Europe in Literature

1 Literature and Imaginary of Europe

In the imagination conveyed by literature, Europe’s identity was first developed in a pattern of opposition to other continents, in a relationship of otherness. This is the structure shared by texts as different as the “Coches” chapter in Montaigne’s Essais and the story of Roland’s death in the medieval epic dedicated to him. The well-known originality of Montaigne’s chapter lies in a system of inversion, with Montaigne taking the position of the other. As for the Chanson de Roland, it plays on an opposition of points of view. At first, the Moor’s point of view is central to the narrative: “He was handsome, he was strong […],” “he seized Roland;” “this sword, I will take it to Arabia.” Then, abruptly, the text changes its point of view: “Roland feels his sword being taken from him;” “He strikes him with it on his gemmed helmet, adorned with gold.” This shift represents an exclusion – “You are not one of us, that I know of!” – on which an identity is founded, that of Charlemagne’s Empire. In fact, the imaginary of Europe is associated with three founding moments: the Roman Empire, which is understood as its direct origin, and the two Empires represented by Charlemagne and Charles V.

Epic represents the mythical foundation of an identity. In L’Amour et l’Occident (Love and Occident, 1939), Denis de Rougemont uses myth to found Europe, based on a system of values and an imaginary world that will leave its mark on literature: starting with Tristan and Isolde, he establishes a filiation in the myths of love between Shakespeare, Racine’s Phaedra, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and the German Romantics. And, as Pierre Brunel reminds us, Eros, who represents passion-love, will be saved by Agape, illustrating the love of charity – the Christian form of love – and founding marriage “which no longer contains morality, but love.”^[1]

Alongside the myth of Tristan and Isolde, two other great European myths have undoubtedly played a part in defining a cultural identity: that of Don Juan, like that of Tristan and Isolde, posits the sanctity of marriage and brings Christian values to the fore, where the sacred meets the social order; that of Faustus, which can be understood as a Christian transposition of the myth of Prometheus, raises the problem of forbidden knowledge. This is why Thomas Mann, as he explains in the introduction to his Doktor Faustus, took Nietzsche as his model. Goethe’s main source, apart from Marlowe’s play, was a popular book – a Volksbuch – dating from 1587 and published by Johann Spiess. The anonymous author, a staunch Lutheran, had conceived his character as a caricature of Erasmus. Faustus is both a theologian and a magician, which places both sources of knowledge outside the circle of reason and understanding. Indeed, the historical figure of Faust, who lived between 1480 and 1540, is known to have expressed pride in his ability to restore, through his magic, the lost comedies of Plautus and Terence.

The religious crisis of the 16th century can be observed in the light of the two relationships to knowledge illustrated by the opposition between Luther and Erasmus. Luther’s famous letter to Erasmus on March 28, 1519, and Erasmus’ reply on the 30th illustrate these two irreconcilable positions: between the Lutheran ideal of rational knowledge, and the humanism taught in universities under the control of the Catholic Church. Stefan Zweig is known, in his particular style of biography, for using a man’s life to illustrate an idea. His 1936 biography of Erasmus is based on the opposition, through Erasmus and Luther, between two visions of Europe: that, represented by Erasmus, of an open, borderless humanism, and that, represented by Luther, of nations and the conflicts that divide them. Yet, according to Zweig, it is this second idea of Europe that history has imposed.

Whether in the myths associated with Europe’s values or in its religious upheavals, the question of Christianity, even when challenged, is central to representations of Europe. The opening sentence of Novalis’s essay Christentum oder Europa (Christianity or Europe, 1800) is famous: “It was a beautiful and brilliant time, when Europe was a Christian land.” From Novalis’s perspective, it was Christianity that ensured Europe’s unity and identity. And the break made in the 16th century thus marked a fall for Europe. For the Romantics, the celebration of the medieval model accompanied their idea of Europe, and even Fichte’s nationalist romanticism consisted in rediscovering the European patriotism of the Middle Ages. In his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Discourses to the German Nation), he asserts that Germans “were able to unite the social order established in ancient Europe with true religion.”^[2] Ernst Behler notes that, while in the early writings of the Jena Romantics, the word “Europe” “is not particularly valued,” it “becomes an essential word in the vocabulary of early Romanticism” from 1800 onwards.^[3] And yet, the idea of Europe is essentially constructed through medieval reference.

