‘bloodless intellectualism’; the explosive compression of opposites that embodies the greatness (and the ambiguity) of so many avant-gardes—and bears the mark of a Europe wavering between anarchy and dictatorship.
That such an extreme tension would not last long, is hardly surprising. Yet that this phase would also be the last creative drive of European literature—this was a surprise for everybody. But too many tendencies, and too deep, were simultaneously at work as the twentieth century moved on: military devastations, limited political sovereignty, migration of economic hegemony towards the United States, and then the Pacific; so many blows for the symbolic universe of the European nation state. In the cultural field, the new media, and the triumph of sound and image over the written word. And finally, the coup de grâce of other literatures, from other continents, still capable of that narrative invention which modernism had stifled, at the cost of a long-standing unpopularity. Face to face with so many difficulties, European literature has stalled: finding itself—for the first time in modern history—an importer of those formal novelties that it is no longer capable of producing. In fact, the very autonomy of Europe is now in doubt, reshuffled as its culture is by the world network that has replaced it. For some of the major European literatures, intercontinental, extra-European exchanges have quickly become the most important ones;43 as for intra-European relationships, a continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis. There is not much more to say, the conditions which have granted European literature its greatness have run their course, and only a miracle could reverse the trend. But Europe has probably already had more than its rightful share of miracles.
1 Erich Auerbach’s review article was published in Romanische Forschungen, 1950, pp. 237–45.
2 Ernest Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinische Mittelalter, 1948, 2nd edn, Bern 1953, p. 387.
3 Ibid., p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 9 (the passage belongs to the preface to the second edition).
5 ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, The Dial, November 1923, p. 201.
6 Gyorgy Lukács, Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA 1968 (1916), p. 34.
7 François Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, 6th edn, Paris 1855 (1828), pp. 35, 37–8.
8 Thus also Geoffrey Barraclough (European Unity in Thought and Action, Oxford 1963, pp. 7, 12–13): ‘The idea of Europe as a distinct unity is post-classical. It was created in the Middle Ages. In the most general terms, it may be described as a result of the collapse of the universalism of the Roman Empire. [The Carolingian Empire] was not a “starting point,” but a conclusion . . . it was necessary for the Carolingian Empire to collapse for Europe to come into being . . . European unity could henceforward only mean the articulation—not the suppression—of ingrained regional diversity.’ Similar considerations inform another work largely influenced by Guizot, Federico Chabod’s Storia dell’idea di Europa, Bari 1961. Immanuel Wallerstein has developed this insight in terms of economic history, defining modern capitalism as that social formation which ‘operates within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control’: the divided states of seventeenth-century Europe were therefore capable of that take-off which proved impossible for the politically united Asiatic empires (Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, New York 1974, pp. 348, 61–3). In the same direction, see also Eric Jones, The European Miracle, Cambridge 1981.
9 Paris 1987.
10 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Princeton 1971, vol. I, p. 141.
11 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of the German Baroque Drama, London 1977 (1928), p. 69.
12 ‘Later’ means here: even centuries later. Of three tragic variations which arose almost simultaneously, the Spanish one achieved its European hegemony between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the French one, during the âge classique; the English one, from the Sturm und Drang to the end of the nineteenth century. And had Benjamin been a little more lucky, the twentieth century might well have been the century of the Trauerspiel.
13 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, London 1972, p. 121.
14 Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin, New York 1977, p. 136.
15 ‘It is evident that this civilization cannot be found, nor its history fully appreciated, within the boundaries of a single state. If European civilization has its own unity, its variety is not less prodigious, and has never fully manifested itself in a single country. Its several features are disseminated here and there; one must look for the elements which constitute European history in France just as in England, in Germany just as in Italy or Spain.’ Guizot, Histoire, pp. 5–6.
16 Archipelagos are posited as models of geographic speciation in Ernst Mayr’s classic Systematics and the Origin of Species, New York 1942.
17 The principle of spatial dispersion applies to literary styles and movements as well as genres. Thus Van Tieghem on Romanticism: ‘to consider these three literatures [German, English, and French] a sufficient manifestation of European Romanticism would underestimate its rich variety; actually, several of its most characteristic features are better represented in other literatures, less well known than the major ones’. Paul Van Tieghem, Le Romantisme dans la littérature européene, Paris 1948, p. 115.
18 London 1837–39, New York 1970.
19 Just one instance, drawn from the section entitled ‘History of the Literature of Taste in Europe from 1520 to 1550’, second part, ‘State of Dramatic Representation in Italy—Spain and Portugal—France—Germany—England’. This is how the various national chapters begin: ‘We have already seen the beginnings of the Italian comedy, founded in its style, and frequently in its subjects, upon Plautus . . .’; ‘Meantime, a people very celebrated in dramatic literature was forming its national theatre. A few attempts were made in Spain . . .’; ‘The Portuguese Gil Vicente may perhaps compete with Torres Naharro for the honour of leading the dramatists of the peninsula . . .’; ‘We have no record of any original dramatic composition belonging to this age in France, with the exception of mysteries and moralities . . .’; ‘In Germany, meantime, the pride of the meister-singers, Hans Sachs, was alone sufficient to pour forth a plenteous stream for the stage . . .’; ‘The mysteries founded upon scriptural or legendary histories . . . continued to amuse the English public . . .’ (Introduction, pp. 601–8). The connection between national spaces is established through the annalistic convention of the ‘meantime’; temporal simultaneity, here, implies no structural interaction.
20 Leibniz’s passage is drawn from a 1697 letter, reported by Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, Notre Dame 1977, pp. xxiv–xxv.
21 Paul Van Tieghem, Histoire littéraire de l’Europe et de l’Amérique, Paris 1946, p. 67.
22 Erich Auerbach, ‘Epilegomena zu Mimesis’, Romanische Forschungen, 1954, pp. 13–14.
23 The latter hypothesis, quite dear to the writer of these pages, will have to wait for another occasion. In a discussion of the origins of the novel, however, the presence of two Dutchmen is far from casual. The novel’s main topic—the bourgeois private sphere—takes its definitive form in seventeenth-century Holland, which is also, for over a century, the economic centre of the world. It would be perfectly logical, then, if the novel were to originate in Holland—except that, as we know, this was not in the least the case. And why not? Perhaps, precisely because the visual representation of the everyday had been so successful.
