Introduction

Literature and the Idea of Europe

TIMOTHY J. REISS is pro-fessor of comparative literature and chair of the comparative literature department at New York University. His most re-cent books are The Uncer-tainty of Analysis (Cornell UP, 1988) and The Meaning of Literature (Cornell UP, 1992). He is at work on a sequel to the second of these, as well as on several other volumes: one on the sixteenth-century de-bates about meaning and method, another on Racine and political thought, and a third on the place of Des-cartes's work in the social and political controversies of the time.

IN HIS 1983 Harvard commencement address, Carlos Fuentes

spoke of the North American threat to and incomprehension of varieties of cultures and politics in Latin America and eloquently

stressed the need for an imagination and memory that would enable such varieties to live, even within a single vast network of cultural relations. The various cultures would form a pluralistic area of ex-change, retaining and surpassing local identities—creating a polyph-ony, not a monotone. Fuentes was merely adopting, he said, Milan Kundera’s “plea for ‘the small cultures’ from the wounded heart of Central Europe” (Myself2\4). The practices that provoke such pleas are what this European issue of PMLA set out to discuss—not, of course, the practices that constitute the military and economic threat the United States poses to Latin America but those social and eco-nomic ones that might create a European hegemonic “system” of the arts, communications, and culture.

Fuentes surely found his model in the more vehement speech AimeCesaire made thirty years earlier in denouncing colonial outrages to an august European chamber. Cesaire, too, protested that societies and cultures need one another and argued that a society incapable of cross-cultural understanding was itself doomed. The ignorant or willful denial of cultural diversity, Fuentes repeated, “is... a prelude to death.” Like Cesaire, he saw the potential for a more generous relationship in an exchange of memory and imagination that would enable cultures to “complete” one another (199, 214). Cultural in-tervention and political colonization create similar blindnesses, con-cealing inequalities, covering contradictions, and legitimizing savage immoralities. To avoid these evils, imagination and memory are essential.

Yet the contemporary American culture is one of forgetfulness, one that almost takes pride in its lack of interest in other cultures, one that finds the effort truly to imagine and sympathetically to iden-tify with cultural differences not only wholly unnecessary but worthy

of scorn and even, in some circles, of vilification. This lack, moreover, echoes internal violences of many sorts, as it does external interven-tionism. And it is not altogether different in kind from the potential perils of some centralizing cultural policy (even more, of some cor-responding authority) within Europe. Addressing this issue, Derrida writes of the “archaeoteleological program of all European discourse about Europe,” a program “ordered most often by the man in charge,” women being excluded from this usually militaristic process.1

“The idea of Europe” suggests a view of the Continent from an American perspective, and many of the early proposals for this special topic seemed to show something of the lack of imagination and sym-pathy that characterizes the United States today. My concern may be put in context by citing a letter I wrote two years ago to the MLA editorial staff:

Maybe American academics working in the literary humanities have little sense of Europe as a real place (not simply an abstraction “peopled” by a few authors), as a living cultural and political milieu confronting issues whose impact on literature, in any sense, will be wholly transformative. They affect circulation, translation, and cultural creation. They involve authors having to adjust to new political and other realities or having to rethink exile. They involve critics—and politicians—having to reevaluate works of one-time protest and their “literary” meaning (what of the ap-palling implications of what government and media in the new Germany are doing, for example, to Christa Wolf?). They mean taking literatures over previous boundaries (the growth of a literary translation industry in Belgium and the Netherlands, for instance).

Such disembodiment and abstraction, a displacement of writing into some ethereal realm of reified thought, are just what makes it possible to change the concrete realities of everyday struggles and emotions, uglinesses and beauties, into the detached themes of post-modern debate. More gravely, these processes make it possible to turn savageries of intervention into benefits of civilization. They echo the idealist “reification” James Buzard notes in his essay on nine-teenth-century travel writing: the type of thinking that enabled Hazlitt to oppose the “splendid vision” of Paris to London’s everyday reality and Henry James to hang on to some idea of the “unity of‘Europe.’ ” The abstract ideal satisfied a need to escape the familiar. The notions composing an identity of, or as, “other” were easily transferred to “understanding” China (Rolf J. Goebel) or Africa (Brian W. Shaffer). Talking of Europe, Derrida uses “we” as a “first axiom” to indicate how the concept “Europe” is taken as—creates, even—a whole, a single identity. His axiom is, however, an ironic one whose status is more than precarious. It marks not only the difficult threshold of identity and diversity but, again, the need for memory and imagi-nation. In turn these demand some focus and experience of time and place—and knowledge enough of particular instances of difference

and otherness to permit a general understanding of what it may mean “to adopt for a while [other] habits of thought,” as Timothy Mo puts it (105).