2 Unity and Belonging: The Europe of the Romantics and the Medieval Model

In her study of Le Moyen Age des romantiques (The Middle Ages of Romanticists), Isabelle Durand-Le Guern clearly shows that, while the medieval period is the preferred setting for many works of the Romantic period, whether in the ballads of Goethe, Scott or Keats, or in the short stories of Nodier, Tieck, Kleist, Brentano, La Motte-Fouqué and many others, it is much less a question of “history” than of “out-of-time.” It is a process of estrangement, of poetic staging, favoring the establishment of the marvelous, and above all close to “the indeterminate epoch of ‘Once upon a time … ’.”^[4] Isabelle Durand-Le Guern points out that Charlemagne, “emperor of a vast land uniting the North and the South,” was of interest “to both the French and the Germans.” She points out that for Michelet, in his Histoire de France (History of France), La Chanson de Roland establishes Charlemagne’s French identity, the traitor being a German, while Uhland, on the contrary, links him to “German historical and legendary heritage.”^[5]

But Charlemagne’s ambivalence is undoubtedly a sign of the deeper unity of North and South: “above all, he represents a unifying figure, that of an emperor of the Christian West, whose vassals come from all horizons of Europe.”^[6] Isabelle Durand-Le Guern cites a few lines from the Légende des siècles (Legend of the Centuries), in which Hugo evokes a wide variety of territories, but the whole of Hernani presents, behind the figure of Charles V, the image of the foundation of European unity through the evocation of Charlemagne: the monologue in Act IV, scene 2, in which Don Carlos, who is about to become Charles V, is locked in Charlemagne’s tomb, symbolizes this foundation, through the meeting of the two Emperors.

The German Romantics’ concept of Europe had obvious literary implications, since their explanation of the birth of Europe combined the history of peoples, languages and literature. For them, it was from the fall of the Roman Empire, the mixing of peoples at the time of the Germanic invasions and the emergence of Christianity that the European identity was born: “the new European civilization,” Schlegel asserts, “was formed from the mixture, at first heterogeneous but gradually becoming intimate, of the peoples of the North with the nations depositing the precious remains of antiquity.”^[7] Its principle, the spirit of chivalry, results from the combination of Christian values and Germanic mores. For Schlegel, the meaning of the word “romantic” is even associated with this history of European civilization. For the southward migration of European populations, which led to the destruction of the Western Roman Empire and a new European configuration, is said to be the origin of modern culture, which he calls Romantic: “For the new dialects resulting from the mixture of Latin with the language of the conquerors have been called Romantic, romance.”^[8] Charles de Villers explains the formation of modern European languages in this way: “Their Tudesque idioms […] gradually mixing with the ancient idioms of the various countries they occupied and with that of the Romans, formed our modern languages.”^[9]

3 Europe’s Heterogeneities

The movement of Germanic populations and the fall of the Roman Empire were, for the German Romantics, the political causes of the transformation of geopolitical space that gave rise to Europe. But the definition of a European identity owes much to Christianity, which led to the creation of a system of values, chivalry, itself associated with the medieval era.

This romantic cliché of a Christian Europe is, for literature, a matter of debate, and The Merchant of Venice (1596) can be read in this light. Centered largely around the character of Shylock, the Jewish usurer, the play is built on an opposition. On the one hand, through the character’s harshness, the whole play plays on the limits of his humanity, right up to the “pound of flesh” that seems to exclude him from it. On the other hand, his long tirade on the humanity of the Jews forms a striking contrast, as if to reintroduce the character into the community. The play thus develops an altogether different model from that of German Romanticism, of an ancient heritage combined with Christian civilization.

