Narratives of the European Border: History of Nowhere (Language, Discourse, Society)

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Narratives of the European Border A History of Nowhere

Richard Robinson

Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley

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

10.1057/9780230287860 - Narratives of the European Border, Richard Robinson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Selected published titles:

Jean-Jacques Lecercle DELEUZE AND LANGUAGE

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 O-333-71482-2 (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



Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS

A History of Nowhere Richard Robinson



Narratives of the European Border

© Richard Robinson 2007

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 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 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-13: 978–1–4039–8720–4 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–8720–3 hardback 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-10: 1–4039–8720–3 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8720–4 1. European fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Setting (Literature) I. Title. PN3503.R595 2007 809’.894—dc22 10 16

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Acknowledgements

vi

1 An Introduction to European Nowheres

1

2 Place-in-Space / Space-in-Place: Theories of the Border

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3 From Border to Front: Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno

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4 Recreating Habsburg Borders: The Later Fiction of Joseph Roth

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5 ‘The earth is what is not us’: Yugoslavia in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

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6 Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space

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7 Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe

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Appendix: Maps

179

References

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Index

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v



Contents

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 permission to reprint ‘From Border to Front: Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno and International Space’, in Journal of European Studies, 36:3 (2006): 243–68 (© Sage Publications, 2006). An earlier version of the Joyce chapter 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 editors, 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 Silipo.

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Acknowledgements

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 châteaux; 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 bipartite 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 independence, 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



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power, or on the brink of such an occupation, there has remained an underlying serenity about the natural, historically just and timeless connection 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 coterminous 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 aberrations. 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 history is not of stately, uninterrupted progress. For example, it was possible 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’wów 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, cultures, 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 indeterminable, places where the search for an origin and a name is always frustrated: ‘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.’5 The name and the place name are deterritorialised signifiers; the European borderlands are unnamable places where names are legion.



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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. CzesAaw MiAosz has expressed the self-image of some borderlanders who, feeling themselves privy to different narratives of history, have a deeper insight into what constitutes Europe: ‘I was born and grew up on the very borderline between Russia and Byzantium […] 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 topos 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 centralising 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.’8 Kundera proposed a benign, mythopoeic history of ‘great common situations’ in which Central Europe is circumscribed not by political frontiers but rather by ‘imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition’.9 There is a constant tension between political borders and the boundaries of imagination and cultural memory, but Central Europe becomes available to writers, both native and foreign, because the political frontiers themselves are ‘ever-changing boundaries’: they may deal out a harsh reality, but they are themselves transient, chimerical and disappear into memory. The Central European border can then be perceived as fictive and unreal – a blank space on to which images can be projected, 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 AustroHungarian Empire ‘Kakania’ – the kaiserlich und königlich (Ka-und-ka) monarchy.10 Musil writes of Kakania as uniquely making visible an ‘empty, invisible space’ – an interior fantasy of space – that remains unseen in other countries.11 The constellated empire is, he half-seriously suggests, the ‘most progressive state of all […] a state just barely able to go along with itself’ where one ‘enjoyed a negative freedom’.12 Hermann





Bahr liked being in Trieste, one of the empire’s main cities, because he had the impression of being nowhere; Jan Morris still thinks of the city – ‘suspended in unreality’, ‘highly subjective’, a ‘“hallucinatory” city’, ‘existentialist’ – in these terms.13 Enzo Bettiza has described Istrian people as apolidi – literally people without a polis, residents of nowhere – who relish their ‘splendidly bastardised identity’.14 Bettiza is attracted to what he calls the ‘Musilian’ availability of people ‘without qualities’.15 He admiringly remembers his father as ‘homo austriacus’, now an extinct species, but once to be found in Vienna, Cracow and Split: that is, an elegant cosmopolitan with the manners and adaptability of the imperial subject.16 But this nostalgia is matched by his lament for the way in which this supranational world has disappeared. The eastern Adriatic coastal town of Zara (now Croatian Zadar) disappeared from the world, and only a speleological exploration into its chasms, Bettiza comments, can bring to the surface its charred remains and corpses.17 The very name of Zara should suggest to the Italian passer-by a ‘disembodied, faceless ghost’.18 Thus to apolidi like Bettiza, nowhere can signify a fabulously ‘negative freedom’, but also non-existence, a deathly afterlife. Nowhere can also be a purgatory of nations without self-determination or sovereignty, condemned by empires to walk the night. The wonders of Kakania, even that most progressive of states, escaped irredentists: it was merely an undemocratic and archaic dynastic arrangement, whose notorious bureaucracy maintained, through inefficiency and procrastination, a semi-feudal status quo. To irredentists, decadent empires were occupying nowhere nations. At the preliminary address to the first performance of his 1896 protoabsurdist play, Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry concluded by saying that the action was to take place in Poland – c’est à dire, Nulle Part (‘that is to say, Nowhere’).19 The time of the play is correspondingly advertised as Eternity, which can be achieved by ‘letting people fire revolvers in the year thousand or thereabouts’; the ideal Nowhere setting would include palm trees at the foot of beds so that elephants, perching on bookshelves, could graze on them.20 The surreal, farcical and Grand Guignol elements of the play, its pre-Brechtian denaturalisation of theatrical convention, its dream-like symbolism and its deformations of language – these comprise the ‘unreality’ of the setting. But so too does Poland, which Jarry describes as ‘a country so legendary, so dismembered that it is well qualified to be this particular Nowhere’.21 A historical map of the time quickly explains that, for all the Poles in Europe, there appears no country called Poland. France was



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home to many of the nineteenth-century Polish diaspora: the Parisian audience of Ubu Roi knew that ‘Nowhere’ had an insidious meaning. It represented a partitioned territory which had again disappeared from the imperial map – a non-existent, buried nation. Ubu, the dethroned, Macbeth-like despot, speaks the final lines of the play in exile: ‘Ah gentlemen, there’ll always be a Poland. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any Poles!’22 Even though spoken by a grotesque, the circular logic of the final lines is tragicomic, defamiliarising the bond between territory and people held sacred in romantic nationalist mythology. Later experiences of twentieth-century border metamorphoses have confirmed Central Europe as the most real of no-places. In interwar Breslau, there were five Germans to every Pole; in post-Second World War WrocAaw, after the repatriation of Poles and the massive expulsion of Germans, that ratio was precisely reversed.23 One of the few German ‘stay-behinds’ after the Second World War wrote: ‘I live in two dimensions / not only of speech: / I float to and fro / on an invisible line – / At home now / both here and there.’24 This writer’s mirror-image – one of the many German ‘expellees’ – sang: ‘I was conceived on the OderNeisse line / I’ve never understood where I come from.’25 In both cases, the former from within the city and the latter from without, home and exile are in simultaneous coexistence. Metaphors of invisibility and weightlessness (and thus spectrality) express border malaise. Another Vratislavian has written: ‘One reason why one always feels so bad in WrocAaw is that nostalgia hangs in the air: as if one were in exile, infinitely far from one’s own people’.26 This fabulation of geography is particularly evident in South-eastern Europe. As Vesna Goldsworthy has shown, the Balkans, either as a literary setting or as the principal ‘character’ in travel narratives, are not mimetically reported but dreamt of and dreamt up by the British outsider. The long tradition of fictional European backdrops nominally set in or around the Balkans is a function of this myth-making: Shakespeare’s Illyria, Anthony Hope’s Ruritania and Kravonia, S.C. Grier’s Kingdom of Thracia, Agatha Christie’s Herzoslovakia, Hergé’s Syldavia, John Buchan’s Evallonia and Bradbury’s Slaka. Goldsworthy coins the phrase ‘Balkan erewhon’ from Samuel Butler: for the Western European, the Balkans was the nearest real, unreal territory. ‘The Balkans’ is itself an inexact geopolitical term, a shifting signifier, sometimes used to include or exclude certain countries depending on its ideological context. The whole of the vaguely demarcated geographical or semantic field has been seen as a borderland – between East and West, Christianity and Islam, Byzantium and Rome, capitalism





and Communism. The Balkans have been represented, Goldsworthy comments, as ‘a multitude of (sometimes tragically overlapping) peripheries [where] individual Balkan identities were shaped over the centuries by the idea of a frontier existence’.27 The ideas of multiple borders, empire and nowhere converge here. An enclave in the writer’s imagination, Nowhere is the baffled Western European, more particularly British, response to the competing territorial borders of imperial occupation and national self-determination. An open border exists between the seeming certainties of geopolitical epistemology and the misty terra incognita of the imagination. Fictive maps may reveal how moral and political states constitute one another. In his Essay on Man Pope wonders where ‘th’Extreme of Vice’ may be located: Ask where’s the North? At York, ’tis on the Tweed; In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where: No creature owns it in the first degree, But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he.28 This is one of Nabokov’s sources for the adventure-book kingdom of Zembla in Pale Fire, the hyperborean kingdom of Kinbote’s disturbed imagination, bordering on its giant neighbour Sosed (Russian for neighbour). Nabokov’s novel may be about fantasy lands, but is it any coincidence that Kinbote’s world and mirroring anti-world appear in the ideologically bipolar year of 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Pope’s Zemblan source reminds us of how and where the pathology of blame is expressed – what is suggested, in Freudian terms, is the reflex of deposing national discontents beyond the border, at the threshold of a near neighbour. Narratives of the European Border will use the term atopia to describe the European border condition. Barthes, after the description given to Socrates by his interlocutors, writes of atopie as a placelessness associated with the unusual, the unclassifiable, that which resists stereotype.29 Barthes also refers to atopia a number of times in The Pleasure of the Text. It is, for example, the phalanstery, or voluntary community, where the Society of the Friends of the Text would meet.30 The text is blissfully atopique because its signification overcomes and undoes systematisation, so that it is both excluded and at peace.31 Atopia, as it is used in this book, suggests an anomalous nowhere place which does exist, but which evades the taxonomising language of



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sovereign spatial histories. Atopia is often an affective term, with a historical emphasis on dispossession and deterritorialisation in Central and Eastern Europe, but it avoids the ethical and political connotations of utopia and dystopia, which speak of aspirations towards a totalising ideal. This book argues that, though historically generated, the condition of peripherality, statelessness or supranationality has produced atopia as a signifier in metaphor and narrative. Nowhere is a political territory which is given aesthetic form.

Literary geography: studying the border Narratives of the European Border practises what Terry Eagleton, describing the work of Franco Moretti, has called ‘literary geography’. Unlike previous literary atlases, Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 uses maps to ‘intervene in the interpretative process’.32 Moretti’s Atlas follows a double impulse: to read space in literature and literature in space.33 It is this first method – of reading space in literature, in particular relation to how the novel and the nation state, or form and space, ‘found each other’ – which inspects how borders shape narrative. Moretti’s general thesis derives in part from Propp’s formalist rules of morphology, which reveal how each narrative function is bounded to its space, and from Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope, where time materialises, becomes concrete, in narrative space. Moretti claims, then, that ‘[s]pace is not the “outside” of narrative’ but ‘an internal force, that shapes it from within […] in modern European novels, what happens depends a lot on where it happens’ (p. 70). Space is ‘not a container, but a condition […] a constraint of history’ (p. 191). During the shift from local to national horizons, a symbolic order was located in the most recent and mutable of literary genres (p. 17). It is a phenomenology of the new: the novel, the multiplying borders of awakening nationalities. Moretti notes that most nineteenth-century historical novels are situated away from the centre, on two types of border. Firstly, the international dividing line becomes the locus of adventure, a convenient and unsurprising frontier of collision with the unknown. This becomes increasingly visible as interstate European borders become more deeply scored: dangerous narrative encounters are readily located in a binary cartography of the national and the inimical extra-national. As we cross the threshold of the national known to the foreign unknown, there is an intensification of ‘figurality’ in historical novels: the sheer quantity of metaphors expresses strangeness (p. 45).





Secondly an internal national schism marks off phases of socioeconomic development and historical epochs within the nation: in Scott’s Waverley, for example, the border between a ritualised Highland culture and the Scottish Enlightenment of the Lowlands (p. 38). The internal unevenness of the development of national space is flattened out by the hero’s very wandering through these stretches of ‘time-in-space’ (one form of Bakhtin’s chronotopes) – this is precisely what constitutes the emergent and totalising national form of Scott’s novel. Moretti shows that the border is a determinant force on narrative, acting upon both morphology and metaphor. His work on the routes of the picaresque, the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and historical novel, and on the urban geography of Balzac, Dickens and Conan Doyle, generates questions about twentieth-century fiction to come. How do we begin to read the imaginative geography of modernist narrative? How do the intrinsic ideological attitudes to the European border and the literary representation of political borders change before and after the First World War? Moretti’s Atlas is directed to the apogee of the novel’s self-confidence. Narratives of the European Border will ask how the fractured cartography of European modernity defamiliarises twentiethcentury narratives. An important recent work of literary geography that focuses on the figure of the border from a postcolonialist perspective is Joe Cleary’s Literature, Partition and the Nation-State.34 Cleary connects political territory, cartography and text, and charts those chimerical lands – nowheres – which have disappeared from the map or are yet to appear on it. In his comparative case studies of Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Cleary argues for a category of post-partition literatures. Cleary notes the ‘discursive invisibility’ of the Northern Irish border in recent texts.35 The border is not an epiphenomenon or passive reflection of primordial ethnic divisions (an essentialist position), but rather a material political construct.36 The typical troubles ‘romance-acrossthe-divide’ strangely evades the divide: that is, it sublimates the Northern Irish border. Although realist mimesis of the political borderline is banished to the margins of the text, the border returns as a displaced site of trauma – a psycho-national fissure – that cannot but haunt the narrative. In the novels of Amos Oz, Cleary argues, the border is recuperable as an immutable boundary: the Manichaean cartography of Israeli and Arab space is the ‘objective correlative’ of Oz’s partitionist stance.37 The hero’s journey to the other side – for example, to an



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unheimlich Arab village – eventually allows a ‘re-enchantment’ of Israeli space to be enacted. No ‘meaningful exchange with alterity’ has taken place, despite the novels’ guilty awareness of, but silence upon, the subject of Palestinian suffering and homelessness. Cleary finds a lurking ideology in Oz’s novels – that the border between Israeli and Arab is impermeable, and an alternative ‘binational consociationality’ – i.e. the sovereign sharing of space – inconceivable. For Cleary, the border-in-the text always surrenders a transcendent signified which matches the political convictions of the writer: unfulfilled political desires are unearthed which are not consciously articulated at the realist surface of the narrative. Nineteenth-century social realism had, as Edward Said has written, a ‘stately and encyclopaedic fullness’, an expansive and descriptive thickness, precisely because it was securely embedded within a stable, totalised nation space.38 Stateless Palestine is, to the novelist, a problematic setting: how can you represent a land that has no official existence? In Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, ‘Palestine’ can only be a ‘negative topology’, ‘a phantom space’. The novel allegorises the Israel–Palestine conflict on the distant Iraq–Kuwait border: its displaced Palestinian protagonists die in the confines of a lorry’s empty water tank, unable to transverse the border or ‘to master space’. The border is the site of paralysis, a ‘space degree zero’, from where it is impossible to move the national narrative forward. Cleary’s book touches on the general effect of German partition on the Cold War literatures on either side of the Berlin Wall. There is thus an awareness of the applicability of his model to continental European spaces, but not a lengthy analysis of specific narratives set on European borders. Like Cleary’s work, Narratives of the European Border studies national emergence within imperial structures: the viability of new or unrealised borders. I argue that thinking about Central and Eastern European territories as sites of colonial power operations is important. In doing this, I do not argue against the fundamental centre-periphery economic model of high imperialism or against the notion of Eurocentrism, other than to remind us that ‘Europe’ here stands for Western European colonising powers, and has little to do with the ‘Other Europe’, itself often subject to Orientalism. Having said this, the book recognises that the congruence between the postcolonial condition of, say, Czech, Bangladeshi or Antiguan can be no more than partial: the model of Central and Eastern Europe I am proposing is, after Finnegans Wake, ‘semicolonial’.39




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The narratives I have chosen to analyse in Narratives of the European Border are as disparate as the borders they represent. It would entirely defeat the study of borders to be constrained to any one literary movement, genre or national canon. Thus, there is a necessary comparatist scope in the book between continental European and texts originally written in English.40 The narratives of border Europe written in English allow me to juxtapose the simultaneous politics and poetics of interwar European modernisms. By scope I do not mean coverage. The subtitle of the book is ‘A’, not ‘The’, History of Nowhere – one of many histories of the European border that could be written. It attends to the discrete, anomalous particularities of some of the continent’s many border places. However, it also develops a unified argument about the atopian typicality of these constellated Central and Eastern European places. Before examining borders in narrative, the second chapter relates the theoretical debate between place and space to the critical trope of the border. It traces arguments made against the Heideggerian idea of dwelling-in-place in a Marxist account (David Harvey), and in postcolonial theory influenced by post-structuralism (Homi K. Bhabha). The border has been claimed as an abstract spatial figure. However, a new defence of place, in opposition to a monocultural borderless world, equates place and the small space of the border. Heidegger’s place is figured as a threshold – a type of border – and anticipates recent developments in postcolonial and ethnographic study. Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ‘trans-national’ identity and James Clifford’s study of diasporic communities which ‘dwell in displacement’ are considered, especially Clifford’s Benjaminian reading of borders. Finally, Foucault’s heterotopia is examined in its different applications – as a virtual but possible site and as a purely discursive ‘site of space’: its relevance to the idea of atopia and the literary representation of borders is assessed. Critical opinion is divided on the conspicuousness of the ItalianAustrian-Slavic city of Trieste in the novels of Italo Svevo. The third chapter argues that although La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923) is now retrospectively classified as one of the founding narratives of Italian modernism, much of its innovation stems from its peripheral relationship to the core nation state. The epistemological instability of the whole narrative resides in the gap between a ‘peripheral’ Triestine dialect and a standard Italian: a problem of space-in-language. The territorial border between Italy and Austria is also a latent textual presence which irrupts into the narrative: Zeno takes a walk on the international



Border texts

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border as it becomes a military cordon. Svevo’s own deterritorialised vernacular is considered with reference to Montale and Robbe-Grillet’s responses to Svevo and to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a Kafkan ‘minor literature’. Svevo and Joseph Roth may seem to be a strange pairing, from a literary geographical point of view: Roth’s birthplace of Eastern Galician Brody, now in Ukraine, is not far short of a thousand kilometres from Trieste, now in Italy. But both writers, of Jewish or partly Jewish heritage, belonged to the same sovereign state at its opposite corners. The fourth chapter examines some of Roth’s later fiction: the two ‘Trotta’ novels Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March, 1932) and Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb, 1938), as well as the short story ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ (‘The Bust of the Emperor’, 1934). Often referred to as the elegist of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Roth re-imagines Habsburg borders lost to time. He is much more conscious than Svevo of being a border writer. As Edward Timms has shown, he constantly considered European case histories of the Grenzländer and Grenzmenschen in his journalism. The representation of the Dual Monarchy is dependent on the idea of contiguity, with the border standing in as a synecdoche of the whole. Lists are therefore important in Roth’s fiction in making an inventory of Habsburg sameness (ochre railways stations, coffee trolleys), but they also revel, however, in the ungovernable plenitude of the multi-ethnic empire. Roth’s Habsburg geography is increasingly fictive: I have attempted to assess how knowingly Roth turns away from the mimetic mode. The fifth chapter examines the representation of political space in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941), based on the author’s visits to South-eastern Europe in the mid1930s. A massive, two-volume work, Black Lamb synthesises literary genres. It is generally held to be the most monumental achievement of a long and diverse career. Although an expression of the ‘geography within her own breast’, Black Lamb is also a progressive, ideological reconfiguration of the map of Europe. The book is a critique of Western European secularism, rationalism and vulgar materialism; it eulogises the hieratic abstraction of Byzantine art and the physical and intellectual purity of the Yugoslavs – the ‘Southern Slavs’. Though not free from its own Orientalist discourse, West’s book is a work of intra-European postcolonialism avant la lettre: it is a resistance narrative for the small European nations, and unremittingly attacks the Ottoman and AustroHungarian influence in Yugoslavia. By the time West was completing the Epilogue of Black Lamb in the early part of the Second World War,





the book had come to represent an urgent polemic against appeasement or surrender, associable with the death-drive. Black Lamb both attacks and defends the entity of Europe. The fifth chapter considers the strategic moral, cultural and religious cartography she employs in sustaining an unambiguous commitment. The antinomial borders of empire and nation, East and West, often overlap and sometimes conflict with one another. To illustrate this, I contrast, in two case studies, Black Lamb’s representations of Sarajevo and Belgrade. The sixth chapter shows that even a text as seemingly hermetic and self-referential as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) responds to contemporary European border histories on the eve of the Second World War. In the ‘Buckley and the Russian general’ passage, completed in the late 1930s, a vaudevillian pair called Butt and Taff report a young subaltern’s Oedipal heroics during the Crimean War: the killing of the ‘Ould Sod’ – the father, the ursine tsar and the British imperialist in Ireland. A crime has taken place in the punning text, so we must travel to Crimea. The Victorian period quality of the Buckley passage – complete with Tennyson’s poem and Florence Nightingale – coexists with an absurd textual geography, which turns the whole of Central and Eastern Europe into a province of a Black Sea peninsula. Cryptic half-allusions to GermanPolish, Czech, Russian-Polish, Finnish and other borders disturb the safe historical remoteness of the Buckley story. Borders and smaller nations are on the brink of being made nowheres in totalitarian Europe. The Wake is always trans-historical, simultaneously taking place in the past and in the present, but close attention to the geopolitical border dissonances of this passage opens up particular parallactic effects to the future reader. Narratives of the European Border establishes the making of a setting which is both oneiric and Central European. The seventh chapter questions Kazuo Ishiguro’s remark that his fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995), could have been set anywhere. The unnamed European city, a dream-like atopia, deliberately frustrates mimetic grounding, reflecting the author’s wider anxieties about where the boundary between verisimilitude and imaginative truth should lie. With reference to Barthes’s ‘reality effect’, the chapter argues that a signified of Central European space nevertheless persists in The Unconsoled. The ahistorical featurelessness of the novel’s city and the silence of its citizens are indirect markers of Central Europe; certain settings are uncanny and kitsch, redolent of the surreal cityscapes of Cold War geopolitics. Ishiguro’s debt to Kafka, much discussed on the novel’s publication, suggests that the novel’s labyrinthine aesthetic of space-time is modelled on Central



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European modernism. Interpretations of scenes from Kafka’s America and Bruno Schulz’s ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass’ are included. Lukács’s and Kundera’s readings of Kafka confirm how Ishiguro’s novel, the form of a form, is set in a second-hand space. I have deliberately avoided writing on a narrative of the Cold War European border: The Unconsoled was written after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The critical study of these Cold War borders, which would include, for example, a large sub-genre in itself – Berlin Wall literature – is the subject of another monograph. The chapter on Ishiguro represents the concluding argument of Narratives of the European Border. Ishiguro’s post-1989 novel has inherited a Central European no-place which, by the end of the century, has assumed a distinctive politicalaesthetic history. For all its modernist qualities, the novel has not been untouched by the Cold War experience in Central Europe. Ishiguro’s contemporary narrative of a divided city and its population thus serves as a coda to my book.

Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 113. 2. Dennis Marks, Fault Line, Director’s Cut Production, BBC Radio 3, 8–29 October 2000. Marks uses this phrase in referring to the Treaty of Trianon’s redrawing of Hungarian borders on the Great Pannonian Plain. 3. Milan Kundera, ‘A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out’, Granta 11 (1984) 95–118 (p. 108). 4. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Does Central Europe Exist?’ in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Cambridge: Granta, 1991), pp. 161–91. 5. Claudio Magris, Microcosms, trans. Iain Halliday (London: Harvill, 1999), p. 157. 6. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 141. 7. The idea of WrocAaw as ‘Europolis’ is explored in Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 497. 8. Kundera, ‘A Kidnapped West, p. 99. 9. Ibid., p. 107. 10. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London and Basingstoke: Picador (Macmillan), 1997), pp. 26–31. 11. Ibid., p. 30; cf. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981): ‘Ein leerer, unsichtbarer Raum’, p. 34. 12. Ibid., pp. 30–1; cf. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: ‘Und darin war Kakanien, ohne daß die Welt es schon wußte, der fortgeschrittenste Staat; es war der Staat der sich selbst irgendwie nur noch mitmachte, man war negative frei darin,’ pp. 34–5.





13. Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 4, 187, 179. 14. Enzo Bettiza: ‘Noi senza nazione e senza odi etnici’, in ‘Taccuino slavo’, La Stampa (18 April 1999): ‘Il punto […] in cui possiamo riconoscerci tutti noi splendidi bastardi derivati’, p. 20. 15. Enzo Bettiza, Esilio (Milano: Mondadori, 1999): ‘In definitiva un popolo che non è mai riuscito a coagularsi in nazione: per così dire, un popolo musiliano antelettera, disponibile e “senza qualità”’, p. 134. 16. Ibid., p. 26. 17. Ibid., pp. 152–3. 18. Bettiza, Esilio, ‘Uno spettro senza corpo e senza volto’, p. 154. 19. Alfred Jarry, Tout Ubu, ed. Maurice Saillet, Paris: Livre de Poche, 1962, p. 21; R. Shattuck and S. Watson Taylor, eds, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (London: Eyre Methuen, 1965), p. 78. 20. Shattuck and Taylor, p. 77; cf. Jarry, Tout Ubu: ‘Nous aurons d’ailleurs un décor parfaitement exact, car de même qu’il est un procédé facile pour situer un pièce dans l’Eternité, à savoir de faire par exemple tirer en l’an mille et tant des coups de revolver, vous verrez […] des palmiers verdir au pied des lits, pour que les broutent de petits elephants perchés sur des étagères’, pp. 20–1. 21. Shattuck and Taylor, p. 79; cf. Jarry, Tout Ubu: ‘Pays assez légendaire et démembré pour être ce Nulle Part’, p. 22. 22. Alfred Jarry, The Ubu Plays: Ubu Rex (Ubu Roi), trans. Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor (London: Methuen Books, 1993), p. 57; cf. Jarry, Tout Ubu: ‘Ah! messieurs! si beau qu’il soit il ne vaut pas la Pologne. S’il n’y avait pas de Pologne, il n’y aurait pas de Polonais!’, p. 131. 23. Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, p. 419. 24. Eva Maria Jakubek, quoted in Davies and Moorhouse, p. 437. 25. Heinz-Rudolf Kunze, quoted in Davies and Moorhouse, p. 483. 26. Maria Dabrowska, quoted in Davies and Moorhouse, p. 446. 27. Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 7. 28. Pope, quoted in Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 187. 29. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 34. 30. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 15. 31. Barthes, Pleasure, p. 29. 32. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 7. 33. Moretti, Atlas, p. 7 and p. 3. All subsequent page references are to this edition and within the text. 34. Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 35. Ibid., p. 98. 36. Ibid., pp. 108–9. 37. Ibid., p. 149. 38. Said, quoted in Cleary, p. 191.



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39. The idea of Joycean and Irish ‘semicoloniality’ (‘Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybrids and lubberds (Finnegans Wake 152.16)’), has been explored in Semicolonial Joyce, eds Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 1–2. 40. The main texts of this book which were not originally written in English are by Italo Svevo and Joseph Roth. These are quoted in translation within the body of the book, and the original corresponding passages are endnoted. There are a number of untranslated works in Italian which I have rendered in English. I acknowledge the assistance of Richard Hibbitt and Petra Rau with the original German texts and with the translation of German language criticism.




Place-in-Space / Space-in-Place: Theories of the Border

The border: place or space? This chapter traces the influence and recurrence of Heidegger’s idea of dwelling-in-place, which he explores in his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. Although Heideggerian place has been influential in defining a post-war theoretical dialectic between place and space, the dominance of the spatial mode in much academic thought and discourse has required an opposition to Heidegger. This is perhaps most obvious in David Harvey’s notion of post-national ‘becoming’, rather than national ‘being’, as an escape from the globalised economy. In that branch of postcolonial theory animated by post-structuralism, perhaps best represented by Homi K. Bhabha, the trope of the border (and its cognates of liminality, marginality and in-betweenness) is used as a spatial and not a ‘platial’ figure.1 Both Harvey and Bhabha make use of Heidegger, but in different ways. A new defence of place, such as that articulated by Michael Cronin, points to an equation of place and border, and to the need for a heterogeneous bordered world with complex small spaces: that is, with places. In this model, space is revealed as aspiring to a parochial, neoBabelian monoculturalism, whereas place need not be thought of as nativist and originary. Re-examining Heidegger’s notion of being-inplace confirms the potential proximity of thinking of the border as platial, not spatial. It turns out that place is a threshold or border (Grenze), such as a bridge: the border stands in a location as place, and thus ‘makes room’ for space. This border-place may be fixedly territorial (rooted, external) but it also persists in consciousness: somewhat surprisingly, Heidegger’s bridge at Heidelberg in some ways predicts diaspora theory. Arjun Appadurai’s model of transnational ‘scapes’ and 16



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translocalities, and James Clifford’s ethnographic meditations on ‘dwelling-in-displacement’, further refine the definition of the border in this chapter. Clifford distinguishes between diasporic and border communities. His Benjaminian reading of Fort Ross in California suggests that localised border histories ‘disarticulate’ teleological historicism. This chapter then considers the extent to which the border is a heterotopia. Foucault may be problematically termed both a post-structuralist and a historian. The difference between his definitions of heterotopia hinge on the interaction between the real and the virtual: does the ‘impossible site of space’ (The Order of Things) reside solely in discourse or is it possible, utopian but existent, within the socio-historical world, as ‘Of Other Spaces’ suggests? Partly explained by its Heideggerian legacy, this tension in Foucault is instructive. The epoch of space is not that of a void but of a network or skein that connects platial points. If the border is to be regarded as a Foucauldian heterotopia, it is not unproblematically commandeered as a figure of post-structuralist space.

Heidegger’s being-in-place: problems Heidegger has a problematic lineage in post-war theories of space and cultural geography, based mainly on his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951), which argues that place (Ort) frees and makes room for space (Raum).2 Etymologically, building and dwelling coexist in the idea of bauen: we build because we dwell, though we do not necessarily dwell because we build. Being-in-place, the undertaking of cultivation and construction, requires cherishing and protecting.3 In this theoretical paradigm, space cannot exist without the boundary or horizon which built-place newly imposes on it. Heidegger resists abstract geometrical or mathematical ideas of space, present in the Latin word spatium (intervals, intervening space), but not in the German Raum. In Heidegger’s usage, Ort (often translated as ‘location’ in English) is inherent in Raum, and other ideas of place, locality or site (variously translated as Platz or Stätte) emerge from this original platial character of space, and from this spatial character of place.4 The difficulty lies in the assumed association of polis, another object of Heidegger’s study, and particular place (Ort). That is to say, the platial history of the mid-twentieth century German polis taints the idea of (German) dwelling. Heidegger’s later platial thinking is conflated with an obsolete and discredited practice of geopolitics (where the term Lebensraum, for example, had its provenance). Biographical evidence is adduced to demonstrate the extent to which Heidegger was an apologist



Place-in-Space / Space-in-Place: Theories of the Border 17


for the Nazi ideology of blood and soil, a spokesperson for the territorialised collective dwelling-place of an expansionist ‘Greater Germany’. Even if this connection is played down, Heidegger’s platial thinking is still primarily related to the general bogey of the nation state and taken to express a kind of static, chauvinistic nationalism. Written in the 1950s, the essay implicitly imagines a post-war dwelling and being – a new, incipient national unity in what has become a partitioned state of the Cold War. Its philosophical position is associable with the political confidence that Adenauer’s West Germany required for the spirit of Wirtschaftswunder. The essay is, in a literal sense, about rebuilding Germany: the conference at which he delivered the paper, ‘Man and Space’, gave Heidegger licence to consider the housing crisis. The received idea has been that Heidegger, in advocating building and staying put, is in thrall to a continuist historical model of man, and nation, in space; and that platial identity (dwelling, being in localities) is an inherently conservative notion.5 This chapter will now outline two paths – in Marxist geographies of capital-in-space and in postcolonial accounts of border space – which proceed from the assumption that the spatial aspiration to become is more progressive than the platial urge to be.