For one gets a sense of others’ histories, as well as of one’s own, only by dwelling in them, a feeling for others’ being and culture only by knowing what it is to inhabit different customs and places. Mar-guerite Yourcenar writes:

The study of ancient literatures, philology, archeology is the passport to these travels, but displacement in time is often never better achieved than by displacement in space. Such and such a place, new for us, but of great antiquity, disorients us enough to engage us in a twofold adventure: whoever goes down the underground staircase of Mycenae plunges into the well of centuries. (Pelerin 174)

For one cannot know Jane Austen without spending some time in the small country towns and villages of southern England, any more than one can grasp John Constable’s treatment of light without having stood in the soft but intense glowing luminosity of a late autumn afternoon in the English countryside, between the lifting of three o’clock clouds and the deepening of dusk. Yet it is also necessary to have some sense of the people in those places if one is to understand, say, George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke or Thomas Gainsborough’s squires, field workers, and cottagers.

Sitting in the bistros of Paris, absorbing the distinctive architecture, the varieties of human space, the gestures of human intercourse, one may get some real sense of Le sursis, Memoires d’utte jeune file rangee, or Les gommes. It is important to know the human difference of living in the “barren hills” of Spain, the “mellow light of Athens,” or the “desolate dunes cut by stiff grasses” of the Low Countries, “forlorn places” of “overcast sky and muddy rivers channelling their way through a land without form or visible spark, where no god has yet shaped the clay” (Yourcenar, Memoirs 30, 38, 135). Writing does not dwell in a disembodied arena where there is no place for light and shadow, croissants and gouda, political dirt and concrete cultural dissension, gray ghosts of low clouds over polders, the gloom of broken San Sebastian bullfights, and the horror of half-wit soccer battles. It feeds on and lives in what Yourcenar calls “the frightful smell of humanity,” caught up in “life itself, with its chaos of formless and violent occurrence” (Sous benefice 15).

Without a physical sense of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, readers will miss the golden bright blues, the dry warmth, the mildly frenzied calm, the flowing mixture of very different cultures that per-meate C. P. Cavafy’s poetry. They will lose the flavor of his writing if they lack a feel not only for Greece’s geography and its atomization throughout the end of the Mediterranean but also for its sharp light and demanding ruggedness—and for the people who live there. And

they will lose all if they have no sense of how the land, light, and people are saturated in history, there where “Homeric shades sway and break in the archaic light,” as Cees Nooteboom writes of a more westerly Mediterranean spot: a landscape that “reeks of gods and history” (Knight 13, 30). Cavafy speaks this landscape, its inhabitants, its history. Essential to his modernity is how deeply he has drunk of “the inexhaustible substance of the past,” every poem becoming “un poeme memorial,” a poem of memory, about memory, in memoriam, as Yourcenar says (Sous benefice 155, 185).

I am not saying that it is impossible to know the products of any culture one has not experienced or cannot experience (because, for example, it is already centuries distant). I do contend that the un-familiar is beyond the reach of those who have not had that experience of difference, of alternative, which makes imagination possible. Worse, when the lack of such experience expunges the very possibility of such imagination, those deprived have no sense of a need and thus no hope for future comprehension. Experience does not, then, merely breed imagination. It breeds, too, an awareness of the imaginative effort one needs to make to understand the actuality of different cul-tural spaces, forms, and beings. Only those who have begun to grasp the complexity of context and to recognize that cultural artifacts live within a particular contextual complexity may be able, like Your- cenar’s Hadrian, to think themselves into another’s culture, society, and mind (Memoirs 141). I do not mean, of course, that one person will have the same experience as another or that experience is nec-essarily singular. On the contrary, as the essays in this collection make clear, experience, imagination, and memory are essential to one another, and particular experiences enable imagination, focus memory, and create the capacity to grapple with difference.

The means and effort of cross-cultural understanding are not only the current challenge here, in the United States. Indeed, though I started with some reminders of North American circumstances, that was partly to create a horizon of possible analogy. For the same ques-tion confronts any united European future—provided that, at least where cultural matters are at issue, any such future is possible, de-sirable, or foreseeable. The idea of a single Europe is an old one, but its history is so ambiguous that (even if one can set aside the now familiar bogey of Eurocentrism) any discussion of its cultural identity may be so flawed as to make the basic questions about it nugatory: How might the lowering of national barriers affect literature and cul-tural life and, perhaps especially, what role might literature and the other arts play in a fundamental restructuring of what initially will be economic order and political organization? What might “Europe” be within the broader sociopolitical and cultural boundaries implied? What might “Europe” mean for present national literatures faced with the possible growth of politically or commercially centralized ways of disseminating culture? Might this development lead, as some

fear, to a homogenized cultural product akin—as many Europeans, especially in Great Britain, assert—to the American variety?