The Jewish part of European identity thus presents another image of Europe. The philosopher Rémi Brague reflects on Europe from the angle of “Romanity,” following the example of Hans-Robert Curtius, according to whom “all Europeans, even the Germans inside the Limes, bore the imprint of Rome.”^[10] From this premise, Rémi Brague puts forward this paradox: “The ‘Greek’ and the ‘Jew,’ insofar as they intervene as the two fundamental components of Europe, are both ‘Roman’.” This collective identity, in turn, leads to an individual identity: “More precisely: it is because Europe welcomes them both, ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew,’ from a ‘Roman’ point of view, that they can remain themselves and produce the fullness of their effects there.”^[11] He insists on the presence of the Arabs in the constitution of this “cultural Romanity,” the Greeks taking on the task of “copying,” the Romans of “adapting,” the Arabs of “translating;” and he defines a Muslim humanism alongside a European one.^[12]

The image of a homogeneous, unified Europe, which the German Romantics associated with the Middle Ages, was thus undermined, and the Romantics themselves emphasized this heterogeneity, in the form of the opposition of Northern and Southern Europe. The division of Europe is an ancient motif, and one that Shakespeare expresses in a number of his plays: Hamlet, in which the division of the kingdom no doubt refers not only to Denmark, and perhaps not only to the threats hanging over Elizabethan England; but above all King Lear, which ends in chaos resulting from the war between an imaginary England and an imaginary France.

Without linking the division of Europe to an image of chaos, the turn of the 18th to the 19th century emphasized its heterogeneity. The opposition of North and South became a cliché in fiction. Goethe builds his personal myth on the journey to Italy, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, 1795–96), through Mignon’s song, creates a heterogeneous literary space within the novel, corresponding to the presence of Italian space within a fiction built on a journey through Germany. The entire plot of Balzac’s L’Auberge rouge (The Red Inn, 1831) is built around an obsessive symmetry between German and French characters, spaces and narrator figures, as if to insist on the dual identity of this universe. In Mme de Staël’s novel Corinne (Corinna, 1807), the Italian and English identities of the main characters are accompanied by a play on the “character of nations,” one referring to rationality, the other expressing an artistic temperament. George Sand’s artist’s novel Consuelo (1843) is also built on the opposition of two spaces, Italy and Bohemia. The same type of representation is found in many other authors, such as Hoffmann, for whom Italy is the land of the arts.

But the distinction between northern and southern Europe was mostly theorized, and described in Mme de Staël’s work, for example, as two literary models. As early as 1800, in De la littérature, she recognized “two quite distinct literatures, that which comes from the South and that which descends from the North; that of which Homer is the first source and that of which Ossian is the origin.”^[13] A little later, 1813 saw the publication in France of three major essays marked by this distinction between two civilizations and two literatures: De l’Allemagne (On Germany) by Mme de Staël, the Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Course on Dramatic Literature) by A. W. Schlegel (in a French translation) and De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (On Literature of the South of Europe) by Sismondi. At the same time, Bonstetten, who belonged to the same Staëlian circle, wrote L’Homme du nord et l’Homme du Midi (The Man of the North and the Man of the South), but did not publish his work until 1824. Finally, in the famous Erotique comparée (Comparative Erotics, 1806), one of the very first comparative texts, the opposition between a sensual and a spiritual representation of love in French and German literature is based on the distinction between religions, whose choice is itself informed by the natural environment.

In many ways, it was the Romantics and their contemporaries who invented Europe, and they invented it in and through literature. But their legacy is vast. Somerset Maugham, for example, illustrates the two forms born at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries: the artist’s novel and the formative novel. In 1919, he published The Moon and Sixpence, a novelistic transposition of Gauguin’s life; but four years earlier, On Human Bondage was constructed as a journey through Europe. He took this pattern from the formative novel as exemplified by Goethe, with whom he also shares a denouement in which the protagonist becomes a doctor.

But Europe can also be the more direct object of a novelistic project. John Galsworthy, with The Forsyte Dynasty (1922), and Thomas Mann, with The Buddenbrooks (1901), offer sagas through which a complete panoply of European history takes shape. The former covers the period from 1880 to 1930, depicting English society at the end of Victoria’s reign. The second, following the same principle, covers an earlier period, from 1835 to 1877. As its subtitle states, it describes the “decline of a family” in a form akin to naturalism.