Against place: Marxism Although the Heideggerian rejection of space as a mystical entity is developed by later cultural geographers such as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, place has nevertheless remained wedded, in Marxist models of economic global space, to endogamous forms of nationalism, particularism, localism and tribalism. David Harvey’s argument in The Condition of Postmodernity is exemplary. At the end of the 1980s – even before the dominance of the Internet age – Harvey diagnoses how we are compressed into ephemerality, loss of continuity and into an ‘overwhelming present’, where all space is experienced simultaneously.6 After postcolonial emancipation and the technological opening up and ‘speed up’ of affiliations which transcend national borders, the world has been repatriated by international, neo-imperialist economic power groups. What then happens to ‘place’ in this homogenising global space? A differentiated, particularised sense of place starts to reassert itself and two things can happen, according to Harvey. The first is that a place, in all its local colouring and charmingly provincial uniqueness, is then re-appropriated as an image and a product by the corporate world: the central paradox is that ‘the less important the spatial barriers, the greater



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the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital’.7 Mobile capital is keen to promote an image of its space as full of discrete places (which are nevertheless within it, under its control). We have the idea that capitalism uses the diminishment of space to exploit and import minute spatial differentiations.8 Variations in placebound identities, subsumed again by world capital, are mere simulacra. The second manifestation of place is more resistant but also more likely to revert to old problems. There is an emphasis on immutable community, on fixity in place, on a ‘knowable’ mini-world standing up to the inscrutably massive forces of the capitalist macro-world and less willing to be ‘bought back’.9 And with it, as Harvey points out, is the risk of a return to parochialism, sectarianism, atavistic narratives and an obsessive competitiveness with other, neighbouring places (as much as with globalised power). This is a familiar trap. Harvey’s concluding way out is to think of alliances made through historical-geographical materialism: rainbow coalitions and unity-within-difference. This space is a fusion of marginalised, dispossessed groups, which in the past have fought one another, but are now working together across national borders, with a shared project of becoming something else, escaping capitalist hegemony, of progressing through a spatial awareness. Harvey suggests a future transnational project, working subversively from the edges but now with a new sense of the potential for worldwide communication and participation, which would launch a more economically streetwise counter-attack of ‘narrative against image, of ethics against aesthetics’.10 Harvey comes down firmly on the side of becoming (a spatial figure), rather than being (Heideggerian place). Place is national, space is transnational. To Harvey the sustaining of national boundaries will obscure the bigger picture, which is that money exploits workers, and that the concept of immanent being does not allow aspiration for change. The possibility of a self-contained, localised platial resistance is always likely, in Harvey’s view, to be contaminated by chauvinistic and exclusionary narratives. Harvey projects this assessment of the post-modern condition back on to modernism, which he regards as place-bound, and prone to aestheticising local, regional or national politics11 – a dialectical positioning of modernism which Andrew Thacker, for example, regards as blunt.12 My study of European modernist border places challenges the automatic correlation of place and parochial politics. Though some borders may become ultra-nationalistic enclaves wedded to a





political territory whose sovereign core is hundreds of miles away, others are weightless, supranational ‘nowheres’, whose very placedness is ‘spatial’. Other analyses of space influenced by Marxist thought, such as Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, emphasise notions of ‘hypercomplex’ social spaces, of interpenetration, superimpositions and flows and waves, of places ‘traversed by myriad currents’.13 These are in fact admirable ways to describe individual border histories, though Lefebvre is rather pointing towards intertwined social spaces, and away from the idea of discrete bordered places, which are not to be thought of as ‘things [with] mutually limiting boundaries’.14 Lefebvre’s analysis may be concerned with undoing the opposition of place and space – place does not disappear beneath space, and space is always socially produced, not transcendently abstract – but the ideas of place and border are twinned in the figures of inert being and a concomitant walled-off separatism.

Against place: post-structuralist postcolonialism This is one path taken in post-war debates about place and space. It may be a late capitalist age, but it is also a postcolonial age: place has also suffered a bad press in certain forms of postcolonial theory, particularly during the post-Saidian, ‘second phase’ postcolonialism influenced by post-structuralist thought. Homi K. Bhabha, for example, has championed the border as a theoretical master-trope to be held well apart from the thoroughly discredited identity of place. However, there are certain inconsistencies in this position, which emerge for instance in Bhabha’s use of Heidegger’s essay on place. Migrant in-between-ness changed the way notions of belonging and home were conceived of, as John McLeod has explained. No longer dependent upon ‘clearly-defined, static notions of being “in place”, firmly rooted in a community or a particular geographical location’ (the link back to Heidegger is implicit), the idea of home was not commensurate with fixity of place.15 Writers such as Rushdie and Kureishi felt neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. McLeod sees these ‘circumstances of migration’, which challenged old models of national rootedness, as merging ‘with the language of post-structuralism in Bhabha’s work.16 According to Padmini Mongia, this type of postcolonial theory (including that of Gayatri Spivak and Abdul JanMohammed), has contributed to the ‘ever more seductive notions of hybridity, marginality, and the diasporic’.17 The decentred subject is in perpetual flight from Western teleological



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narratives which taxonomise and ‘emplace’. Despite the yearning for national self-expression, being-in-postcolonial-place is, according to such accounts, always already contaminated by the ‘empire of [Western] reason’ and imprisoned within the power structures of Eurocentric historical discourse.18 The border to Bhabha is privileged as a spatial and not a platial figure. Notions of in-between-ness, liminality, hybridity, marginality, syncretism, transit and process militate against any form of autochthonous or totalised subjectivity. Bhabha resists border dialectics. Minority discourse or cultural difference is enunciated between binary structures of self-other, here-somewhere else, the observer-observed; or between archaic and residual (colonial), and modern and emergent (national), practices.19 In ‘DissemiNation’, the border is an ‘intersticial space that emerges as a structure of undecidability at the frontiers of cultural hybridity’ – ‘the disjunctive space of national society’.20 The border is neither inside not outside the nation, but articulates ‘its “difference” […] turned from the boundary “outside” to a finitude “within”’.21 Bhabha views the representation of the national borderline more in terms of time than space. The ‘double time’ of the nation oscillates between the pedagogical (continuist, historically sedimented, turning the scraps of everyday life into the signs of a national culture) and the performative (a perpetual signifying which resists the monumentality and teleology of that unitary sign). However, Bhabha’s terminology fuses the temporal and the spatial: the narration of the nation’s time is still a site of fissure, a location of cultural difference. The idea of ‘beyondness’, for example, is inseparably spatio-temporal. Bhabha has no truck with the Heideggerian idea that place is prior, but he nevertheless appropriates ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in order to elaborate the figure of the boundary: The boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the beyond […] ‘Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks […] The bridge gathers as a passage that crosses’.22 Heidegger is paraphrased and quoted here because he uses the threshold figure of the bridge, which Bhabha adds to other liminal images in which he is interested, such as the stairwell, the harbour and the haunted house. It is not explained how a platial thinker like Heidegger





can be laying claim to the border. It becomes clear that Bhabha’s benign ‘aesthetics of the border’23 must not be territorialised – for then the border would become a barrier, a wall, a cordon, a place where pluralities are segregated into discrete monads, where the ‘many’ are disunited as lots of ‘ones’. This accounts for the relative lack of work on inter-state borders in Bhabha. His interest is not in the geography of displacement and decentring, nor in narrative strategies of representation at the political border. He does mention performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña, who ‘lives on the US/Mexico border’ – in the ‘beyond’.24 But even here, the ‘border’ turns out to be the movement between Mexico City and New York City – a shuttling between metropolises. Likewise, ‘Nuyoricans’ – Puerto Ricans in New York City – are seen as border subjects: the border and the diaspora merge into one another. Another exception is Bhabha’s reference to Freud’s comments, in Civilization and its Discontents, about feuds between ‘communities with adjoining territories’, such as the Spanish and the Portuguese – and indeed, the Scottish and the English. Freud uses this analogy, in developing the idea of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, to point to the ambivalence of love and hate.25 The accent here is on unheimlich encounters and erasures on the frontier: the terra is etymologically a site of terror, a place ‘from which people are frightened off’.26 For Bhabha, if the territorial border appears, it is – in Joe Cleary’s phrase – as a ‘negative topology’. That the border is a baleful line of exclusion – armed with talons, as Claudio Magris has put it – is always implicit but seldom examined, lest it diminish its attractiveness as a theoretical metaphor.27 However, if the abstract, spatial border is commandeered in opposition to place, the following question might be asked: how can we all be liminal border citizens if there are no borders to live on, if there is nothing to be between? Heidegger’s platial border essay turns up unexpectedly in Bhabha, and the absence of explanation is significant. It suggests that there are ways, unsuited to Bhabha, of working through associations of boundedness, belonging and border identity; that there are ways of not automatically thinking of the border in spatial terms.

Defence of place and border The translation theorist Michael Cronin has defended the particularism of places and developed arguments against the fetishising of borderlessness. There is, Cronin contends, an emancipatory potential in preserving the world as a constellation of small places and diverse language



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communities, separate but interconnected. The terms of debate by which the local or discretely national is often characterised – as being essentialist, nativist, parochial, locked into teleological and atavistic narratives – are inverted by Cronin. Rather than celebrating the necessity of an undifferentiated cosmopolitanism, Cronin has rather warned of the imminent problems of ‘heteroglossia and hegemony becoming synonymous’, of the inculcation of, in V. Shiva’s phrase, ‘monocultures of the mind’.28 The Microsoft practice of assimilationist sameness-through-difference is founded upon a ‘neo-Babelian’ gigantism which pushes towards deregulated, frontierless utopias of cyberhype, of a ‘world community working in one language’.29 ‘Heteroglossia’ is revered in academia, but as a model of the contending forces within one (English) language. It requires a pre-existent set of linguistic differences to be intrinsically plural. In terms of translation theory, then, ‘Bilingualism is predicated on monolingualism, and polyglossia without monoglossia is monoglossia’ – the extinction of minority languages may leave us with ‘the global parochialism of Anglophone monoglossia’.30 Or put in more general, aphoristic terms: ‘Mixtures are mixtures of something’; ‘Diversity universalizes, uniformity provincializes’.31 Cronin implicitly seeks out the transcendent master-signified or the ideology lurking in the post-structuralist apotheosis of non-identity, turning the guns of post-structuralism or post-modernism back on themselves. Différance disavows the starting position from which individual historical narratives can be enunciated. It thus risks promoting a de facto homogeneity where everyone is the same because they cannot begin the project of claiming distinctness in discourse. ‘We can only recognize the figure of sameness against the background of diversity. If everything was the same, there would be no such thing as sameness’.32 In this process the border is associable with a ‘good’ differentiation of the world into small and separate, though reticular, spaces: ‘Borders not only exclude, they protect, cherish and maintain’.33 Here Cronin repeats Heidegger’s words –‘bauen […] also means at the same time to cherish and protect’ – and shares his concern with the cultivation of local dwelling-places, particularly in relation to the nurturing of language communities. Cronin, a translator into and out of Irish but also other languages, expresses a plural national set of resistances to global parochialism. This approach overlaps with a branch of postcolonial studies, unlike that accented by post-structuralist theory, which is primarily engaged in recuperating or projecting new national histories. Seamus Deane, for





example, is resistant to ‘clonialism’: ‘the postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism supplants the search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin’. It is another ‘kind of colonizing experience’ – ‘such pluralism refuses the idea of naming; it plays with diversity and makes a mystique of it; it is the concealed imperialism of the multinational, the infinite compatibility of all cultures with one another’.34 Just as Cronin dares to speak of borders as cherishing and protecting, Deane here aims to re-legitimise the bête noire of post-structuralism, ‘origin’. Although Joe Cleary generally reveals the border to be a negative topology in narrative, he too positions himself against a borderless world: New modes of commerce and finance, new communication technologies, new multicultural ethnoscapes, we are told, are finally creating the conditions that will deliver a borderless world […] The word ‘border’ has become one of the great academic buzzwords of recent times; ‘border-crossing’ a term used by cultural critics and multinational corporations alike to describe all sorts of supposedly transgressive acts. In this sanitised currency, the complex material reality of state borders is volatilised.35 This position is like Cronin’s: you need nations to achieve an airily modern transnationality; you need to maintain the local to come up with formulations such as the ‘glocal’ or the ‘translocal’; to resist a borderless world, you need borders. Cleary’s focus on texts that are trapped in a stateless no-place connects to the ongoing debate in postcolonialism about how writers may be engaged in articulating the viability of unrealised national sovereignties. This type of defence reminds us that an adherence to the ortgebunden or place-bound border distinguishes certain forms of postcolonialism; and that ‘being-in-place’ rather than ‘coming-into-space’ is, to an extent, the marker of postcolonial resistance theory. However, this should be treated cautiously, because firstly Négritude (the ‘original’ resistance of Césaire and Fanon in postcolonial theory) is by definition transnational and diasporic, and secondly because it imagines that the advance towards a future post-nativist and (epistemologically as well as chronologically) post-imperial future will be made by an ethically universal ‘whole man’.36 Or in Deane’s case, an adherence to the placebound borders (of Ireland) must at the same time aspire to change the cartographic status quo of a politically partitioned island. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that these forms of resistance, reclaimed by Benita Parry and others, aim for a ‘platial becoming’.



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Stuart Hall’s resistance, like Parry’s ‘two cheers for nativism’, has been called a ‘strategic essentialism’ but it is still notably accommodating to post-structuralism.37 In Hall, ‘place’ appears as ‘points’: the borders of cultural identity are inscribed, arbitrary ‘cuts’ and stops are made in order to find enunciative positions – but that is all. Hall is careful to avoid any model of separateness which might naïvely take root in an unmediated factual past: Caribbean nostalgia or Présence Africaine is celebrated, but it remains a symbolic representation, a Lacanian imaginary.38 Hall does warn against the tendency for a ludic, Derridean-influenced formalism to evacuate political meaning. Hall’s nodes or points or resting-places allow the infinite semiotic flow to be interrupted and for identities to be articulated: Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made […] Not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental law of origin’.39 Fixed, originary place cannot describe the many passages of black diasporic identity, but the epistemic surfaces of relativist, deferred space (spatial différance) cannot distinguish between historical and political differences. The border appears here as the suture, which binds together and which leaves a trace. Like Cronin, Hall continues to see, and to wish to see, difference in the world: not the homogenised ‘Caribbean’, but how Martinique (or more precisely, Fort de France) is different from Jamaica (or more precisely, Kingston).40

Studying the small To perceive such differences we must have a reduction in scale, from the global to the national, and from the national to the local. Cronin’s work is also useful in linking his idea of the border, neither academic trope nor exclusionary wall, to the idea of the small space. The individual border histories of places like Trieste, Brody, Sarajevo and Danzig, to which this book is drawn, demonstrate that the border city may not necessarily be small qua city, but that, as an intersection of a number of national hinterlands, it is commonly thought of as a micro-cosm of a multiform whole. Cronin has illustrated how Benoît B. Mandelbrot’s theory of fractal differentialism works ‘on the ground’ – and how it acts as a defence of





the study of the small. This theory firstly argues – and we shall see how this reaches back to pre-Socratic philosophy when Zeno of Eleas is renamed as Zeno Cosini in Svevo’s novel – that the world does not become less complex as it gets smaller, but rather that the level of complexity remains the same. The isomorphic abstractions of Euclidean geometry do not adequately describe the shapes of the world, which is not made up of cones and cubes. A sprig of broccoli has the same shape and complexity as a head of broccoli; part of a cloud or a mountain is and reproduces the same shape in its whole: this is what Leibniz called ‘recursive self-similarity’. There is, then, an ‘immanent universalism’ of the micro-space.41 Cronin uses the example of the travel writings of Rosita Boland, who walked around the coast of Ireland. Boland came across an inhabitant of a remote island who had not gone over the crest of the local hill in ten years. The traveller’s life was on a greater scale than that of the remote dweller, but it was not more complex: there was a sufficient degree of complexity for the dweller not to bother to go over the hill.42 This model is particularly useful for the heterotopian sites of Central and Eastern Europe. The sameness and difference of Roth’s typical cruciform border town, for example, is a synecdoche of the whole Habsburg Empire. We might remember Milan Kundera’s observation that ‘Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe’, ‘a small arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe’ – that here can be found ‘the greatest variety within the smallest space’.43 The Russian doll effect, then, is doubled at the Central European border: the border site is a fractal of Mitteleuropa; Mitteleuropa is a ‘condensed version’ of Europe.

Returning to being-in-place: Heidegger’s bridge So far, we have seen that border non-identity, in its protean forms (such as ‘contact zones’, hybridity and liminality), has been captured as a progressive term of spatiality in those theories of postcolonialism accented by post-structuralism.44 The claim to territorialised place and its borders is tainted by the Heideggerian idea of dwelling in and cultivating place, and remains a taboo both in these and Marxist accounts of anti-national space. Although Bhabha approvingly cites Heidegger’s bridge as an image of the threshold-boundary (die Grenze), this is in the co-option of the border as a spatial metaphor. But how does Heidegger theorise the bridge not as spatial but as platial?



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A bridge is a thing which, when built, causes the river banks to lie across from one another: ‘The location is not already there before the bridge is […] the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge’.45 The bridge is a location (Ort): other locations can then take their positions at relative distances from this place. Space – the in-between area of locations – is only then a permissible concept: ‘spaces receive their essential being from locations and not from “space”’.46 Heidegger says of the bridge-boundary that space is cleared from within a boundary, and that ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops but […] the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding’.47 In another example from Heidegger, making a path (Weg) in a virgin snowfield clears, makes room for and releases space (Raum).48 Dwelling, building and thinking in place gives the boundary a kind of prior quiddity. In national and international terms, the border – most commonly thought of as a no-place – is now the first place which frees national spaces (which do not pre-exist it) on either side. The argument usually follows, in dismissing the border, that the geopolitical line expressly causes the nations (like the river banks) to lie across from one another, and the territory to split. Differentiated space admits the possibility of isolation and conflict: a border is a cordon, maintained to contain and exclude. This type of border may delineate a constellation of places in space, the argument goes, but in the cause of national separateness and often enmity. This version of the border has, as we have seen, tended to inform subsequent readings of the Heideggerian idea of being-in-place. What is noticeable in Heidegger’s account of the bridge, however, is how mobile and conjoining this supposedly fixed model of place is. Like a bridge, the building of the border – if benignly figured as a threshold – can be seen as initiating interconnectedness and exchange between communities. Building is a neighbourly act: Nachbar derives from Nachbauer, which means to build is to bring ‘near-dwellers/builders’ closer to us. People come and go; the bridge is an omni-directional site which gathers the network of long-distance traffic; it is a place which ‘brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood’.49 This is why Heidegger’s bridge, with its ‘lingering and hastening ways of [people] to and fro’, appeals to Bhabha. When we think of the old bridge at Heidelberg, Heidegger states that this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the essence of our thinking





of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location […] we are there at the bridge […] we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing […] mortals persist through space […] by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things.50 We can add to this a supporting example from Heidegger’s essay on language (1958): two farmsteads an hour apart can have greater neighbourhood than two adjacent townhouses.51 Space is not an absolute, pre-social category, a fixed grid which we are condemned to inhabit; rather, we make and think space. Heidegger’s idea is that space is not inertly outside nor purely imaginary – ‘neither an external object not an inner experience’; we are not at the bridge through ‘some representational content in our consciousness’.52 Heidegger’s conviction is that space is not an abstract category but is produced by man. It is similar to Goethe’s post-Romantic idea of the Localität, of man persisting in harmony with his immediate environment. Indeed, Bakhtin’s analysis of Goethe’s Italian Journey draws attention to another bridge – an aqueduct in Spoleto which has a necessary purpose, a ‘civic good’, unlike arbitrary and fantastical fabrications.53 Goethe and Heidegger’s objection is to Enlightenment principles of a mathematical ‘space’, untouched by man, which operates with Apollonian perfection. The aqueduct binds man to the earth – an eco-reading is clearly available – and it also binds and makes inseparable ‘terrestrial space and human history’.54 The small space or locality contains epochs of time: places are ‘deep’ sites where mankind develops in the Nacheinander. Heidegger likewise commends a 200-year-old Black Forest farmhouse which has persisted through time.55 Goethe’s mistrust of spatial contiguity (Nebeneinander), as it is presented by Bakhtin, sheds light on Heideggerian place as a chronotope, a site of time-in-space. We might bear in mind these deep historical localities, in which history and threshold inhere, in our later approach to heterotopia in Foucault, where it emerges that the proclamation of an ‘epoch of space’ is not symmetrical to the ahistorical post-modern promulgation of free surface play. To return to Heidegger’s bridge, we can think of immigrant or minority cultures as residing within a host nation, perhaps physically indifferent to a nearby bridge, but imagining another, distant bridge by thinking and persisting through space. Despite the conflation of place and nationalism in representations of Heidegger, his bridge strangely



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helps us conceive of diasporic affinities and sovereignties without a national terrain or a place on the map – of transnational imagined communities which perhaps depend upon a kind of virtual territory. Heidegger’s model of being-in-place is more kinetic, as it were, than has been recognised. It can be transposed across and through space (both near and far) to the configuration of homelands in the postcolonial world. Place allows space to be gone through and pervaded, so that Heidegger can say, ‘I am never here only […] rather, I am there’.56 Heidegger’s interest in liminality – even under the auspices of 1950s nation-rebuilding – anticipates a branch of thought, in postcolonialism, translation theory and ethnography, which is now defending place, locality and national particularity against homogenised concepts of borderless space. However, Heidegger’s temporally immanent model imagines there as somehow unchanging, whereas the postcolonial imagination may cling on to, in Rushdie’s phrase, imaginary homelands, knowing well that such theres are lost to time. Nevertheless, Heideggerian platial identity is not inertly nativist, and ‘dwelling’ is not always a territorialised, physically rooted concept. More broadly, as Stuart Elden has written, Heideggerian place – at the border of the bridge – is ‘not opposed to space’ but rather allows ‘space [to be] rethought through its relation to place’.57 Place is less abstract than space, and attention to its particular histories, or its historical particulars, will in itself undo the fixed opposition of place and space.

Transnational identities: diasporas and borders There is, then, a congruence between Heideggerian place and recent negotiations of place and space which attempt to dissolve the problematic opposition between the local and the global. Arjun Appadurai, for example, proposes a post-national geography of ‘scapes’ (‘ethnoscapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’). This is a fluid alternative to the ‘cannibalizing’ mutuality of sameness and difference with which global culture has ‘[successfully hijacked] the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular’.58 According to Appadurai, the world is no longer imaginable as a ‘simple, mechanical infrastructure’, or as a colonial or Marxian economic centre and periphery.59 The hyphen between nation and state has become an ‘index of disjuncture’: ‘One man’s imagined community is […] another’s political prison’.60 Rather, deterritorialised states and transnational communities (say, the Sikhs’ imagined nation of Khalistan, the Turkish Kurds, the EU as super-state, the ‘Nation’ of Islam)





are now being reconstituted. Like the Heidelberg bridge, these are both thought and made places, near in the imagination (here) but physically distant (there). Appadurai’s concept of ‘non-isomorphic’ communities, whose boundaries are neither on the ground nor on the map, overlaps with the idea in this book of the ‘nowhere’ border-city. ‘Translocalities’ are places where the nation is bypassed, places with ‘weak national referents’ (old Hong Kong, Vancouver, Brussels) or civil war zones (Sarajevo, Belfast, Beirut, Mogadishu).61 The ‘nowhere city’ is without a secure national hinterland, too. My chapter on Rebecca West will concentrate in part on the representation of Sarajevo, historically overlaid by empires, as one such site with weak national referents. This explains why Sarajevo, though at the heart of Bosnia, can be regarded in this book as a border-city. The contemporary practice of diaspora studies is a manifestation of the study of such non-isomorphic alignments. This proposes transnational movement, but is it also pronouncing the end of the nation state? Appadurai has drawn attention, like Harvey, to the potential for ‘rainbow alliances’, and to the hope of other transnational diasporas which are cohering across technologically shrinking world-space. It seems like an aspiration which remains uncompleted. James Clifford thinks of Appadurai’s use of the label ‘post-national’ as premature, his view being that the obsolescence of the nation state is not yet assured, and that transnational crossover practices are not always liberatory.62 (It should be pointed out that Appadurai has himself referred to the violence with which transnational states have also articulated themselves, citing the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Basques and Québecois.63) To Clifford, the postnational only makes sense in an emergent, utopian context (p. 277). Nevertheless, Clifford’s own articulation of communities that ‘dwell-indisplacement’ also takes as a starting-point the inadequacy of national borders in mapping the world. The geopolitical boundedness and cultural organicism of the nation state and the imperium – how the political atlas interprets the world and its populations – makes for misleading maps (partitioned and unitary blocks of people; the European centre radiating out to its colonial peripheries) which conceal the momentary contacts both of the postcolonial world, and indeed its prehistory. Clifford’s ethnographic model is of contemporary and historical travelling, rooted by and in its routes. One of the focuses of Clifford’s analysis is on the elasticity and limitations of diaspora as an adequate catch-all term for the many different forms of dispersed peoples. Is it appropriate to think of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’, of the successful pseudo-cosmopolitan businessmen,



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whose only criterion is to live near an airport, and of the medieval Mediterranean routes/roots of Ashkenazi Jews, as equally diasporic? Not surprisingly, the seductiveness of diaspora as a just descriptor of transnational practices and loyalties brings it into contact with theories of the border. Clifford comments on the overlap and discrepancy between diaspora and border discourse. For instance, the Aguilillans who move in regulated and subversive ways between Michoacán (Mexico) and Redwood City (California) are not in diaspora, according to Clifford: the United States–Mexico border and borderlands in general ‘presuppose a territory defined by a geopolitical line: two sides that are arbitrarily separated and policed, but also joined by legal and illegal practices of crossing and communication’ (p. 246). Diaspora, on the other hand, implies much greater distance and diffusion (p. 246). But Harvey’s technological ‘speed-up’ – the annihilation of space – carries dispersed peoples back to the old country and brings the remote border ever closer. Perhaps, Clifford goes on to say, it is worth thinking of the territorial ligna between the United States and Mexico as displaced to the Mexican American neighbourhoods of Chicago (p. 247). While acknowledging the ongoing interest to scholarship of those people who constantly cross the borderline, or who live in a politically divided borderland, Clifford is also suggesting a more versatile model of the deterritorialised border. There is a wryness to Clifford’s recognition that ‘the US-Mexico frontier has attained “theoretical” status’ (p. 37). Territorial borders subvert as well as attract binary thinking; they invite metaphor and academic abstraction. Clifford is more interested in territorial borders – discrete case histories and geopolitical absurdities – than in ‘troping’ the border. Clifford mentions a number of examples. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines reveals that cartography does not merely come after, and serve as the mimetic reflection of, political territory; it rather shapes expectations of imagined space. A character is bemused that there is no colouring on the ground to distinguish two nations: the countryside of Bangladesh should somehow look different from Pakistan after partition (p. 332). The US-Russian Convention line is like an invisible border line running through the sea, drawn between two islands on the Bering Strait, but nevertheless a completely sealed frontier during the Cold War. Peter Schneider’s meditation on the Berlin Wall, The Wall Jumper, is centred on the physical obstacle and how to jump it, but the novel is no less concerned with the ‘internalized walls’ erected by colliding ideologies (p. 333).





Historical atlases of shifting borders defamiliarise national myths of historical inevitability. For example, a map of North America in 1845, on which a border begins at New Orleans and runs up to Montana, and on which a vast ‘Mexico’ includes Los Angeles, makes contemporary borders look less natural or preordained (p. 328). Clifford lingers upon the case history of Fort Ross, a nineteenth-century Russo-American border site (‘Fort Rossiia’ or ‘Fort Russia’). Fort Ross is the Benjaminian monad which stops historical time and ‘disarticulates California’, because it has been ‘historically constituted from Asia as well as from Europe’ (p. 331). The US westernmost border meets Russia’s easternmost border: the Fort Ross settlers looked back at the Pacific horizon, not out at it, as Americans do (p. 302). To Clifford, such border places are Benjaminian – where materialist history ‘blasts open the continuum of history’, or blasts ‘a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history’.64 American ‘Fort Ross’ is one realised historical potentiality among the innumerable citable data which fill ‘homogeneous, empty time’: it is not a rosary bead counted on a teleological chain.65 Regarded as a border place, rather than as deterministically American, Fort Ross is a lost moment in a parallel history. The stockade community at Fort Ross is compared to a beached ship: rather like Foucault’s heterotopian ship, it is ‘a floating piece of space’.66 It is through this ethnographic and archaeological ‘staying-inplace’, this peeling off of the strata of converging diachronic histories (Russian, Spanish, British, Native Indian, American Settlers), that Clifford opens up the spatiality of a single border place and offer alternative, Benjaminian histories to those causal narratives of nationalist myth.