So confronted, current national literatures, if I may call them that, might feel threatened, their writers making increasing efforts to be representative of their nation or region, as Roger Scruton has sug-gested they should be {Arts without Frontiers', plenary session 1, “Culture without Frontiers” 3—5).2 Conversely, the process might be liberating: writers from smaller lands or groups might find that a wide cultural umbrella affords more space for particularizing, a greater freedom: what is implied, for example, by the idea of writing with a view to having one’s work rendered in another language? Questions of nationalism, of cultural centralism, of translation, and others arise. What is suggested by Franz Stummann’s statement (in 1990) that the European Economic Community’s “translation fund only goes into nine languages, which are the languages of the nation states which form the European Community” {AF: S5, “The Role of the Regions in Europe” 12)? They are not even that, if I add rightly: Danish, Dutch (Flemish), English, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish make ten. Even so, the exclusion of Basque, Breton, Catalan, Gaelic, Provencal, Sardinian, and Welsh indicates, at the least, an insensitive view of what it means to read a text and of what language means to culture.

These worries and questions are caught up in older ambiguities beneath the European idea. On the one hand, a plea like Scruton’s reminds us how much European aesthetic culture is bound up with internal violence and memories of war: from Don Quijote and its recall of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain to the path left by the Thirty Years’ War; from Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and Courage through Schiller’s Wallenstein to Doblin’s novel of the same name, to Brecht’s Mother Courage, and to the similar tracks of the Dutch Revolt; from Vondel’s tragedies to de Coster’s Tyl Ulenspiegl, to the no less powerful marks left by the French Revolution and Napoleonic adventurism; from Beethoven, Hegel, and Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Hardy, and even Forester’s popular tales of his Nelsonian hero, Hornblower. And this progression leaves aside accounts of twentieth-century hostilities, from Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Yourcenar’s Denier du reve or Coup de grace, Mal- raux’s L’espoir, Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, and so many others, to Claus’s Sorrow of Belgium, Minco’s Bitter Herbs, and Grass’s Tin Drum, the last recalling both the Thirty Years’ War through Doblin’s Wallenstein and the Dutch Revolt in its picaresque recapturing of Tyl Ulenspiegl (Grass 4, 10). Gian-Paolo Biasin’s essay on Calvino suggests, in fact, that such violence has come to imbue every level of personal, social, and cultural relations. On the other hand, much of European culture is caught up as well in imperialism and colonialism, matters that have received far more theoretical attention in recent years than have the internal conflicts.

Both associations—with imperialism and with internal violence— show how the very idea of Europe falls ambiguously between the exclusive and the inclusive, how “Europe” has always foundered over its identity and its relations with others. In 1989, Fuentes rightly adjusted his American plea to the nascent European case: “[D]oes Europe not hide her undesirables too easily from sight?” Is there not in Europe something of “a feeling of lassitude, of spiritual sloth . . . a crisis of reason, a crisis of goals, a crisis of justice and a circular triumph of production and consumption” that not only explains Thatcher, Kohl, and Mitterand’s mutation but calls for a return to national and regional cultures? Fuentes argues that Europe cannot afford to ignore its “other face.” For him, this face is “Ibero-America . . . whose colours are also Amerindian and African” and which is as close in spirit as “Europe beyond the Danube is [as] a physical fact” (“Europe’s”). Here Fuentes is warning against the old bugbear of Festung Europa, which operates inwardly by violence and exclu-sion, as well as outwardly. I return to it below.

Europeans themselves have to broaden that face, for many of the facets composing it are already there—a fact noted with considerable anger by every one of the participants in a seminar on cultural di-versity at the 1990 Glasgow conference on the consequences of Eu-ropean union. Yasmin Alibhai asserted that “16 million non-white Europeans who reside in Europe” are largely left out as members of “Europe” and as present or future beneficiaries of its largesse (AF\ S6, “Cultural Diversity” 3). Eduard Delgado, a Catalan, cited “a contemporary dance group that has members from six different countries [and] an exhibition of paintings by a Dutch artist living in Majorca, with an Indian wife who is influencing his work very much” (AF: S5, “The Role of the Regions” 8). A tale David Daiches told on the same occasion is not inapposite here: two small “dark-skinned children” he had seen playing near Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye “were talking to each other in Gaelic. Then they went into the shop and spoke to their parents in what I think was Urdu. These seemed to be their two languages. Will they,” he asked, “belong to the new Europe, and if so, how?” (AF: PSI, “Culture without Frontiers” 18). If not, there is surely a problem, as all these comments imply. Can the new Europe avoid it? The history of the idea does not raise optimism.

