Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere PDF
Preview Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere
Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Selected published titles: Richard Robinson NARRATIVES OF THE EUROPEAN BORDER A History of Nowhere Lyndsey Stonebridge THE WRITING OF ANXIETY Imaging Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture Ashley Tauchert ROMANCING JANE AUSTEN Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a Happy Ending Reena Dube SATYAJIT RAY'S THE CHESS PLAYERS AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity John Anthony Tercier THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED The Ultimate Rush Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE Geoff Gilbert BEFORE MODERNISM WAS Modern History and the Constituency of Writing Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors) THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER Michael O'Pray FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS European Pedigrees/African Contagions Patrizia Lombardo CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD Second edition Moustapha Safouan SPEECH OR DEATH? Language as Social Order: A Psychoanalytic Study Jean-Jacques Lecercle DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY The New York School of Poets Moustapha Safouan JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose) Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE The Legacy of Molecular Biology Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN Cinema and Psychoanalysis Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT The Emergence of Literary Education Denise Riley 'AM I THAT NAME?' Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71482-9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Narratives of the European Border A History of Nowhere Richard Robinson * © Richard Robinson 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007978-1-349-54129-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 wn Tottenham Court Road, London 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-54129-4 ISBN 978-0-230-28786-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230287860 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Richard, 1967- Narratives of the European border: a history of nowhere/Richard Robinson. p.cm. Based on the author's thesis (doctoral-University of East Anglia 2003) under the title Border Space: Central and Eastern Europe in the writings of Italo Svevo, joseph Roth, Rebecca West and james joyce. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4039-8720-4 (alk. paper) 1. European fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Setting (Literature) I. Title. PN3503.R595 2007 809'.894--dc22 2007022911 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Transferred to Digital Printing 2011. Contents Acknowledgements vi 1 An Introduction to European Nowheres 1 2 Place-in-Space / Space-in-Place: Theories of the Border 16 3 From Border to Front: Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno 40 4 Recreating Habsburg Borders: The Later Fiction of Joseph Roth 66 5 'The earth is what is not us': Yugoslavia in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 100 6 Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space 128 7 Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and Central Europe 156 Appendix: Maps 179 References 182 Index 191 v Acknowledgements This book is based on, and grew out of, my doctoral thesis at the University of East Anglia. I am grateful to Sage publications for their per mission to reprint 'From Border to Front: Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno and International Space', in Journal ofE uropean Studies, 36:3 (2006): 243-68 (© Sage Publications, 2006). An earlier version of the Joyce chap ter has appeared as 'Buckley in a general Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space', in Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings, eds Sebastian D.G. Knowles, Geert Lernout and John McCourt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). Most of the Ishiguro chapter is reprinted from 'Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and Central Europe', in Critical Quarterly, 48:4 (Winter 2006): 107-30. My gratitude goes to these publishing houses for their permission to adapt these earlier articles or book essays. Many thanks are due to the following people for their help with this book: Joe Brooker, Helen Chambers, Aaron Deveson, Jon Hughes, Geert Lernout, Marina Mackay, Dennis Marks, Nola Merckel, Brian Moloney, Petra Rau and Lyndsey Stonebridge. Gavin Ledger took the trouble to design the maps, and Jill Lake at Palgrave Macmillan advised me on the structure of the book. I am grateful to Denise Riley, one of the series edi tors, for kindly commenting on earlier draft material. I would like to reserve particular thanks for Jon Cook for securing the publication of this book; for Alistair Cormack for always being the most enlightening and confidence-inspiring of readers; for Richard Hibbitt for his consistent, loyal and expert help with my work over the years; and for Victor Sage for continuing to offer his ideas beyond the call of professional duty. My final and warmest thanks go to Sandra SHipo. vi 1 An Introduction to European Nowheres The atopian condition The political borders of Europe were violently transformed during the twentieth century. The large, multi-ethnic and moribund empires of the Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties were broken up into nation states after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Sovereign states such as 'Czecho-slovakia' and 'The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes' were confected on the drawing boards of the Parisian chateaux; Poland was once again reconstituted from partition; Romania expanded, as Austria and Hungary contracted. Such was the new power of national self-determination that, as Benedict Anderson has written, 'even the surviving imperial powers came to the League of Nations dressed in national costume rather than imperial uniform'.1 Borders were not so much redrawn as reinforced with concrete after the Yalta