Heterotopias and borders Compare the tension between the following excerpts from Michel Foucault’s writing about space: The space in which we live […] is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things […] we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.67 What historical a priori provided the starting-point from which it was possible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of differences?68



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The first quotation is from the much-quoted essay ‘Of Other Spaces’. The ‘epoch of space’ is not that of a void but of a network or skein that connects points. There is the idea of the relative space between nodes, but the residue too of the platial: the discrete self-identity of sites. Foucault is here resisting spatial homogenisation. The second quotation is from The Order of Things. How, Foucault asks, can there be an originary place of residence, a differentiated backdrop? The formulation ‘indifferent background of differences’ is telling. Though the distinction of historical origins is impossible to establish, the background remains undefined but still unnamably plural. The tension is between the historian and the post-structuralist: the former not quite willing to think of a pre-historical primordial swamp, of a precondition of homogeneity; the latter all too aware that the enunciation of historical identities, the naming of constitutive ‘ingredients’, can only take place in discursive subject positions. Gestalt confirms this: who is to say which delineated place is figure and which is ground? The world is not a void, but it is an indifferent background. This platial-spatial aporia informs Foucault’s various definitions of heterotopia in these two texts. In The Order of Things, Foucault considers Borges’s Chinese Encyclopaedia, an absurd taxonomy which divides animals into the following categories: a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.69 Foucault tells us that this is not a surrealist juxtaposition: the placing together of an umbrella and a sewing machine on Roussel’s operating table gives some sort of bizarre surgical order to the generically diverse. This heterotopian list, on the other hand, deconstructs itself, both in the meta-textual ‘included in the present classification’ and ‘et cetera’, and also in the inapplicable terms of inclusion and exclusion. Might not a stray dog be tamed, so much loved by the emperor that he embalms it? Where would that go? This is the incompatibility not of type, but of typology. In addition, the idea of the encyclopaedia as a sealed temporal and historical container is obviously subverted by ‘having just broken the water pitcher’. The impossibility of Borges’s list is not of the propinquity of very different things, but the impossibility of the very site. Utopia imagines a





perfect order, a projected common site, whereas the heterotopia is a space where ‘fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite […] in such a state things are “laid”, “placed”, “arranged” in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all’.70 As Andrew Thacker has pointed out, Foucault is thinking of a kind of groundless writing (like the avant-garde language of Blanchot and Bataille) which links aphasia and atopia, and which may also be applied to the modernist style of, say, Gertrude Stein’s prose or to Finnegans Wake.71 The definitions of heterotopia given in ‘Of Other Spaces’ are in some respects different in that they claim a material social reality, distinguished from utopia, for the space that is not here. Utopia is placeless place, but the counter-site of this Foucauldian heterotopia is both absolutely virtual and absolutely real, like the position and existence of the reflection one sees in a mirror. Society needs to create ‘nowheres’ or ‘not-here’ places where it can deposit its discontents (‘deviant’ actions).72 The impossible heterogeneous site of The Order of Things is given physical, social form in ‘Of Other Spaces’: the third type of heterotopia, for example, ‘is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.73 Foucault is thinking of theatres and cinemas, and of Oriental gardens whose ‘symbolic perfection’ is ‘the smallest parcel of the world and […] the totality of the world’.74 There are ‘absolutely perfect’ and uniform other places, like Jesuit colonies in Paraguay or even Puritan societies in seventeenth-century New England, which are ‘effectively enacted’ utopias – that is, heterotopias. Foucault is willing, then, to find impossible sites of space in the world, not just in language. Again, this is the historian resisting a certain form of structuralism, practised by what he calls those ‘determined inhabitants of space’: this type of space seeming to connote an ahistorical superficial relativism.75 Grounded place – virtual, other, nowhere (not here, not in this society), but nonetheless ‘absolutely real’ – remains. We can glimpse here the Heideggerian idea of space which, though it may reside in the imagination, is not pure (geometric) abstraction but can both be built and ‘thought through’. To what extent is it useful to think of the border as a heterotopia? Firstly, Foucault is moving outside of Bachelard’s imagined interior space to external, Lefebvrean ‘social spaces’, to governmental institutional spaces or sites of control (prison, hospital, asylum: the polis as police). In passing through gardens, cemeteries, brothels, rest homes, fairgrounds,



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Polynesian vacation villages, saunas and Jesuit colonies (is this another list from the Chinese encyclopaedia?) Foucault is considering civic and governmental space in an often general, universal application. There is not, on the whole, a concern with geopolitical expansion and contraction, in how states contain and delimit their sovereign space along borders and frontiers. The Foucauldian model of ubiquitous power-flow is in this sense borderless; the panoptic centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. Foucault’s interest in the eighteenth-century French polis is an exception. The city planners and architects of the French government began to envisage the whole state territory as a city, which, no longer insulated and exceptional, should radiate and enforce a systemic connectedness. ‘There is,’ Foucault claims, ‘an entire series of utopias and projects for governing territory that developed on the premise that a state is like a large city; the capital is like its main square; the roads are like its streets’.76 France’s ‘departmentalisation’ of places like Corsica, or previously Algeria, is an example of how the state centralises power across and indeed beyond Europe through synecdochic arrangement of its space: the far-flung border, at the end of the longest road, is still a part of the state. France is one of the most centrist of democratic republics, but how might this model apply to the contiguous relationships of pre-First World War, monarchist Central Europe? Does the core represent itself at its borders through metonymic contiguity, and if so, what is the role of metaphoric substitution? As chapter four demonstrates, the presence of Austria in what is now Ukraine strikes us not as an achievable government project but as fantastically utopian. Nevertheless, identical portraits of Emperor Franz Josef did hang above Lemberg hearths: some revelled in imagining his whiskery metonyms joining Central and Eastern Europe together. The two competing definitions of Foucauldian heterotopia, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ and The Order of Things, suggest questions about the representation of protean Central and Eastern European borders. Are such literary representations the purely fictive imaginings of an ungrounded writing, or can the ‘impossible site of space’ be found on the map? Is the border, not a utopian ‘nowhere’ (never in this world), rather a ‘real’ placeless place – a heterotopian ‘not-here’ (not, for example, at the Viennese centre)? In academic discourse, perhaps because of the prefix ‘hetero’, the Foucauldian term connotes a universal kind of otherness and miscellaneous plenitude. As the first chapter stated, this book’s use of the idea of atopia borrows from these components – particularly in the chapter regarding Joseph Roth – but also balances them with a micro-historical emphasis on the nowhere condition.




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The territorial and political border is undoubtedly a problematic, sometimes violent site, most notably when used as a weapon of colonial and postcolonial partition. It is often the sealed frontier where the polis (nation, nation-as-empire, empire) may most forcibly articulate itself. But are all borders undesirable? Or put the other way, is total(ised) borderlessness desirable? The border has become a troublesome trope in theoretical discourse. The inconsistent application of Heidegger’s notion of place, the bridge and the boundary is symptomatic of this. The border stands on the one hand for a transcendent and utopian sign of incompleteness, process, difference and beyond-ness that is resistant to identiarianism and continuist teleology. At the same time, in its territorialised form, it must remain an unambiguous site of exclusionary terror. Semantically, border begins to work loose from itself, because sometimes it means a ‘good’ border space, where everyone lives; and sometimes a ‘bad’ border place, a thin line where no one lives, associated with the barbed wire of no-man’s-land, or the sinister nullity of ‘space degree zero’. This semantic uncertainty has perhaps encouraged rather than constrained the production of increasingly abstract, ungrounded border discourse. Border space, in postcolonial criticism, has come to signal a certain ‘aspecificity and ahistoricity’ (Aijaz Ahmad) which, while carefully disposing of Western history, does not attend to alternative, anomalous, intra-European border histories and what they might tell us.77 Andrew Thacker’s work on space, concerned with reconnecting metaphorical and material spaces, makes the same criticism: ‘postcolonial criticism [frequently] employs spatial metaphors – mapping, displacement, exile, the nomad, deterritorialisation – without much consideration of the material spaces and geographies from which such metaphors draw their power and meaning’.78 Tropes cluster around a global version of border contact. The keywords and passwords of theory, which appear to have been engendered from the ether of the university campus – have, it turns out, a prior encryption on the ground. The following chapters show how the empirical (though not empiricist) study of political borders, of Benjaminian ‘chips’, ‘moments’ and other historical monads, both ground and amplify the potential metaphoricity of the border as a theoretical term. A continuing interest in the textual representation of the interstate border and its peoples does not reify the historicist-pedagogical, the realist synchronous sign, and the idea of the totalised nation space. Indeed, in



Border places

eschewing the automatic instrumentalisation of post-structuralist language and thought, a ‘straight’ exposition of border representations gives historical substance to foundational theoretical metaphors. Michel Foucault has said that ‘History protects us from historicism’.79 Likewise, border history protects us from border historicism – that is, from co-opting particulars in the service of linear national narratives. A literary-geographic awareness of the particular case study will only emphasise the uncanniness, the included middle, the strangenesswithin – as Bhabha himself says, the ‘perplexity of the living’ – which is to be found on the border.80

Notes 1. I am following Stuart Elden in using the adjective ‘platial’ in distinguishing place and space. Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). 2. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings from ‘Being in Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 320–39. 3. Heidegger, p. 325. 4. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967), pp. 19–36. 5. See Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 14–15. 6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 291. 7. Ibid., pp. 295–6. 8. Ibid., p. 294. 9. Ibid., p. 351. 10. Ibid., p. 359. 11. Ibid., p. 273. 12. Thacker, Moving through Modernity, p. 39. 13. See Thacker, for a summary of Lefebvre, pp. 16–22, pp. 18–19. 14. Thacker, p. 18. 15. John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 214. 16. Ibid., p. 216. 17. Padmini Mongia, ed., in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), p. 7. 18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value’, in Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, pp. 198–222 (p. 206). 19. Raymond Williams, cited in Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–322 (p. 299).





20. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 312. 21. Ibid., p. 301. 22. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 5. 23. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, p. 219. 24. Bhabha, Location, pp. 6–7. 25. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 300. 26. Bhabha, Location, pp. 99–100. 27. Claudio Magris, Microcosms, trans. Iain Halliday (London: Harvill, 1999), p. 107. 28. Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 89 and p. 74. 29. Cronin, Translation and Globalization, p. 59. 30. Ibid., p. 91. 31. Ibid., pp. 71, 73, 91. 32. Cronin, Translation and Globalization, p. 73. 33. Ibid., p. 89. 34. Seamus Deane, Introduction, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, A Field Day Company Book, 1990), pp. 18–19. 35. Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 225. 36. Benita Parry, ‘Resistance Theory / Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism’, in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), pp. 84–109. 37. Mongia, p. 11. 38. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), pp. 110–121 (p. 120). 39. Hall, p. 113. 40. Ibid., p. 114. 41. Michael Cronin, ‘Holograms, Cosmopolites and Tipping Points: Windows on Europe’, keynote address for ‘Borders and Margins: Redefining Space and Place in European Literary and Cultural Discourses’, NUI-Galway (January 2005). 42. Ibid. 43. Milan Kundera, ‘The Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out’, Granta, 11 (1984) 95–118 (p. 99). 44. For ‘contact zones’, see Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, 91, ed. Phyllis Franklin (New York: MLA, 1991), pp. 33–40. 45. Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p. 332. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Elden, Mapping the Present, also thinks of the door threshold which ‘bears the between’ in a Trakl poem, p. 85. 49. Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p. 330. 50. Ibid., pp. 334–5. 51. See Elden, Mapping the Present, p. 91. 52. Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p. 335.



38

53. See M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 39. 54. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, p. 40. 55. Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p. 38. 56. Ibid., p. 15. 57. Elden, Mapping the Present, p. 85. 58. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 220–30 (pp. 229–30). 59. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, p. 223. 60. Ibid., pp. 227, 221. 61. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Sovereignty without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography’, in The Anthropology of Space and Place, eds Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga (Malden, MA, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 335–49 (p. 339). 62. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 9–10. All following references to this edition will be made in the text. 63. Appadurai, p. 227. 64. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 254. 65. Ibid., pp. 246, 255. 66. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics, vol. 16 (Spring 1986) 22–27 (p. 27). 67. Ibid., p. 23. 68. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. unknown (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. xxiv. 69. Ibid., p. xv. 70. Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii. 71. Thacker, Moving through Modernity, p. 28. 72. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 24–5. 73. Ibid., p. 25. 74. Ibid., p. 26. 75. Ibid., p. 22. 76. Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’, trans. Christian Hubert, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 239–56 (p. 241). 77. Aijaz Ahmad quoted in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), p. 8. 78. Andrew Thacker, ‘Toppling Masonry and Textual Space: Nelson’s Pillar and Spatial Politics in Ulysses’, Irish Studies Review, 8.2 (2000) 195–203 (p. 195). 79. Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’, p. 250. 80. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 314.




From Border to Front: Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno

Trieste: ‘personaggio-città’ Italo Svevo’s native Trieste was – debatably still is – a paradigmatic border city. A topographical map reveals the city’s curious position: a Mediterranean port adjacent to Central Europe, it is on the upper rim of the Balkan Peninsula. A series of twentieth-century political maps confirms this confusion of place. The major port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste was incorporated into Italy after the First World War; made a Free Territory, which was divided into Italian and Yugoslavian zones under UN supervision, after the Second World War; and then passed back to Italy in 1954. Tito was still trying to claim the city for Yugoslavia in 1975. Like Fort Ross, Trieste ‘disarticulates’ the nationalist histories it has suffered from. To Glenda Sluga, Trieste encapsulates and undermines ‘the presupposition that places [can] only be identified with nations’: it is the site of anti-history.1 To many contemporary writers and critics, such as Fulvio Tomizza, Claudio Magris, Elizabeth Schächter, Katia Pizzi, and Jan Morris, Trieste has invited metaphorical and theoretical disquisitions on its anomalous character. It is, in the words of some of these authors, a ‘small compendium of the universe’, a microcosm, a ‘city of contrasts’ which resists monolithic identity, a nation-less ‘nowhere’, always marked on the map by hatching.2 Pizzi, for example, has explored how the ‘constant provisionality’ of Triestine identity is a form of geographical neurosis: Trieste is to her a city in search of an author.3 The general importance of Svevo’s triestinità has often been noted. In this hybrid cultural milieu, the businessman Ettore Schmitz, with Jewish, German, Hungarian and Italian antecedents, gave himself another bilocated pseudonym – Italo Svevo – ‘the Italian from Swabia’.4 40



3

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In fact Svevo himself, in his ‘Profilo Autobiografico’, felt the need to explain that that his name was formed out of a ‘crucible which amalgamated heterogeneous elements’ (crogiolo assimilatore degli elementi eterogenei), and hinted at the possible intellectual and spiritual advantages of being at such a crossroads of ideas and cultures.5 Part of the interest in the provincial identity of Svevo is explained by the fact that, although he wrote in Italian, he cannot be regarded unproblematically as an Italian writer. Fulvio Tomizza, an Istrian novelist, has ranked Svevo rather as a great Central European writer, like Musil, Kafka, Lukács and Andric.6 Tomizza claims that all writers from the Italian North-east (Friuli-Venezia Giulia), from Svevo to Claudio Magris, have one foot outside the Italian frontier, whether they like it or not, and begin to write in order to proclaim or discover how different, or even how slight, their Italian identity is.7 Giuseppe Antonio Camerino has also written on Svevo as a mitteleuropäisch rather than Italian writer, comparing aspects of his work to that of Kafka, for example.8 Critics point to how Trieste, alternatively a ‘nowhere’ or a microcosm of everywhere, has had an inhibiting or liberating effect on the cultural attitudes of its writers. Elizabeth Schächter has elaborated this paradox. Trieste’s élite ‘had access […] to a far richer cultural diet than their counterparts in Italy’; however, though ‘one read Freud, Ibsen et al. […] there was also a sense of Trieste as a literary periphery, a cultural backwater without a specific literary identity’.9 This has led border writers to feel inadequately attached to a national culture, but also to be bursting with cosmopolitanism. The fate of the border dweller is to be under-represented and over-determined. Naomi Lebowitz has written that in Svevo’s case ‘geographical alienation was an emblematic climate for the homeless, weightless, bourgeois, superfluous man relentlessly portrayed in modern literature as politically useless, socially decadent, and psychologically anxious’.10 Trieste is here an ‘advantage’, at least if a crisis-laden modernist Weltanschauung can be considered as such. This border strangeness has led to bold claims about the representation of the city in Svevo’s fiction. Eugenio Montale, in a lecture given in 1961 on the centenary of Svevo’s birth, spoke passionately of the inescapable triestinità of his novels. Trieste is the symbolic, non-naturalistic personaggio-città (city as character) of Una Vita; it breaks into and gives life to the characters of Senilità.11 In La coscienza, Trieste is not a background to the dominating figure of Zeno but ‘the tissue, the very warp’ (il tessuto, l’ordito primo) from which he is made, ‘so strong that it could be said to produce the characters themselves’ (così forte che si direbbe produttore delle stesse figure).12 To Montale, Trieste, with its ‘many-spirited



From Border to Front


life’ (vita multanime – a coinage) or ‘double spirit’ (doppia anima, in Scipio Slataper’s phrase) is an intensely European but distinctly singular place. The typical Svevian character – hypochondriacal and neurotic but somehow stable, besieged but nonetheless able to muddle through – cannot, to Montale, be anything other than Triestine.13 More recently, Elvio Guagnini has regarded Trieste as indispensable to a complete understanding of Una Vita, which moves from documentary naturalism (showing the inability of its hero to adapt to hostile class conditions) to a more symbolic and existential mode. Guagnini states that it would be difficult to understand the genesis and development of Una Vita without the city and all its contradictions.14 Elizabeth Schächter also argues that Svevo’s native city is both ‘physical topography and psychological space’ and that this ‘is the very essence of his novels’.15 Others, however, have been struck by the inconspicuousness of Trieste in Svevo’s writing. According to Sergio Pacifici, the Svevian antihero looks out on to one of the ‘narrowest [landscapes] in modern Italian fiction’; there is no ‘feeling of society’ or ‘of history unfolding’ in the novels.16 J.M. Coetzee remarks that ‘Svevo’s writing career stretches over four turbulent decades in Trieste’s history, yet strikingly little of this history is reflected, directly or indirectly, in his books’.17 These readers might say that although Svevo had wanted James Joyce to write a Portrait of Trieste, he failed to do so himself.18 Indeed, in the simplest terms Zeno pays only occasional attention to his home city; and the novel’s fame is as a comic psychological novel. The ‘confessions’ are a pastiche of a psychoanalyst’s casebook, a catalogue of lapsi and parapraxes, condensations and substitutions, phallic symbols, Oedipal triangles, dream-sequences, jokes and lies. The introspective anti-hero, with his evasions, repressions and self-justifications, constructs for himself an inner life which largely occludes historical and social detail. The first-person narration is a prolonged recollection which turns a conscience and a consciousness, both meanings of which are implied by coscienza, from the inside out. The local realist world has receded; states of mind have taken the place of place. This is not only explained by those classically modernist reasons: what Lukács called the ‘bad infinity’ of abstract potentialities in consciousness which modernism fetishistically recorded; and the privileging of time (the Bergsonian-Proustian dureé) over notions of fixed external spaces.19 For the Triestine, or more broadly the Central European, the sense of dislocation – being out of place – can lead to a neurotic obsession to write, as an internal exile, about one’s deracinated



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identity. But for Svevo, I would argue, it connected to a certain unwillingness or lack of confidence in creating a ‘setting’ securely embedded in national space. What is missing is the confident realist particularism of Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’s London. Montale’s claim for the ‘Triestinity’ of the novels is, in fact, based on this idea that the city appears as an indeterminate image or symbol of place – there is no mimetic reflection of city-space: the Triestine writer is not ‘connected to a folklore […] or to a local colour, rather to the image of a city like no other in Italy’.20 This chapter elaborates how this fictive image of space, and of the citizenship of the apolidi (people without polity or nation), can be understood through the figure of the border. I concentrate on two manifestations of border space. The first, by considering the dialect of triestino (what a Joyce biographer recently called a ‘living encyclopaedia of cultures, nations and languages’), conceives of space-in-language.21 La coscienza reveals the asymmetry of Triestine and Italian identity in the gap between local dialect and national language. Like his author, Zeno is problematically caught between speaking his Triestine mother tongue but having to write in the rather remote literary language of Italian. Zeno’s supposedly ‘regional’ triestinità is finally seen to be central to the complex and destabilised epistemology of the novel. In the final chapter, Zeno is stranded on the Austro-Italian border on the day war breaks out between these combatant nations. This episode is not an external adjunct to the novel’s interiority, an eleventh-hour shift to the realist mode. As he negotiates the military cordon, Zeno – a victim of the Central European atopia where national teleologies disappear into blank space – is increasingly representative of the floating, ‘extraterritorial’ modernist subject.22

Wooden words: Tuscan and Triestine We are made quietly aware of the Triestine dialect during the course of the novel. Zeno points out, for example, that the nurse in the sanatorium is a ‘pure’ dialect speaker; and that Carla’s broad vowels lend a certain foreignness to the way she talks – she is more adept at local love songs, transcribed with their strange-looking collection of x’s and z’s (Fazzo l’amor xe vero, Cossa ghe xe de mal), than with the masterpieces of Italian opera.23 Though a member of the commercial upper-middle class, Zeno is nevertheless a dialect speaker, though he can gingerly venture into standard Italian. For example, hurrying to the stock exchange in order to meet





his prospective father-in-law, Zeno intends to ask for Ada’s hand in marriage, but rather than worrying whether he will be accepted or not, occupies himself solely with the choice of asking the all-important question in lingua or in dialetto. He can switch between the two, but the coexistence of a stern ‘big’ language and a more natural ‘little’ dialect creates inhibiting social dilemmas, even amongst Triestines of the same class. Zeno’s first meeting with Guido Speier – his rival in love, partner in business and inimical friend – is dramatised (in the presence of Ada) as a type of competition in echt Italianness. Zeno asks Speier, who has just arrived in Trieste, if he is German, to which he replies that, although his name might suggest this, documents show that his family had been Italian for centuries.24 Speier talks Tuscan fluently; he has been ‘rinsed in the Arno’ – that is in the national language modelled on the Tuscan dialect, and adopted in the late nineteenth century by the new nation state.25 In the familiar role of the grumbling provincial, Zeno laments that he is not a ‘good’ Italian; he is condemned – at least it is with Ada – to the Triestine dialettaccio (the pejorative suffix suggesting coarseness and dissonance). It is strikingly illogical, and wholly in keeping with the lapses and impulses of Zeno’s conversational outbursts, that he should choose to attack Speier for being German – that is, an alien trespassing on Italian soil – on the very grounds of which, as a dialect speaker uncomfortable with Italian, he is uncertain himself. From the point of view of linguistic space, there is a further irony. Zeno repeatedly refers to toscano as synonymous with italiano, drawing attention to the very regionality of the national standard language. The historical disposition of space had, over the centuries, placed one language (Tuscan) at the core, and the other (Triestine) at the periphery. But as Samuel Beckett pointed out in his essay on Finnegans Wake, the toscano written by the Florentine Dante – in his attempt to resist Latin and pave the way for a communal language of state – was itself an ideal, synthetic language, which had imported elements from the other dialects of the peninsula.26 Zeno feels inferior because of what he perceives is an easy commerce between a core language and the nation, but in fact no such territorial relationship had existed. The most central irony, of course, is that Zeno tells us about his dialettaccio in standard written Italian. It is within this unnatural medium that he has to attack the doctor for his failure to understand that the dialect speaker will involuntarily distort and mislead when forced to



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The doctor puts too much faith also in these damned confessions of mine, which he won’t return to me so I can revise them. Good heavens! He studied only medicine, and therefore doesn’t know what it means to write in Italian for those of us who speak in dialect and can’t write it. A confession in writing is always a lie. With our every Tuscan word, we lie! If he knew how, by predilection, we recount all the things for which we have the words at hand, and how we avoid those things that would oblige us to turn to the dictionary! This is exactly how we choose, from our life, the episodes to underline. Obviously our life would have an entirely different aspect if it were told in dialect.27 (p. 404) The narrator here purports to explain why La coscienza is not more Triestine. How can Zeno compose a portrait of his Triestine self when he cannot write in triestino? It is a question which relates to Svevo’s narrowness of landscape, the relatively silent local space in his novels. Zeno tells us that he is compelled to write a more generalised account of his life, using or misusing terms which his doctor can then frustratingly match to his pre-formulated, Oedipal mould. Zeno must include material which the foreign-familiar lingua expects of him, or omit what it cannot accommodate. He thus writes not as he speaks – as a subject of the borderland between the Germanic, Latin and Slavic worlds – but in the limited palette of usable italianità. The entirely different or ‘other’ appearance (tutt’altro aspetto) is unrepresented. True to his anti-Freudian Freudianism, Zeno turns his anxiety into another suppression, a joke. Zeno repeats that ‘a confession made by me in Italian could be neither complete nor sincere’ (p. 414),28 and illustrates this with a particular example of an omitted confession – which, significantly, is a kind of paradox. The doctor, who wants to prove that Zeno’s hatred of Guido Speier remained profound and undimmed, gleefully pins a great deal of significance on the fact that Zeno had never mentioned Speier’s huge timber yard, seeming proof that he had been commercially successful at some point in his career. The explanation, Zeno would have us believe, is rather less psychological than linguistic: In a lumberyard there are enormous varieties of lumber, which we in Trieste call by barbarous names derived from the dialect, from Croat,



translate himself into the national language. Zeno makes the following complaint:


from German, and sometimes even from French (zapin, for example, which is by no means the equivalent of sapin). Who could have given me the appropriate vocabulary? Old as I am, should I have found myself a job with a lumber dealer from Tuscany?29 (p. 414) Zeno does not confess to the existence of Speier’s timber yard because he does not have the Italian vocabulary. It is a mimetic crisis, however comic: he cannot match the word to the wood, nor the wood to the word. He is stranded between two places: in declining to work for a Tuscan timber merchant, he also fails to fashion himself as a true ‘barbarian’ of Trieste. Is Zeno, always seeking to excuse his own mendacity in the hope of escaping the charges that will be brought against him by his doctor, speaking (that is, writing) in bad faith? Brian Moloney, who emphasises the complete unreliability of the narrator, believes that Zeno misleadingly adduces linguistic rather than psychological reasons in order to throw the reader off track, and to discredit the manuscript as a psychoanalytical document.30 Moloney wryly observes that Zeno continues to write in the same language in which he wrote the other chapters.31 How can Zeno’s implication, that he is now using a meta-language which circumscribes all that has come before, be sustainable? Naomi Lebowitz points out that the inevitability of the lie in written confessions has a long tradition (she cites Montaigne and Heine); the plea is thus ‘conventional and unconvincing’, a ‘ridiculous ascription of cause’.32 Lebowitz also feels that we surely should not be taken in by such a literal rationalisation. I would first argue that though Zeno’s is a special pleading, it is demonstrably close to Svevo’s own statements about his Triestinity. What is often seen as complete authorial irony at the expense of the narrator’s final self-justification is not as detached as it may seem. This passage from the Profilo Autobiografico, for example, aligns Svevo with Zeno: [Svevo] was well aware that his language could not be embellished with words he did not feel. One can tell a story effectively only in a living language, and his living language could only be Triestine, which did not need to wait until 1918 to be felt as Italian.33 There was both a feeling of inferiority and of scornful pride in Svevo’s perception of his own defective prose. He was unable completely to efface his Triestine self in the practice of writing ‘pure’ Italian. Domenico



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Cerneca and Serge Vanvolsem, amongst others, have pointed out some of the marks of Triestine dialect: the German grammatical influence of zu on the Italian use of di; the use of a Triestine lexicon of non-standard locutions, such as those wooden words, or of archaisms; the mistaken use of the subjunctive; and the tendency of dialect writers to assume a hypercorrect lexicon in an effort to come as close as possible to Italian.34 The end result was, according to P.N. Furbank, ‘a kind of “business” Italian, almost an esperanto – a bastard and graceless language totally without poetry or resonance’.35 Svevo was famously mistrustful of what he thought of as ornate writing (he jokingly remarked of poetry that it was a pity not to use part of the paper when you had paid for all of it).36 His resistance to D’Annunzio – contrary to Joyce’s reverence for the poet – was not only based on his wish to undermine the Italian’s veneration of the Nietzschean Superman, but also on linguistic grounds, as the following biographical episode reminds us: [Svevo] challenged Joyce to find any page by D’Annunzio which did not contain at least one meaningless sentence and, opening one of the Pescarese writer’s books at random, read the following passage: ‘The smile which pullulated inextinguishably, spreading among the pallid meanders of Burano lace’.37 The aesthetic glories of Italian language enjoyed by his contemporaries, adepts of the canon, linguistic virtuosi, were unavailable to Svevo, who thus struck an attitude of verbal utilitarianism. Zeno’s self-justification is built into the novel as a pre-emptive defence, an authorial manoeuvre which anticipates the Italian charges of anti-literariness that surely enough would be levelled against him. The self-exculpatory plea may be in the spirit of his Witze (or witticisms – the substantial timber yard that vanishes into thin air) and is certainly not free from irony. But here J.M. Coetzee can venture to say that Zeno is speaking ‘from the heart’.38 At such moments Svevo-Zeno, unable to transcribe an inner voice, is genuinely dislocated by the irreconcilability of written lingua and spoken dialetto. The author is caught in the same bind as the narrator: how can I write a good book about Trieste (and my Triestine self) in Italian, a distant written form with which I am uncomfortable? And, conversely, how can I write a book about Trieste (and my Triestine self) in good Italian? Elizabeth Schächter’s analysis of the focalisation and diegetic levels of La coscienza (the relationship between the older narrating and younger





narrated ‘I’, how the truth-claims of the narrative are affected by the in-built readerly position of the psychoanalyst Dr. S.) recognises how Zeno exploits his sense of linguistic deficiency.39 However, she concludes: ‘The reader’s task of unravelling the truth from the falsehood is made more difficult by Zeno’s apparent linguistic inadequacies, but all we have are Zeno’s words on which every hypothesis and interpretive act seem to founder and collapse’. Or, in the words of M. Lavagetto which she then quotes, ‘the reader is forced to surrender any illusion of truth […] [and] is a prisoner of (a fictional) pretence which reveals itself as such’.40 Thus, even if we should continue to emphasise the unreliability of Zeno’s narration, the dialect question remains inseparable from the epistemological status of the novel as a whole. Whether Zeno’s dialect plea is the author’s prime motive for the paradoxical mode of telling with truthful mendacity, or simply one of the many excuses of an untrustworthy narrator, is another circular question. It is a Möbius-strip, a Cretan Liar paradox, a Catch-22 situation.41 The excluded dialect-speaking author creates an unreliable narrator; the narrator tells us, unreliably, that his confessions cannot be believed because he is an excluded dialect speaker. If we believe Zeno’s claim that he lies with every Tuscan word, then that claim is false: he is speaking true (but still in standard Italian). The aporia in which the novel fails to ratify itself is, in Derridean terms, the classic Western anxiety of logocentrism. Zeno’s/Svevo’s writing is merely supplementary to his speaking, a distorting shadow of what is felt to be an original spoken meaning. Zeno affords a new conspicuousness, even if some take it to be spurious, to the Triestine periphery. His border language cannot be dismissed as the latter component of a simplistic binary between ‘internal’ formalist-narratological and ‘external’ territorial-linguistic problematics. In this novel the political space between dialect and language proves to be a hermeneutic gap into which the narrative collapses. However, what seems to be an orthodox deconstructive reading relies for its success upon a prior sense of triestinità as grounded in asymmetrical linguistic territory.