It is a history fraught with conflict over national and international identity, individualism and community, sovereignty and collectivity. Here I must set limits on its mining. There is no need to go back to the idea of Europe that existed in the Christian and Latin Middle Ages: this was quite different from any such idea or reality that could now—or will—exist. After that idea had collapsed, sometime between the onset of the Hundred Years’ War in the north and the heyday of humanism in the south, it was not replaced by anything comparable for centuries. One can certainly not find any such new idea in 1492,

however attractive that date may be to the view from America. On the contrary, if 1492 stands for anything at all, it emphasizes the economic and political interests of individual nations. Columbus’s voyage had, after all, been authorized as a speculative venture whose achievements, if any, would benefit the Catholic monarchs (and through them, perhaps, the particular interests of the church). Spain and subsequent colonial powers may have been European, but they were emphatically not representing—in any sense at all—“Europe.”

Indeed, the earliest secular effort to establish a united Europe, a “Most-Christian Republic,” called for “the union of all the Christian Potentates of Europe” and the reduction of “all the greatest of them to almost equal size of dominion.” The idea seems to have arisen from discussions between Henri IV of France and his chief minister, Sully, aimed at countering a Spanish threat to European peace: the proposal, however, left no doubt that France would head any such federation and would do so to its own benefit.3 A few years later, in a volume entitled Le nouveau Cynee (1623), Emeric Cruce laid out a plan for a “general peace,” suggesting a European assembly to be held in Venice, whither “Monarchs and Sovereign Princes” could send representatives to resolve disputes by diplomacy. Here states would be identified with their princes; indeed, republics—such as Venice itself—could be allowed to vote only to break a deadlock.4 This notion of a supranational assembly, rather than a federation, was much admired by Charles Sorel, who found it feasible (62), and by Gabriel Naude, who considered it mere wishful thinking (69).

In 1692, William Penn set out a slightly more detailed proposal for a European “general diet, estates, or parliament” that would “es-tablish rules ofjustice for sovereign princes to observe to one another,” enabling them to do so in bi- or triennial meetings (7-8). Each sov-ereign nation would have proportional representation, according to “the value of the [sovereign] territory” represented. Penn calls the arrangement “this European league or confederacy” and finds it nec-essary to include “the Turks and Muscovites” (10-13). In its func-tioning and in its relation to its individual members and their areas of sovereign authority, the league would resemble the government of the United Provinces as recounted in William Temple’s book on that subject (21).

Recalling Sully’s earlier idea for “something of the nature of our expedient,” Penn remarks that it was the chief reason for styling Sully’s king “Henry the Great” (21). “This great king’s example,” he concludes, “tells us it is fit to be done; and Sir William Temple’s history shows us by a surpassing instance that it may be done; and Europe, by her incomparable miseries, makes it necessary to be done” (22). The “miseries” refers to the wars of the Augsburg League against France and its allies consequent on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, soon to be followed by the wars of the Spanish Succession, which seven years later would provoke Archbishop Fenelon to accuse

Louis XIV of having made France into nothing but a hospital filled only with the dead and the dying. They would also provoke an em-inent Colbertian (if I may so call him), the abbe Castel de Saint- Pierre, to write both his Discours sur la polysynodie (1719), which advocates an almost republican assembly for France, and his Projet de paixperpetuelle (1713), which suggests an analogous body at some not very specific international level. Rousseau considered these works fundamental to his own political thinking.

From Sully and Cruce to Penn and Saint-Pierre, from Rousseau to Kant and Bentham, the idea of united European sovereignties became familiar—and always as a means to peace. In no form, how-ever, did it seek to restrain or reduce the sovereignties involved. Each proposal called for some sort of synod, parliament, or diet composed of members who represented individual authorities, just as those au-thorities represented the individual members of the civil societies they governed.5 None of these notions, that is to say, required any change in, or even adjustment to, cultural matters at large or in small. Furthermore, while the proposals may have sprung from European fears and debate, thinkers from Saint-Pierre on conceived such an arrangement not as specifically European but as worldwide—albeit directed from Europe, as Sully’s earlier one had been from France. I return at the last to this further ambiguity.

In 1868, however, a newspaper entitled Les Etats Unis de I’Europe was launched in Geneva. According to La voix de Pouvrier, a Brussels workers’ newspaper housed in the Ghent socialist archive, this pub-lication had an editorial board “composed of members belonging to different nations [and uniquely judged] all social and political facts from a European point of view” (4; my trans.).6 In February 1887, a fly-by-night Brussels socialist newspaper, Le conscrit, printed in its brief pages a long quotation from what it called the “French reac-tionary Boucher de Perthes, some twenty-years dead,” which it found to express “very revolutionary ideas in a paradoxical form”:

Why are there so many nations in Europe—he starts by saying—when there is only one race of men? Our European association, its social contract, its entente cordiale between government and government or people and people, indeed its national representational organism where there is one, or its camarilla where there is not, resembles nothing so much as a gang of curs fighting before a bowl of stew, while meanwhile some great mastiff eats it, turning occasionally to nip the curs, encouraging them the better to bite one another.