4 A Divided Sky

A pessimistic image of Europe emerged in the course of the twentieth century, and the division of Europe presented more serious features than simply the “character of nations.” Philippe Chardin perceives in Julien Benda’s Discours à la nation européenne (Discourse to the European nation, 1933) and in Denis de Rougemont’s Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe (Twenty-Eight Centuries of Europe, 1961) a common intention, that of analyzing “the vicissitudes of the European idea throughout history” and highlighting “alternating periods of great actuality and periods of relative effacement of this European ideal.”^[14] But Julien Benda questions the unity of Europe as a whole: “all these truly European movements have done absolutely nothing for the unity of Europe.”^[15] Pascal Dethurens evokes, with Jules Romains, “the original epic of Europe,” and notes that his poetic collection Europe, published in 1916, represents “the first time that the word Europe appears, in the most condensed formulation, in the service of a work.” According to him, “this ‘song of Europe’ presents itself as a discourse on the Old World and against war at the same time.”^[16]

The nostalgic view of a bygone Europe, the deploration of the war that most destructively manifested Europe’s perhaps fundamental division, reflect a pessimistic view of Europe. Stefan Zweig, for example, saw Europe in this light. His work Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), subtitled Memories of a European, was published in 1944, but completed in 1942, a few days before his suicide. In it, he expresses nostalgia for Vienna and the Europe of pre-World War I, which combined freedom of spirit with stability. The work can also be understood in the light of Brasilien, Land der Zukunft (Brazil, Land of the Future), written a year earlier while he was in exile there, in which he expressed his enthusiasm for a country he saw as the antithesis of Europe. Thomas Mann’s 1934 Mehrfahrt mit Don Quijote (Crossing with Don Quixote) takes a similarly detached look at the identity of a Europe undermined and alienated by Nazism. Following his lectures on Wagner, which aroused the fury of the regime, Thomas Mann had to leave Europe and set sail for New York. The ten-day crossing is the occasion for a reading of Don Quixote, interspersed with reflections on the situation in Europe. He observes it with the distance that travel gives him, and for him, the soul of Europe is that critical sense of Cervantes that Nazism destroyed. Like Zweig with Brazil, Thomas Mann looks to the United States as a counterpoint to a threatened Europe.

Another example is Education européenne (European Education), the first novel published under Romain Gary’s name in 1945. His European education is shaped by the bombs, violence and destruction with which he is surrounded. But the idea of Europe’s destruction from within found its strongest formulation, perhaps, at the end of the First World War, in Valéry’s La Crise de l’esprit (The Crisis of the Spirit), with the oft-quoted phrase: “We civilizations now know that we are mortal.” Pascal Dethurens comments that “this pithy statement is not, as it has often been considered, an ultimate statement. On the contrary, it is a preliminary word that forces us into existence and language.”^[17] For, by evoking the possible disappearance of Europe, alongside ancient and prestigious civilizations, now extinct, such as Elam, Nineveh or Babylon, he also founds it.

Thinking about Europe in literature is an infinite subject, and Pascal Dethurens has touched on some important aspects. But in the way that a literary image of Europe has contributed to its construction and accompanied its political life, the representation of a division has also taken other paths, and in particular that between West and East. The most striking example is Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Sky, 1963), which deals with the building of the Berlin Wall. The character of Manfred decides to move to the West part of Berlin, and must therefore separate from Rita. At the moment of separation, the lovers discuss the idea of watching the same star at the same time every night. But they arrive at the idea that the sky, too, can be divided. The novel takes a personal look at the division of Europe.

The imaginary of Europe thus sought the unity of nations, but above all found divisions: that of the Romantic era, between North and South, faded behind other, more pessimistic divisions, those of a twentieth century torn apart by two World Wars. The distinction between Western and Eastern Europe, between capitalist and communist Europe, was the last form taken by these images of division. But it is significant that Europe has always defined itself through literature, and that in its current institutions, it looks to Beethoven and Schiller, the authors of the European anthem, for its model. Schiller’s “Ode an die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”, 1785), far from the destruction evoked in the literature of Europe, is a call to fraternity, and ends with an evocation of the “starry vault” that is the antithesis of Christa Wolf’s “divided sky.” Schiller, a model for Europe, was not only a poet, but also a historian and defender of the freedom of peoples, as illustrated by his Don Karlos, dedicated to the freedom of Flanders, and his Jungfrau von Orleans (Maid of Orleans). A European man, he was granted French citizenship by the Revolution.