Zeno in no man’s land The narrative of La coscienza, then, is built on paradox. This connects to a point often made: Zeno’s name is designed to recall that of the paralogician, Zeno of Elea.42 The Eleatic space-time continuum is infinitely divisible; the world is stasis rather than universe. Thus the fleet Achilles can never catch the tortoise; he is a moving object condemned to



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constant pursual, moving through the eternal intermediate gradations of space but never reaching his final destination.43 Temporally, the point at which the arrow leaves the bow (now!) is always before or after that moment: it may be wound to the bowstring, or it may be in flight, but it is always, at a given time, at rest. These paradoxes relate to Zeno’s compulsive resolution-making – most famously to give up cigarettes, but also to leave his mistress Carla. Zeno nominates a last cigarette, a last time with Carla, and these final moments – which convince him of his worthy and refashioned self – are so sweet that he continually repeats the cycle. Fearful of the unknown thereafter, Zeno is trapped in his desire for the ultimate rather than the terminal. Beno Weiss has emphasised Zeno’s procrastination and inability to finish things (his law or chemistry degree, his course of psychoanalysis), and his obsession with calendrical dates, which allow him to count and divide the durée of time in order to decelerate it.44 This is typical of Zeno’s non-linear, pre-Socratic philosophy of the world. Zeno, of the last initial letter, is the Omega seeking an Alpha-wife – neither Ada nor Alberta, but Augusta. His tall stories were designed to conquer the first ‘A’, but as he says, he was like the marksman who hit the bullseye, but that of the target next door (p. 83). In a caricature of the Freudian lapsus, Zeno famously goes to the wrong funeral, not that of his ‘friend’ Guido: this is another of Zeno’s missed destinations and also an example, in therapeutic jargon, of his failure to achieve closure with his suicide brother-in-law. In his determination not to reach his destination, Zeno Cosini is thus like his Eleatic namesake. However, what has been missed by critics is that the psychological spaces of the novel eventually incorporate Zeno’s movements on the international border as well. The Triestine frontier irrupts into the secure interiority of the novel as space becomes, in Lebowitz’s words, an ‘obsessive term in the last part of the novel’ (p. 26). She is referring to the way the last section famously opens out on to the cosmos, but Zeno’s journey outside of Trieste during wartime is an important middle term. The space between warlike nations broadens the interpersonal animosities, hitherto confined to the drawing rooms, bedrooms and offices of the city, that have characterised the novel to this point. The outbreak of war between Italy and Austria is not a mere contingency to seal up the period of Zeno’s comfortable Habsburg life, but adds to the established Svevian pattern of illogic and absurdity. Brian Moloney, writing about La coscienza as a type of war novel, has challenged the idea that the last chapter merely uses the war, otherwise conspicuous by its absence, as a structural device to separate Zeno from





his hostile personal relationships. Rather, he argues for the primary importance of the last section, proposing that ‘it was the war that inspired Svevo to write the novel, and that the last chapter fully reveals the ontological meaning of the preceding chapters’.45 I would also like to concentrate on these final, dated pages of Zeno’s writings by relating this ontological readjustment to the way Trieste’s peacetime border is shown to be metamorphosing into a wartime front. Zeno’s penultimate diary entry, dated 26 June, tells the story of how, a month before, war had caught up with him. Zeno has just discovered that his family is safe and sound in Turin, and thus feels able to recount the story in his diary.46 He compares himself to a man living calmly in a building whose ground floor had caught fire; he is now stranded in his hometown.47 The war seemed to be happening in another time and in another place, but time (the day war broke out) and place (the AustroItalian border) have converged upon him. He ‘stumbled’ into the midst of war (p. 423) – or it stumbled into him. ‘The war has overtaken me’ (p. 423), ‘the war and I met’ (p. 424):48 this peculiar grammatical agency is explained by the strange reversal which, instead of sending Zeno to the front, sends the front to him.49 He acknowledges that events unfolded in a way which was both a little violent and a little comical. On 23 May, the day on which, unbeknownst to him, war between Italy and Austria was officially declared, Zeno is staying with his family in his villa in Lucinico, a village near what is now Gorizia/Nova Gorica. Along with a dose of Carlsbad salts he must also take a two-hour morning constitutional walk, an obligation of his cure, the reward for which will be a coffee when he returns home. Zeno is given a reason for his walk – namely to find his daughter some roses – which pleases him: he ominously has a destination and a purpose. Having met a peasant neighbour and reassured him that his potato field will not become a theatre of war (which it did), Zeno then comes across a troop of soldiers. The scene of his encounter with the AustroHungarian army, rag-tag and polyglot, gives a brief glimpse of the way a formerly unified political space (the Habsburg Empire) is in the process of dissolving into mutual bafflement and incompatibility. Though it was the Austrian government who were the first to declare war, its army – as it appears here – hardly seemed fit for it. This is the beginning and not the end of war, but the soldiers are in some disarray – aging, shabbily dressed, malodorous (they reek of game), and equipped with weaponry (such as the Durlindana bayonet) more suited to the nineteenth than the twentieth century.



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In an echo of Zeno’s own dialectal dilemmas, the German lingua franca is shown to be comically inadequate in such a disparate multinational army. The sentinel who stops him on the corner of the road shouts ‘Zurück!’, but this is the only word of German he knows. Zeno repeats the word and retreats. When he comes across the same platoon on the top of the hill, he is at least able to conduct a conversation in German with the commanding officer, who is nevertheless not a native speaker (otherwise it would not be notable that he could speak German properly (p. 428)). This time Zeno is disadvantaged by his own relative lack of fluent German. He is watched by the other soldiers, cinque mammelucchi (p. 406) or five ‘Mamelukes’, interestingly rendered in an earlier translation as ‘five Czech soldiers’ (though this national designation is not made directly in the Italian).50 It is clearly a broad pejorative, signifying Zeno’s haughty contempt of the soldiers, but also has a historical relevance to the Mamelukes themselves, Circassian slaves who became military rulers in Egypt and Syria from the thirteenth century.51 The offensive term hints at the way Slavic peoples from all corners of the AustroHungarian empire had been drafted into the army and, in a classic imperialist strategy, ended up by defending and expanding the hegemony of those who had originally subjugated them. Zeno is finally insulted by the officer in German (‘he ordered me to go wherever the devil might wish to take me, wo der Teufel Sie tragen will’ (p. 429) and escorted down the hill by a Slavic corporal who does his duty by shouting ‘Marsch!’ and acting sternly while still in sight of the other soldiers. But Zeno tells us that the corporal ‘spoke rather decent Italian’ (p. 430),52 and that he reverted to this more natural, though still foreign, tongue when out of sight of his superior. This episode is indeed rather comical (un poco buffo, 400), with Zeno prevented from drinking his coffee, and politely inquiring whether it would be possible to cross the military frontier for his hat and coat.53 Furbank has emphasised how the wildly farcical tone of the last chapter returns to the first comical section with Zeno in the sanatorium, voluntarily imprisoning himself and then escaping from this wretchedly smoke-free zone.54 The disintegration of the ramshackle empire’s army is probably best captured in Jaroslav Hašek’s subversively comic The Good Soldier Švejk, a novel directly contemporary to Svevo’s, and a very oblique kind of companion text to this brief passage in La coscienza. The scene is a miniature of the collapse of the motley Austro-Hungarian army and its particoloured empire. Technically, the little group on the hill, including Zeno, are all subjects of the same state – a sovereignty of





the absurd whose failure of language points to the imminent failure of state. But part of the burlesque of this last section is the unexpected threat of violence – Zeno is after all held at gunpoint, and will be cut off from his family. War will have a particular type of tragic outcome for the border citizen. Svevo described elsewhere the meeting on a tram – on the very day that war was declared – between an Italian mother, whose son would soon be fighting for Italy, and the wife of an Austrian officer. Each recognises the anguish of the other; they almost but do not quite embrace one another: ‘neither of them dared – it would have been a protest against the war’. As Moloney suggests, Svevo opposed ‘the mystical and untruthful rhetoric of patriotism’: the women stop short of uniting themselves in grief at the prospect of heroic (male) sacrifice.55 But there is a particular sharpness to the Triestines not daring to embrace – it would reassert, in wartime, a supranational civic autonomy. The border city is now internally riven along national lines, and war will initiate, in certain cases, a type of local fratricide, sadly typical of some Central and Eastern European histories. On the train from Gorizia to Trieste, Zeno has a view of the Sassonia di Trieste, a mild green area of the Karst particularly picturesque in May. As the train stops to let eight or nine others head towards Italy, he thinks of the border as splitting open: The gangrenous wound (as the Italian front was immediately called in Austria) had opened and needed material to nourish its purulence. And the poor men went there, snickering and singing. From all those trains came the same sounds of joy or drunknenness.56 (p. 433) Zeno adds the metaphor of the border to his lexicon of ailments: the front is a physical wound, a purulent infection which – in the expected paradox – does not require disinfection but rather the nourishment of trainloads of soldiers on a one-way journey. The pathos of the high-spirited generation of 1914 (here 1915) derives from a later disillusionment – Svevo’s knowledge that the North-east of Italy, quite narrow in comparison with the Western Front, nonetheless sucked in and decimated huge numbers of soldiers on both sides. The battle lines drawn up on the day of Zeno’s walk, on either side of River Isonzo, remained fatally stable until the Caporetto retreat of 1917, and the subsequent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (This is the same territory in which Hemingway sets A Farewell to Arms, whose most bravura passage describes



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Fredric Henry’s participation in the retreat – a scar on the collective Italian memory.) The shock of this wartime section in La coscienza depends on a preceding lack of portentousness: the novel finally reveals that it has no need to plant signposts to the bloody losses of the Isonzo, Caporetto and the Piave precisely because it is sited there. This gives a spatial inflection to Moloney’s argument that in Svevo’s view war was not ‘other’ or elsewhere, but rather a natural and paradigmatic continuation of the human condition.57 By superimposing Zeno’s route upon the coordinates of the battle lines established on the same day, we note that it is a circle which does not quite close – another missed destination. Zeno walks eastwards from Lucinico, crossing the Isonzo to the Gorizian side. He then walks back towards Lucinico, to a point at which he can see his villa again, but finds himself behind a troop of soldiers. He is stopped there by a sentinel, but still intent on his coffee climbs the neighbouring hill next to the road, only to come across other members of the regiment. He is marched back away from Lucinico and ends up going to Gorizia where he fails to make telephone contact with his family at the villa. He is advised more than once that the quickest way to Lucinico from Gorizia is now via Trieste, a geographical absurdity, but nevertheless takes a train to the city.58 The small village of Lucinico ‘becomes’ Italian, and Gorizia (or in German, Görz: a couple of miles away but an important defensive position) remains Austrian. For the duration of the war Zeno’s wife and children find themselves in Italy, and Zeno, trapped in his own backyard, in Austria. In the retelling of the story we are aware of exponentiality – how an irritant to Zeno’s daily routine becomes a cause for concern, a threat, an emergency and then a final rupture. Furbank has noticed that in this final chapter the ‘pace accelerates and becomes staccato as we return from Zeno’s inner life to his antics in the face of present circumstances’; and that ‘[t]ransition huddles on transition’. This adds ‘a further Chinese box effect’ to the narrative framing.59 It also helps to visualise the spatial amplification of the chapter, which is consistent with Zeno Cosini’s Eleatic paradoxes: his walk around and across the border is a final geopolitical fable to add to the paralogician’s list. It is certainly a comic episode, and reminds us that the philosophical paradoxes are themselves playful. Zeno set off from a starting point knowing that his point of return was easily accessible. But although within sight of his own house, he tantalisingly could not get there, ultimately failing to join Z(eno) to L(ucinico). He himself recognised the absurdity of being told that the best way to get from Gorizia to Lucinico is via Trieste: motion through Julian space become stasis. He





is also stuck in time before and after, one moment enjoying a holiday walk in May, the next witnessing the fires of Trieste, unaware of the absolute moment of the outbreak of war (which takes place while he is on a train – i.e. in transitional space). This emphasis on the anti-empirical, surreal potentiality of the novel’s representation of its international space should not, however, suggest that the border was an apolitical figure to Svevo. For example, in his essay on peace and war, ‘Sulla teoria della pace’, together with draft fragments ‘Pace e guerra’ and ‘Sulla guerra’, Svevo argues in favour of Italy’s participation in the newly formed League of Nations, and proposes that borders should be weakened or opened.60 State-enforced borders prohibit free economic exchange and healthy competition. The disposition of private property – based on unfettered competition between individuals – is better regulated than the brute power which the state applies to territory and which inevitably leads to the collision of borders and to war. The conservative, free-market economic model that Svevo advances in this essay – more as the businessman Schmitz than the writer Svevo – modulates into a more utopian cosmopolitanism. Some territorial possessions should be sacrificed by nations in the interests of humanity. Svevo proposes quixotic experiments with open borders; frontiers should be reduced to the extent that they are simple signs which warn the newcomer that certain laws apply and should be complied with, like the Swiss cantons or the interstate borders of the United States. Peace treaties, including the recent Paris Treaty, are criticised for quibbling and getting bogged down by border questions whenever they can: they ratify the idea of the border as the point beyond which one cannot pass, as a brick wall. In the broader, non-economic sense, the border impedes life as well as capital.61 Reading the last chapter of La coscienza beside the contemporaneous ‘Sulla teoria della pace’, it can be seen that it is precisely because the border is a problematic political site – over-pressured by competing polities – that it likewise becomes invitingly symbolic and over-determined in narrative too. It also perhaps strengthens the idea that the border and the war were inevitably associated in Svevo’s mind and work: if La coscienza is to be regarded as a type of war novel, as Brian Moloney proposes, the fact that it is eventually drawn to the theatre of the front gains in significance. In his final diary entry, written in March 1916, nine months after the border adventure, Zeno reports his own health but the illness of mankind. For the first time, he feels himself free of hypochondria and is defiantly



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dismissive of the use of psychoanalytical therapy – the barb is aimed at his first reader, Dr. S. The jolting tonal shift in the final pages of La coscienza has been compared to the ending of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, as both interns of the sanatorium are forced to break away from the seclusion of their illness.62 Both books are conceived on a relative scale of sickness and health, and have ordinary heroes who – unlike other fatally ill characters – manage to escape their confinement at the outbreak of war. As a terminal epidemic breaks out across Europe, Hans Castorp and Zeno Cosini find that they are rid of their phantom diseases. Both the novels are pessimistically open-ended,63 and their survivors, strange Darwinian creatures indeed, are hardly to be regarded as ‘safe’. Castorp marches off to the murderous front, while Zeno’s unreliable narration of his present ‘recovery’ and future health is purely conjectural – as differing interpretations of this final section, and the subsequent fragment ‘Le confessioni del vegliardo’ (which relates Zeno’s post-war resumption of his conscience and neuroses), make clear.64 Perhaps most importantly, as Moloney has convincingly argued, Zeno’s health is a dangerous, self-deceptive sickness: ‘his conscience was cauterized by the war […] Zeno surrounds himself with a misty, imaginary harmony’.65 Zeno’s final vision is of a dystopia in which machines rule, disease proliferates, and mankind kills itself. This anticipates the atomic and nuclear ages, and acutely understands – prophetically or not – that it will be the psychologically sick or weak who will be dangerously empowered with the new weaponry. However, the contemporary impact of these closing lines should not be understated: the ordigni, the hightechnology weapons, had already laid millions to waste. Zeno chokes like a Malthusian at the thought of abundant mankind filling up the spaces of the earth, occupying every square yard: ‘Who will cure us of the lack of air and space?’ (436).66 There is a desperate social Darwinist plea – Svevo had read Herbert Spencer – that machines, in making obsolete the survival of the fittest, have fatally damaged the law of natural selection (436).67 The envisaging of a silent explosion with which the novel ends, and with it the return to a nebulous world (terra nebulosa) without mankind and without disease, has a certain ideological ambiguity. Furbank feels – again returning to the problem of whether the narrator ever speaks ‘from the heart’ – that this is the moment in which Zeno’s voice modulates into that of the author.68 Moloney, on the other hand, emphasises that Zeno’s attitude is being heavily ironised: ‘L’apocalisse di Zeno: altro che pharmakon’.69 While Svevo’s general pacifism would certainly not allow for anything curative in the poison of war, it should be noted that the hope for a new world purged and





purified, technophobia, the longing for a more natural world, together with alarm at the growth of the masses, were nonetheless symptomatically modernist forms of despair, as John Carey has illustrated.70 When, after a long period of discouraged silence, Svevo came to write La coscienza, it was not in a contemporary but in a historical, even nostalgic, mode. In contrast, the Trieste glimpsed in Joyce’s prose poem Giacomo Joyce, written in the years before the First World War, is still a semi-dormant border: ‘Trieste is waking rawly; raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance’.71 (Joyce transforms the lines in Ulysses to ‘Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets.’)72 In its Triestine form, the lines suggest that the imbricated roofs are the tortoiselike shields of the besieged rather than besieging Italians, who, in the commonplace of national rhetoric, must wake after a long Austrian sleep. The joke about bugs doubles back on itself: not only do the irredentist Italians not own their own beds but they are also hosts to the Austrian parasites. But whereas Joyce’s text witnesses this aspiration to border change with wry detachment, Svevo’s novel includes and enacts the inception of this changeover in its final chapter. The Trieste which Joyce left, but where Svevo remained, had indeed been ‘delivered’ from Italy to Austria, but at a cost: the First World War. Thus, La coscienza counterbalances what had become a suddenly anachronistic Habsburg world with the horrors of Caporetto, the neuroses of the mal du siècle with a vision of the abyssal modern. There is a sense, then – which should not be confused with Svevo’s happiness at Trieste being handed over to Italy – that there has been a general shift from a borderless to a dangerously bordered world. La coscienza can be read not just as a war novel or a post-war novel but as anticipating the later 1930s spirit of the entre deux guerres. The supervention of the border into Zeno’s consciousness at a local Triestine level pinpoints the schism between the world’s nations that is about to be enacted. The novel does not quite leap as violently as it may seem from an individual’s introspective urban life to his cosmic projections. The contested international border is the mediate term of a spatial modulation – into a world suffocated by lack of open spaces (by proliferating mankind, and thus warring nations), and thence to a terra nebulosa. Zeno echoes his philosopher-namesake in conceiving of mankind’s infinite ‘progress’ in empty space, and in prophesying the destruction of linear time. By lifting place out of the text, we are not led outwards to reified naturalist settings but further inwards to metaphor and form. As Franco



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Moretti has said, ‘near the border figurality rises: spaces and tropes are entwined; rhetoric is dependent on space’.73 La coscienza’s border is suddenly put centre stage, where it reveals itself not as incidental local colouring but as a territorialised conundrum, a trope of space. The final Eleatic paradox of the novel, a comic meeting of diachronic and synchronic states, occurs when the decelerating subject is stranded between Italy and Austria: bourgeois Western man in no-man’s-land. Svevo intentionally interposes his home border between Zeno and his destination, thereby drawing the suppressed locus of the novel into its map of psychological and philosophical coordinates.

Border modernism: the language of mistrust As the text foresaw, La coscienza, by ‘lying with its every Tuscan word’, did indeed manifest its Triestine identity in its own chill reception: what Svevo himself called ‘an utter lack of understanding and a glacial silence’.74 Readers elsewhere in Italy thought the book to be foreign and unpatriotic; Triestines felt that it treacherously misrepresented the city (perhaps in not representing it at all). Bruno Maier powerfully expressed this contemporary rejection: The ‘barbarian’ Triestine, the Italo-German writer who betrayed his hybrid origins in his very pseudonym, could not, with his unpleasant, clumsy jargon, full of Germanic traces and of dialect remnants, bristling with ungrammatical constructions and with incorrect vocabulary and syntax, be admitted to the noble castle of Italian literary tradition.75 The ‘Svevo case’, the ‘Svevo question’, the ‘Svevo campaign’ – in other words the battle within Italy for the acceptance of supposedly badly written novels such as those of Svevo – was caught up with the political programme of an increasingly Fascist state. As Maier’s summary suggests, one reviewer of La coscienza was disturbed by the author’s unpatriotic combination of forename and surname: the battle was lost even before the front cover had been opened.76 And it was a symptom of the nationalist (recently irredentist) culture of 1920s Trieste that the poor reception of La coscienza in Italy was led by critics from that country’s newly redeemed city in the North-east. Svevo’s fellow Triestines felt that the novel had somehow insulted their hometown.77 We know that Joyce helped secure Svevo’s European reputation, but it was Eugenio Montale who was the first Italian to champion him.





Montale’s article in Milan’s L’Esame, ‘Omaggio a Italo Svevo’ (1925), inspired other young Italian writers of his generation to take up Svevo’s cause.78 In ‘I limoni’, Montale opposes himself to the laureate poets (i poeti laureati – the festooned prize winners, the hyper-educated) who use archaic or recherché words. Montale was the first Italian to understand that Svevo’s modernity, his acute psychological understanding of the contemporary mind, had been neglected during and partly because of the dittatura dannunziana – the Byzantine stilismo of D’Annunzio and his school.79 There is a sense in which Montale understood, as Fascism was beginning to take hold, that appreciating ‘European’ works such as La coscienza was a resistance to atavistic cultural conformity.80 Zeno’s musings about his dialettaccio show us that Svevo not only anticipated the initial coolness of his novel’s reception, but also that, in maintaining the Swabian part of his italianità, he was eventually ready to advance a modern identity for himself as a new type of novelist, free from the tyrannical laws and sacred lists of the national canon. Lebowitz has paired Svevo and Pirandello as regional writers who overcame the problem of dialect and ‘discovered new languages that could interpret as well as describe their deracinated visions’: Svevo thus made ‘of his “defect” a part of his strength’.81 In his ‘modern anthology’, Alain Robbe-Grillet sees Svevo (at least linguistically) as a prototypical nouveau romancier, for his lack of appeal to the belles lettristes, and his proud conviction to say things badly.82 This inability to master and emulate traditional literary languages, a refusal to play by the rules of the novel, is what makes such writers fit to change the direction of the genre. As Moretti has pointed out, the novel has metamorphosed in what he has termed the ‘semi-peripheries’ of the world-system: the patrilineal line is broken and a new form – the Russian novel of ideas, Latin American magic realism – evolves.83 Svevo was a nephew rather than a son to Italy. La coscienza, perhaps Italy’s first modernist fiction, may be seen as an example of one such generic shift in the psychological novel.84 By the 1960s Montale noted that Svevo had moved, in reverse direction, from the ambiguous fame of Weltliteratur to ‘the world of our highest national literature’ – that is, to the belated membership of a canonical élite.85 Robbe-Grillet has identified dialect (along with time, Zeno’s libido and even his gait) as another form of sickness in La coscienza. The narrative insincerity and ill health of Zeno reflect on the lost innocence of the novel, which must speak false to ring true. Robbe-Grillet perhaps surprisingly connects Svevo’s sick language to its provenance in the imperial borderlands, reminding us that irredentist Trieste is comparable



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to ‘Kafka’s Germano-Czech Prague, and Joyce’s Anglo-Irish Dublin – the birthplace of everyone who is not at ease with his own language’.86 The idea of this linguistic unease, clearly relevant to Svevo’s modernist vernacular, has been developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of Kafka’s ‘minor literature’ and the deterritorialisation of language. Seen alongside Kafka, Svevo (as a border Triestine in the shadow of great Italian literature) also undertakes ‘the minor practice of a major literature’. Rather than attempting a reterritorialisation (an ‘artificial enrichment’, a Joycean ‘exhilaration and overdetermination’ of language) Svevo chooses the path of deterritorialisation: like Kafka and Beckett, though not as radically or self-consciously, he finds ‘his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois’ through the ‘willed poverty’ of language.87 This type of border literature is imprisoned in a partly foreign language, flat and functional, which forces complexity to be made elsewhere, not at the particular verbal level. We thus come to read the stiff prose of La coscienza – in some respects like Kafka’s German officialese, the prose of mistrust – as the deterritorialised idiom of Mitteleuropa. This is not the diffusely cosmopolitan sharing of an experimental aesthetic, but an atopian modernism whose poetics are ‘without qualities’.

Notes 1. Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 161. Sluga borrows the term ‘anti-history’ from a revisionist Triestine historian. 2. Quotations from Ippolito Nievo, in Fulvio Tomizza, Alle spalle di Trieste (Bologna: Bompiani, 2000), p. 7; Claudio Magris, Microcosms trans. Iain Halliday (London: Harvill, 1999); Tomizza, Alle spalle, p. 35; Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). All translations and paraphrases of untranslated Italian texts are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3. Katia Pizzi, ‘“Silentes loquimur”: “foibe” and border anxiety in post-war literature from Trieste’, Journal of European Studies, 28 (1998) 217–29 (p. 220). Katia Pizzi, A City in Search of an Author (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). 4. Svevo had in fact been educated in Segnitz, in Bavaria rather than Swabia, but probably intended the name to be taken as a synonym for non-Prussian, non-Austrian Germanity. 5. Italo Svevo, ‘Profilo autobiografico’, Opera omnia, 4 vols, ed. Bruno Maier (Milano: Dall’Oglio, 1968), III, pp. 799–810: ‘Non si poteva vivere a Trieste appartandosi dal movimento delle idee che in questa città laboriosa fu sempre attivissimo e fecondo’, p. 799; ‘Trieste era allora un terreno singolarmente adatto a tutte le coltivazioni spirituali. Posta al crocevia di più popoli, l’ambiente letterario triestino era permeato dalle colture più varie’, p. 801.





6. Tomizza, Alle spalle di Trieste, pp. 63–72: ‘Ritenevo e ritengo di possedere scarsi titoli per figurare quale scrittore mitteleuropeo, accanto ai sommi Musil, Kafka, Lukács, Andric e al nostro Svevo’, p. 68. 7. Ibid., pp. 97–104: ‘Tutti gli scrittori che qui sono nati e hanno operato, da Italo Svevo (classe 1861) a Claudio Magris (1939), volenti o nolenti, sono uomini e autori di tale Nord-Est da tenere un piede oltre i confini d’Italia, da mettersi a scrivere per proclamare o scoprire la loro italianità diversa se non esigua’, pp. 99–100. 8. See, for example, Giuseppe Antonio Camerino, ‘Italo Svevo: significato e caratteri di una poetica mitteleuropea’, in Italo Svevo scrittore europeo: atti del convegno, eds N. Cacciaglia e L. Fava Guzzetta (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1994), pp. 15–29. 9. Elizabeth Schächter, Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000), pp. 12, 16. 10. Naomi Lebowitz, Italo Svevo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), p. 2. 11. Eugenio Montale, ‘Italo Svevo nel centenario della nascita’ in Svevo-Montale carteggio, con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo, a cura di G. Zampa (Milano: Mondadori, 1985), pp. 128, 132. 12. Montale, p. 138. 13. Ibid., pp. 138, 142. 14. Elvio Guagnini, ‘Esordi di Svevo: città, letterature e società triestina’, in Italo Svevo scrittore europeo, Cacciaglia and Fava Guzzetta, eds, pp. 161–74: ‘Senza la città […] con tutte le sue punte ma anche contraddizioni in sviluppo […] sarebbe difficile concepire la genesi e lo sviluppo di Una Vita’, p. 171. 15. Schächter, Origin and Identity, pp. 2–3. 16. Sergio Pacifici, The Modern Italian Novel from Manzoni to Svevo (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 156. 17. J.M. Coetzee, ‘The Genius of Trieste’, New York Review of Books (26 September 2002), pp. 58–60 (p. 59). 18. ‘When will you write an Italian work about our town?’, letter to Joyce from Ettore Schmitz, 26 June 1914, Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), II, p. 335. 19. Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. J. and N. Mander (London: Merlin, 1963), p. 24. 20. Montale: ‘Non [è] legato a un folklore […] o a un color locale, bensì all’immagine di una città che in Italia non somiglia a nessun’altra’, pp. 120–1. 21. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), p. 52. 22. The term is taken from George Steiner, ‘Extraterritorial’, in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 14–21. 23. Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), p. 222. I will quote and cite references from the following translation: Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience, trans. William Weaver (London: Everyman, 2001). For longer quotations, I will endnote the original Italian from the Mondadori edition. 24. Place names are geopolitical signifiers. In La coscienza, surnames point to the novel’s hybrid locus: not only Guido Speier, but Zeno’s dying friend Enrico Copler (who comes from a village in Austrian Styria and is a bilocated



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25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

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Germanic-Italian, like Italus the Swabian), the shady Dr Coprosich (who, though supposedly an irredentist, is nonetheless trusted by the Imperial Courts, and whose name has a Slavic as well as scatological ring), and Tacich, the Dalmatian who is dismissed as a provincial by Guido. This is a paraphrase of Manzoni, who journeyed to Florence to ‘rinse his clothes in the Arno’: Brian Moloney, ‘Italo Svevo and the European Novel’ (Hull: University of Hull, 1977), p. 4. Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of ‘Work in Progress’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 1–22: ‘Dante did not adopt the vulgar out of any kind of local jingoism nor out of any determination to assert the superiority of Tuscan to all its rivals as a form of spoken Italian […] He did not write in Florentine any more than in Neapolitan. He wrote a vulgar that could have been spoken by an ideal Italian who had assimilated what was best in all the dialects of his country, but which in fact was certainly not spoken nor ever had been’, p. 18. For Beckett, this ideal Italian, constructed in defiance of the medieval Latin audience’s intolerance of innovation, is analogous to the modernist language of Finnegans Wake and its hostile reception; both Dante and Joyce ‘saw how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation to a universal language’, pp. 17–18. La coscienza: ‘Il dottore presta una fede troppo grande anche a quelle mie benedette confessioni che non vuole restituirmi perche le riveda. Dio mio! Egli non studiò che la medicina e perciò ignora che cosa significhi scrivere in italiano per noi che parliamo e non sappiamo scrivere il dialetto. Con ogni nostra parola toscana noi mentiamo! Se egli sapesse come raccontiamo con predilezione tutte le cose per le quali abbiamo pronta la frase e come evitiamo quelle che ci obbligherebbero di ricorrere al vocabolario! E’ proprio così che scegliamo dalla nostra vita gli episodi da notarsi. Si capisce come la nostra vita avrebbe tutt’altro aspetto se fosse detta nel nostro dialetto’, pp. 381–2. La coscienza: ‘Una confessione fatta da me in italiano non poteva essere né completa né sincera’, p. 391. La coscienza: ‘In un deposito di legnami ci sono varietà enormi di qualità che noi a Trieste appelliamo con termini barbari presi dal dialetto, dal croato, dal tedesco e qualche volta persino dal francese (zapin p.e. e non equivale mica a sapin). Chi m’avrebbe fornito il vero vocabolario? Vecchio come sono avrei dovuto prendere un impiego da un commerciante in legnami toscano?’, p. 391. Brian Moloney, ‘Psychoanalysis and Irony in La coscienza di Zeno’, Modern Language Review, 67:2 (1972) 309–18 (p. 313); and Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore: lezioni triestine, Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1998, p. 85. Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore: ‘Non continua a scrivere nella stessa lingua in cui ha scritto gli altri capitoli?’, p. 89. Lebowitz, p. 125. Translation in Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo: A Critical Edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974, p. 111. Opera omnia, III: ‘D’altronde [Svevo] ben sapeva che la sua lingua non poteva adornarsi di parole ch’egli non sentiva. Non si può raccontare efficacemente che in una lingua viva e la sua lingua viva non poteva essere altra che la loquela triestina, la quale non ebbe bisogno di attendere il 1918 per essere sentita italiana’, p. 806.





34. Domenico Cerneca, ‘Dialectical [sic] error and linguistic complex in Italo Svevo’, Modern Fiction Studies, 18, 1972, pp. 81–9. Cerneca also makes a useful distinction between the inner and outer languages: ‘The dialect takes first place in that the fundamental texture of the inner discourse, the humus from which Svevian characters emerge, suffer, and live their psychological ordeals is precisely the Triestine dialect. However, later after conception, the characters shift at the language level and take up the Italian cloak through a sometimes more or less conscious effort […] Svevo’s linguistic expression […] is represented by a dialect-language in which the dialect tries to melt and burn itself out without leaving any traces (even though it does not always succeed) and in which the beat goes on underneath, more or less openly, to make itself felt’, p. 85. See also Serge Vanvolsem, ‘La lingua e il problema della lingua in Svevo: una polimorfia che non piacque’, in Cacciaglia and Fava Guzzetta, eds, Scrittore Europeo, pp. 433–48. 35. Quoted in Coetzee, ‘The Genius of Trieste’, p. 58. 36. Quoted in John Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo: A Double Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, p. 342. 37. Ibid., p. 231. No Italian text is quoted. 38. Coetzee, ‘The Genius of Trieste’, p. 59. 39. Schächter, Origin and Identity, p. 132. 40. Lavagetto quoted in Schächter: ‘Il lettore è costretto a dimettere ogni illusione di verifica […] si trova prigioniero di una finzione che si denuncia come tale’, p. 133. 41. In fact in one episode La coscienza resembles Joseph Heller’s novel: in order to convince his father of his sanity, Zeno produces a certificate of proof of mental health, to which his father despairingly replies, ‘Ah, you really are crazy’ (p. 35). Both Zeno and Yossarian, in their imaginary or willed illnesses, are subjects dispossessed of truth, tragicomically condemned to procuring medical certificates, but only to prove themselves false to a hostile authority (the nation, the army, the father). 42. See, for example, Anthony Wilden, ‘Death, Desire, and Repetition in Svevo’s Zeno’, Modern Language Notes, 84, 1969, 98–119 (p. 106); Beno Weiss, Italo Svevo, Twayne’s World Author Series, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987, 57–8 (p. 71); Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo: A Double Life, p. 315. The name of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, is also present. Weiss relates Cosini’s conclusion that there is no cure to life, and his final, tranquil acceptance of this idea, to Stoic philosophy (p. 90). 43. A well-known exposition of the paradoxes is in Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Avatars of the Tortoise’, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, pp. 237–43. The second paradox is expounded as follows: ‘Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise and gives the animal a headstart of ten metres. Achilles runs those ten metres, the tortoise one; Achilles runs that metre, the tortoise runs a decimetre; Achilles runs that centimetre, the tortoise, a millimetre; fleet-footed Achilles, the millimetre, the tortoise, a tenth of a millimetre, and so on to infinity, without the tortoise ever being overtaken’, p. 237. 44. Weiss, pp. 57–8. 45. Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore: ‘Ho avanzato l’ipotesi che sia stata la guerra a ispirare a Svevo il romanzo, e che l’ultimo capitolo riveli pienamente il significato ontologico dei capitoli precedenti’, p. 99.