I am reminded of Fuentes’s plea and the ambiguities mentioned ear-lier: of struggling sovereignties, of constituting identity, of the relation between European cultures and war and between them and what and whom they exclude. Above I cite the sentiments of some of the non-white participants at the Glasgow congress, and now I recall another

congress, dedicated to “l’avenir de l’esprit europeen” and held in Paris under the auspices of the League of Nations in October 1933.

Addressing this congress, Paul Valery belittled any notion that “Europe” involved political issues and concerns (far less economic ones), emphasizing, rather, some continuously unbroken “esprit” (L’avenir 9-10). In the speech that followed, however, Hermann von Keyserling revealed the danger in such views, especially at that time. He exulted over “telluric” values, claiming to counter Valery’s pes-simistic view of a loss of the European spirit. He asserted the value of courage and faith and argued that the “European spirit,” charac-terized by “depth,” by “discrimination and practicality,” and by an interest in actuality (in contrast, for instance, to the “Oriental mind”), could lead these revolutionary telluric forces back into present history and so “reconstruct the world.” This strength, he averred, is the priv-ilege of the European “esprit,” all others being “psychologically and morally weak,” at once inferior and suffering from a justified infe-riority complex, passive and suggestible (L’avenir 27-28). I need not continue. Like it or not, this dark side is, I have been implying, in-herent in the idea of Europe: always and ever trammeled in war and memories of war.

This opposition is found in the tension Goebel examines between Kafka’s “Great Wall of China” and Dittmar’s travelogue. Festung Europa survives in Dittmar’s exaltation of “Western superiority,” and though Kafka’s uncertainties attack its ideology, its legacy remains in Kafka’s sense that China denies progress in favor of an essentially unchanging (and thus non-European) condition. Festung Europa dwells too in Spencer’s militant-versus-industrial modeling of societies and in Conrad’s combining of the two motifs, as Shaffer shows. But while Conrad assimilates one to the other and refuses to regard progress as beneficent, he nonetheless sees Kurtz’s tribe as “militant,” reinstating the very values he ostensibly rejects. With whatever hes-itancy, Calvino’s work, too—as Biasin explores it—shows the Eu-ropean tourist as ingesting other cultures—a pretty slant on possessive individualism. Palomar may doubt “the rights man has attributed to himself, of possession, division, and consumption without residue of the terrestrial continents and of the loins of the animal body” (77), and Under the Jaguar Sun may suggest an alteration in this relation-ship, such that cultures mingle equally, but the mark of imposition remains that of a “cruel nightmare,” as Paz puts it.

The nightmare may become a more joyous vision in Buzard’s de-piction of nineteenth-century travelers, and it is certainly more benign in its consequences, but it expresses the same sense of militant over-sight. The danger of ideas such as Kayserling’s is what Derrida has in mind when he speaks of the “sinister” program of a “New Europe” and warns against returning to an earlier European “history and. . . geography.” In an account of traveling down the Danube, Claudio Magris captures this view as an age-long battle between overbearing

“Germanism” and a more generous Central European universalism (31). Yourcenar opposes Danubian legions that “functioned with the precision of newly greased military machines” to “the sleepy garri-sons” of Spain {Memoirs 46). The Europe of which I write here is sensitive to the issue in similar terms.

“I remember practically nothing,” says Nooteboom, “about my first five years as a Dutchman, and personally, I think this is due to the tremendous shock with which, on the 10th of May 1940, at the age of six, I was suddenly dubbed a European with the arrival of the German army.” And, he goes on to tell his Berlin audience, this is “not a joke either” (“Abduction” 92).7 The idea was basic to the spread of the Reich. In his best-selling novel of Belgian identity and unease, Hugo Claus faces off two drunken Flemish fascists:

“Europe, Europe, there’s no such thing!” said Mamix de Puydt. “Mamix,” said Papa . . . “Mamix, you’re far gone!” “Staf Seynaeve, Europe always has been and always will be a pile of little countries thrown together hig- geldy-piggeldy which’ll always fight tooth and nail for their own national specialities, for their spaghetti, for their Pale-Ale, for their Goethe.” “And yet in the minds of many people a Great Europe is a reality,” said a teacher.

