bourgeois north to the new nineteenth-century nations to the full incorporation of Russia. And so?
So, the reason for the modernist explosion shouldn’t be sought in a new geographical space, but in new social spaces within the old geography. A space in terms of audience, first of all; as for baroque tragedy, and then for the novel, a new audience offers a freer, more hospitable ecosystem, with greater chances for formal experimentation. And especially this new audience, Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘intellectual field’, which is a sort of anti-market, and flatly rejects the standardization of taste. It is following—whether it knows it or not—the slogan coined by Viktor Sklovski, the critical genius of the age: estrangement. Serious imitation of the everyday? Not in the least;
