What has happened is that—let us open a short parenthesis—in the course of the nineteenth century, the urban audience has split. Poe, Balzac, Dickens are still appealing both to Baudelaire and to his philistine double. But the synthesis does not last, and in France and England (always there) a handful of new narrative forms—melodrama, feuilleton, detective fiction, science fiction—quickly capture millions of readers, preparing the way for the industry of sound and image. Is it a betrayal of literature, as cultivated critics have long maintained? Not at all; it is rather the coming to light of the limits of realism; at its ease in a solid, well-regulated world, which it makes even more so, the realistic temper doesn’t know how to deal with those extreme situations, and terrible simplifications, that at times history forces one to face. Realism does not know how to represent the Other of Europe, nor yet—which is perhaps even worse—the Other in Europe: and so, mass literature takes over the task. Class struggle and the death of God, the ambiguities of language and the second industrial revolution; it is because it deals with all these phenomena that mass literature succeeds. And because it knows how to encrypt them, of course, in rhetorical tropes and plot devices that hide their deeper meanings, and foster a basic unawareness in readers. But literature always works like this, at least to a certain extent, and the excommunication of mass culture is truly a thing of the past.
But more: isn’t there a sort of pact between mass literature and modernism—a sort of silent division of labour? Where the latter plunges into abstraction, decomposing the character to the point of making it vanish (Musil’s ‘qualities without the man’), the former strengthens anthropomorphic beliefs, filling the world with ghosts and Martians, vampires and great criminals. Modernism drops the ‘linear plot’ (Gide), and the ‘story’s thread’ (Musil), to produce immense, immobile works; mass literature places plot in first place, gravitates towards the ending, has a tendency for short narratives (and thus prepares the conventions of film). Modernism, especially in poetry, exploits linguistic polysemy, stressing hermeneutic ambiguity and indecision; mass literature, especially detective fiction, is a dis-ambiguating machine, which aims at restoring the univocity of signs, to reimpose a rigid causality in all things human.35
Farewell, middle way of realism; farewell, educated nineteenth-century reader . . . Here one finds much less, or much more; formal automatisms for the majority, but all sorts of novelties for an over-educated aggressive minority. It’s the first ‘empty’ space needed for the genesis of modernism, and it interacts with a political space, or more precisely, a space liberated from politics. Following Mannheim’s hypothesis on the relationships between capitalism and culture, as the economic network of European societies becomes more diffuse and solid, a rigid symbolic orthodoxy is no longer needed to keep them together. Contrary to the great prophecy of the Dialectic, of Enlightenment, the ‘unity of the Western system’ does not ‘grow increasingly stronger’ as capitalism succeeds. Culture is freed from political obligations; surveillance decreases, selective pressure grows weaker—and the strangest experiments are free to take place.36
It is not an uneventful process, of course: there are the book-burnings of degenerate art and the persecution of the Russian avant-garde; on a more bland note, the scuffle at the première of the Sacre du Printemps, the banning of Ulysses, fistfights and insults at each Dada event. But the trend is clear, and, within capitalist democracies, never really called into question. Art has become a protected, a neutralized space; as Edgar Wind observed, ‘Art is so well received because it has lost its sting.’37 In a sort of unspoken pact with the devil, nothing is forbidden any longer, because nothing is significant any longer. For the first generation, this is an exhilarating discovery: in the beginning was the scandal, as Mann’s Mephisto will put it, and the scandal was made into a success. But in the perfect void one cannot breathe, and it won’t take long for European literature to discover that it has nothing left to say.
8. CITÉ PLEINE DE RÊVES . . .
An audience space. A politically neutralized space. And a geographical space: after the Europe of courts, the République des Lettres, the Lutheran world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tragedy, the nation states of the novel, it’s time for the Europe of capitals.38 Better still, of metropolises: Milan more than Rome, Barcelona more than Madrid, Petersburg more than Moscow. Their true bond is no longer with the interior (towards the provinces, or the countryside), but with Europe: with the wealthy north-west, and even more so with other metropolises, at times quite far removed in physical space, but close and congenial in the space of culture. Under their sign, in fact, the very boundaries of Europe begin to lose their relevance; for the avant-garde, Paris is closer to Buenos Aires than to Lyon; Berlin more akin to Manhattan than to Lübeck.
This syntony between modernism and the metropolis arises first and foremost out of a common enthusiasm for the growing division of labour. In the theoretical field, it’s the analytical breakthrough of the Formalist school; in the artistic field, techniques such as polyphony, rooted in the proliferation of professional jargons and sectorial codes. Specialism, for this happy generation, is freedom; freedom from the (narrow) measure of the (bad) taste of the (bourgeois) nineteenth century. Specialism emancipates sound, meaning, colour, line, time; whole worlds to be explored with no fear for the equilibrium of the whole. And specialism is radicalism; it plays with daring hypotheses, which would never pass the rigid controls of the provinces, but in the niches of the metropolis (in the garrets of the bohème) may survive and prosper. It is the big city that protects what is unusual, writes a sociologist at the turn of the century, and that makes it more unusual still:
The city is the spectroscope of society; it analyses and sifts the population, separating and classifying the diverse elements. The entire progress of civilization is a process of differentiation, and the city is the greatest differentiator. The mediocrity of the country is transformed by the city into the highest talent or the lowest criminal. Genius is often born in the country, but it is brought to light and developed by the city [just as] the boy thief of the village becomes the daring bank robber of the metropolis.39
Division of labour aside, the metropolis of the early twentieth century is also a great meeting-place, which multiplies the ‘artists of world-literary formation’ first perceived by Nietzsche, and spreads what Enzensberger has called ‘the universal language of modern poetry’:40 this strange lingua franca, obscure but effective, and capable of travelling any distance; the Italian futurists, who write their manifestos in French, and are immediately read by their Russian contemporaries; the Rumanian Tristan Tzara, who invents in German-speaking Zürich the antilanguage of Dada; French surrealism, which will give its best on American soil, in narratives written in Spanish . . .
This is Raymond Williams’s ‘City of Strangers’: where language has lost its naturalness and must in a sense be reinvented. It’s the story of Joyce’s English, ‘familiar and foreign’ as early as Portrait; and then, as years go by, less and less comparable to a national language. Ulysses, with its Latin title referring to a Greek hero, and written by an Irishman moving between ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris’ (a Trieste that was still the Italian port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . . . ), is the clearest sign of a literature for which national boundaries have lost all explanatory power.
Intrinsic to the City of Strangers, then, is a great literature of exiles: the final chapter in a long-term tendency, a true constant, of European history. Dante leaves Florence for Verona, and Galilei (mistakenly, as Brecht would say) Padua for Florence; the great philosophy of the seventeenth century finds a refuge in wealthy Amsterdam (‘That Bank of Conscience, where not one so strange / Opinion but finds Credit, and Exchange’: Andrew Marvell); the Romantic movement swarms across the continent; there is Paris capital of the nineteenth century, the central European migration to England, Scandinavia and the United States, and the Jewish diaspora, of course, a little everywhere.41 See here how Europe is more than the sum of its parts; it is only thanks to the diversified system of its nation states that what each individual state would gladly silence