Of course, answers de Puydt, but that was in times long past. Now it may be equated with every other “piddling obsession with making everything great! Great Ghent, Great Antwerp, Great Netherlands, Great DietslandT Soon, however, Seynaeve consoles a Flemish League soldier returned from the Russian front by telling him that he’s been working his “balls off for a united Europe and for history over there” (342, 347).

The myth’s end bespeaks a fragmenting of identity, one’s own and, here, that of the Belgian nation itself. The terrible loss of identity that accompanies an atrocious excision of the past is what Marga Minco addresses in her novels about the wartime experience of Jews in the Netherlands: “I’d had the feeling that I’d forgotten to do something, that I still had to go somewhere. For some reason, I couldn’t remember what it was” {Empty House 142). Cut off from a past that lies on the other side of a nightmare, her people endlessly seek their own and others’ identity, without which no relationship and no future are possible: the house remains “completely empty” (77). To live in the present and have hope toward a future, one needs a past and a surety of place. Without a language beyond that “stammering of a gravely wounded person who is being reeducated,” as Yourcenar wrote in 1943 {Pelerin 171), Minco’s people are on one side of a bridge of transparent ice cut off from the past, unable to cross back {The Glass Bridge), meaninglessly and disastrously repeating their lives (like Frieda Borgstein in The Fall or Yona in An Empty House).

Similarly, Andre Steenkamp in Nooteboom’s 1963 novel The Knight Has Died suffers from “an emptiness that continues to pour

into him” (54). The emptiness echoes an utter vacuity of life, as it does for Claus and Minco. During a farcical drunken pilgrimage on Menorca, one of Steenkamp’s companions jokes about a sobbing Englishman: “ ‘England is crying. A fine mess. What is the world coming to? Russia number one in space, America slowly rotting away in its own juice, and England crying in a taxi to San Carlos.’ Ele points out of the window and shouts, ‘Europe! Europe!’ ” (35). More usually, for Nooteboom, loss and fragmentation rouse optimism. The past may be recaptured for the needs of the future; destroyed places may be rebuilt in full awareness of needs created by past catastrophe.

In the Dutch Mountains is almost an allegory of immersing a coun-try in a new Europe, indeed, of losing it there. Nooteboom stretches out an imaginary Holland from Maastricht (a town with now wholly new resonances) and Limburg “into a corridor reaching far across the Alps into Slovenia, after which the Netherlands extended across the entire Balkan region to the Greek border,” as the author describes the country in his Berlin talk (93). Not by chance does the first part of this corridor correspond closely to the “Spanish Road,” which was massively important to the progress of the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years’ War.

The narrator is a Dutch-speaking Spaniard, a surveyor of roads, and in the novel the differences of language and speaking (constantly recurring matter that lends itself beautifully to a work made for trans-lation) are absorbed in travel, in “[c]amino, carretera, way, street, road. It has always intrigued me that in Dutch the word weg, way, also means away, absent. In Spanish el camino is not only the road but also the journey. Now a journey is by definition also the absence from the place you have set out from.” Beginning with his first novel, Philip and the Others, Nooteboom’s work reflects his fascination with roads and wayfaring: “A road. I now know what a road is, because I have seen many of them, bathed in red and pink by a first and last sun, tapering to an end at a horizon embraced by rain, crumbling and cracking and covered in choking dust that whirls around me, wayfarer, and creeps into my pores” {Philip 65-66). Roads allow you, he deftly puts it, to go “walking through names” (68).

Both Nooteboom and the narrator of In the Dutch Mountains, Alfonso Tiburon de Mendoza, insist that this novel is a fairy tale and that fairy tales, unlike myths, need translating. Fairy tales, this one especially, are wrung through with the difficulty of passing from one language to another, fragmented, here, into hard but fragile glass shards (the abducting Snow Queen who breaks up the initial story speaks a language that is unintelligible until one is elsewhere and someone else—her herefodor, in the narrator’s invented term [67]). And yet only speaking can repair the fragments—at least in fairy tales, where the possibility of telling remains still a hope of cultural community, as borders dissolve and as Tiburon meets his own Snow Queen from the North, a blue-eyed Dutch woman on the road to

Zaragoza (95). The book may be about reading from one language to another (118), but it is also about the community of cultures: Plato, Spinoza, Hans Christian Andersen, Kundera, Eugenio d’Ors.