The relationship between literature and the idea of Europe, but also with its political reality, is therefore complex, and involves different relationships to comparative literature. The comparative approach to Europe can first and foremost focus on European domains, and observe, for example, in the wake of Jacques Dugas, “that most of the great literary movements that mark the history of Europe have had a transnational extension: humanism, the ‘Enlightenment,’ romanticism, naturalism or symbolism cannot be attributed to a single country.” But despite their European reach and undisputed contribution, such approaches can be criticized for confining themselves within borders that their cosmopolitan vocation should lead us to transcend. They can also lead to a more theoretical reflection on literature: as Franco Moretti puts it, these “literary maps” drawn up by the comparative researcher “demonstrate the ortgebunden, ‘place-bound’ nature of literature.”^[18] But Europe – representations of Europe, the idea of Europe, or its political or geographical reality – can also be an object of study for the comparatist, as in the research conducted by Pascal Dethurens or Philippe Chardin. Finally, the relationship with literature can lead to reflection on the conditions of possibility of a European literature, and the implications that such a notion entails. On the one hand, it is a way of going beyond the boundaries of national literature; on the other hand, European literature remains far from the “planetarity” to which Gayatri Spivak calls. This definition of a European literature was already a Romantic ideal: “European literature forms a coherent whole, in which all the branches are intimately woven together, build on each other, thereby enlightening and complementing each other. This runs through time and nations right up to the present day,” Friedrich Schlegel asserted.^[19]

5 Towards a Comparative Literary History

The idea of European literature was associated with the object of comparative literature in the early days of the discipline. This is apparent in one of the very first texts to elaborate a theory of comparative literature, the speech Fernand Brunetière gave at the Congrès d’histoire comparée des littératures (Congress of Comparative History of Literatures), which he chaired, on the occasion of the 1900 Universal Exhibition. In it, he develops two hypotheses for European literature, and uses the organic metaphor drawn from the Romantic era to characterize his own position on criticism:

There is, so to speak, an arithmetical unity, a unity of repetition, whose fractions are all equal or identical to themselves; and there is an organic unity, a unity of variety, whose harmony results from the very differentiation of the parts that constitute it. If there is such a thing as “European literature,” it can only be in this second sense; and, supposing it is still in an inorganic state, it can only be constituted on condition that it is organized.

In this organic unity, the countries play the role of “members,” in the corporeal sense of the term. The Anthology of European Literature, entitled Mémoires d’Europe (Memories of Europe), takes up the idea of an all-encompassing unity, which ensures the identity of each of its parts: “what counts is to show that a national literature or an art is constituted thanks to a larger whole, to a history that plays with borders, wars and intellectual journeys.”^[20] Last but not least, this unity is characterized by circulation, the “formidable exchanges that have presided over so many creations.” Whether it is a question of exchange or opposition, the essential point is to show that a national literature or art is constituted in Europe. The debt owed by Lamartine to Byron in his Méditations is evoked: “This is when the anthology can begin, linguistic field by linguistic field, and the authors are classified alphabetically.”^[21]

In 1996, Jean-Louis Backès published a textbook entitled, perhaps paradoxically, La Littérature européenne (The European Literature). In presenting his subject, he makes a point of using the singular, right from the initial “Presentation”: “It is not a question of presenting all the literatures of Europe, but of seeing what the literature of Europe consists of, in the singular, if it exists.”^[22] In order to underline the unity of the whole that forms his object, he evokes the case of Romanian writers who wrote in French, such as Tzara or Ionesco, an argument that can certainly be turned against a definition of literary Europe, by shattering all borders: to what unity would the situation of authors like Kundera or Nabokov relate? Does not Nabokov’s English remind us that European languages have ceased, for some of them, to characterize European identity?.