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46. We may also note that the Olivi family were forced to leave Trieste as they were Italian citizens – unlike Zeno and his family. Zeno also notes of his other Triestine employees that ‘[they] have all gone off to fight on this side or that’, p. 423 (La coscienza: ‘Sono andati a battersi di qua o di là’, p. 400): this points to the choice many Triestines had to make between fighting for Austria or for Italy. 47. La coscienza: ‘Io che stavo a sentire le storie di guerra come se si fosse trattato di una guerra di altri tempi di cui era divertente parlare, ma sarebbe stato sciocco di preoccuparsi, ecco che vi capitai in mezzo stupefatto e nelle stesso tempo stupito di non essermi accorto prima che dovevo esservi prima o poi coinvolto. Io avevo vissuto in piena calma in un fabbricato di cui il pianoterra bruciava e non avevo previsto che prima o poi tutto il fabbricato con me si sarebbe sprofondato nelle fiamme’, pp. 399–400. 48. La coscienza: ‘La guerra m’ha raggiunto!’, p. 399; ‘La guerra ed io ci siamo incontrati’, p. 400. 49. We find the same reversed agency in Schmitz’s explanation of the revival of his urge to write: ‘I regarded myself as having been convicted and sentenced and certainly if Italy had not come to me, I would not even have thought I could write’ (my italics), quoted in Gatt-Rutter, p. 291. 50. Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, trans. Beryl de Zoete, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 407. 51. The Mamelukes were also a ruling caste within the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century. The Austro-Hungarian Empire took over former Ottoman lands in Bosnia during that century, which could explain the curious transmigration of this term. 52. La coscienza: ‘Parlava discretamente l’italiano’, p. 406. 53. Svevo used to entertain friends by putting on an ‘act as a conscript in the army of Franz Josef’, Gatt-Rutter, p. 337. 54. P.N. Furbank, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer, London: Secker and Warburg, 1966, p. 202. 55. Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore: ‘Nessuna delle due osò. Sarebbe stata una manifestazione contro la Guerra’; ‘la mistica e la falsa retorica del pattriottismo’, p. 101. 56. La coscienza: ‘La piaga cancrenosa (come in Austria si appellò subito la fronte italiana) s’era aperta e abbisognava di materiale per nutrire la sua purulenza. E i poveri uomini vi andavano sghignazzando e cantando. Da tutti quei treni uscivano i medesimi suoni di gioia e di ebbrezza’, p. 409. 57. Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore, p. 103. 58. Zeno is asked by a friend if he has been taking part in the Triestine looting. On the night Italy entered the war, the Austrians organised ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations in Trieste against irredentist shopkeepers. Brian Moloney notes that this is an ironic foretaste of Zeno’s war profiteering: ‘Italo Svevo: A Critical Introduction’, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974, p. 83. 59. Furbank, pp. 202–3. 60. Italo Svevo, ‘Sulla teoria della pace’, ‘Pace e guerra’ e ‘Sulla guerra’, in Opera omnia, III, pp. 649–62. 61. Svevo, Opera omnia, III, pp. 660–1. 62. Zeno constructs his own prison bars, though he too has a spell in a Triestine institution to cure himself of smoking. The two books have been compared in L.R. Furst, ‘Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno and Thomas Mann’s Der




63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

Narratives of the European Border Zauberberg’, in Contemporary Literature, 9, 1968, 492–506. Furst stresses the biographical Germanic influence on Svevo, and his alienation from the Italian literary tradition, which has contributed to Svevo being perceived as ‘modern’ and European. Furst contrasts the essentially comic, sometimes burlesque, tone of La coscienza with the ernste Spiel of Der Zauberberg, and their differences in narrative technique and literariness. See also Moloney, Italo Svevo Narratore, p. 102. Furst comments on the incomplete closure of both novels, ‘Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno’, p. 499. For instance, contrast Beno Weiss: ‘At the end of his analysis he [Zeno] emerges as a whole and authentic human being, fulfilled and even contented, able to work and function in society as well as anyone else – perhaps even better, because of his capacity to laugh at life’, p. 91; and Brian Moloney: ‘He has not achieved wholeness or integrity. He has merely acquired the precarious superiority of the jackal who suddenly finds himself in a jungle temporarily deserted by its fiercest predators’, ‘Italo Svevo and the European Novel’, pp. 16–17. Brian Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore: ‘La sua coscienza è stata cauterizzata dalla guerra […] Zeno si circonda di una nebbia di armonia immaginaria’, p. 108. La coscienza: ‘L’uomo […] ha impedito il libero spazio […] Ne seguirà una grande chiarezza […] nel numero degli uomini. Ogni metro quadrato sarà occupato da un uomo. Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?’, p. 412. La coscienza: ‘Ed è l’ordigno che crea la malattia con l’abbandono della legge che fu su tutta la terra la creatrice. La legge del più forte sparì e perdemmo la selezione salutare’, p. 413. Furbank, p. 176. Moloney, Italo Svevo narratore, p. 111. See for example John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, London: Faber and Faber, 1992. James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 8. James Joyce, Ulysses, London: Bodley Head, 1993, p. 35. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, p. 43. Opera omnia, III: ‘Un’ incomprensione assoluta ed un silenzio glaciale’, p. 809. L.R. Furst, ‘Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg’, quotes Bruno Maier, Opere di Italo Svevo: ‘Il barbaro triestino, lo scrittore italo-tedesco che sin nello pseudonimo adattato tradiva la sua ibrida origine, con quel suo gergo ingrato e rozzo, pieno di calchi germani e di residui dialettali, irto di sgrammaticature e d’improprietà lessicali e sintattiche, non poteva essere accolto nel nobile castello della tradizione letteraria italiana’, p. 493. Gatt-Rutter points out that this conveniently disregarded the thirty-year-old Triple Alliance, pp. 317–18. Gatt-Rutter, pp. 321, 327, 328. Eugenio Montale, ‘Omaggio a Italo Svevo’, in Carteggio, pp. 71–82. Montale, p. 78.



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80. Montale signed the anti-Fascist manifesto. He probably wrote the poem ‘I limoni’ soon after reading La coscienza. It begins: ‘Ascoltami, i poeti laureati/ si muovono soltanto fra le piante/ dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti’, Eugenio Montale, ‘I limoni’, Ossi di Seppia, Verona: Arnoldo Mondatori Editore, 1948, p. 13. 81. Lebowitz, Italo Svevo, pp. 191–2. 82. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright, London: Calder and Boyars, 1965, p. 98. 83. Moretti, Atlas, p. 196. 84. This is obviously a generalised claim: La coscienza is often compared in this respect to the earlier novel Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904) by Luigi Pirandello. 85. Montale, Carteggio: ‘Quello della nostra più alta letteratura nazionale’, p. 143. 86. Robbe-Grillet, New Novel, p. 105. 87. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. 18–19.




Recreating Habsburg Borders: The Later Fiction of Joseph Roth

Habsburg borders: from Trieste to Brody Joseph Roth was born near the town of Brody, almost a thousand kilometres from Trieste, at an opposite border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now within Ukraine, Brody was part of the Galician province of Lemberg, situated on the frontier which ran between Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia. Although Svevo’s prosperous Mediterranean port and Roth’s landlocked township were unalike in most ways, they were both polymorphous European borders. Just as ‘Austrian’ Triest and its Julian hinterland was mainly Italo-Slovene (Trieste, Trst), so the province of ‘Austrian’ Lemberg was Polish and Russian and Ukrainian (Lwów, L’vov now L’viv) – though all of these labels fail to name the town’s mainly Jewish identity.1 Excessively named and claimed, these Central and Eastern European border places define what is heterotopian about atopia, and vice versa. Though Roth left Brody and Lemberg when he was quite young, he repeatedly returned to – indeed made a kind of protagonist of – Eastern Galicia in his fiction, particularly that of the 1930s. For all the more recent critical work on Roth’s sharp-eyed observations of interwar metropolitan life, his early reputation as an exponent of Neue Sachlichkeit, or the importance of Roth’s contribution in the 1920s to the Heimkehrerromane (novels of the soldier returning from war), narratives of the late imperial periphery are still what most readers first associate with his fiction.2 Of all the writers in this book, Roth most self-consciously develops an aesthetic theory of the border. Roth’s ‘Greeneland’ is the Grenze-land: what to the Viennese would be the fly-blown recesses of the Empire. The setting may comprise the frontier tavern, the distant garrison, the isolated two-storey hotel, the last 66



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station on the line – all encircled by treacherous swampland. The same melancholic or untrustworthy types appear: lonely and adulterous wives, migrant hucksters, unscrupulous moneylenders, border traders or smugglers, aristocrats living on borrowed time, idling and dissolute soldiers, refugees, Jewish innkeepers, matronly brothel-keepers and idealistic men soon corrupted. For all that its characters suffer from the ennui and degeneration of the European outpost, Roth’s fiction is most vividly at home on the border. In this first, naturalistic sense, Roth is a convincing portraitist of twilit Eastern European borders. Roth is often called an elegist of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and the extent to which that elegiac quality is or is not ironised has been a continued subject of critical discussion. But a consensus exists on this point: that it was precisely because Roth was not Viennese that he was the best – the most affectionate, the most critical – of Habsburg elegists. Vienna is often a mythic, distant, imagined, remembered or eroticised presence in his books – the capital of a supposedly unified state but the city of unrequited desire. Roth looked inwards to the imperial core, and diagnosed Habsburg Europe as it existed in its Crown Lands, its margins and marches. Roth writes of the border both as an Austrian and as a Jewish-Slavic Crown Lander: it is, respectively, an estranging outer space, or the Heimat of the Habsburg Empire. This chapter will first examine how the concept of ‘nowhere’ is a commonplace in Austrian history and literature. Roth’s journalism reveals that he is preoccupied with the border both as a political problem and a site of desire. How, then, are the borders of the atopian Habsburg Empire represented in his fiction? The following sections illustrate how Roth’s fiction imagines Habsburg Europe as a metonymic space, but also how that model of contiguous, unitary space is working loose. Roth is known for his lists: this textual site is where the tension between Austrian sameness and multinational difference is best theorised. I consider fictionalisations of Roth’s Galician border in some of his work of the 1930s: the two ‘Trotta’ novels Radetzkymarsch (1932) and Die Kapuzinergruft (1938) and the short story ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ (1934).3 In Radetzkymarsch, a Slovene soldier of peasant stock saves Emperor Franz Josef’s life. The hero of Solferino is ennobled as an Austrian. His son is a faithful civil servant, his routine that of the perfect Austrian – even down to cherry dumplings on Sunday. But the third generation Trotta, Carl Joseph, is a Habsburger maudit. He returns, symbolically if not literally, from where the Trottas came – to the border provinces, eventually ‘going native’ as a Ukrainian peasant, and tragicomically falling in battle. The Galician border is a key presence in Radetzkymarsch.



Recreating Habsburg Borders 67


‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ tells of Count Morstin, a Galician aristocrat whose paternalist belief in the supranational dynasty is destroyed by the post-war transformation of Europe into nation states. The village of Lopatyny, of which he was the Habsburg representative, becomes part of the Polish Republic. Morstin is looked upon as increasingly eccentric (and ex-centric), but stages a well-attended burial of the bust of the Emperor which had been carved by a local peasant. He has to retire to the Riviera; a passage from his papers speaks of his love for the Big House of Austria, with its enfilade of little rooms, and his hatred for the broken-up cabins of the nation states. Die Kapuzinergruft resurrects the Trottas. Franz Ferdinand, the narrator, is related to the hero: he too is a sometime-soldier but more accurately a decadent Viennese. He forms friendships with a Slovene chestnut roaster and a Galician Jew, who visit him in Vienna. He visits the border town of Zlotogrod just before joining up; during the war he is captured and sent with them to Siberia as a prisoner of war. The novel narrates his interrupted and eventually extinguished passion for Elizabeth, and satirises the opportunists and frauds of interwar metropolitan life. It ends with the Anschlu, desperately concluding at the Capuchin crypt of the Habsburgs, with the narrator’s question, ‘So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?’ (p. 157).4 There is a consistently identifiable and recurrent ‘Rothian’ border in these texts, which the sections on metonymy and lists will address. However, the last section reads between rather than across the Trotta novels, in considering whether Roth’s recreation of the Habsburg Empire changes during the 1930s. I argue that a discriminate study of the literary manifestations of the Galician border contributes to the critical debate in Roth scholarship over his supposed nostalgia and sentimentality for the lost empire.

Austrian atopia Politically, it was essential to Austria that it did not exist. The Austrian Empire had taken its recognisable shape in post-Napoleonic Europe, profiting from its strategic importance as a Central European axis between East and West. Austrian diplomacy, such as that practised by Metternich, championed this imperial vacuum in the heart of Europe, the necessity for a buffer between pan-German or pan-Slavic movements. This, at least, was part of the Catholic ‘mission’ which this relict space of the Holy Roman Empire promulgated to further its interests, and what allowed the anachronistic Habsburg dynasty, through a muddle



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of alliances, cessions and annexations, lost wars and political manoeuvrings, to persist into the twentieth century. The compromise or 1867 Ausgleich with Hungary had given Habsburg Austria, in the bizarre geopolitical form of the Dual Monarchy, a stay of execution. Vienna presided over a heterogeneous population of Germans, Magyars, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians (or Ruthenes), Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Italians, Ladins as well as many assimilated and orthodox Eastern European Jews. Ethnographically, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was both mosaic and melting pot, utterly without unitary character. Geographically, there was an equal absence of logic behind the existence of a territory which sprawled from Lombardy in the west to Russia in the east, from the Swiss Alps to the Carpathians, from the Southern Adriatic to the Bohemian hinterlands of Prague. It was impossible for Austria to conceive of itself as a nation, because it identified itself as a space from which nation states were excluded. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Robert Musil called this fantastical space Kakania, the kaiserliche und königliche Monarchie: or, in the nursery, the ‘Ka-Ka’ (K-und-K) land. Musil compared the particular mysteries of Dualism to those of a higher Trinity.5 He is never more Austrian than when capturing the ratified absurdity of his own country: It did not consist of an Austrian part and a Hungarian part that, as one might expect, complemented each other, but of a whole and a part; that is, of a Hungarian and an Austro-Hungarian sense of statehood, the latter to be found in Austria, which in a sense left the Austrian sense of statehood with no country of its own. The Austrian existed only in Hungary, and there as an object of dislike, at home he called himself a national of the kingdom and lands of the AustroHungarian monarchy as represented in the Imperial Council, meaning that he was an Austrian plus a Hungarian minus that Hungarian.6 This is nationhood as remainder, deficit, residue: anxieties about expressions of Englishness in post-devolution and post-imperial Britain may be seen as partly comparable. Franz Werfel described ‘a true and real sacrificium nationis, a renunciation of facile self-assertion and indulgence in the instincts of one’s own blood’, a process of assimilation by which ‘the individual changed from a German, or Czech or whatever he was, into an Austrian’.7 But as these individuals began to recognise their ethno-nationality, the ‘Austrian’ was left without such a nation to belong or aspire to.





The Austrian thus existed as a lack. Late imperial power and an impending sense of statelessness combined in a typical fin-de-siècle attitude of neurosis, decadence, the tragicomic or the simply frivolous. The Prussian would say, ‘The situation is serious, but not hopeless’; the Austrian, ‘The situation is hopeless, but not serious’.8 Musil distinguished an Austrian ‘Kultur der Differenz’ – Austria as a country defined by its external relationships (Friedrich Heer’s ‘Außenbezogenheit’) – from the Prusso-German drive to national unity.9 Habsburg Austria was a decentred patchwork made up of the protoborders of undetermined nationalities. Or, as one of Roth’s characters, Count Chojnicki, puts it: ‘Austria’s essence is not to be central, but peripheral. Austria is not to be found in the Alps, where you can find edelweiss, chamois and gentians but never a trace of the double eagle’ (p. 17).10 Nor could ‘Austria’ be found in Vienna, though it was administered from there – a great European seat of culture, it had no identity as a national capital. The idea of an Austrian ‘nowhere’ had a specific meaning to the Eastern European Jews of the empire, too. Writing in the 1920s about the semiassimilated Eastern Jews, Roth said, ‘Zionism and nationhood are by their nature Western European ideals, even if what they aspire towards may not be. Only in the East do people live who are unconcerned with their “nationality”, in the Western European sense […] Nationality is a Western concept’.11 Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist and initially an assimilationist, founded Zionism in the Austrian parliament, a battlefield of competing nationalisms.12 For Roth, the doubled displacement of being a Jewish and Slavic outsider defined his objection to ‘Western’ nationality and his corresponding alliance – either in celebratory, melancholy or despairing strain – with deterritorialised atopianism. W.G. Sebald has written that, for diaspora Jews whose graves lie everywhere, the ‘Heimat is nowhere and therefore the epitome of pure utopia’.13 After the redrawing of the Central European map at the Treaty of Trianon, writers like Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Bruno Schulz, Italo Svevo and Sándor Márai were repatriated by the ground beneath their feet: in a purely technical sense, these imperial ‘Austrian’ subjects ‘became’ Czech, Polish, Italian or ‘fully’ (but also, because of their reduced territory, depletedly) Hungarian. Habsburg Austro-Germans, like Musil, Stefan Zweig and Broch, ‘became’ Austrian nationals, part of a diminished Alpine rump republic. The idea of an Austrian vacuum thus changes in the interwar years. The Habsburg Empire, Atlantis-like, comes to stand for a territory of lost



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time, and its exiles, in Julia Kristeva’s words, ‘strangers to themselves’: they are ‘melancholy lover[s] of a vanished space’ who cannot get over having ‘abandoned a period of time’.14 Finally, Austria is lost to its Germanity: the Anschluß is the most extreme manifestation of the country’s atopian history. That this kind of anti-topos underlies Austrian literature is made clear in the very title of W.G. Sebald’s Unheimliche Heimat.15 The starting point of Freud’s essay on the unheimlich is the shared, rather than antonymical, etymology of heimlich and umheimlich – that the home is the furtive place where secrets are stowed away, and thus where the familiar, repressed into the unfamiliar, reappears as the ghostly ‘uncanny’. Sebald shows how the concept of Heimat (Heimatbegriff ) has become uncanny to different generations of Austrian writers. To Stifter, capitalism brought the unheimlich to the Heimat.16 JewishAustrian writers who, on emigrating from the Eastern borderlands, had then lost the Habsburg Monarchy, felt both the practical reality of Austria as an accommodating Heimat, but also its transience and illusory quality. Heimat was thus, in Sebald’s words, a ‘rehearsal for exile’.17 Sebald suggests that the Anschluß rendered Heimat – by now an ‘ideologised’ label – unusable, reduced to the reactionary pastoral (or Holzwegliteratur).18 Though it is still not easy to feel at home in Austria, certain writers have in recent years started re-examining the notion of Heimat, which itself throws up spectres of Austria’s political past.19

Roth’s journalism: borderlines and borderlands Chapter Two argued that the border has become an abstract, spatial figure, dissociated from territorial place, in post-structuralist forms of postcolonial discourse. This tension between models of the border generated from within theory, and the lived history of borders on the ground, is traceable back to Roth’s own statements about the border in his journalism. Edward Timms has considered how a set of Rothian border thematics can be reconstructed from the numerous articles Roth specifically directed to this subject in the interwar years.20 Timms argues that, for Roth, the border is essentially not a metaphor.21 Whereas philosophers like Karl Jaspers may conceive of die Grenze as the most extreme limit, as a site of existential isolation, Roth emphasises the solidarity of border communities.22 Grenzmenschen, like the Lorrainer Hermann Wendel, born in German Metz but now living in French Metz, are special men who represent an ideal but practicable





supranational politics.23 His connection is with the Land, not the Vaterland, with the pays, not the patrie.24 The ideal of the Grenzmensch can be equated, for example, to Enzo Bettiza’s championing of the floating Istrian apolide, the (Croat-Slovene-Italian) citizen ‘without a polis’. We have seen from Bhabha’s work that a semantic fissure opens up between, on the one hand, the little-mentioned political borderline as an exclusionary site of terror, and on the other, the signature use of the border as a theoretical master-trope of in-between-ness, interstitial or hybrid non-identity, of spatio-temporal beyondness. In Roth’s use of the term Grenze the same instability is visible, but with the important difference that the figure of the benign between – the Zwischenbereich – is grounded in his own experience of Niemandsland and his interest in other widely spread European border peoples.25 He makes particular mention, for example, of a tiny community, somehow forgotten in the criss-crossing of the political map, between Holland, France and Germany; he considers the lot of refugees, coming both from Hungary and Russia, who build a new village on the border – a new emigrant nowhere-nation; he admires the Transylvanian ‘love on the border’ between Germans and Hungarians who do not think of themselves as such, and likewise the peaceable citizens of Katowice who are ‘above’ questions of nationality.26 Svevo objected, in his non-fiction essays, to the recently erected barriers of the Paris Peace Conference; La coscienza tragicomically records the formation of the military border across which the unsuspecting Zeno shall not pass. In the same year, in a newspaper article entitled ‘Die Grenze’, Roth himself wrote against the new borders, drawn up by statesmen as if they were playing chess, as ‘unnatural’.27 This objection to the border as dividing-line (Trennungslinie) and barrier (Schranke), is an immediate response to Woodrow Wilson’s abstract wielding of the principle of self-determination in Central and Eastern Europe.28 Svevo imagines ideally unenforced borders merely reduced, canton-like, to their symbols; but Roth hated all the border paraphernalia – signposts, wire netting, customs officers, visas, permits: to him these were despicable trivialities (Niederträchtigkeiten).29 It is no surprise that his characters complain about having to carry passports after the war. Roth’s journalism, as Timms reveals, follows the pattern of border theories of space and place – attracted to the supranational zone of the anti-teleological borderland, but repelled by the hyper-historical, barbed-wire excess of the borderline.



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As we have seen earlier, Foucault was interested in how the government of France began to think of its whole state territory as a city radiating and enforcing systemic connectedness. This sort of utopian centralism envisaged the far-flung border, at the end of the longest road, to be as much part of the nation state as the capital. The contiguous geographic imaginings of the Trotta family are those of the eighteenth-century town planners. Although there are scenes in the Emperor’s palace, and all three Trottas visit the city at various stages, Vienna is not represented as a self-bounded metropolis, but as the epicentre of the Austro-Hungarian state. Helen Chambers has written of the partial absorption of the capital in Radetzkymarsch: it is the demimonde of Carl Joseph’s erotic fantasies.30 Post-war Vienna is one of the Eliot’s fallen, ‘unreal cities’: its association is with the myths of Marie’s pre-War world; it is also an image of childhood to Carl Joseph.31 The very contiguity of late Habsburg space, with Vienna at its heart, becomes for Roth increasingly fabulated. When Carl Joseph sees the majestic Corpus Christi procession on the Ringstrasse, in all its technicolour variegation – the pale blue trousers of the infantry, the burnished Knights of the Golden Fleece, the Hungarian Life Guards draped in black and yellow, the ‘blood-red fezzes on the heads of the pale blue Bosnians [which] burned in the sun like bonfires of joy, lit by Islam’ (p. 211) – he thinks that ‘the whole city was just an extended court’ (p. 212).32 The District Commissioner’s idea of reform in the empire is ‘to see all the Crownlands simply as large and suitably colourful wings and extensions of the Imperial Palace’ (p. 138) – a geopolitical fantasy of Habsburg sameness in Central and Eastern Europe.33 The Trottas’ dream world was nonetheless a real state, emanating from Schönbrunn chamber to Moravian barracks, and on to the frontier garrisons in Bosnia, Transylvania and the Russian border. Now we might pause to consider the categories of metonymy, synecdoche and contiguity. In David Lodge’s exposition of Jakobson’s structuralist opposition of metaphor and metonymy, he uses the example ‘Keels crossed the deep’ for ‘Ships crossed the sea’. The former is a synecdoche – a keel is part of a ship. The latter is metonymic: depth is a property of the sea. The ideas of sea and deep are already connected but they are not similar: that would be metaphorical.34 Combination, association and contiguity belong to metonymy, whereas selection, similarity and substitution belong to metaphor.



Metonymic state


In Barthes’s Elements of Semiology, the metonymic axis is emphasised as horizontal and syntagmatic, and the metaphoric axis as vertical and paradigmatic.35 The column is conceptualised metonymically in relation to the doorway, plinth and architrave, other parts of the whole building; as a metaphor the column is considered Ionian, selected from the vertical axis of other, absent possibilities, such as the Doric or Corinthian.36 In the simplest sense, the metonymic text is associable with realism and the metaphoric with poetry, and, in Lodge’s analysis, with the radical revolutions of the word in modernist prose works. However, the relationship between metaphor and metonym is not dualistic or mutually exclusive but rather a question of the relative dominance of one mode over another. What I would like to draw attention to, in this formalist-structuralist analysis of discourse, is the kind of world-view or ontological status that may be extrapolated from it. Wellek and Warren briefly distinguish between ‘poetry of association by contiguity [as] movement within a single world of discourse’ and ‘poetry of association by comparison, joining a plurality of worlds’ (my italics).37 Lodge points to how the ‘contextural’ condensation of keels and ships ‘reflects their actual existential contiguity in the world’.38 In ‘Keels ploughed the deep’, however, ‘ploughed’ is a metaphor for the way ships cross the sea. There is no contiguity between ploughs and ships: they exist, as it were, in different worlds. The Trottas’ vision of Habsburg statehood equates the metonymic urge with the single world – with, in Brian McHale’s terms, a kind of ‘this world’ ontology – in which a concatenation of particulars is implicitly projected upon an imaginable site of space.39 From the point of view of the undetermined Central and Eastern European nationalities, this is the conservative geography of a status quo which resists substitution. As the following chapter will reveal, nationalists conversely require a transforming dream of national substitution, where ‘this world’ is replaced by other, better worlds. The national consciousness, perhaps most particularly when it is ‘unredeemed’, relies on the lyricism, romanticism, and symbolism that are all listed by Jakobson as features of metaphor.40 The use of metonymy and synecdoche is ambiguous: the former is regarded as the umbrella term (a general category which stresses the existing contiguity between figures or mutually shared or combined properties) for the latter (the part standing for the whole), but sometimes the two terms are taken to be interchangeable. Based on the first usage, for example, it may be said that the very nomenclature of the Habsburg Empire lends itself to metonymy. ‘The Monarchy’, the ‘Dual



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Monarchy’, the ‘double-eagle’ (Doppeladler), the ‘Black and Yellow’ (Schwarzgelb), ‘His Apostolic Majesty’, the ‘House of Austria’: such titulature, iconography and personification seem less to be synecdochic fragments than mutually coexisting, metonymic representations of the Austro-Hungarian state. Roth’s fiction contains a set of overlapping Habsburg synecdoches and metonyms – parts and properties from which we are continually asked to infer the political whole – whose syntagmatic connectedness bears the ideology of the Habsburg motto Viribus in Unitis (strength through unity). Roth is humorously aware of this model of space. In the Moravian province – a close concentric circle to Vienna but a Czech border – the District Commissioner, who represents Austria and the Emperor as both administrator and figurehead, has muttonchop sideburns, standard issue in the civil service, which are themselves an extension of his uniform (p. 29) – like his elasticated trousers, or his distinctive high-stepping walk. The identifiable sameness extends down the imperial hierarchy: even the waiters, who may be serving Viennese coffee 500 miles away from the metropolis, sport dundrearies just like Emperor Franz Josef. And the comic logic of this synecdochic figure is followed through to its precise political meaning in Dualism: a character strokes muttonchop whiskers ‘as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the Monarchy’ (p. 55).41 Imperial iconography is a function of space: the Emperor is ‘[s]cattered a hundred thousand fold throughout the whole great Empire […] as omnipresent among his subjects as God in the world’ (p. 75).42 The Emperor’s portrait hangs in the assembly hall of the military school, in the colonel’s office, in the officer’s club, in the station restaurant in Galicia and in a brothel. This last location implies that the demiurge has been debased: in enfeebled emulation of his grandfather’s accidental heroism on the battlefield (p. 82), Carl Joseph ‘saves’ the Emperor by removing his portrait from the wall of the brothel. The imperial paterfamilias is at the same time near and far, ubiquitous but remote. The Emperor’s painted presence is a portrait of Habsburg life on the border, where depthless metonymic surfaces encode archaic rituals (duelling, equestrian displays and the playing of Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’) which will soon be rendered obsolete. The imperial image betrays itself – through its indiscriminate reproducibility – as an outdated simulacrum of imperial essence. Not all the Slavic subjects keep the portrait above the hearth; the innkeeper relegates a pockmarked and faded canvas from the taproom to the kitchen. Radetzkymarsch, as an end-of-empire novel, recognises the movement towards a ‘deep’





metaphoric model of substitution, in which the imperial world is imagined as replaceable by a world of national communities. In revealing the metonymic bonds of Austrian space, the Trotta novels simultaneously draw attention to the gaps between – the over-extension of – empire. Railways, for example, loom symbolically in Roth’s work: the border nodes of Mitteleuropa are joined together in a unitary Habsburg state, but distance competes with proximity. It takes the District Commissioner 18 hours to reach the Eastern Galician outpost from the interior. At this last halt before the Russian border, his son Carl Joseph habitually observes the westward train, which travels to Crakow and Oderberg and onwards to Vienna. He dreams of following the shining rails into the heart of the empire; its ‘bright, cheerful, glassy’ telegraph signals, ‘a faint echo of a mother’s calls’, are ‘beautiful confused voices of a distant lost world […] busily tapped out, as if by a clattering sewing machine’ (p. 142).43 In Die Kapuzinergruft, Franz Ferdinand notices the iron contraption in Zlotogrod station (which he remembers in Slovenian Sipolje too) out of which the telephone also signals ‘from other worlds’ (p. 36). Helen Chambers has argued that such technological connections give the border a direct route to the centre, an unmediated communication between peasant and emperor, so that the modernity of the city is brought into the province. As the title of Chambers’s essay suggests, this mutual constitution – the city and border town are not binarised as metropole and backwater but are, rather, in or of each other – is a metonymic structure: they belong to the same contiguous whole.44 However, the railway tracks map the dreams of the outlying melancholic soldier, stuck on the border and barely sustained by this sense of the interconnected whole.45 Carl Joseph experiences the otherworldliness of the borderland, and his apprehension of the capital is likewise of a distant, other world from which he is excluded. Roth also imagines a different geopolitical binary opening up between the Viennese metropolis, described in fairly damning terms, and the benign periphery. The Vienna of Die Kapuzinergruft sits ‘like some brilliant and seductive spider at the heart of the mighty black and yellow web, ceaselessly drawing power, energy and brilliance from the surrounding Crown Lands’ (p. 60).46 The spider’s web figure of political space has the same radial form as the railway network but becomes a model of economic parasitism. Imperial power is no longer emanating benevolently to nodes on widening but interconnected concentric circles (say, Bohemia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Transylvania and Galicia). Chojnicki thinks of the Austrian body politic being constantly replenished from



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the Crown Lands (p. 17). The centripetal benevolence of the border peasantry and Jewry has been abused by the rotten city: it was they, not the Viennese, who were the nourishers of the supranational ideal. This idea is considered by Georg Lukács in his essay on Radetzkymarsch.47 It was because of this perceived estrangement of centre and periphery that Roth is conscious of Galicia as a sign of place. Since Brody’s first appearance in the short story ‘Erdbeeren’ (‘Strawberries’), Galicia became a template of the Austro-Slavic border.48 In Radetzkymarsch, the town plan is laid out: a spacious Ring, where the two principal roads crossed, one north to south, the other east to west, connecting the station to the cemetery, and the ruined castle to the steam-mill (p. 139). The cruciform Habsburg town became, for Roth, an identikit place that could be assembled out of its old Habsburg parts in any of the imperial margins. Maria KAan´ ska argues that Galicia’s political status as part of the Empire is only relevant when it functions as a metonymy of the monarchy – a specific example of the synecdoche or pars pro toto of Austria, where the destructive processes of the Monarchy are particularly visible.49 The miniature model is replicable throughout Eastern Europe: as far as Roth’s ‘private’ Heimatbild is concerned, ‘Galicia’ can also refer to parts of Poland or Russia.50 It is clear that Roth’s repeated throwing up of the border stage-set in the 1930s fiction is completely dependent on his sense of a reliable contiguity in lost space.