Nooteboom constructs a culture—of Europe?—from the fragments of various national cultures. Maps fascinate him: indeed, in some sense an ancient map of Eastern Europe provides the creative motor for his Song of Truth and Semblance (11). Perhaps more to the point, Philip and the Others explores a European journey, as the narrator pursues “a girl with a Chinese face” who is in fact half Laotian and half French (66, 32). In the Dutch Mountains gives readers bonds with “Isfahan” and “Peking” (32). The protagonist of Rituals goes further, learning on the one hand to feel himself almost physically into a European Renaissance culture and on the other to dwell with the quite other meanings of Japanese culture, with the Japan of the Raku potters, of the artist Utamaro, of Kawabata and Okakura. His chief teacher in this venture has learned the art of Zen from “a South American Jew with a dash of Red Indian blood in him” (119; the previous references are chiefly from 95, 99-101, 103-06, 132-41).

With this phrase we return to Fuentes’s “Ibero-America,” with its “Amerindian and African colors.” Indeed, Nooteboom’s efforts to construct a whole from fragments recall precisely Fuentes’s concern with preserving diversity in unity, as well as my many earlier questions about the cultural effects of a consolidated Europe and literature’s role within it. The contemporary idea of Europe is, I think, quite different from its predecessors. It is affirmative in ways the concept has not been since the Middle Ages. The affirmation is, of course, based no longer on a common religion and language but, rather, on common economic and political interests. More important, it is founded on a claim about a shared history and culture that can make an altogether wider union of the kind Cesaire yearned for. It can enable not just political and economic union, federation even, but the forging of a European culture that brings together both the similar and the disparate elements of hitherto distinct national and regional cultures—yet without, as the first Liber put it, substituting “for the old cultural nationalisms, which are far from having had their day, a narrow form of Eurocentrism” (2).8

The most typical representative of this affirmative idea may well be Yourcenar’s Hadrian. Born in Spain, educated in Athens, trained in campaigns from Asia and Syria to the mouth of the Rhine and from the lower Danube to Britain, the Roman emperor is imbued with a Greek culture that “invented a definition of method, a system of politics, and a theory of beauty” (74) and that has “its treasures of experience already behind it” (35). Hadrian, furthermore, is among the first foreign-born Roman emperors, heading diverse peoples who will accept many more (Yourcenar, Sous benefice 22). An Andalusian by birth, he is from one of the frontiers of a Europe with whose others, in the east and north, he is deeply familiar. Andalusia, writes

Yourcenar elsewhere, is one plate of a scale whose other is Asia Minor and Thrace and whose fulcrum is Rome, land of poets past and pres- ent (Temps 167, 179). In his profound respect for and understanding of other cultures, Hadrian already exhibits the generosity of soul that Nooteboom’s people long for.

But Hadrian’s past, with its Grecian glory and its Andalusian po-etry, carries another note for the present. The violent centuries of Rome may be traced, Yourcenar suggests, past the chaos told in the Augustan History, through deeds of medieval popes and emperors down to recent times, with “Hitler waging his last battles in Sicily or at Beneventum like a medieval Germanic Roman Emperor, or Mus-solini killed in full flight and hung by his feet in a Milan garage; dying in the twentieth century the death of a third-century emperor” (Sous benefice 25-26). Memoirs of Hadrian captures a depth of history and a breadth of place essential to the imagination and memory of Europe.

On 29 June 1973, Gunter Grass made an impassioned plea for the artist’s freedom of expression, emphasizing—like Yourcenar’s Ha-drian—the obligation to use such freedom for political ends. In doing so, he referred especially to post-1968 occupied Czechoslovakia and to the then junta-ruled Greece. Delivering this address in Florence to “the Council of Europe and its Commission for Culture and Ed-ucation,” Grass spoke as a German writer displaced from his native city of Danzig, now Polish Gdansk. The situation was almost em-blematic, even then (nearly a decade before that city became the cradle of Solidarity’s uprising). As he noted, “[T]he artists of all Eu-ropean countries are placed willy-nilly in political contexts” (127). Yourcenar’s, Minco’s, and Nooteboom’s explorations are inevita-bly—and knowingly—saturated with political implications, quite aside from their ethical claims and their aesthetic virtues.

Six years before he became president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel also addressed the issue, giving the same importance to place and person as I do at the outset of this essay and maintaining, with writers like Fuentes and Nooteboom, that the artist’s essentially po-litical role should be beyond the often “confused categories” of ideologies:

The question is . . . whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speaking, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral and dignified human I, responsible for ourself because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of [our] banal, prosperous private life ... for the sake of that which gives life meaning. (149-50)

This way of putting the matter is appropriate to a European context of Enlightenment, Cartesianism, national wars, and divers intermit-tent tyrannies, as it might not be where the idea and practice of individualism have had no tradition and been of no consequence. But like Nooteboom and many others, Havel emphasizes that the individual is placed in community and that community is first in ethical obligation. If one understands that rightly, it becomes easier to “understand the totalitarian systems for what they ultimately are— a convex mirror of all modern civilization and a harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of that civilization’s self-understanding” (145). Neither community, as some kind of party-led mechanism, nor individualism, as some foundational absolute, can stand alone. Their interplay may be sensed first in aesthetic culture.9 This culture certainly teaches that no future can ignore the past with impunity, as Yourcenar observes in a scathing 1940 review of Anne Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi Wave of the Future {Pelerin 55-62). It is also aesthetic culture that opens the pores of locality.

