EUROPEAN LITERATURE

‘When we assume that a literature exists we assume a great deal’, wrote T. S. Eliot in a 1919 review of a
history of Scottish literature for The Athenaeum, and proceeded to lay the ground rules for a line of
argumentation that led him to answer the question posed by his title, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’
in the negative: We do not suppose merely a ‘history’, for there might be a history of Tamil literature;
but a part of History, which for us is the history of Europe. We suppose not merely a corpus of writings
in one language, but writings and writers between whom there is a tradition; a greater, finer, more
positive, more comprehensive mind than the mind of any period.

For Eliot here, as in much of his writing on culture and the concept of tradition central to his vision,
literatures compete for recognition, a sense of broader value or temporal continuity, as well as, quite
literally, for (and in) actual space:It is not always recognized how fierce and fatal is the struggle for
existence between literatures. A powerful literature, with a powerful capital, tends to attract and absorb
all the drifting shreds of force about it. A provincial capital is the matter of a moment; it depends on the
continuous supply of important men; the instant this supply falls off, the metropolis, even if suffering
from a like poverty, gains the ascendant. And then the important men turn to the metropolis.
The fact that this stridently ideological view was expounded by a North American aspiring cultural
arbiter seeking his roots in Europe is perhaps less ironic than may seem at first glance. Not unlike
religious converts – and Eliot was soon to become a convert to the Anglican Church (in 1926), as well as
a naturalized British subject (in 1927) – whose conscious choices are more staunchly defended, a
‘Europeanized modern’ perhaps even more than a mere modern European, would pronounce on the
fortune of literatures in Europe. Eliot’s advocacy of the centralizing powers of ‘capitals of civilization’,
embodied in the mobilization of ‘important men’ in the service of (capitalized) ‘History’, as coterminous
with the history of Europe, is a paradigmatic example of the centripetal tendency which we associate
with Eurocentric, metropolitan modernism. ‘Everything has come to Europe, and everything has come
out of it’, claimed the French writer Paul Valéry in a similar vein and in the pages of the same journal
earlier that year, reflecting on the ‘intellectual crisis’ threatening Europe with a ‘diminutio capitis’
(‘diminution of capital’). As he put it in a previous ‘letter from France’, again in The Athenaeum, ‘We
civilizations now know that we are mortal’, echoing contemporary concerns about culture in the wake of
the First World War, but also attributing the pre-war ‘disorder of our mental Europe’ to a typically
modern ‘free co-existence in all cultivated minds of the most heterogeneous ideas’ . By 1914, Valéry
argued, Europe had arrived ‘at the limit of this modernism’, and as an ‘intellectual Hamlet’ ‘now looked
upon millions of ghosts’ .
As defensive statements, Eliot’s and Valéry’s reflections bring into focus the contested, perennially
crisis-ridden character of Europe as a literary and cultural space, and the fragility of its borders. Already
in 1906, Joseph Conrad, the francophone Polish émigré who wrote his major works in English, had
commented on ‘the want of a common conservative principle abstract enough to give the impulse,
practical enough to form the rallying point of international action’ in ‘the civilized world’. Debunking
Victor Hugo’s late nineteenth century notion of an ‘illustrious, rich, thoughtful, peaceful’ federalist
nation that ‘would be called Europe in the twentieth century; and in the centuries that follow,
transformed still more, would be called humanity’ (qtd. in Bru 2009: 4–5), Conrad found instead that ‘Il
n’y a plus d’Europe– there is only an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing
economical contests for life and death, and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions’ . Reprising the
motif of moral bankruptcy and the grotesque perversions of human agency in the pursuit of wealth and
power which he explored in tales of colonial ventures gone wrong, such as ‘An Outpost of Progress’
(1897), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Nostromo (1904), Conrad stakes a rather grand claim for Europe’s
moral responsibility for both itself and the world. His vision in the same essay of a ‘universal city’ to be
built as the guarantee of the ‘true peace of the world’ , like Valéry’s concern for the future of the
‘European mind’ , is a political challenge, as well as a matter of how linguistic and literary capital is best
deployed.
The exilic and cosmopolitan migrations of European transnationals such as Conrad and other citizens of
a self-proclaimed ‘world republic of letters’ (Casanova 2004) relied on and effected the intellectual and
linguistic diffusion and heterogeneity that Valéry identified with European modernism, but also created
a momentum for the pursuit of a literary common language intelligible across national and cultural
boundaries. For the exponents of symbolism, the aesthetic movement that declared itself an enemy of
‘teaching, declamation, false sensibility, and objective description’, as Jean Moréas, the Paris-based
Greek poet, argued in the founding ‘Symbolist Manifesto’ (1886), a ‘new vocabulary’ of ‘unpolluted
words’, ‘restored and modernized’, was necessary for the clearing of a new space for language abused
by rhetoric . An international, pan-artistic movement, with the explicit aim of transcending linguistic and
formal boundaries policed by bourgeois taste and the newly expanded (‘mass’) audiences it held in its
thrall, symbolism is often seen as the efflorescence of a deliberately obscure, anti-realist style that
attempted to re-sacralize art, or as Arthur Symons, one of its early promoters, put it, to ‘spiritualise
literature’. In its transcendent and restorative function, language in symbolist poetry and prose works by
suggestion, towards an inner rhythm of evocation and absence; in the words of Stéphane Mallarmé, the
movement’s central figure: Everything will be held as if suspended: the disposition of parts, alternations
and contraries, converging on a total rhythm, which will be the very silence of the poem, in its blank
spaces, as that silence is translated in its own way by every component of the book, suspended in time
and space.
For Mallarmé, ‘speech has only a commercial interest in reality; in literature, allusions are sufficient:
their inherent qualities are extracted, and then embodied in an idea. Song, when it becomes an
unburdened joy, soars heavenward. I call this goal Transposition’ . ‘Transposition’ of speech into song
and ‘translation’ of blank spaces into rhythm herald a new aesthetic articulation that ‘involves the
disappearance of the poet as a speaking subject’, and points towards a transcendent, supraliterary
horizon: ‘For what is the charm of literature if it is not to open the book, and the text itself, to the
volatile scattering of the spirit, whose sole purpose for existence lies within the realm of universal
musicality?’ The claim to ‘universal musicality’, with its Wagnerian undertones, and the creation of ‘a
word, total in itself, new, foreign to language and close to incantation’ , distinguishes symbolism from
the cognate and near contemporaneous aesthetic project of decadence, which, though sharing some of
symbolism’s defamiliarizing gestures, was concerned more with unsettling accepted notions of beauty
and aesthetic pleasure and disrupting the normalized boundary between nature and artifice. The
countercultural effect (at least as perceived by their detractors) of decadent works such as Charles
Baudelaire’s poetic sequence Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À
rebours (Against Nature, 1884) and its reincarnation in Oscar Wilde’s equally scandalous The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1890), and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889), was never fully
matched by the symbolists, at least not in terms of public notoriety, despite the appearance of Mallarmé
alongside Tristan Corbière and Arthur Rimbaud in Paul Verlaine’s anthology of Poètes maudits (Accursed
poets), a ‘rude phalange’ of outcasts, as Verlaine put it . Yet the very identification of a ‘crisis in poetry’,
the debt to Baudelaire’s sign- and sensation-filled cosmic modernity (as the ‘forest of symbols’ through
which Man passes in his ‘Correspondences’, the sonnet from Les Fleurs du mal often invoked by
symbolist writers), as well as the vision of the liberated word, dislocated from the world and open to the
vicissitudes of chance (embodied in Mallarmé’s 1897 poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard [A
Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance]), establishes a vocabulary of rupture and the pursuit of
alternative realities that goes on to become the impetus for many European modernisms.