Lists: sameness One idiosyncrasy of Roth’s writing, central to his literary representation of the Galician border and of the empire as a whole, is the list. The Rothian list points two ways. It generates a semiotics of ubiquitous ‘Austria’, which, in replicating a single world, chains together identical synecdochic parts: the centre is everywhere. At the same time, the list builds up a semiotics of Slavic and Jewish difference, in which sheer exotic miscellany suggests the heterotopian incompatibility of these elements: the circumference is everywhere. Within this tension, the mimetic, naturalistic description of ‘setting’ is destabilised by an increasing awareness of the meta-fictive. Enumeration is a tradition of classical rhetoric: in Roth’s fiction, these sets of Habsburg signifiers constitute a self-conscious literary performance. The representation of a single, interlinked mitteleuropäisch polity demands the recognition of sameness-within-diversity. In ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’, the multicultural mosaic of Count Morstin’s utopian Europe





must share signs of common Habsburg polity. His native Galician village of Lopatyny reappears, he feels, throughout the Monarchy: the station, the kiosk, the Trafik store with its facade of yellow and black diagonals, the feathered hats of the policemen, the double eagle, the nine o’clock retreat, and the same nasal medieval German to be heard amongst all the different peasant folk songs (p. 237). Bruce Thompson notices the ‘exaggerated quaintness in the long list of identical features and phenomena selected for mention’.51 There is an opening paradox here, which is that the Count catalogue needs to be as long, varied and non-identical as possible in order for him to celebrate imperial uniformity. Franz Ferdinand’s inventory of the Café Habsburg in Zlotogrod has the same purpose: he lists off the chessboard, dominoes, smoke-stained walls, gas lamps, the cake trolley in the corner, the blue-aproned waitresses, the country gendarme with loam-yellow helmets, the roundsleeved cardplayers (p. 39). These minutiae initially seem to belong to the camera-eye naturalism of Roth the Berlin journalist, but it is a later Roth who is here salvaging the particulars of memory. And whereas naturalist prose pretends to suppress its own aesthetic qualities and its potential interpretability as literary text, Roth seems to invite both. The Café is to be vividly localised, to be sure, but Roth’s transparent purpose is to render it, and Zlotogrod, as an almost infinitely replicable fractal in Central and Eastern Europe. Leibnizian ‘recursive self-similarity’ connects the small border fractal of the Galician village to the whole of the empire, which is regarded as ‘greater’ than its small spaces in scale, but not in complexity. A second type of homogenising list selects a particular feature and asks us to imagine its typicality. While visiting Zlotogrod, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, in Die Kapuzinergruft, notes of the typical buxom barmaid, to be found in the typical coffee house: ‘I had seen her like in Agram, Olmütz, Brünn and Kecskemet, in Szombathely, Ödenburg, Sternberg and Müglitz’ (p. 39).52 Habsburg paternalism has ‘the ability to bring near what is remote, to domesticate what is strange and to unite what seems to be trying to fly apart’ (p. 38).53 The House of Austria’s domestication includes the comfortable Germanisation of places now known to us as Zagreb, Olomouc, Brno […] Sopron, Sternberk, Mohelnice. Trotta, a careworn Viennese Jäger of peasant Slovene ancestry, is ‘home from home’ in Zlotogrod. Establishing this network of palpable sameness in the polity would always allow ‘homo austriacus’ to pitch his tent anywhere in half of Europe: ‘I had hardly spent a week in Zlotogrod before I was as much at



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home as if I were in Sipolje, Müglitz, Brünn or our own Café Wimmerl in the Josefstadt’ (p. 39).54 Similarly, Morstin’s universalist map of Europe is an idealised political space where the familiar and the strange coexist, and the border is an obverse site of home and exile: Like every Austrian of that time, Morstin was in love with the constant in the midst of change, the familiar in the variable, the dependable in the midst of the unaccustomed. In this way, what was foreign came to be homely to him, without losing its timbre, and home had the reliable charm of the exotic.55 (p. 237) Morstin’s ‘Austria’ is the place in which the fremd and the heimisch are shown to be happily interpenetrative, just as it is the more clandestine place – the Viennese hearth – where Freud undoes the semantic opposition of heimlich and unheimlich.

Lists: diversity This state of equilibrium between the homely and the foreign is, however, at a tipping-point. Morstin thinks of the bourgeois nationalists, all formerly ‘Austrians’, now agitating for change in places like Tarnopol, Czernowitz, Oderburg, Troppau (now, Ternopil, Chernivitsi, Bohumin, Opava) (pp. 241–2).56 The emergent nationalities he then lists do not correspond to the order of the place names: the randomness suggests both the Count’s own disregard of discrete Slavic (and other) identities, and the intrinsic impossibility of assigning a single nationality to cities which may be, for example, part Ukrainian and part Polish. To a Habsburg loyalist such as Count Chojnicki, in Radetzkymarsch, the aspirational ‘dirty little statelets’ (p. 149) (dreckigen, kleinen Staaten (p. 266)) require a carefully enumerated set of insults, which include the assertion that Poles are ‘fornicators, barbers and fashion-photographers’ (p. 148).57 The chauvinism of this catalogue is characteristically ‘Austrian’, however: Chojnicki is himself a Pole. Habsburg apologists argue for the overarching sameness of the supranational House by listing the deficiencies of separate national groupings, but in doing so draw attention to the increasing ungovernability of this unitary Habsburg world. It is notable that when the ‘good’ diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is celebrated, it must be captured in non-national terminology.




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The gypsies of the Puszta, the Huzulen of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria; and the poorer they were, the more generous.58 (p. 61) Foucault, as we have seen, thinks of heterotopia as both discursive (groundless writing) and as possible in the world (utopian projects which are not here, but nevertheless elsewhere in the world). Roth’s circumscribed plenitude, an impossible menagerie, did ‘exist’ – precariously. James Wood has recognised the high nostalgic utopianism and instability of Roth’s passage: ‘[He] relishes the strange crooked proper names […] The nouns become almost abstract, lift out of reference and hover in the unaccountable, where they cannot be verified or really known: where is Podolia?’59 In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson cites the Habsburg titulature as an example of the dynastic gathering – or ‘the innumerable marriages, hucksterings and captures’ – of diverse populations (I quote his incomplete list in full): Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, etc.; Archduke of Austria [sic]; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Loth[a]ringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, and Guastella, of Ausschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa, and Zara, Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Görz, and Gradiska, Duke of Trient and Brizen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lausitz and in Istria; Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and above the Windisch Mark, Great Voyvod of the Voyvodina, Servia … etc.60 But, for all the supposed historical concreteness of this title, the reading eye glazes over – did it not? – when confronted with such a miscellany.



Franz Ferdinand’s eulogy of the peripheral essence of the empire, in Roth’s most memorable list, is mainly topographical, regional, or ethnic:

As Foucault says, ‘in such a state [we may say, ‘in such a State’] things are “laid”, “placed”, “arranged” in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all’. Although a defamiliarising name such as ‘Ausschwitz’ (Austrian? German? Polish; a universal place) pulls us up short, the heterotopian geography of the real and the fictive become indistinguishable. In Twelfth Night Viola asks: ‘What country, friends, is this?’ and the answer is contained in this list.61 Roth’s text is almost as self-referential – risking self-parody and on the brink of logorrhoea – as the lists in Ulysses. In Joyce’s case, the absurdity of Irish national belonging is intentionally comic and much more meta-textually aware than Roth: Irish heroes of antiquity include (damaging though it is to select from the list): Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages […] the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight […] Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone […] The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn’t […] Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton […] Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven.62 Here, the first impression is of a lawless enumeration: the common locus of Irish national heroism not just subverted but rendered impossibly heterotopian. But, on second consideration, the writing is not as threateningly groundless, aphasically lacking in metonymic chains, as is Gertrude Stein’s, for example. The common site of space, it might be speculated, is the satirical voice of the text – we may not know who is coming next, and we may not even be sure if it will be ludicrously unIrish or occasionally ‘straight’, but we appreciate the comic ground plan of the passage. Roth’s territorialisation of sub-Carpathian Huzulen, Osman Sibersna and Podolian coral dealers is not really comic, but it too revels in its own textual fantasy. The well-known inventory of goods exchanged by the Brody border traders in Radetzkymarsch runs as follows: They traded in feathers, in horsehair, in tobacco, in silver bars, in jewels, in Chinese tea, in exotic fruits, in horses and cattle, in hens and eggs, in fish and vegetables, in jute and wool, in butter and cheese, in forests and property, in Italian marble and in human hair from China used for the manufacture of wigs, in silkworms and in silk, in textiles from Manchester, in lace from Brussels and galoshes




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It is mentioned, almost as a postscript, that they also traded in human beings. This list is different from those eulogies of diversity quoted above in that it deliberately mixes what is beyond and within the confines of the empire. There is no unifying transcendent signified – ‘Austria’ – to which these particulars are magnetised. Helen Chambers has pointed out that the border place is characterised by its peculiar position between East and West; she refers both to the metonymic precision and poetic brio – poetischer Schwung – of the seemingly unending list.64 For a moment we accept the naturalistic notation – we presume these data to be verifiable – but the Borgesian quality takes over: how can so much sheer strangeness be gathered together in one transcontinental site? Roth knows, as did Joyce in ‘Ithaca’ and Cyclops’, that any list that seems to aspire to exhaustibility, and to passively objective denotation, is doomed: thus, the clever collocation here of the common or garden and the precious; and the comical pairings of linen and lead, wigs and galoshes. The poetischer Schwung which Chambers refers to is also the self-conscious modernist awareness of fictional prose, not as a vehicle for mimesis, but as an aesthetic medium. It is as though Roth could have continued to juxtapose the plain and the colourful, the light and the heavy, for as long as he wanted. There is a playful, meta-discursive awareness here, as there is in the ‘crooked’ list of Erzgebirge weavers and Swabian tobacco growers from the Bacska. Barthes gains textual pleasure from the following sentence in Bouvard et Pécuchet: ‘Cloths, sheets, napkins were hanging vertically, attached by wooden clothespins to taut lines’.65 What he enjoys is an ‘excess of precision, a kind of maniacal exactitude of language, a descriptive madness’: this discursive code, like that of Robbe-Grillet, ignores literary or oratorical language and aims instead to represent itself as ‘lexicographical artifact’.66 Elsewhere in The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes distinguishes between the verbal erotics of extravagant repetition and those of ‘succulent’ or ‘glistening’ new words which appear in the text as ‘incongruous apparitions’.67 Roth’s lists are pleasurable in this Barthesian sense. The list of border goods makes the marvellous ordinary and vice versa, just as the Galician border is the symbiotic locus of the heimisch and the fremd to Count



from Moscow, in Viennese linens and Bohemian lead. Not one of the wares in which the world is so rich was either so marvellous or so ordinary as to be beyond the ken of these traders and dealers.63 (p. 140)

Morstin. The border undoes the binary: are Wellingtons exotic in Moscow, or is human hair to be marvelled at in China? Conversely, the inclusion of eggs and vegetables is wonderful. Denotative mania is scriptible jouissance. Roth is, we might imagine, reading himself, enjoying the fictive dimensions of his recreated Habsburg world at the ‘sumptuous rank of the signifier’.68 As we shall see, discussions about the value of the political signified in the Habsburg texts, which focus solely on recuperating Roth’s ideological orientation, must also recognise Roth’s own awareness that he has ‘suspended’ the value of the signified.69

Does Roth’s Galician border ‘change’ in the 1930s? A critical debate remains as to whether the Habsburg sign functions with marked differences in Roth’s 1930s texts. To some the fiction becomes a paean, unvisited by irony, to a lost cosmopolitan utopia. Others argue that Roth’s recreation of the empire may not be ironic but that it is nonetheless knowingly contained as a fictive rather than political imagining. These critical assessments of Roth’s later fiction partly turn on the specific question of how, and how consistently, the Galician border town is represented. In Radetzkymarsch the border town is an unnamed late imperial setting: though vividly described, and unmistakably a portrait of Brody, this anonymity pretends to a coy neutrality. ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ makes a point of geopolitical transformation. From Morstin’s point of view, Lopatyny is a site of pre- and post-lapsarian time: the Habsburg province of Lemberg becomes ‘the voivode of Lvov’ in the Republic of Poland. In Die Kapuzinergruft, the confected place name Zlotogrod, the Polish-Russian ‘gold-city’, has a manifest and precious fictionality. To the narrator, Zlotogrod is indistinguishable from the dimly remembered family home of its ‘southern sister’, Slovenian Sipolje (another fictional name). The inertia of Musil’s Parallelaktion is a type of Viennese paralysis – a largely though not exclusively metropolitan implosion.70 Roth, however, stages the end of empire in scenes which are founded on the idea that the supranational dynastic principle is proportionately more meaningful, and its loss more deeply felt, the more remote we are from Vienna. In Dennis Marks’s words, Roth views the death of a major European dynasty through ‘the wrong end of a telescope’.71 In Radetzkymarsch Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo is reported during a regimental summer ball on the Galician estate of Count Chojnicki. The infinite riches of the Empire are locked in the





small room of a country estate in ‘Little’ Poland. At the news of the Archduke death, the empire of many peoples is unmasked as a collection of autonomous-thinking, independent proto-nations: from this most un-Austrian edge of Eastern Europe we view Werfel’s idea of national sacrifice in reverse. The Empire splinters into its constituent parts. The main fissure is down the middle of the Dual Monarchy. The crapulous Carl Joseph Trotta is outraged, as is a Slovene Habsburg loyalist, at the behaviour of the Magyars, who celebrate the Archduke death. The episode ends farcically with the Hungarians drunkenly dancing to an allegro Funeral March. Jaroslav Hašek’s comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk, a Czech subversion of the Austrian ruling classes in their last military throes, is unlike Roth’s novel in most ways, but it mockingly opens with confusion about the assassination: Švejk knows two Ferdinands, one a chemist’s messenger, the other a collector of dog shit.72 That Roth too can make some comic capital out of this news suggests the tonal ambiguity of the narrative: without overtly guiding the reader’s sympathy, it accommodates the ‘inappropriate’ behaviour of the Hungarians and the helpless Habsburg loyalty of Carl Joseph. ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ also restages the death of empire with a Galician cast of national representatives. In the post-war years, the Count buries a sandstone bust of the already-buried Emperor in his Lopatyny garden. A Ukrainian joiner makes the coffin, a Polish blacksmith a huge brass double eagle, a Jewish scribe inscribes a blessing on parchment, and another Jew holds the black and yellow banner (pp. 256–7). The question is whether the loyalty of Morstin and the Lopatyny villagers is ironised, and whether the provincial miniature – the synecdochic commemoration of a belittled Emperor, the back garden as Capuchin crypt – is a consciously mock-heroic simulacrum of Viennese splendour. Otto W. Johnston regards ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ as a turningpoint in Roth’s work, arguing that the story can be read as the ‘Glaubensbekenntnis eines Monarchisten’ – the creed or conviction of a monarchist.73 His genetic approach to the drafts of the story attends to certain alterations which elide the distance between the narrator and Morstin, and provide uncharacteristic political-historical contextualisation. To Johnston, the ‘oddball’ Count (Sonderling), whose failure to acknowledge the end of the Empire is unintentionally absurd, compromised the literary success of the work.74 Johnston argues that the narrator’s growing sympathy for Morstin has a somewhat ‘ridiculous’ effect.75



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The burial scene, unlike the end-of-empire scene in Radetzkymarsch, is chronologically displaced. Roth, after the historical fact, is putting the pieces of empire back together, resurrecting the Emperor in his fiction so that he can be laid to rest on the border. Roth is not pretending that the empire is alive, as Morstin does, or that it can be sustained in the Polish Republic, but he appropriates its demise for the private world of his fiction. In Radetzkymarsch the Trotta and Habsburg families peter out in parallel, whereas in the short story Roth allows the ‘Habsburgers’ to cling on beyond their historical span. But Roth is aware that the Empire lacked an ‘original’ reality and historicity in the first place: the sandstone bust is a copy of a copy. If there is mimesis, it is of Kakania. In both scenes, the Galician border is a component of narrative, the culminating ‘platial’ metonym of empire and of its loss. However, the materiality of Brody and its environs, as the biography of Roth’s birthplace tells us, seems inescapable. The Galician swamp (der Sumpf), seemingly the most eternal of backdrops, is a testing-ground for the general representation of the border in the Trotta novels. In Radetzkymarsch, the swamp is a treacherous presence: its fever bacteria and quicksands have often lured unwitting strangers to their deaths. The swamp surrounds, isolates and threatens the island-garrison, this remoteness suggestive of the over-extension of empire. The swamp is an enemy to the wan, schnapps-soaked soldiers: ‘Any strangers who came to this part of the world were slowly but irresistibly doomed. No one was a match for the swamp. No one could stand up to the border’ (p. 141).76 The indigenous ‘swamp-bred’ border traders have, according to the narrator, inherited the treacherousness of the flat-lands in their blood. However, for all their cunning and worldliness – since they are in the pay of the Austrian crown and the Russian rouble they are the first to divine changes in the international climate, to hear the rumbles of war – the traders are like ‘living ghosts’, hopelessly stranded between east and west, night and day (p. 139).77 Some concession is made here to benevolent Nature: the borderlanders are in the midst of green forests and blue hills, and in this are favoured by God. But the endless cacophony of croaking frogs is a constant dialogue between sky and swamp which, for all its familiarity, is supremely indifferent to the hollow human rituals of the dying Empire. The swamp has corrupted and, in some respects, dehumanised the community – both indigenous and military – it surrounds. Secrets are kept behind closed doors; the streets have no names.





The swamp of Zlotogrod, in Die Kapuzinergruft, is much less prominent. It is true that its oppressiveness is briefly recognised; and the same idea conveyed that this landlocked border community is more like an island surrounded by Nature. However, though admittedly uncultivable, the swamps are now ‘luscious and benevolent’, and the croaking of the frogs becomes a hymn of praise to God the creator (p. 40).78 There is no mention of men meeting their deaths there. Border place – the Galician swamp is one index of it – unquestionably ‘changes’ if we isolate it as a setting in Roth’s fiction. But a simple juxtaposition of geographic contents is too simplistic: we have to examine the ways in which the border is deliberately filtered or focalised through the narrative voice. Unlike Carl Joseph in Radetzkymarsch, Franz Ferdinand is not a dissolute officer wasting away on the border. Rather, basking in the peace of his idealised Austro-Slavic-Jewish Crown Land life, he can afford to be warmly ironic about those same officers, who convince themselves that Zlotogrod is a town rather than the extended village it is, and who feel the need to escape from the supposedly stifling city atmosphere by riding out into the very swamps that oppress them (pp. 44–5). While the insidiousness of the swamps is not completely removed, it is significant that Franz Ferdinand observes, but does not suffer from, the border. Maria KAan´ ska, in emphasising the damaging effects of the provincial border on the stationed Austrian officers in Roth’s work, excepts Die Kapuzinergruft from her analysis on the grounds that Franz Ferdinand has merely come to Zlotogrod on a visit.79 Sidney Rosenfeld points out that Roth changed the novel from third to first-person narrative, going so far as to say that Franz Ferdinand ‘comes across as a talking puppet on the knee of the author’, and that the sense of ‘intense inner conflict’ present in Radetzkymarsch is lacking in the sequel.80 This accounts for his view that the border region is unsatisfactorily and benignly transformed in the later work.81 Alfred Doppler argues against this view of Franz Ferdinand as the author’s surrogate, stating rather that Die Kapuzinergruft is not a nostalgic glorification of empire but a moral settling-up or reckoning.82 There remains, according to Doppler, an ironic distance between the illusions of the first-person narrator, whom he initially characterises as embarrassingly naive and politically blind, and the implied position of the author, who was writing undeluded articles about the death of Austria after the Anschluß.83 At the same time, Doppler somewhat contradictorily acknowledges Franz Ferdinand’s interwar guilt, grief and isolation,



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suggesting that he does in fact possess a degree of self-awareness and is able to see the new Austria for what it is.84 It is important to recognise that the narrator acknowledges the unreliable, youthful optimism of his pre-War memories (p. 42). The descriptions of Zlotogrod are signalled as subjective perceptions. For example, Franz Ferdinand concentrates on the smile of the hugely bearded Manes the Fiaker, comparing it to a milky moon shining between woods – an image which for him dominates the landscape (p. 37). Idiosyncratic metaphors govern the register here: the small ochre railway stations are ‘like lazy cats lying in the snow in winter and in the sun in summer’ (p. 35), watched by a black double eagle;85 the hotel lantern, a solitary street illumination, is compared to an ‘orphan vainly trying to smile through its tears’ (p. 38).86 It is made explicit, through self-interpolation, that Franz Ferdinand only understood the meaning of this Habsburg world later, in the postwar years. While the young man is warmed by the familiar homeliness of what ought to have been the strangest of borders, he does not understand why: his later self explains (by listing) how the heimisch border had the quality of a ‘natural’, domesticating paternalism in the Habsburg dominions (p. 38). Nevertheless, this temporal fracturing of narrative subjectivity – the dialogue between the narrated-I and the narrating-I – does not alter an underlying consistency: ‘both’ Franz Ferdinands, as it were, appreciate the imperial disposition of space. Rather than saying, as KAan´ ska does, that Franz Ferdinand’s representation of the border simply does not ‘count’ because different rules apply, I would argue that Roth’s decision to displace the border, making it into a kind of holiday destination, is itself significant. We ‘participate’ in the stationed officers’ dissolution in Radetzkymarsch, and this malaise we equate with general imperial decline. In Die Kapuzinergruft, the malaise is deliberately contained, indeed made fun of. The border is defamiliarised through the fresh eyes of the visiting Viennese, who is not struck, as was Carl Joseph, by the remote otherness of the place. As we have seen with the list of jute, marble and silkworms, the narrative of Galicia in Radetzkymarsch enjoys its own poetischer Schwung and heterotopian enumeration, too. The strangeness of the place, from a Western European metropolitan point of view, is given substance, even exploited as ‘a most extraordinary region’ (p. 139) (eines der merkwürdigsten Gebiete (p. 257)). When Roth is taking pleasure in his sumptuous signifiers – for example, during the bravura passage describing the Cossacks’ display of horsemanship – there remains a simultaneous wonder that the Austro-Hungarian Empire did indeed stretch to such a





European frontier. Subjective perceptions of this outpost are important – the District Commissioner, for instance, imagines a place inhabited by bears and wolves, and what is worse, lice and bed bugs (p. 167) – but these perceptions are mediated by the narrative. Like Hardy’s Egdon Heath, the border swamps deterministically ‘produce’ the characters; Roth at this stage camouflages how Habsburg Galicia has become a private remembrance of place. While Carl Joseph is killed on the border, and with him apparently the family line, Franz Ferdinand (grand-nephew to the Hero of Solferino) resurrects the Trottas. In the later novel, it is the place which is destroyed. Reisiger, the cabby, comes to interwar Vienna, to report that ‘[d]aisies and crocuses flower where once our houses stood’ (p. 138).87 The locals, like the tavern keeper Jadlowker and the buxom barmaids, become victims of history, their private lives fatally made public (p. 50).88 Reisiger and Jadlowker are Jewish: Zlotogrod, re-imagined in 1938, is a lament for the vanished shtetl. In Roth’s recirculating formulation, ‘Death crosses his bony fingers’ over the soldiers of both novels.89 Sebald has observed how the vultures of time even hover over the double eagles of the Corpus Christi procession (p. 212), unnoticed by Carl Joseph.90 But the completed action of Radetzkymarsch leads to a certain posthumous stylisation of time. It is a historical novel whose endpoints are the First World War and the dissolution of the Empire. Doppler has called Die Kapuzinergruft a Zeitroman:91 it brings the action into the uncertainties of the present. That it lacks the organicism of Radetzkymarsch can be defended: the disjunctures of montage are a more appropriately formal enactment of the present ‘shock’ of history than completed, teleologically developed narratives.92 Before the Second World War, the temporality of the border in Die Kapuzinergruft is, in Conradian terms, that of the ‘shadow-line’.93 Focusing on the topos of the border tavern in Roth’s fiction, Joachim Beug shows that the border is defined by the confrontation between permanence and ephemerality.94 At Jadlowker’s tavern, the refugees travel ‘between past and future, between a known past and a highly uncertain future, like passengers crossing a wobbling plank from terra firma into a strange ship’ (p. 49). This was written when Europe was walking the plank again: the crossing of the border does not have Radetzkymarsch’s controlled sense of chronologically periodised time. Zlotogrod’s disappearance from the map functions doubly: as a historical reference to the material destruction of Eastern European villages



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on the Austro-Russian front in the First World War (the razing of the Habsburg periphery); and as a proleptic intimation of the extinction of Eastern European Jewry in the war to come. In Die Kapuzinergruft place has a transparent purpose as an allegorical setting: Zlotogrod is (alphabetically and geographically) the last town of the Empire, the lost grad, the aureate capital of a quasi-mythical Europe of peace-loving Slavs and Jews. As Philip Manger has written, Roth turned to the past not only to oppose, but to compete with Nazism, ‘[reconstructing] a world of stable, humanitarian values against the German barbarism’.95 In one type of critical view of his oeuvre, Roth’s exile in Paris, after his expulsion from Germany, comes to represent a turning point in his aesthetic judgements about the Empire. There is an inversely proportionate relationship between Roth’s despair about Nazism and his veneration of the old Monarchy. It is for these reasons that, as we have seen, Johnston argues that Roth fails to mediate his character’s immoderate apologia for the Empire, and Rosenfeld claims that Franz Ferdinand is his author’s puppet. However, others such as Edward Timms warn against the idea of this neat biographical correlation. Timms argues that Roth’s consistent interwar sympathies for the border condition (the ‘realm of the between’ or Zwischenbereich) are later transferred to the model of Habsburg monarchism. This transferral should be seen as the logical development of Roth’s earlier journalism.96 Although his analysis does not directly mention the later Habsburg texts, Sebald argues strongly against the critical assumption that Roth’s literary recreation of the Monarchy was tinged by sentimentality.97 The border is represented, in Die Kapuzinergruft, as a memory, an impression, a subjective geography. While this makes it true to say that Radetzkymarsch is the more nuanced or balanced novel, the partiality of Die Kapuzinergruft is quite deliberate. Voice is given to the romantic politics of the ideal, to the yearnings for utopias, and against balance and compromise: these would connote appeasement, a supine acceptance which led to the Anschluß. The book no longer needs an internal counterposition, because Hitler’s Europe serves that need all too well. It is rumoured that Count Chojnicki is an alchemist; Roth too wishes to transmute the base substance of contemporary political reality. His late Trotta novel fights, in a brief interlude, for its own private, utopian space, knowingly recreating a border site of fraternal and borderless plurality.




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W.G. Sebald’s critical account of Roth emphasises, as one would expect from the trans-historical chronotopes of his own fiction, how the imperial Heimat is a ‘deep’ site of time: he quotes, for example, Roth’s own comment that the Empire ‘sank into a sea of time’.98 To Sebald, Roth retrospectively appreciates Galicia as ‘a Crownland of longing’ – though this longing is unsentimental – which is ‘beyond history’.99 Though the Emperor may freeze time by apparently not getting older, clock time ticks away, shadowing the Empire in mortality.100 Roth’s 1930s map of the vanished Empire is ‘not of the real world but of the realm of eternity’: Sebald turns the received historical idea that the Empire was ‘out of time’, hopelessly anachronistic, to its favour, arguing that Galician Brody is an ahistorical sign which comes to be, for Roth, the eschatological topos of the New Jerusalem.101 Sebald’s reading of Roth is influenced by Benjamin. Roth’s Austria represents history’s missed possibility – it is an unrealised place which escaped the causal clutches of the doomed master-narratives of history. David Bronsen, Roth’s biographer, has similarly gestured towards Roth’s Habsburg metaphysics: ‘The perspective of looking backwards provides the Monarchy with a radiance that transforms the supranational polity into a promised land’.102 Though Sebald denies that Roth ‘transfigures’ the Empire, we cannot help but feel that he is arguing for timeless, relict qualities which are, like Benjamin’s natural history, ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time’.103 It is clear that, for critics such as these, the Heimat is a fictive image and not to be thought of as a transcendent signified of political space. James Wood has written of how ‘the Empire is not quite a reality’, that its uncontainability is too magical for life and can only exist for the novel. Roth’s Habsburg Monarchy is, for Wood, an ‘empire of signs’.104 The Empire, and its synecdochic borders, is also a dream-image. Bronsen has argued that the exiled Roth ‘began to conceive of Austria in terms of dream and myth’ (p. 60).105 Hermann Broch, another Jewish-Austrian writer who like Roth and Stefan Zweig ‘recreated’ the Empire in his Sleepwalkers trilogy, wrote that the Dual Monarchy ‘was a reality which needed a dream in order to be real’.106 The Austro-Russian frontier of Radetzkymarsch is a theatre where a provincial company halfheartedly tries to revive an old classic – except that the classic, the Radetzky militarism of yore, the heroism of Solferino (another lost battle) is itself a myth. This accounts for Wood’s argument that Roth’s



Dream-space

novels are not simply elegiac, but ‘are elegies for an original feeling of elegy’.107 The fiction revels in being a semblance of a substance-less original. The supranational, hierarchic, universalist, Catholic-Jewish empire, the residue of the Holy Roman Empire, was somehow still on the map during the ‘Age of Nations’: Kakania was a dream made manifest. Accusations made against Roth’s uncritical nostalgia for the ‘Habsburg myth’ should be contextualised by relating his interwar fiction to contemporary literary modernism, both Anglophone and Central European. The subject of much of Roth’s later fiction is the fracturing of the imperium, but writing Habsburg fiction is also a re-creative act which puts the Empire back together again. Roth’s aesthetic of ‘organic wholes’ is in this sense typically modernist.108 Roth shores fragments against his ruin, and looks backwards to superseded traditional cultures in the face of a radical modernity. There is thus a partial overlapping here with Eliot’s evoking of myths to replenish and give order to the deserts of post-war cultural life. The opening Germanic vignette in ‘The Waste Land’ – of Marie’s winter freedom, of the Lithuanian woman claiming to be ‘echt deutsch’ – is co-opted by Eliot into his vision of pre- and post-war civilization. Both Roth and modernists like Eliot and Woolf oppose the Central Europe of the small nation states. But the affinity is only partial because Eliot’s views of the Asiatic ‘hooded hordes’ (originally ‘Polish hordes’) ringing the plains of Eastern Europe, of the Hesse-influenced fear of chaos and torpor followed by violence, of the ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik’ menace, are diametrically opposed to Roth’s trenchant defence of Eastern European Jewry and his polemic against Western European attitudes. The often-repeated idea that Roth’s espousal of the Habsburg myth is a nostalgic flight from reality seems to suggest the solipsistic idiosyncrasy of such a retreat. But the Rothian dreamscape is also quite typical of Central European modernism. ‘Austria’, the nationless nation, depended on an interior self-identity: it possessed many lands but lacked a Heimat. In Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle the imperial capital is a fin-de-siècle night-world of masked performers. According to Lukács, Musil’s arch-modernism expresses itself in an unhealthy, metropolitan psychopathology.109 Though Kafka’s nightmare of powerlessness, exclusion, and narrative deferral is universal, its provenance is a Czech-GermanJewish city where Habsburg bureaucracy reigns. What makes Roth’s fabulist space distinctive is not that it is wilfully oneiric – that is characteristically Austrian – but that the dream is not of the metropolis but of the border.