With the United States on one side and the old Soviet Union on another, Europe saw itself for two-thirds of this century in self-pro-tective terms: on the one hand, against more war (the League of Nations and the United Nations were products of this thinking); on the other, against the loss of national colonies. And while such eco-nomic and political cares led to a distinctly reactive concept of Europe, in recent decades the sense of a shared history and a common culture would seem to have produced a more positive idea. But this culture confronts issues having little or nothing to do with any simply Eu-ropean situation per se—for example, the pressures exerted on lan-guages by the globalization of means and modes of communication, the tendencies toward overbearing cultural artifacts and processes coming both from these pressures and from multinational economic ones, and the potential homogenization due to such forces. Specific— at least potentially—to Europe, apart from long-standing cultural competition, is the possibly abrupt centralization of economic re-sources, of marketing, and finally, perhaps, of political authority and cultural policy. These eventualities are charged with memories of a darker Europeanism. But the answer, surely, is not Scruton’s and others’ return to nations and regions, to the conflicted and divided enclaves whence the darkness has always come. Rather, it is to place senses and feelings of nations and regions on a cultural weg and camino overleaping (while including) Europe, to make a field of re-lations that incorporates its identity, while denying such identity any singular accumulation of properties. It is the answer of Ishiguro and Mo, of Nooteboom and Yourcenar—writers who foster a spirit that counters the historical and ever-present dark side of economic and political forces.10

Notes'What is one to make of the absence of essays by or about women in this European

collection (some were submitted)? Or of the common theme, in divers variants, of almost all the fifty or so essays considered: the way that Europeans see others or that others see Europe? Little of Europe, much of others. The holes represented by this response too readily reflect such familiar categories as self/other, dominance/subjugation, and male/female to be other than deeply dismaying—however simplistic that superficial association may be.

21 am obliged to give full reference for these texts because—while they are, or were, all available from the Arts Council of Great Britain—they are not grouped together but arranged by individual seminars and plenary sessions (under the general title Arts without Frontiers) and paginated separately. In subsequent documentation the title is abbreviated AF, seminar to S, and plenary session to PS.

’Sully 2: 386. See also 402, 407, 439, 445-48. Sully dates these texts from late 1605 to early 1606.

4According to Huizinga (341), Hugo Grotius’s De lure Belli et Pads is also a plea for a community of nations united in some pax Christiana.

5An exception may be a pamphlet produced by Saint-Simon for the September 1814 opening of the Vienna Congress: De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne ou de la necessite et des moyens de rassembler les peuples de I’Europe en un seul corps politique (Voyenne 115-22).

6On 31 August 1884, the same newspaper praised Lucien Pemjean’s internationalist Plus de frontieres (Paris, 1884). The Etats Unis de I’Europe was founded by Charles Lemmonier, a Saint-Simonian who published a book with the newspaper’s title in 1872. By 1880, the paper claimed to follow Proudhonist federalist views (Voyenne 120, 144). Workers not unusually spoke of their “association europeenne” during the First and Second Internationals. Thatcher’s modern-day fears of what she and her Tory companions call a “socialist Europe” doubtless refer to some obscurely atavistic memory of this nineteenth-century history.

’The text is a translation of the lecture Nooteboom gave at a meeting of the Akademie der Kiinste in Berlin when he received the literature prize of the City of Berlin.

‘Liber is a European literary review that was included monthly, in the appropriate languages, in the cultural supplements of Frankfurter Allgemeine, L’indice, Le monde. El pais, and TLS.

’Does this interplay reflect the “third way” that seems yet to be discovered? Perhaps so; and it may be that its possibility has first to be developed as a sensibility, as a way of understanding and interacting, before its political terms can be developed. Ralph Dahrendorf denies that the idea is useful, contending that no one could conceive what such a third way might be in concrete terms (save as a false image of “Sweden”). Therefore, writing at a time when the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe were showing the apparent bankruptcy of Soviet communism, but before the Soviet Union itself broke up, he argues for adopting “a road to freedom” (the Hayekian overtones are intentional) based on nation-states and local and global economic enterprise.

IOI thank Patricia J. Penn Hilden for her comments on an earlier version of this text. I am grateful to her for acquainting me with many of the Low Countries’ writers on whom I draw.

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