In his first chapter, significantly entitled “Is there such a thing as European literature?,” Jean-Louis Backès takes up the question and sketches out an answer: “there are books written in Europe, in one of Europe’s languages, which have been translated and widely distributed throughout the continent.” The definition here is based less on expression in a European language than on a common reception of translated works, on the constitution of a canonical corpus which, through its dissemination among a European readership, would have the value of a common cultural heritage and thus the function of defining an identity. This founding corpus would include, among others, “The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faustus, The Miserables, Crime and Punishment.”^[23] This corpus itself raises two questions: that Dostoyevsky belongs in the pantheon of European literature is indisputable. But is Russia’s literature entirely and uniquely European? Wladimir Troubetzkoy’s answer provides nuances and reservations, and insists on the inflections followed by history: “Europe or Asia? After two centuries of heading due west, Russia has been wavering between Europe and Asia since the beginning of the 20th century: after the ‘Mongolian’ fantasies of André Bély (Peterburg, 1916) and the Eurasian speculations of the 1920s and 1930s, revived more recently by Lev Goumilev, the ‘Iron Curtain,’ after 1945, seems like a Chinese wall built right across Europe […].”^[24] On the other hand, the definition of literary Europe based on such a pantheon may come up against another objection: we can imagine that the references of a Chinese reader will be different, but what will be those of an American reader, whether from North or South America? However, Jean-Louis Backès’ definition focuses on the corpus of works: European works are those that have permeated the whole of Europe.

He thus establishes the distinction on which his project is based: to “European literature,” which refers to “the various literatures that have developed in the different languages of Europe,” and whose history can be traced for each of them, he contrasts “European literature,” which “assumes […] that this ensemble has its unity, that its history is provided with a certain coherence.” He notes that “all European literatures have followed more or less the same evolution,”^[25] and it is this that he sets out to trace. The 16th century began with the publication of two major works, which Europe would not stop reading or dreaming about for at least three hundred years: Orlando furioso and Amadis.^[26] Similarly, the spread of the sonnet form from Italy throughout Renaissance Europe, and before that the art of the troubadours, which spread widely and found a counterpart in the German Minnesang,^[27] underline, among countless other examples, the continuity of the European literary phenomenon. Jean-Louis Backès does not, however, gloss over the difficulties of such an ambitious project, and points out the chronological gap between the different countries, with regard to the Renaissance, Romanticism, or the contemporaneity of French Symbolism and German Naturalism, which itself appears as the continuator of French Naturalism. He also speaks of the difficulty of referring to French literature as Baroque, and generally refuses to blur the differences in order to assimilate everything into a common scheme, to “seek to make diverse phenomena coincide, under the pretext that they have been given the same name.”^[28]

6 European Identity and the Idea of Literature

Two years later, in 1998, Béatrice Didier published a voluminous collective work entitled Précis de littérature européenne (Handbook on European Literature), edited by the Presses universitaires de France. Once again, this is a singular work, and in her introduction, Béatrice Didier reflects on the problematic aspects of the syntagm “European literature,” and the floating meanings that each of these two notions can take on. She highlights all the contributions of a literature that has constructed a certain idea of Europe, from Mme de Staël and Goethe to Romain Rolland, founder of the journal Europe, via Berdiaev, Curtius and Charles du Bos. But above all, she highlights the founding role played by French comparatists of the early 20th century, such as Jean-Marie Carré, Fernand Baldensperger and Paul Hazard.^[29] She then discusses the different approaches to her object of study, explaining the plan followed by the book. This follows four parts: the first is precisely a way of establishing the object of the work by reflecting on “methods;” the second reflects on the identity and borders of Europe by posing the question of “space;” the third follows, through a chronological thread, the different literary movements, and takes up the approach of literary history; finally, the fourth adopts a more formalist point of view and considers the “forms” of this literature, a notion which, in reality, places literary genres in the foreground. An insensitive shift has thus taken place from Europe to literature, just as a similar methodological shift has led from a historical to a formalist approach. These shifts are at once representative of a desire to grasp this fluctuating object, “European literature,” in a comprehensive way, and of the difficulty, precisely, of grasping it. We can see how far we have come since the Anthology of European Literatures: the shift from the plural to the singular decompartmentalized fields, and also accompanied the transition from a corpus to the study of a literary reality, whose identity was certainly difficult to apprehend, but just as difficult to deny.

This was also the background to the considerable collective volume published by Hachette under the direction of Annick Benoit-Dusausoy and Guy Fontaine, Histoire de la littérature européenne (History of European Literature, 1992), republished in expanded form in 2007 by De Boeck, under the title Lettres européennes. Manuel universitaire d’histoire de la littérature européenne (European Literatures. Academic Handbook of European Literature). In this latest version, the work brings together contributions from “two hundred academics and writers from all over geographical Europe.” The literature in question is therefore that of critics and creators alike, and Europe is neither political nor economic, but “geographical,” with the presupposition that this unity, which underpins exchanges between populations, is superimposed on a cultural, literary unity. The approach is chronological, from the origins of Europe to the contemporary forms of its literature. The presuppositions seem close to those of the critics of early German Romanticism. The starting point is the early Middle Ages, and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as it lies at the crossroads of “two fields of intellectual activity: philosophy and literature.”^[30] More precisely, nourished by Neoplatonic thought, the work manifests its European identity, which can be understood as the emergence of the very idea of literature from ancient philosophy.