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1. The competing of national place names is a consistent manifestation of border identity, as the palimpsest of Wrotizla, Vretslav, Presslaw, Bresslau, Breslau and WrocAaw reminds us. The microcosmic border’s nominal difference from itself is sited linguistically in these endlessly mutating national sovereignties. See Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City, (London: Pimlico, 2003). 2. Otto W. Johnston argues against the restrictive critical attention given to Roth’s representation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, proposing a broader European ‘geographical dialectics’, which takes account of Roth’s time in Berlin and Paris. Nonetheless, Johnston concedes the ‘pivotal position Vienna and the Danube Monarchy occupy in his best narrative fiction’. See Otto W. Johnston, ‘Jewish Exile from Berlin to Paris: the Geographical Dialectics of Joseph Roth’, in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 31 (1986) 441–54, p. 441. For a recent study of the earlier works, see Jon Hughes, Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth’s Writing of the 1920s, MHRA Bithell Series of Texts and Dissertations, Leeds: Maney, 2006. 3. I will mainly quote the English translation of Roth’s works in-text, and endnote the German original. Occasionally, if the quotation is short or apposite, I will quote both the English and the German in-text. Indirect paraphrases of the translation will be referenced in-text and not be endnoted in German. The translations are as follows: The Radetzky March, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2002); The Emperor’s Tomb, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 1999); ‘The Bust of the Emperor’, in Collected Shorter Fiction, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2002), pp. 235–58. The German sources are as follows: Radetzkymarsch, in Joseph Roth, Werke, 6 vols (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990–91), V, pp. 137–455; ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’, in Werke, (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990–1), V, pp. 655–76; Die Kapuzinergruft, in Joseph Roth, Werke, (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990–1), VI, pp. 225–346. German language criticism will be rendered or paraphrased in English and endnoted in German: many thanks are due to Richard Hibbitt for his assistance with these translations. 4. Werke, VI: ‘Wohin soll ich, ich jetzt, ein Trotta? …’, p. 346. 5. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, p. 181; cf. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), p. 170. 6. Musil, Man Without Qualities, p. 180; cf. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: ‘Es bestand nicht etwa aus einem österreichischen und einem ungarischen Teil, die sich, wie man dann glauben könnte, ergänzten, sondern es bestand aus einem Ganzen und einem Teil, nämlich aus einem ungarischen und einem österreichisch-ungarischen Staatsgefühl, und dieses zweite war in Österreich zu Hause, wodurch das österreichische Staatsgefühl eigentlich vaterslandslos war. Der Österreicher kam nur in Ungarn vor, und dort als Abneigung; daheim nannte er sich einen Staatsangehörigen der im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie, was das gleiche bedeutet wie einen Österreicher mehr einem Ungarn weniger diesen Ungarn […]’, p. 170.



Notes

7. Franz Werfel, quoted in Philip Manger, ‘The Radetzky March: Joseph Roth and the Habsburg Myth’, in The Viennese Enlightenment, ed. Mark Francis (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 40–62, p. 49. 8. Manger, ‘The Radetzky March: Joseph Roth and the Habsburg Myth’, p. 51. 9. Emil Brix, ‘Germany and Austria: Difficult Relations in a Central European Neighbourhood’, in Ilona Slawinski and Joseph P. Strelka, eds, Viribus Unitis: Österreichs Wissenschaft und Kultur im Ausland – Impulse und Wechselwirkungen. Festschrift für Bernhard Stillfried aus Anlaß seines 70. Geburtstags (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 63–75, p. 70. 10. Werke, VI: ‘“Das Wesen Österreichs ist nicht Zentrum, sondern Peripherie. Österreich ist nicht in den Alpen zu finden, Gemsen gibt es dort und Edelweiss und Enzian, aber kaum eine Ahnung von einem Doppeladler. Die österreichische Substanz wird genährt und immer wieder aufgefüllt von den Kronländern”’, p. 235. 11. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2001), p. 15; cf. Juden auf Wanderschaft, in Joseph Roth, Werke (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990–1), II, pp. 827–902. 12. Wandering Jews, pp. 15–16. 13. W.G. Sebald, Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur, Salzburg und Wien: Residenz Verlag, 1991: ‘Für die Juden auf Wanderschaft aber, […] ist die Heimat nirgendwo und somit der Inbegriff der reinen Utopie’, p. 110. 14. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 9. 15. Sebald’s Unheimliche Heimat is a synoptic account of Austrian literature by Charles Sealsfield, Peter Altenberg, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Hermann Broch, Jean Améry, Gerhard Roth and Peter Handke. 16. Ibid., p. 12. 17. Ibid., p. 13. 18. Sebald, ‘Die Ideologisierung der Heimat […] lief letztlich auf Zerstörung hinaus. Heimat […] in dem jeder von jedem und alles von allem vereinnahmt wird […] Die Holzwegliteratur hatte einen zentralen Anteil an dieser Umwertung sämtlicher Werte, in deren Zusammenhang auch die Pervertierung der Heimat gehört’, p. 14. 19. Sebald, ‘[…] wie in den letzten Jahren nicht selten, die Unheimlichkeit der Heimat durch das verschiedentliche Auftreten von Wiedergängern und Vergangenheitsgespenstern öfter als lieb ins Bewußtstein gerufen wird’, pp. 15–16. 20. Edward Timms, ‘Joseph Roth, die Grenzländer und die Grenzmenschen’, in Ilona Slawinski and Joseph P. Strelka, eds, Viribus Unitis: Österreichs Wissenschaft und Kultur in Ausland Impulse und Wechselwirklungen. Festschrift für Bernhard Stillfried aus Anlaß seines 70. Geburtstags (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 419–32. 21. Timms, ‘Eine Grenze ist für Roth im Grunde keine Metapher’, p. 421. 22. Timms, ‘Für Jaspers bedeutet die Grenzsituation Vereinsamung, für Roth aber Gemeinschaft’, p. 419. 23. Roth quoted in Timms, p. 425. 24. Roth quoted in Timms, p. 425. 25. Timms equates Zwischenbereich with the English word ‘borderlands’, p. 420.





26. See Timms for Roth on the village of Kerkraade, p. 424; on ‘der ungarischrussischen Grenze’, p. 430; on “Liebesromane an der Grenze” in the Burgenland, p. 422; and on German-Polish Kattowitz/Katowice: ‘Natürlich weiß der “einfache Mann aus dem Volk” nicht, ob der Deutscher oder Pole ist’, p. 422. 27. Roth quoted in Timms, ‘[…] gibt es zwar immer noch politische Grenzen, aber längst keine natürlichen mehr, sondern unnatürliche’, p. 422. 28. Timms, p. 420. 29. Roth quoted in Timms, ‘Was ist eine “Grenze”? Ein Pfahl, ein Drahtgitter, ein Zollwächter, ein Visum, ein Stempel, ein Aufenthalt. Es sollten Symbole sein, und es sind Niederträchtigkeiten’, p. 424. 30. Helen Chambers, ‘Großstädter in der Provinz: Topographie bei Theodor Fontane und Joseph Roth’, in Theodor Fontane Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, ed. Hanna Delf von Wolzogen with Helmuth Nürnberger (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), pp. 215–25: ‘Wien, die Hauptstadt der Habsburger Monarchie, wird im Roman Radetzkymarsch auch nur sehr partiell aufgenommen […] Wien wird dem Leser bei der ersten Erwähnung im Text als “große, nächtliche Halbwelt” in der Phantasie Carl Josephs vorgestellt […] ’, p. 217. 31. See T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Waste Land and Other Poems (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985), pp. 25–51, p. 27. 32. Werke, V: ‘Die blutroten Feze auf den Köpfen der hellblauen Bosniaken brannten in der Sonne wie kleine Freudenfeuerchen, angezündet vom Islam […] Die ganze Stadt war nur ein riesengroßer Burghof’, pp. 321–2. 33. Werke, V: ‘so wäre es ihm genehm gewesen, in allen Kronländern lediglich große und bunte Vorhöfe der Kaiserlichen Hofburg zu sehn’, p. 255. 34. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Writing (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 76. 35. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 121–2. 36. Ibid., p. 122. 37. Wellek and Warren quoted in Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, p. 73. 38. Lodge, p. 77. 39. See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987). 40. See Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, p. 81. 41. Werke, VI: ‘Dabei strählte er mit beiden Händen immerzu seinen graublonden Backenbart, es war, als wollte er gleichsam die beiden Hälften der Monarchie liebkosen’, p. 266. 42. Werke, V: ‘Und hunderttausendmal verstreut im ganzen weiten Reich war der Kaiser Franz Joseph, allgegenwärtig unter seinen Untertanen wie Gott in der Welt’, p. 203. 43. Werke, V: ‘Auch dieser Bahnhof hatte helle, gläserne und fröhliche Signale, in denen ein zartes Echo von heimatlichen Rufen klirrte, und einen unaufhörlich tickenden Morseapparat, auf dem die schönen, verworrenen Stimmen einer weiten, verlorenen Welt fleißig abgehämmert wurden, gesteppt wie von einer emsigen Nähmaschine’, p. 260. Vienna’s Nordbahn ran to Galicia, its Südbahn to Trieste. But the imperial node was as much in Budapest as in Vienna: the railways thus outlined the Dual Monarchy. 44. See Chambers, ‘Großstädter in der Provinz’, pp. 217–18.



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45. Compare the Habsburg railways with the putative railway network which PiBsudski had to contemplate in forming the post-War Republic of Poland: ‘Railways were a nightmare, with 66 kinds of rails, 165 types of locomotives and a patchwork of signalling systems’: Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 220. 46. Werke, VI: ‘einer glänzenden, verführerischen Spinne ähnlich, in der Mitte des gewaltigen schwarz-gelben Netzes saß und unaufhörlich Kraft und Saft und Glanz von den umliegenden Kronländern bezog’, p. 270. 47. Georg Lukács’s review of The Radetzky March, ‘Radetzkymarsch’, in Kulturpessimismus und Erzählform: Studien zu Joseph Roths Leben und Werk, ed. Fritz Hackert (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1967), pp. 147–51, was drawn to the same socio-economic model. Lukács’s short article is interestingly poised between the expected Marxist critique of the novel’s faulty ideology and an admiration for the effective emergence of the psychology of imperial demise. Lukács points to the fact that the novel is one-sided, socially incomplete (unlike the cycle of Arnold Zweig, it narrates from the point of view of the middle-ranking civil servants and officers and not from the unterdrückten Klassen), and inadequate in its economic explanation of the Empire’s demise. It also fails to understand why there was a desire for autonomy from below. Nevertheless, Lukács goes on to say that the social element of the book becomes increasingly important and that the story of the Trotta family shows up the failure of the Austrian assimilation of its Slavic (in this case Slovene) character. He observes that The Radetzky March, despite its restricted social perspective, does uncover the fact that what he calls the Verdauung of the ruling classes (the digestive machine which processes its border peoples) was no longer working. Roth is mistaken in writing of the bureaucracy and soldiery as if it accurately represented the whole of life in the Habsburg lands, from top to bottom. However, Lukács recognises that the novel succeeds artistically because of its ideological flaws, and that his brand of ironic affection does indict the complacency of the Austro-German governors (and by implication, neglect of its Slavic ‘essence’). The novel thus conveys the consequent inevitability of the Empire’s dissolution. 48. Joseph Roth, ‘Strawberries’, in Collected Shorter Fiction trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2002), pp. 134–65; ‘Erdbeeren’, Werke, IV, pp. 1008–36. 49. Maria KAan´ ska, ‘Die galizische Heimat im Werk Joseph Roths’, in Joseph Roth: Interpretation – Rezeption – Kritik, eds Michael Kessler and Fritz Hackert (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), pp. 143–56: ‘Galizien als Ort, wo die Zersetzungsprozesse der Monarchie besonders sichtbar werden, ist ein besonderer Fall der Verwendung des galizischen Modells als “pars pro toto” für Österreich’, p. 153. 50. KAan´ ska: ‘Die staatliche Zugehörigkeit der dargestellten Gebiete ist nur dort relevant, wo Galizien als eine Metonymie für die Habsburgermonarchie fungiert. Wo es sich aber um das “private” Heimatbild handelt, spielt die Handlung manchmal in Galizien, manchmal allerdings in dem russischen Teil des geteilten Polens resp. auf den einschlägigen Gebieten des polnischen Staates’, p. 144.





51. Bruce Thompson, ‘“Schlecht Kommen Wir Beide Dabei Nicht Weg!” Joseph Roth’s Satire on the Emperor Franz Joseph in his Novel Radetzkymarsch’, Neophilologus, 81 (1997) 253–67, p. 262. 52. Werke, VI: ‘Desgleichen hatte ich schon in Agram, in Olmütz, in Brünn, in Kecskemet, in Szombathely, in Ödenburg, in Sternberg, in Müglitz gesehen’, p. 252. Agram is Zagreb (Croatia); Olmütz is Olomouc (Czech Republic); Kekskemét is in central Hungary; Szombathely is the Hungarian town where Leopold Bloom’s father hails from; Ödenburg is Sopron (Hungary) – near the Austrian border; Sternberg is Sternberk (Czech Republic); Müglitz is Mohelnice (Czech Republic). 53. Werke, VI: ‘Dem durchaus natürlichen Gesetz eines starken Geistes unterliegen müssen, der imstande ist, das Entlegene nahezubringen, das Fremde verwandt werden zu lassen und das scheinbar Auseinanderstrebende zu einigen’, p. 252. 54. Werke, VI: ‘All dies war Heimat: stärker als nur ein Vaterland, weit und bunt, dennoch vertraut und Heimat: die kaiser- und königliche Monarchie […] Es dauerte kaum eine Woche, und ich war in Zlotogrod ebenso heimisch, wie ich es in Sipolje, in Müglitz, in Brünn und in unserem Café Wimmerl in der Josefstadt gewesen war’, p. 253. 55. Werke, V: ‘Wie jeder Österreicher jener Zeit liebte Morstin das Bleibende im unaufhörlich Wandelbaren, das Gewohnte im Wechsel und das Vertraute inmitten des Ungewohnten. So wurde ihm das Fremde heimisch, ohne seine Farbe zu verlieren, und so hatte die Heimat den ewigen Zauber der Fremde’, p. 657. 56. Werke, V: ‘Und all die Menschen, die niemals etwas anderes gewesen waren als Österreicher, in Tarnopol, in Sarajevo, in Wien, in Brünn, in Prag, in Czernowitz, in Oderburg, in Troppau, niemals etwas anderes als Österreicher: sie begannen nun, der “Forderung der Zeit” gehorchend, sich zur polnischen, tschechischen, ukrainischen, deutschen, rumänischen, slowenischen, kroatischen “Nation” zu bekennen – und so weiter’, p. 661. Tarnopol is now Ternopil (Ukraine), but was then Tarnopil (Poland); Sarajevo (Bosnia); Brünn is Brno (Czech Republic); Czernowitz is Chernivitsi (Ukraine, in the Bukovina); Oderburg is Bohumin (Czech Republic); Troppau is Opava (Czech Republic) – the last two close to the Polish border. Morstin’s list of Austrian cities and towns does not match with the respective nations: the randomness speaks of a certain disregard for the individual importance of the small states. Tarnopol/Tarnopil/Ternopil illustrates how historical parallaxes appear: like Brody and Lopatyny, it had been given to one nation after 1919, but is now within another. 57. Werke, V: ‘Und die Polen, denen er ja selbst angehörte, Courmacher, Friseure und Modephotographen’, p. 265. 58. Werke, VI: ‘Die Zigeuner der Pußta, die subkarpatischen Huzulen, die jüdischen Fiaker von Galizien, meine eigenen Verwandten, die slowenischen Maronibrater von Sipolje, die schwäbischen Tabakpflanzer aus der Bacska, die Pferdezüchter der Steppe, die osmanischen Sibersna, jene von Bosnien und Herzegowina, die Pferdehändler aus der Hanakei in Mähren, die Weber aus dem Erzgebirge, die Müller und Korallenhändler aus Podolien: sie alle waren die großmütigen Nährer Österreichs; je ärmer, desto großmütiger’, p. 270. 59. James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (London: Pimlico, 2005), p. 133.



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60. Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, quoted in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 20. 61. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Arden edition, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 8. 62. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Bodley Head, 1993), p. 244. 63. Werke, V: ‘Sie handelten mit Bettfedern, mit Roßhaaren, mit Tabak, mit Silberstangen, mit Juwelen, mit chinesischem Tee, mit südländischen Früchten, mit Pferden und Vieh, mit Geflügel und Eiern, mit Fischen und Gemüse, mit Jute und Wolle, mit Butter und Käse, mit Wäldern und Grundbesitz, mit Marmor aus Italien und Menschenhaaren aus China zur Herstellung von Perücken, mit Seidenraupen und mit fertiger Seide, mit Stoffen aus Manchester, mit Brüsseler Spitzen und mit Moskauer Galoschen, mit Leinen aus Wien und Blei aus Böhmen. Keine von den wunderbaren und keine von den billigen Waren, an denen die Welt so reich ist, blieb den Händlern und Maklern dieser Gegend fremd’, pp. 257–8. 64. Chambers, ‘Großtädter in der Provinz’, ‘Schier unendlich scheinende Beispiele für die Verbindungen der Einheimischen mit der weiten Welt, über Kontinente hin wohnen vor allem dem Ort selbst inne, in seiner Sonderstellung an der Grenze zwischen Ost und West, von Roth mit metonymischer Genauigkeit und poetischem Schwung aufgelistet’, p. 218. 65. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 26–7. 66. Ibid., pp. 26–7. 67. Ibid., p. 42. 68. Ibid., p. 65. 69. Ibid., p. 65. 70. Although there is an important interlude in Brünn, Musil’s novel mainly takes place in Vienna. 71. Dennis Marks, Fault Line, BBC Radio Three. 72. Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War, trans. Cecil Parrott, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Alan Menhennet has briefly compared Hašek and Roth: ‘For Hašek, the end of Austria is the disintegration of a pantomime-horse; for Roth, who sees his subject seriously – too seriously, perhaps, for his own good – it is Untergang, indeed, Weltuntergang. ‘Flight of a “Broken Eagle”: Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch’, New German Studies, 2 (1983) 47–65, p. 54. We may add Stefan Zweig’s gravity in The World of Yesterday: ‘Then, on 29 June, 1914, in Sarajevo, the shot was fired which in a single second shattered the world of security and creative reason in which we had been educated, grown up, and been at home – shattered it like a hollow vessel of clay’ – a sentence whose ghostly trace, James Wood argues, is felt in nearly all of Roth’s novels. James Wood, ‘The Empire Writes Back’, New Republic (3 January 2000) http://www.thenewrepublic.com. 73. Otto W. Johnston, ‘Joseph Roths Pariser Exil: “Die Büste des Kaisers” als Glaubensbekenntnis eines Monarchisten’, in Das Exilerlebnis: Verhandlungen des Vierten Symposium über deutsche und österreichische Exilliteratur, eds Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig M. Fischer (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1982), pp. 152–61.





74. Johnston, ‘Durch seine politische Perspektive gefährdete der Schriftsteller das Künstlerische in ‘Büste des Kaisers’. […] Graf Morstin behielt etwas Komisches, ja geradezu Absurdes, was der neuen politischen Perspektive des Autors entgegenwirkt’, pp. 153–54. 75. Johnston, ‘Der alte Morstin […] hat bei aller nachträglich empfundenen Sympathie des Erzählers etwas Lächerliches an sich’, p. 159. 76. Werke, V: ‘Wer immer von Fremden in diese Gegend geriet, mußte allmählich verlorengehn. Keiner war so kräftig wie der Sumpf. Niemand konnte der Grenze standhalten’, p. 258. 77. Werke, V: ‘Denn sie lebten fern von ihr, zwischen dem Osten und dem Westen, eingeklemmt zwischen Nacht und Tag, sie selbst eine Art lebendiger Gespenster, welche die Nacht geboren hat und die am Tage umgehn’, p. 257. 78. Werke, VI: ‘Die weit gebreiteten, unfruchtbaren Sümpfe selbst erschienen mir saftig and gütig und der freundliche Chor der Frösche, der aus ihnen emporstieg, als ein Lobgesang von Lebewesen, die besser als ich wußten, zu welchem Zweck Gott sie und ihre Heimat, die Sümpfe, geschaffen hatte’, p. 253. 79. KAan´ ska, ‘Unterschiedlich ist die Rolle des Galizienaufenthalts im Falle Franz Ferdinand Trottas aus Die Kapuzinergruft. Da er nach Zlotogrod nicht dienstlich, sondern zu Besuch kommt, verläuft sein Aufenthalt in Galizien nach anderen Spielregeln’, p. 156, n. 32. 80. Sidney Rosenfeld, Understanding Joseph Roth (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 81. 81. Ibid., p. 84. 82. Alfred Doppler, ‘Die Kapuzinergruft von Joseph Roth: Österreich im Bewußtstein von Franz Ferdinand Trotta’, in Joseph Roth: Interpretation, eds Kessler and Hackert, 91–8: ‘[…] es nicht um die nostalgische Verherrlichung eines untergegangenen Reiches geht, sondern um eine moralische Abrechnung’, p. 91. 83. Doppler, ‘Das Spezifische des Romans besteht somit darin, daß der Erzähler Franz Ferdinand Trotta eine peinliche Ahnungslosigkeit an den Tag legt, die der Autor des Romans nicht teilt, sondern indirekt als unpolitische Verblendung ins Spiel bringt. […] In der für die Exilzeitung Die Zukunft geschriebenen Satire Österreich atmet auf stellt er – erstaunlich gut informiert – illusionslos in allen Einzelheiten dar, was sich in Österreich nach dem Anschluß ereignet hat’, pp. 92–3. 84. See, for example, Doppler on Franz Ferdinand’s awareness of his belonging to a degenerate, liberal tradition: ‘Gleich verhängnisvoll wirkt in den Augen Franz Ferdinands aber auch eine degenerierte liberale Tradition,’ p. 95. 85. Werke, VI: ‘Waren sie trägen Katzen ähnlich, die winters im Schnee, sommers in der Sonne lagern’, p. 250. 86. Werke, VI: ‘Die einsame Laterne davor erinnerte an ein Waisenkind, das durch Tränen vergeblich zu lächeln versucht’, p. 252. 87. Werke, VI: ‘Gott hat die Welt verwirrt, das Städtchen Zlotogrod hat er vernichtet. Krokus und Gänseblümchen wachsen dort, wo unsere Häuser gestanden haben’, p. 332. 88. Werke, VI: ‘Der seine ganze Vergangenheit liquidieren muß; ein Opfer der Weltgeschichte eben’, p. 262. The English translation omits the idea that the Jewish Jadlowker is a victim of Weltgeschichte, of world history.



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89. For example, The Emperor’s Tomb, p. 40: ‘Death crossed his bony hands above our glasses as we drank’; Werke, VI: ‘Über den Kelchen, aus denen wir tranken, kreutzte der unsichtbare Tod schon seine knochigen Hände’, p. 253. 90. See Sebald, p. 108. 91. Doppler, ‘Roth greift in der Kapuzinergruft auf die Form des Zeitromans zurück, in dem das Geschehen bis an die Gegenwart herangführt wird’, p. 92. 92. Doppler, ‘Den assoziativ gereihten Erinnerungen des Ich-Erzählers, die gesteuert werden durch den Schock der nazionalsozialistischen Machtergreifung, entspricht die Technik der Erzählmontage, in der die einzelnen Lebensabschnitte lose miteinander verknüpft sind’, p. 97. 93. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line, ed. Jacques Berthoud (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 94. See Joachim Beug, ‘Die Grenzschenke. Zu einem literarischen Topos’, in Helen Chambers (ed.), Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect (Riverside: Ariadne, 1991), pp. 148–65, especially pp. 163–4. 95. Manger, ‘The Radetzky March’, p. 47. 96. Timms, ‘Für viele Zeitgenossen war seine Parteinahme für die Habsburger und den katholischen österreichischen Ständestaat ein Zeichen geistiger Verirrung. Sie merkten nicht, mit welcher Konsequenz er die Grundthemen seiner zeitkritischen Journalistik weiterentwickelte: den Kampf gegen Nationalitätenwahn und die Verteidigung der Grenzländer und Grenzmenschen’, p. 430. 97. Sebald, Unheimliche Heimat, p. 107. 98. Sebald, ‘Roth […] ruft in einem 1929 geschriebenen Feuilleton den mythischen Augenblick zurück, in dem das Reich der Habsburger versank “im Meer der Zeiten” …’, p. 104. 99. Sebald, ‘Erst in Retrospektive tat sich Galizien ihm auf; ein weites, jenseits der Geschichte gelegenes Kronland der Sehnsucht […]’, p. 104. 100. See Sebald, p. 113. 101. Sebald, ‘auf dieser Karte nicht die reale Welt, sondern das Gefilde der Ewigkeit verzeichnet ist, das nur der eschatologischen Vision sich auftut und dessen bekanntester Topos der vom himmlischen Jerusalem ist’, p. 110. 102. David Bronsen, ‘The Jew in Search of a Fatherland: The Relationship of Joseph Roth to the Habsburg Monarchy’, Germanic Review, 54:2 (Spring 1979) p. 59. 103. Sebald, ‘Nichts an diesem Zug um Zug jede Illusion ausräumenden Roman läuft hinaus auf eine Verklärung des Habsburgerreichs’; p. 109; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 255. 104. Wood, The Irresponsible Self, p. 138. 105. Bronsen, p. 60. 106. Broch quoted in Bronsen, p. 58. 107. Wood, The Irresponsible Self, p. 132. 108. See Stan Smith, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 150. 109. Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963), pp. 29–30.




‘The earth is what is not us’: Yugoslavia in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

‘I wanted to write a book on Finland …’ At the time of the First World War Armistice in November 1918, Yugoslavia did not exist as a country, as Misha Glenny has remarked.1 A sovereign state was quickly agglomerated out of the rubble of the fallen empires at the Paris Peace Conference. Glenny describes its inception: It was constituted as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes a few days later on 1 December. But it was established without clear borders and with no clear constitutional order. Had the kingdom of Serbia merely absorbed the south Slav regions of the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Montenegro? Or was the country a novel entity in which Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro would assume equal constitutional weight with Serbia?2 Glenny catches the seemingly arbitrary confection of this new state. King Alexander later replaced its cumbersome title (abbreviated to ‘SCS’ during the Paris Conference) with the more homogeneous-sounding ‘Yugoslavia’ – the interwar federation of the ‘South Slavs’ – a potentially frangible polity which, like the new ‘Czecho-slovakia’, compounded smaller polities. Rebecca West always intended to write about one of these new countries. It was a British Council trip to Scandinavia and the Baltic that had given West her idea: I wanted to write a book on Finland, which is a wonderful case of a small nation with empires here and there, so I learnt Finnish and I read a Finnish novel. It was all about people riding bicycles. But then, 100



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The Duchy of Finland had taken the opportunity to secede from Tsarist Russia during the Revolution. West was ‘looking for Yugoslavia before she found it’, as Rosslyn puts it – that is, she was looking for an underdog country that could continue to surprise and nourish her intellect.4 In the classic David and Goliath parable, Finland preceded Yugoslavia as the small nation state triumphing over empire. It was simply that she soon found it too boring to write about. As a disciple of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of national selfdetermination, a kind of League of Nations attachée in the field, West evidently had a pre-formulated ambition to understand the process of decolonisation from within Europe. She wished to articulate the interwar spirit of the modern nations of the Little Entente, the so-called successor states, whose rights to autarchy were a necessary resistance to the voracity of empire: For the old Turkey had gone and its successor had no interest in Empire, and Russia was a Union of Soviet Republics, and the Habsburgs were fallen, and the treaties of Versailles and Trianon and St. Germain had set the small peoples free. Freedom was for these people an ecstasy. That I knew to be true, for I had seen it with my own eyes. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, they were like young men stretching themselves at the open window in the early mornings of their long sleep.5 Rebecca West visited Yugoslavia three times in the mid-1930s before writing her magnum opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). In occupying a recently unified, multinational space in the interwar years, Black Lamb continually crosses overlapping geopolitical borders – both historical and contemporaneous. It also crosses the borders of literary genre, synthesising history, politics, travel writing, aesthetics, religion and literature. It is an urgent wartime polemic which in many of its passages reveals the premeditated symmetries of the novel.6 Fictive imagination and factual erudition work upon one another. One commentator has written of ‘West’s violation of simple genre definitions’;7 another wrote of Black Lamb as an ‘irretrievably hybrid book’.8 The Foucauldian conceptions of heterotopia as discursive, and as imaginable (virtual, utopian) in this world, are both applicable



when I went to Yugoslavia, I saw it was much more exciting, with Austria and Russia and Turkey, and so I wrote that. I really did enjoy it terribly, loved it.3

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to the many-placedness of Yugoslavian space and the atopian unclassifiability of its genre.

