Useless memories and vain disputes . . . ‘I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old’, opens one stanza of Baudelaire’s Spleen. But European modernity cannot escape the fate described by Hans Blumenberg in his great study on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age; it cannot simply begin anew, ignoring previous history. Even though the past no longer dominates the present, it still survives within it; the new age arises in the old world, trapped in a veritable spatio-temporal paradox. For Ernst Bloch and Reinhardt Koselleck—who have baptized it ‘nonsynchronism’—such conjunction has far-reaching consequences in the political sphere. And the same applies to literature; to the Joyce–Kafka generation, to be sure, but not only to that.
Side by side with the novel, in fact—with its average style, homogeneous space, and circumscribed temporal horizon: the solid form of ‘the present’—side by side with the novel, and silently opposed to it, another great narrative begins to develop in nineteenth-century Europe (and in between Europe and the world): an epic form, in whose key scene—the Walpurgisnacht—a Babel of discordant voices points out how precarious is the cohabitation of the past and the future. Kraus, Döblin, Pound, Mann, Meyrink, Joyce; before them, Melville and Flaubert; before still, Goethe: as it all begins with the gigantic mosaic of Faust, where a man of modernity must face the medieval and classical past; must learn to exorcize and conquer them, and finally (but never completely) must also learn to relinquish them. Museum der Weltliteratur, a recent critic has defined Faust; and it’s true, Goethe’s poem is the perfect text for a world which has crystallized in its museums a deep ambivalence towards the past. We should venerate the past as a sacred thing, the museum tells us—but after having secured it within well-guarded marble jails;42 we should acknowledge it as past, yet possibly endow it with a contemporary meaning as well. As within mythic bricolage, or Faust’s allegory, in a museum, the signifieds of antiquity become the signifiers of Modernity; face to face with objects torn from their world, the European imagination acquires an extreme, at times irresponsible freedom with regard to historical materials. Would Mona Lisa have acquired her moustache had she not been inside a museum? And indeed, the great modernist myth of origins tells the story of a young painter, unsure of the road to follow, who happens to be near the Trocadéro; he walks inside, and wanders for a while through its rooms crowded with outlandish objects. When Pablo Picasso’s stroll is over, Cubism begins, with which everything else begins.
The museum and the avant-garde, unsuspectible accomplices in a violent reorganization of the past. But is it simply the past at stake, in nonsynchronism? The great nineteenth-century museums are located in London, Paris, Berlin, and are filled with objects taken from Greece, from the Roman Empire; Mediterranean Europe, taken by force to the north. And then Egypt, Assyria, Persia, India, China . . . As in Faust, in the archaeological museum time and space overlap: better, history becomes a trope for geography; the conquest of the past—the conquest of Helen of Greece—a trope for the subjection of the world. And so, at the very hour of its birth, Goethe’s cultural dream immediately forces a question upon us. Weltliteratur: world literature, human literature? Or the literature of imperialism?
Its capitals, after all, are England and France: the two major colonial powers (and a colonial museum is what the Trocadéro used to be). And then department stores, marchés aux puces, panoramas, ads, passages, world fairs; Baedekers, travel agents, catalogues, timetables . . . At the turn of the century, the entire planet is channelled into the Western metropolis (Cosmopolis, as some decide to call it) and the truly epic, world-historical scope of many modernist works is indeed dependent on Europe’s world domination. Unpleasant but true, imperialism plays for modernism the same role played by the French Revolution for the realist novel; it poses the basic problem—how can such a heterogeneous and growing wealth be perceived? how can it be mastered?—addressed by collage, intertextuality, or the stream of consciousness. Without imperialism, in other words, we would have no modernism; its raw materials would be lacking, and also the challenge that animated many of its inventions. And after all, what are Conrad and Eliot and Pound in search of? Certainly not of the small, cohesive England cherished a few years earlier by Henry James; but of the Merchant Navy, of the City, of the disorderly width of an Empire which is a planetary embodiment of nonsynchronism.
The truth is, for the great generation of exiles Europe is no longer enough; they perceive it as a limit, an obstacle to the intelligence of reality. ‘All of Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz’; yes, but Kurtz’s truth, and with him Europe’s, is down in the jungle, not in Brussels or London. Marlow’s audience is still a European one, but the material of his stories belongs to the East, to Africa; and their formal pathos lies in the difficulty of saying in a European language experiences which are European no longer. Pound’s poetics, and quite a few of the Cantos, are obsessed by the (frustrated) ambition of finding a Western equivalent for ideogrammatic writing. The last word of The Waste Land is a Sanskrit term, hieratically repeated three times, but declared untranslatable by Eliot himself; and the poem emphasizes more than once the Eastern roots of European symbols and myths, just as Joyce had accepted, a few years earlier, Victor Bérard’s thesis on the Phoenician basis of the Odyssey.
Europe has become small again. The world escapes it, the new escapes it. The new? Yes and no. The English exiles and the Surrealists, the Demoiselles d’Avignon and the Sacre du Printemps; in the early years of the century, the genesis of the new coincides as a rule with the rediscovery of the primitive. And after all, it is the appropriate paradox, to bring to an end the trajectory of European literature. Baroque tragedy tears it away from the classical heritage; the novel roots it solidly in the present; Faust even starts playing with materials which had long been venerable. No doubt about it, the break with the past has been successful. Too successful, perhaps, as for so many other European attempts? That is what it looks like; and from the falling apart of historical continuity originates that overpowering need for myth that characterizes the modernist moment. Myth as depth, order, primordial unity; but also as visionary hallucination, and ‘hellish fire under your pot’, to quote Mann’s Mephisto again. It is the ‘bloody barbarism’ which supports Adrian Leverkühn’s ‘bloodless intellectualism’; the explosive compression of opposites that embodies the greatness (and the ambiguity) of so many avant-gardes—and bears the mark of a Europe wavering between anarchy and dictatorship.
That such an extreme tension would not last long, is hardly surprising. Yet that this phase would also be the last creative drive of European literature—this was a surprise for everybody. But too many tendencies, and too deep, were simultaneously at work as the twentieth century moved on: military devastations, limited political sovereignty, migration of economic hegemony towards the United States, and then the Pacific; so many blows for the symbolic universe of the European nation state. In the cultural field, the new media, and the triumph of sound and image over the written word. And finally, the coup de grâce of other literatures, from other continents, still capable of that narrative invention which modernism had stifled, at the cost of a long-standing unpopularity. Face to face with so many difficulties, European literature has stalled: finding itself—for the first time in modern history—an importer of those formal novelties that it is no longer capable of producing. In fact, the very autonomy of Europe is now in doubt, reshuffled as its culture is by the world network that has replaced it. For some of the major European literatures, intercontinental, extra-European exchanges have quickly become the most important ones;43 as for intra-European relationships, a continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis. There is not much more to say, the conditions which have granted European literature its greatness have run their course, and only a miracle could reverse the trend. But Europe has probably already had more than its rightful share of miracles.
1 Erich Auerbach’s review article was published in Romanische Forschungen, 1950, pp. 237–45.
2 Ernest Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinische Mittelalter, 1948, 2nd edn, Bern 1953, p. 387.
3 Ibid., p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 9 (the passage belongs to the preface to the second edition).
5 ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’,