But this starting point, which links the notion of a literary Europe to the birth of the Middle Ages, is preceded by a first chapter devoted to sources, to “legacies,” and Europe is first and foremost founded by what is foreign to it, in an initial development devoted to “extra-European legacies.” Jean Weisgerber presents “some of the main features” of “the contribution of other continents, so fertile and diverse, to European literature.” He outlines a few examples of those involved in the exchanges and intermingling that make it impossible to circumscribe literary Europe:

travelers (from Herodotus to Marco Polo, from Las Casas to Pierre Loti), ambassadors (from Siam to France), missionaries (sait Paul in Corinth, François-Xavier in Japan), merchants (the East India Companies), invasions and military campaigns (from the Indo-Europeans to Alexander the Great, from the Crusaders to Cortez and Kitchener), readings and translations (sometimes beautiful, often unfaithful).^[31]

These contacts, if they determine a contribution to European literary identity, nonetheless point to an outside of Europe. But the “heritages” that follow repeat the Romantic scheme of a Christian contribution to the remains of Greco-Latin civilization: the second heritage is “Greco-Latin,” the third is “Judeo-Christian” and the fourth “Byzantine.” This division, which reminds us that the ancient Greek world cannot be understood in terms of the notion of Europe, distinguishes between a European and an Eastern Greek heritage. It also complements the German Romantics’ idea of a Christian origin for Europe by taking into account a Jewish source. Finally, the Greco-Latin sources of European literature are at the heart of this scheme, which recalls Joyce’s debt to Homer, that of contemporary theater to Greek tragedy, or that of Molière and Calderón to the comedy of Plautus or Terence.

In the following edition, two other heritages are added to complete the picture: the Celtic heritage, which brings to light Macpherson’s role in the invention of Ossian, and the Arab-Andalusian heritage, demonstrated by the role played by Muslims and Jews, from the 10th century onwards, in the formation of a Spanish identity. Raymond Lulle, Quevedo, Lope de Vega and Cervantes all illustrate these heritages in different ways in their works.^[32]

7 The Risk of Eurocentrism

But Janos Szavai points out the objection to the notion of “European literature:” it is based on a “Europeocentrism” that is opposed by Etiemble’s ideal of “universal literature.” Pierre Brunel raises the same objection, noting that recent reflections on the notion of European literature have “fallen into the trap already denounced by Etiemble in 1963 in Comparaison n’est pas raison, that of Europeocentrism.” And both recall the antiquity of the notion. Pierre Brunel cites Henry Hallam’s 1937 Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 17th, 16th and 17th Centuries, Periods of European Literature, edited by G. Saintsbury, as well as the work of French comparatists of the same period: Paul Van Tieghem, who devoted a study to pre-Romanticism and another to European Romanticism, as well as a Histoire littéraire de l’Europe et de l’Amérique de la Renaissance à nos jours (Literary History of Europe and America from the Renaissance to our days); Paul Hazard, who left two authoritative works: La Crise de la conscience européenne (The Crisis of European Conscience) and La Pensée européenne de Montesquieu à Lessing (The European Thought from Montesquieu to Lessing).^[33] The example chosen by Janos Szavai is Mihaly Babits’s Histoire de la littérature européenne (History of European Literature, 1934), which claims to be a work of intellectual aristocracy.