conference at the end of the Second World War. A new bipar tite Europe was constructed on either side of the Iron Curtain: national autonomy was subsumed under the ideological uniformity of 'the Eastern bloc'. After 1989, the European patchwork changed again: Germany was reunified, the former Soviet Republics gained independ ence, while 'Czechoslovakia' and 'Yugoslavia' fragmented under vastly different circumstances. This twentieth-century convulsion in border space is mainly Central, Eastern and South-eastern European. Here, statehood has often amounted to the temporary occupation of 'arbitrary slices of latitude and longitude' - something unimaginable to many Western Europeans.2 What I mean by this generalisation is not that Western Europeans are any less hybridised or that they have not felt (and do not feel) that their borders are threatened - far from it. But even when occupied by a foreign 1 2 Narratives of the European Border power, or on the brink of such an occupation, there has remained an underlying serenity about the natural, historically just and timeless con nection between a homeland and its people. When history disturbs this equilibrium, it is regarded as an aberration which will be corrected. To many Central and Eastern Europeans in the twentieth century, the idea that a people and a territory are necessarily bound to, and coter minous with, one another has had a different history: the cosmopolitan feels it to be an absurd aspiration, the patriot considers it an often unachievable ideal, and the nationalist is aware that the will to unitary ethnic power will always be resisted. Provisional sovereignty, irredentist longing and expatriation - these are the norms rather than the aberra tions. Milan Kundera writes that Central Europe has 'a deep distrust of History [. .. ] that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of Reason that judges and arbitrates our fate'; its people 'represent the wrong side of History: its victims and outsiders'.3 The Central and Eastern European experience and perception of his tory is not of stately, uninterrupted progress. For example, it was possi ble in the twentieth century to have lived under Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union and Ukraine - while not moving an inch. Such has been the history of a citizen of Lemberg or L'wow or L'vov, and now L'viv, the capital of Galicia. Sovereign nationality is ephemeral, a label bestowed and removed. Timothy Garton Ash has written of Central Europe as a forest of historical complexity [. .. ] a territory where peoples, cul tures, languages are fantastically intertwined, where every place has several names and men change their citizenship as often as their shoes, an enchanted wood full of wizards and witches, but one which bears over its entrance the words: 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here, of ever again seeing the wood for the trees.'4 These metaphors - of maze-like entanglement, fantasy, the supernatural and the irrational, the Dantean underworld - make clear how fertile this territory can be in the writer's imagination. The Slavic-Italian borderlands of Istria and Dalmatia described by Claudio Magris are equally indeter minable, places where the search for an origin and a name is always frus trated: 'Scratch an Italianized surname and out comes a Slav layer, a Bussani is a Bussanich, but if one continues an even more ancient layer appears, a name from the other side of the Adriatic or elsewhere.'s The name and the place name are deterritorialised signifiers; the European borderlands are unnamable places where names are legion. An Introduction to European Nowheres 3 But the wood is enchanting, as well as enchanted. Central Europe and its border cities have been celebrated as a model of cosmopolitanism and supranationality. Czeslaw MBosz has expressed the self-image of some borderlanders who, feeling themselves privy to different narra tives of history, have a deeper insight into what constitutes Europe: 'I was born and grew up on the very borderline between Russia and Byzantium [. .. J only from the outer edge of Europe, which is Central Europe, or, in this case, Wilno, can one properly understand the two qualities of Europeanness.'6 A common tapas is the benign Central European microcosm, which may refer to the culture of a vanished Habsburg Mitteleuropa, and to a future home for the typical new border city of 'Europolis',7 To Kundera, the tragedy of post-war Central Europe, imprisoned within the central ising monolith of the Soviet empire, was that it had been deprived of this enlightened cultural role: 'Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural variety, a small arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space.'s Kundera proposed a benign, mythopoeic history of 'great common situ ations' in which Central Europe is circumscribed not by political fron tiers but rather by 'imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and con flicts, the same common tradition'.9 There is a constant tension between political borders and the bound aries of imagination and cultural memory, but Central Europe becomes available to writers, both native and foreign, because the political fron tiers themselves are 'ever-changing boundaries': they may deal out a harsh reality, but they are themselves transient, chimerical and disap pear into memory. The Central European border can then be perceived as fictive and unreal - a blank space on to which images can be pro jected, a more baleful zero-degree zone of nullity or alternatively an over-determined dream-space where fantasy and allegory can be given a home. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil renamed the Austro Hungarian Empire 'Kakania' - the kaiserlich und koniglich (Ka-und-ka) monarchy.lO Musil writes of Kakania as uniquely making visible an 'empty, invisible space' - an interior fantasy of space - that remains unseen in other countries.ll The constellated empire is, he half-seriously suggests, the 'most progressive state of all [. .. J a state just barely able to go along with itself' where one 'enjoyed a negative freedom'. 12 Hermann
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