Importantly too, symbolism explores the literary potential of a radically altered interiority, as in the
‘work of subject deformation’ integral to the ‘symbolic novel’ for Moréas (qtd. in Nicholls 1995: 66), and
deployed in an early use of the interior monologue by Edouard Dujardin in Les Lauriers sont coupés (The
Bays Are Sere, 1888 – one of the prototypes for James Joyce’s later experiments); the ironized, self-
doubting, and masquerading poetic personae of Jules Laforgue; the expansive, excessive ‘vagabundance’
of experience in André Gide’s early writing (qtd. in Nicholls 1995: 74); but perhaps most iconically in
Rimbaud’s figuration of the poet as pathfinder for the unknown through a ‘derangement of all the
senses’ . The revolutionary fervour of the precocious poet, inspired by the Paris Commune of 1871 and
expended in a brief life of exploration and risk-taking at all levels, underscores the few but influential
works: the long poem Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat, 1871), and the prose poem sequences Une
Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873) and Les Illuminations (Illuminations, 1874). Rimbaud’s
conviction that ‘I is someone else’ , and the vision of the ‘fraternal awakening’ of collective energies,
though seemingly paradoxical, resonate with ideas of a classless, universal humanity as well as the
notion of the self as the site of that struggle, or to invoke another key modernist mode, the supreme
experiment. The brevity and incompletion (some would say failure) of the vision, as a set of random,
boundless, and sudden ‘illuminations’ subject to chance rather than causality or rational design, and the
absolute connection of art and life as a simultaneous pursuit and practice of emancipation, are
emblematic for modernist and vanguard experiments to follow: from the Swiss Blaise Cendrars’s
picaresque accounts of actual and fantastic journeys (for instance, in the 1913 poem La prose du
Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France [The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of
France] or the 1926 novel of limit-experiences Moravagine), to surrealism, the project of personal and
‘collective innervation that sought the everyday marvellous and its Rimbaldian images of ‘convulsive
beauty’.
Expansive or fractured selves are of course a staple of European modernisms: as English novelist Virginia
Woolf sought to illustrate in her kaleidoscopic rendition of fluid subjectivities, ‘the true self is neither
this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give
rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves’ ; and on a grand scale
there is the portfolio of selves, or seventy-odd ‘heteronyms’ invented by Portuguese poet, writer, and
translator Fernando Pessoa, whose unfinished, fragmentary lifetime project Livro do Desassossego (The
Book of Disquiet, 1982) is the embodiment of the imaginative life as endless flânerie (wandering).