Janos Szavai proposes to go beyond this conception of literature “as an uninterrupted, age-old dialogue between great works and great creators.” He also departs from Hugo von Melztl’s theory of “decaglottism,” which distinguishes, in European identity, languages of civilization from languages producing folk literature. For him, European literature can neither be confined to great figures, nor defined by languages; rather, its identity is forged around a system of values “in which the notion of the person and freedom play an essential role,” as well as “a permanent questioning of what has been acquired”. He takes up Todorov’s idea that literature has always been both “art and ideology,” and sees a “unity of European literature” in the idea that it is “penetrated by the same ideology.” And in 1994, before the undertakings of Jean-Louis Backès, Béatrice Didier, Annick Benoit-Dusausoy and Guy Fontaine, he concluded, alluding to Babits’ work: “The sequel to L’Histoire de la littérature européenne [The History of European Literature] remains to be written.”^[34]

From Pierre Brunel’s perspective, it is not just a question of ideology, but more generally of a system of thought or values. He draws on Kundera’s L’Art du roman (The Art of the Novel), which opens with a reference to Husserl’s 1935 lectures on “the crisis of European humanity.” These lectures start from a definition of Europe as a “spiritual identity […] born of ancient Greek philosophy” and built around “the passion to know.” But the development of science and technology, which began with Galileo and Descartes, has led, according to Husserl, to a “crisis of European humanity,” a pessimistic vision opposed by Milan Kundera. Kundera sees Cervantes as “the founder of modern times,” and a whole tradition of the European novel has formed the basis of a European identity and helped avert this crisis.^[35]

8 Europe’s Crisis and the Search for Elsewhere

Friedrich Schlegel had already given clear expression to this crisis in the short-lived magazine Europa, which he founded in 1802, and whose title recalls Novalis’s Christianity or Europe, published three years earlier, in 1799. An article by his brother August Wilhelm, entitled “On literature, art and the spirit of the present age,” expresses this program, which contradicts the Enlightenment. But the crisis of Europe is affirmed by Friedrich in his first contribution to the journal, published under the title “Travel in France.” In the section entitled “Considerations,” he characterizes this identity crisis in terms of the “division” (“Trennung”) between poetry and philosophy, North and South, Classicism and Romanticism. This distinction, both geographical and aesthetic, echoes the theories expounded by the philosopher Franz von Baader, and above all by August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Berlin lectures published between 1798 and 1803 under the title Vorlesung über die Ästhetik (Lessons on Aesthetics). Schlegel drew a parallel between the activities of the mind and the points of the compass: science and philosophy would be to the north, art to the south, morality to the west, religion to the east.^[36] Likewise, his brother Friedrich, in his “Travel in Paris,” hopes to overcome the split between the One and the Whole, which forms the character of classical antiquity, by forging an alliance between the two parts of the earth that form “the visible poles of the Good,” namely the North and the East, “the iron strength of the North” and “the luminous ardor of the East.”^[37] And it is this East that ensures or restores the lost unity of poetry, philosophy and religion, the original unity of human knowledge.

The idea of Europe in literature thus calls for its own transcendence in the more universalist vision of the poet as citizen of the world. As David Damrosh reminds us,^[38] Goethe’s conception of World Literature is not without ambiguity. On the one hand, in his interview with Eckermann on January 29, 1827, he held ancient Greek poetry to be a universal reference. Indeed, his disciple Meltzl von Lomnitz extended the idea of a Eurocentric World Literature with his theory of decaglottism. On the other hand, Goethe also celebrated the Persian poet Hafiz, with whom he engaged in a poetic dialogue in his West-Eastern Divan; and he evoked the resemblance of a Chinese novel to his Hermann and Dorotheus or to Richardson’s novels.

Similarly, in 1813, Adalbert von Chamisso, son of French émigrés during the French Revolution and a German-speaking writer, published an astonishing short story, L’Etrange histoire de Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte (The Strange Story of Peter Schlemihl), a kind of retelling of the pact with the devil, in which the protagonist sells his shadow to a strange man. But the absence of this shadow, which seems to be nothing, puts Peter Schlemihl completely on the margins of human society. The meaning of the story undoubtedly lies in the outcome Chamisso grants his character: in seven-league boots, he travels the world, reaching Egypt in a few steps, China in a few seconds. Significantly, the two countries mentioned by Chamisso point beyond Europe. Barrès’ nationalist interpretation in his Cahiers (Notebooks) is well known: for him, the lost shadow refers to Chamisso’s lost homeland. Philosopher Bernard Lortholary, on the other hand, interprets it as lost identity. But whatever the meaning of the shadow, the compensation for this loss elaborates Chamisso’s character as a Socratic or Kantian ideal of world citizenship.