Though West’s interwar journey was through a new country, Yugoslavia would soon be rendered temporarily invisible during the Second World War; by the time of Black Lamb’s publication, it was, as Vesna Goldsworthy point outs, already a ‘dismembered’ country under Nazi occupation.9 Janet Montefiore uses the same metaphor of dismemberment to describe the book as a memorial to a country which, after the break-up of the federation in the 1990s, no longer exists.10 This sense of the nation which has been buried or made to disappear contributes to a prevailing sense in Black Lamb of precarious statehood, and points backwards and forwards to the pathologies of small and postcolonial nations, which live with the perennial fear of the atopian condition – of being, as Kundera puts it, on the wrong side of history. West herself wrote of ‘a state engaged in resurrection, and therefore ravaged by the pangs of both death and birth’ (p. 940).11 That this threat of subjugation also hangs over wartime Britain is, by the book’s Epilogue, Black Lamb’s all-encompassing analogy. Western European shibboleths about the multiply bordered Balkans are contained in the pejorative term ‘balkanism’, which denotes dangerous centrifugality, fragmentation, impossible parcelisation – a geography of crazy paving. To the outsider, even one who would become as quickly and considerably informed as West, the entire region of South-eastern Europe would initially be perceived as ‘a confused liminal zone’ where ‘the attribute of standing across a frontier’ was ‘a constant feature’.12 Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans – a historical and theoretical companion to Vesna Goldsworthy’s literary readings of Ruritania – emphasises the ‘in-betweenness of the Balkans, their transitionary character’.13 Allcock and Young write about the problems Balkan countries face in constructing intelligible and intrinsic values for themselves: ‘Whatever [the Balkan countries] are, or claim to be, they are always incompletely, marginally, ambiguously, something else as well’.14 This imaging of the Balkans as marked with internal European difference is similar to Bhabha’s definition of border space which, neither inside nor outside the nation, articulates ‘its “difference” […] turned from the boundary “outside” to a finitude “within”’.15 Larry Wolff has identified West’s intervention with ‘a new selfconsciousness’ about the cultural production of the Slavic European ‘other’, and claims that Black Lamb is the ‘most overwhelming attempt



Yugoslavia: borderland, atopia

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to come to terms with what it meant to contemplate Eastern Europe as an intellectual from Western Europe’.16 Vesna Goldsworthy has emphasised that in the 1930s West refused ‘to accept the conventional division of Europe, but tried to redefine the conceptual map’.17 Black Lamb stands as a corrective to a Western European inheritance of Orientalism about its ‘other half’, and marks a stage in twentieth-century intellectual history at which the Western scholar and traveller has started to question the traditional Enlightenment tendency to bisect Europe between its supposedly ‘barbarous’ Eastern and ‘civilised’ Western selves. Todorova, however, resists seeing Balkanism as a mere ‘subspecies’ of Orientalism: ‘orientalism is dealing with a difference between (imputed) types, balkanism treats the differences within one type’.18 That ‘one type’ is Europe. Whereas the ‘West and the Orient are usually presented as incompatible entities, antiworlds, but completed antiworlds [ … the Balkans], on the other hand, have always evoked the image of a bridge or a crossroads’ – an image that ‘borders on the banal’.19 Todorova adds that the ‘Balkans are also a bridge between stages of growth, and this invokes labels such as semideveloped, semicolonial, semicivilized, semioriental’.20 Although the heuristic meaninglessness of ‘semicolonial’ is admitted, she still finds it a useful way of indicating how the Balkans are perceived and how they perceive themselves as transitionary.21 As we shall see in the next chapter, in Finnegans Wake Joyce too punningly describes his Shemmish self as ‘semicolonial’. Janet Montefiore has pointed to how the ‘frontier territory’ of Yugoslavia is a recurring theme in Black Lamb,22 and to how ‘Yugoslavia is not only a border country [but] a stage where tensions of Europe are acted out, in intricacies as well as in battles’.23 The multiple borders of the federation, in Montefiore’s account, dismantle the idea of the book moving from the periphery to the core, the typical trajectory of travel writing. Yugoslavia is taken to be a decentred border space which deconstructs linearity: ‘The route taken by [West] and her husband is itself a confusing series of zigzags […] There is no point at which one can say “Here they encounter, at last, the heart of Yugoslavia: for, of course, given a nation so multifarious and patchworked as Yugoslavia once was, no single place could claim to be the heart’.24 The extent to which Old Serbia represents a core in West’s ‘geography of the soul’, if not in Yugoslavia, will be discussed later in the chapter. Although Goldsworthy’s notion of ‘Ruritanian Erewhons’ – of fantasy kingdoms of the British imagination – is a playful concept of atopia, it is far from being apolitical. Paraphrasing and quoting from Paolo Rumiz, Goldsworthy suggests an absurd relativism and elusive ubiquity to the Balkans: ‘[they] might not be in the East at all. They might be as far west





as Catalonia, or as far north as Scotland, or even in the ‘heart’ of the Continent, in Brussels, “that metaphor-capital of a Europe which does not exist”’.25 As we have seen, the location of Pope’s Zembla is a question of moral relativism. Likewise, the defamiliarisation of Balkan spaces, in James Clifford’s term, surreally ‘disarticulates’ historically received norms. The Yugoslavia of Black Lamb is, in this sense, Zemblan, Ruritanian, atopian: West herself spoke, after Dante, of the ‘geography within [her] own breast’.26 Black Lamb is unashamedly subjective, resisting aspiration to objective travel reportage. Marina Mackay points to how Black Lamb aims ‘to interpret Europe rather than to describe it’, and suggests that West’s championing of non-naturalistic art – an aesthetics which transforms the ‘nonsense’ of non-mimetic representation into the ‘supersense’ and concealed transcendence of art – is also a self-reflexive justification of ‘her own decision to invent the Balkans’ (my italics).27 This invention of Yugoslavia is deceptive, because the book has a declarative confidence which disguises its transmutative artistry: as Janet Montefiore writes, ‘although she constantly reads things and people in terms of a highly expressive symbolism, Rebecca West never says “This is my interpretation of the scene”, but “This is its meaning”.28 Against this, Black Lamb is often cited by historians who respond to it solely as a work of history, inspecting the accuracy or partisanship of its Yugoslavian ‘content’, and thus judging its disposition of material against an objective norm.29 For example, in the bibliography to The Habsburg Monarchy, A.J.P. Taylor eulogises Black Lamb as ‘a work of genius’, while other historians have drawn attention to what they see as the book’s pro-Serb bias; others still have regarded it as an indispensable vade-mecum while travelling in Yugoslavia. There is a distinction to be made between a position which emphasises that, on the one hand, the cartography of Black Lamb is subjective and anti-mimetic, and on the other, one which claims that Black Lamb is ‘not so much a book about Jugoslavia as about Rebecca West’, as John Gunther originally felt.30 The latter idea, in a misleading way, suggests a kind of introspective monomania (what West identified in the book as private, female ‘idiocy’ – as opposed to public, male lunacy). Yugoslavia might, to an extent, be seen as an objective correlative, a tabula rasa on to which West’s personal desires and fears are projected. But Black Lamb is still concerned with mapping the formations of contemporary and historical space. The geography may well be ‘within [her] own breast’ – moral, spiritual, polemical – but it is still geography. The cartography of West’s ‘Yugoslavia’ requires a kind of decryption which does not simply open out on to the author’s ‘idiotic’ thematics.



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There is not the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism, which is the desire of a people to prevent other peoples from being themselves. (p. 843) The moral cartography of Black Lamb relies on an uncomplicated opposition between nation and empire. The history of Yugoslavia is drawn as a succession of alien inscriptions upon Slavic territory, overlaid by the Roman Empire in Illyria, the Venetian and Napoleonic republics in Dalmatia, the Ottoman Empire throughout the peninsula and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Dalmatia, Croatia, and for a brief period, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The book’s animus flows from this antecedent history of over-powerful states which have had a desire ‘to prevent other peoples from being themselves’. Black Lamb, at a chronological midpoint between J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), has thus been classified by critics as ‘a study of imperialism’, a ‘reflection on the nature of empire’, an ‘anti-imperial tract’.31 West presents her resistance to empire as part of an autobiographical narrative: she emerged from the shadow of Edwardian England, whose confidence in the imperialist project was beginning to wane, to become ‘an exasperated critic’ of ‘one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen’. But it was the visit to Yugoslavia which made her ‘newly doubtful of empires’ (1089) – and, as she presents it, the writing of Black Lamb which clinched her antipathy to imperialism. For West, imperialism refers not to the historical phase of rapacious continent carving, nor to an economic theory of global exploitation, but to a more universalised human tendency to trespass and lay waste, to suppress and dominate, and also to persist obstructively. Black Lamb presents a history of expansionism within Europe as specifically colonialist in nature. Metaphorical patterns are consistently built into the book to map imperial space in Yugoslavia as archaic but visible. Empire has laid a dead hand on Slavic culture, or it has spread over the Balkan peninsula like a contagion, an overturned cup (p. 639). Although empire may have receded, its detritus still litters the land. The hovels of Macedonian Skopje are ‘the tide-marks of the Ottoman Empire’ (p. 647). Colonial occupation is equated with sterility, attenuation and degradation – a blight on native life (p. 903). Rather than presenting the injustices of modern history with dry objectivity, West traces in imperialism the ancient instinctual vice: an Onanistic spilling of seed (p. 908).



Empires and nations


Overstretched empire remains in the foreign land, ebbing away. In forming image-clusters around the idea of death-in-life and the moribund, West follows and exaggerates historiographical figures. The best known is that the Ottoman Empire was known as the ‘sick man of Europe’, but A.J.P. Taylor, for example, also described late Habsburg Austria as a carcass, a dynasty which ‘in its last years [was] content to guard its own coffin’.32 To West, Austrian rule in Dalmatia was a ‘stagnancy’ (p. 264); ‘pure negativism’ (p. 186): no paean to Bettiza’s homo austriacus here. The imperial body politic is entropic. Emperor Franz Josef court is ‘a morgue of etiquette’ (p. 10). In Trebinje in Herzegovina, West comes across sad and angry Muslims, no longer able to weave or sew, who are ‘dead and buried in their lifetime, coffined in the shell of a perished empire’ (p. 279). Palaces and barracks give off the stench of gangrened corpses (p. 1056). West’s remark that she could not believe that, even in life, these corpses were healthy (p. 280) is again in direct contradistinction to Roth and Musil’s memories of the non-existent fantasy-land of ‘Kakania’. Just as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a cadaver, so the putative South Slavic nation must be figured as youthful and vital. Whereas empires offend against nature, and have outlived their lifespan, the nation is a fit, self-bounded organism. Although West recognises the national awakenings of Paris, she actually sees them as re-awakenings; Ernest Gellner’s sense of the nation as modern artifice is played down.33 To West, the nation is a natural being. Lionel Trilling isolated nationalism as one of the main characteristics of her writing, associating it with that of one of her role models, Edmund Burke: they both imagine the nation as an ‘almost mystical entity of language, custom, history, and destiny’.34 The nation – particularly Serbia – is once again alive and healthy, and tends to be represented in masculinist symbology. Shouting, angry young men recur in the book (pp. 118, 128, 387); many of the young Serbs, reputedly completely free of homosexuality, are uninhibited and good-looking, putting to shame the soft and unmanly Western European.35 For the Serb – be it a heroic warrior-king or a robust peasant – West’s normal scepticism about gender roles seems to be suspended, for the purpose of idealising a virile nation. Nevertheless, she recognises that the unbridling of the young nation has its dangers until the moment that ‘reason dares to take control’ (pp. 102–3). This metaphorical anthropomorphism is connected to West’s conviction that the motives of conflicting political states are like those of a family. Psychoanalysis, rather than traditional historiography, can unlock the secret perversions which characterise the chicanery of



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Yugoslavian sovereignty (p. 54).36 Thus, the parallel binary of empire/nation and death/life is also aligned to Freudian pathologies. Joseph Roth’s Emperor Franz Josef, presiding distantly over Central Europe for two-thirds of a century, represented himself as the paterfamilias of his Slavic children: as Roth’s fiction has shown, the metaphor of state and family ran close in Austrian antechamber and Galician hearth alike. West thinks of Freudianism in its cradle of pre-War Mitteleuropa: the Oedipus myth was rediscovered in an age of assassination attempts, when people were acting upon the urge to kill off their terminally ill political fathers; the death-drive was formulated by a Viennese doctor who saw Thanatos in the morgue-like, etiquette-ridden court of the Habsburgs (p. 10).37 After the parricide of the old emperor, the Slavic nations are left to fend for themselves, but this has also meant a fight amongst brother communities for new patriarchies. West is clear that one of the responsibilities of the Yugoslavian fraternity is that they must stick together to defend themselves. Balkan violence is not immediate self-infliction but a consequence of prior damage visited upon it by centuries of subjugation; it is a residue of the old imperial policy of divide and rule. West argues for solidarity in the family of smaller nations, and a resistance to fratricidal in-fighting – thus her approval of the arranged marriages of the Paris Conference, between Czechs and Slovaks (grouped as western Slavs), and between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (grouped as southern Slavs). Nevertheless, Black Lamb’s model is not of decentred federal space: West advocates the idea that, to be a nation, ‘Yugoslavia’ needs a core – Serbia – around which to bind and unite.38

Easts and Wests Black Lamb attempts to reduce the political surface of Yugoslavia to a moral map without ambiguous hatching. Its polemic depends upon a clearly bisected geography which may make sudden leaps between transcendent hallmarks of native space (for example, a Serbo-Byzantine church) and the abhorred dregs of foreign occupation (an Austrian brothel). Border hybridity – what Claudio Magris calls scolorazione (or discolouration) – and moral greyness or ambiguity tend to be avoided: this is what gives this massive book its marvellously comprehensibile structure. The same uncompromising apparatus which opposes empire and nation also allows a ‘good’ East to be defined against a ‘bad’ West, and a ‘bad’ (or Orientalised) East to have rhetorically prepared the way for the resistance of a ‘good’ West in the book’s Epilogue. Although it is





a book about small nations, Black Lamb represents Europe macrospatially, in antagonistic blocs which face each other across a fault line. The main thrust of the book is its passion for Slavic Europe. West constructs, around her admiration for Byzantine aesthetics, Orthodox Christian spirituality, Serbian royal history and the moral health of preindustrial Europe, an ideological East which challenges the certainties of Western Europe. The Slavs – often posited as a general category – have not been deceived by mimetic realism and the tyranny of the fact, rather turning their hieratic faces to exquisite abstractions and a faith in the unknowable. They have borne centuries of adversity with beatific humility, or have alternatively met it with uncomplicated military ardour. They have simply accepted the beauty and tragedy of the natural world, and have an equally pure conception of the supernatural world and the afterlife. West’s revisionist encomium of ‘the Slav’ is a most effective critique of the opposing vices of the Occidental other. The Western European presumes that finite rational knowledge is the only valuable knowledge, has a blind, secular love of fussy realist homilies, is bourgeois and superficial, has eliminated mystery from a life of vulgar materialism, and is now contaminated by a proliferating urban underclass. Black Lamb most resembles a work of progressive postcolonialism when it unmasks Western Europe’s stereotyping of a supposedly distant Balkans, and rages against its corrupting and often treacherous role in Yugoslavian history. But Slavic Europe is also a reversible construction which can be flipped over to become part of an all-inclusive West when threatened from the East, more specifically by Islamic incursions into sacred European space. There seems to be a critical consensus that West was at the very least unfair on Turkey. Indeed, biographical evidence suggests that West’s demonisation of the Ottomans in Europe was or became something of a pathology.39 Janet Montefiore states that West’s ‘racist dismissal of Muslim culture is the only serious blind spot of her otherwise remarkably open-minded book’.40 Richard Tillinghast wrote at the time of the ‘cartoonish’ representation of the Turks, the omission of Byzantine excesses which matched those of the Ottomans and an ‘appalling’ ignorance of Islam.41 To West, the historical presence of the Ottoman Empire in Europe did nothing but ill. Her condemnation is full-blooded: ‘The Turks ruined the Balkans, with a ruin so great that it has not been repaired and may prove irreparable’ (p. 1066). Once a stance like this has been taken, there is little going back: West is committed to deploring all remnants of its alien Ottoman and Islamic past.



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There is thus a degree of contradictory characterisation: we are to believe that Turks are both fastidious and slovenly in their habits (p. 289), intoxicated ‘by militarist ardour and religious fanaticism’ (p. 649) but somehow poor soldiers. The East is associated with hallucinogenic experience (p. 649). A book called Turkey in Europe is recommended, but only because its author argues so strongly that Turkey should be kept out of Europe. West argues that the Christian people of Rab, a small Adriatic island, had saved and are saving her (p. 137) from the Ottoman Empire – a comment which, even if its synecdochic rhetoric is conceded, is difficult to apply to a British woman in the mid-1930s. The Slav, more particularly the Serb, is consistently credited with fighting a heroic rearguard action against Islamic imperialism, in the name of Christianity and for the sake of a ‘civilised’ Europe which thanks him with contemptuous indifference. West berates the reader, who may or may not worship at the Church of England twice a year, for not being grateful to the south Slavs for preserving what we are now clearly to infer, rather in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, is a shared Christian culture.42 As Black Lamb so often expresses the difference between, say, a Serbo-Byzantine fresco and the music of Wagner, it is difficult to appreciate the author’s sudden demand that we appreciate this unitary Europeanness. A Macedonian town was once ‘a glory to Europe’ (p. 137): the implication is that such historical glory was only possible when the continent had impervious borders which kept out an Eastern otherness: in ‘The Statues’, Yeats similarly thought of the Greek defeat of the Persians at Salamis as the putting down of ‘Asiatic vague immensities’, of the formlessness of its ‘many-headed foam’.43 In its need to divide and keep separate, Black Lamb does not fully recognise that the creation of ‘Europe’ as a concept was dependent on a history of ethnic-cultural importation and interpenetration. As the next section shows, this is inconsistent with the impression West gives of places like Sarajevo, in which it is this very otherness which has sometimes made such a distinctive contribution to Slavic culture. Croatia is a flexible space which to some extent destabilises the clear distinctions between East and West on which Black Lamb often relies. Zagreb bears those marks of Austria – toast-coloured barracks, law courts and municipal offices, but preserves ‘a delight that begins quietly and never definitely ends’ (p. 47). West wonders during a snowy night if ‘Zagreb is not a city without substance, no more solid than the snowflakes’ (p. 103).





However, this charm evaporates. The author later thinks of the partial ‘Western education’ of the Croat soul (p. 972). Revisiting the city, she feels that the citizens’ common antipathy to the new Yugoslavian state is explained by their ‘dislike for the inferior Oriental civilization of the Serb’: the West is equated to the remnants of the Habsburg Empire (p. 1079). Past imperial occupancy has compromised the Slavic identity of the Croat whereas it has crystallised, though buried, that of the Serb. The religious division between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs – a schism which triangulates the Christianity-Islam dialectic – shifts the role of the East in the text: according to West, the Croats loathe precisely the Oriental civilisation of their neighbours and Yugoslavian compatriots. Slovenia is completely absent from the pages of Black Lamb. The former ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ is rid of its third ethnic group; no visit is made to Ljubljana. In explaining how Slovenia remained relatively unscathed by the fighting in the early 1990s, Glenny refers to ‘its distinct culture and history, its ethnically homogeneous population and its Alpine location, nestled between Austria and Italy’.44 This sort of distinctness is not useful to West: Slovenia does not fit her template of political space. As a faithful province of the Habsburg Empire which had not had the mystique of heroic national failure behind it, it was said by some to be ‘a-historical’ – an objectionable formulation. It is likely that West viewed this adaptive rural community to be lacking in Slavic ‘authenticity’ (because it did not have a self-determined national history); perhaps, like Finland, she found it too boring; perhaps, even more than Croatia, it is too close to and complicit with the borders of Western Europe. The result is that Slovenia, always being absorbed into its Venetian, Istrian, Croatian and Carinthian marches, simply disappears from the text: it is an absent border space which has fallen into the Karst chasm. Black Lamb is unimpeachable in its rooting out of Western European complacency, but this criticism is directed towards a moderate and persuadable audience to which the author implicitly belongs. However, she also tells us that in writing Black Lamb she was following ‘the dark waters’ of the inevitable World War ‘back to its source’ (1089). The source to which she refers – Mitteleuropa – is also part of a supposedly civilised Western tradition which has become anti-Slavic, anti-Semitic, over-industrialised, philistine, its teeming metropolises producing rootless ideologues. This ‘bad’ West is of course coterminous to contemporary Nazi Germany. The expansionism of the Third Reich (or Empire) is



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functionally analogous, in Black Lamb, to other representations of the colonial occupations of Slavic Europe. How can a book set in mid-1930s Yugoslavia, but concluding in 1940 as London is being blitzed, represent this threat to autonomous European space? For a good part of Black Lamb, the qualities of sanity, tolerance and open-mindedness apparently espoused by the author and her husband are matched (indeed superseded) by their opposing vices in Gerda, the German wife of West’s Serbian travelling companion Constantine. Read as a character in a realist travel journal, Gerda is unsatisfactory. To Kime Scott, Gerda ‘strains the imagination and spoils her characterization’.45 Montefiore’s inspection of West’s diaries has led her to say that ‘Mrs Vinaver is not quite as outrageous as the book represents her, though she behaves badly enough’, concluding that ‘[h]orrible as Gerda may be, she is good for Rebecca West’s narrative’.46 A stereotype, a cardboard cut-out villainess, she is a too conveniently monstrous portrait of the contemporary German soul. Gerda constitutes nothing less than a ‘threat to existence’ (p. 800) in the present; in assessing the risk to Europe of totalitarianism we should ‘calculate how many Gerdas there are in the world’ (p. 801). Gerda is the thorn in the rose: she functions in the narrative as a synecdoche of German Empire (at one point simply labelled ‘Gerda’s empire’ (p. 800)) within an idealised Yugoslavia. It is superfluous to list off all of Gerda’s vices as they are presented to us – they equate to those of Nazi Germany. As a political signifier, Gerda is like the transplanted Swabian village of Franzstal, a colony of ethnic Germans settled by Empress Maria Theresa, once on the Hungarian side of the old Habsburg border, but now within contemporary Yugoslavia. A trip is taken there on Gerda’s account (while a visit to an ‘authentic’ Serb village is cancelled). West gives Franzstal, grafted on to Slavic soil, short shrift: it is worth ‘ten seconds’ of sightseeing (and a couple of pages of travel writing), its streets are muddy, even its pigs are ‘ill-tailored’ (p. 496). It is a geopolitical oddity – a mitteleuropäisch ethnic enclave, like the Transylvanian Siebenburgen. While West finds the tepid liver sausages ‘peculiarly horrible’, Gerda eats them with ‘complete contentment’ (p. 497). Like the villagers of Franzstal, she is a German resident in Yugoslavia, and is presented as pining for a homeland from which she voluntarily went into exile. They are both pieces of Germany-within-Yugoslavia which have intruded on to land which they do not want and which does not want them.





Franzstal must remain in the traveller’s log for strategic reasons. The circularity of the book compels us to link the observation of a train compartment full of grumbling Germans at the journey’s beginning with the propagandising style of the Epilogue at the journey’s end. Germany frames, one might say surrounds, the Yugoslavian content. Gerda is the mechanism at midpoint, in which historical empire and ‘Gerda’s empire’ coalesce: she should be interpreted as a fragment of Nazi Germany which Black Lamb must carry around with it to sustain its propagandising energy. Thus, just as there are two Easts – either the noble spiritualism of Slavic (Serbian, Byzantine) Europe or the destructiveness of the Islamic Ottomans – so there are alternate Western Europes: either the godless empire of Gerda or the community of self-respecting Christian nations worth fighting for. The Epilogue clarifies the final formula of political space: Yugoslavia is to the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires what Britain now is to Germany. The analogy is split on both sides. The South Slavs, having fought for the triumph of the cross over the crescent, have been a model of resistance against the imperial East; but they also submitted to it at Kosovo in 1389, having accepted the offer of the grey falcon and chosen a future spiritual paradise over present victory on earth. Britain can either emulate Serbian national resistance against a new empire, or follow the older disgrace of Kosovo – akin to appeasement and Chamberlain – and sacrifice itself like the black lamb. If the binarism between historical and contemporary narratives becomes too fixed, leading to misrepresentations of past empires, this is justified, West implicitly feels, by the needs of the historical moment – the need to know who is on your side of the border and who is not. It was not in her final interest to make concessions to former colonial wrongdoings, lest it should diminish the impact of her warnings against contemporary forms of what she labelled ‘empire’. In wartime, West saw it as unpatriotic to equivocate morally, or to indulge the ambiguity of borderless or supranational utopias. The horrible irony was that this defensive need to identify and defend borders was turning fratricidal, as the murderous activities of the Ustaše in the Second World War make clear, and as did the vengeance of Serbia in the 1990s after West’s death.

Invisible cities: Sarajevo A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning-rods,



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On her arrival in Sarajevo, Rebecca West sees the river running red – a pathetic fallacy she finds excessive (p. 297). Sarajevo is like Calvino’s invisible city. It seems to make its brimming history available but, in the end, discloses itself to the traveller without explanation. West measures Sarajevo’s present space in order to interpret its overwhelming history. There is no room for a day-to-day travelogue in the Sarajevo section of Black Lamb: it is a place where the river runs through the landscape with bloody chutzpah, or where ‘one of the most notable men in Yugoslavia’ suddenly appears on the street to deliver his judgement on world history (p. 352). To West, Sarajevo is a fabulous border city, a multi-ethnic microcosm: ‘a fantasia on Oriental themes worked out by a Slav population’ (p. 647), where ‘a great range of human beings […] all of sorts unknown to us’ are to be seen (p. 324). Sarajevo is ‘proof positive that the European frontier has been crossed’ (p. 297). But when the author describes two Muslims in Oriental costume as ‘Danish sea-captains, perhaps, had they not been wearing the fez’ (p. 297), the idea of leaping over the fault line to the Islamic or Asiatic East is immediately qualified. This is a porous, interpenetrative, ‘semicolonial’ space where fixed dualities, such as between Turk and Slav, do not hold. West’s representation of the first colonial occupation of Sarajevo is figured not so much as a theatre of contestation, as of intermarriage and incestuous enmity. In an extended sexual metaphor, the Ottoman Turk and the Bosnian Slav are, respectively, an overmastering man and a compliant lover who resists by yielding. This submission, a type of passive-aggressiveness, creates a dependence in the ruling husband/nation. Thus Sarajevo, which fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1464, was for many centuries free from the violence and then the mortmain of Islam in Europe. It was ‘plump in insubordination’ (p. 305), a Free City within empire in which the Slavs lived as they liked (p. 304). The imperialist victor could but wonder, ‘But when did we conquer these people?’ (p. 304). In the dying days of Ottoman influence in South-eastern Europe, the Turk-Slav affair was to end badly, as it must – the lovers destroyed one another. Nevertheless, to West the ‘beautiful city speaks always of their preoccupation with one another’ (pp. 305–6). This preoccupation belongs more to the architecture and inherited customs of Sarajevo than to its living population, however. The city’s



the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.47 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


Muslims, ethnically Slav like their fellow Christian Sarajevans, have become an isolated community. West describes the much-anticipated visit of the Turkish Prime Minister and the War Minister to a train halt, where she estimates that most of the city’s 30,000 Muslims have turned out to honour a centuries-old historical relationship. This episode represents the interface of the old and new spaces of Turkish Sarajevo: the residuum of a defunct empire and the new nation state led by Atatürk Mustafa Kemal, a ruthless moderniser. The fez, ubiquitous in this Sarajevan crowd, is prohibited in Turkey. The Turkish ministers are ‘little men in bowlers and trim suits’, who wince at the sight of the green crescent of the old Ottoman flag draped from a window, and make not a single reference to ‘the ancient tie’ (p. 307) which links them to the crowd. West concludes that she has seen final collapse of the old Ottoman Empire after 500 years: ‘Under our eyes it had heeled over and fallen to the ground like a lay figure slipping off a chair’ (p. 318). The travel writer’s privilege is to invest an individual travel sketch with such epochal significance and to see in the lineaments of the city those of empires and nations. Metonym and metaphor work conjointly: the scene at the train halt is a component of the whole dead Ottoman space; it is also a draper’s dummy, a hollow and unrealistic character no longer on display. The second phase of colonial occupation, that of the Habsburgs in the late nineteenth century, is figured as the unwelcome visit of a braying, arriviste Mitteleuropa. The sleek minaret of one of the city’s hundred mosques, adjacent to the ‘lumpish’ and ‘crudely fretted’ Austrian Town Hall, has ‘the air of a cat [watching] a dog making a fool of itself’ (p. 331). According to West, the Habsburgs have blundered into northern Bosnia, leaving breweries, brothels and the usual toast-coloured barracks amidst the white villas, firs and cylindrical Muslim tombs (p. 333). They have imposed thoughtless action and beer on the ‘essentially speculative’ and wine-drinking Slav (p. 351). The dimensions of Sarajevo are integral to the unfolding of the long narrative of the assassination (or attentat) of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Countess Sophie Chotek by Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914. The townscape is deliberately read as a confirmation of historical forces and the Austro-Slavic dialectic is measured in the city grid. Like Calvino’s Zaira, it consists of relationships ‘between the measurements of its space and the events of its past’.48 There is an aptness in the fact that Princip emerged from the narrow and crooked streets of the ‘real’ Sarajevo (that is, the old Bosnian city), and on to an intersection with an esplanade whose straightness seemed to reproach the river for winding and was typical of the imposed rectilinearity of the Austrians (p. 351).



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The agency of the narrative is retrograde: West perhaps rather absurdly presents the victims as far keener to die than the assassins were to kill. Archduke Franz Ferdinand chooses the anniversary of Serbian defeat at the battle of Kosovo on which to visit the Bosnian capital; after an earlier botched attempt on his life, he determines to go out again; his car overshoots the bridge, reverses and comes to a halt where Princip is standing with his revolver. The six conspirators were ill-trained juveniles, and all of them hopeless shots, except Princip, who was no more than fair. Most of the would-be assassins turned away, or even ran away, constantly postponing their predestined convergence with world history till the very last minute. Having accepted the others’ failure over a cup of coffee, Princip accidentally stumbled through the crowd to the right street corner. His second shot was intended for General Potiorek, but found Sophie, who had thrown herself across her dying husband. The attentat is compared to the parallel story about the Archduke specially arranged hunting parties, designed to showcase his shooting talents, in which scores of animals were channelled by beaters to the exact point of their deaths – in the cross wire of his waiting rifle. West mischievously turns the story back on itself. The Austrians are driven to the exact point at which they are to be killed. West concludes that ‘the bullets had been coaxed out of the reluctant revolver to the bodies of the eager victims’ (p. 361): the same image of reversed volition which Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow adopts from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This rendering of the attentat inverts the norms of culpability by inverting the norms of character-agency – the victims are responsible for their own deaths, the assassins are passive ciphers from whom bullets are ‘coaxed’. West transforms a linear narrative of causality, traditionally inherited from the classroom (the supposedly precipitant cause of the First World War), into a modernist narrative of contingency in time and space. The impression of simultaneous movements on the trellis of the colonial city space is, for example, similar to that of Dublin in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter of Ulysses.49 But whereas nothing of such historical moment occurs on Bloomsday (at least in Dublin), Sarajevo’s own special day eliminates the potential possibles of historical nonevent, which are narrowed until all that is left is the Aristotelian ‘actuality’ of the assassination.50 According to West, everybody except Princip ‘acted contrary to his own will’. The novelist in her enjoys the ‘exquisite appropriateness’ of these events occurring on St Vitus’s Day, as the saint gave his name to a disease whose victims ‘suffer an incontrollable disposition to involuntary





motions’ (p. 370). There is a ludicrous contingency to the killings. West relishes the lack of causality and determinism in this historical narrative: such an arbitrary concatenation of unrelated events is central to her view of history as ‘involuntary motion’. This enjoyment stems from a broader admiration of the mystic Slav’s acceptance of history as enigmatic and inexplicable, which shows up the impatience of the rationalist Western European, who finds the strangeness of episodes like the attentat unpalatable. The city also contains an interpretable past in its pockmarks, the imperfect erasures on its palimpsest space. Near to the point by the river where the murders took place, West observes two stumps: they were statues of the Archduke and Archduchess, taken down as soon as the city was liberated (362).51 West herself enjoys a flight of fancy – pawkily envisaging the statues in ‘some backyard, intact or cut into queer sculptural joints, cast down among ironically long grass’ (p. 362). The assassination is commemorated – one of Calvino’s ‘scratches, indentations, scrolls’ – but far from being a monument or ‘a barbarous record of satisfaction in an accomplished crime’, as Churchill suggested (p. 351), is in fact a modest black tablet placed high above street level, easily unnoticed. In spite of its red river, Sarajevo will remain invisible to the visitor. West leaves the city acknowledging that ‘the more one knows about the attentat the more incomprehensible it becomes’ (p. 383). It is because of its miscegenated past that Sarajevo has acquired its unique historical personality. This impression is at odds with the uncompromising statements about the alien Ottoman presence in South-eastern Europe which West makes elsewhere. Mosques suddenly become graceful next to Austrian architecture ‘stuffed with beer and sausages down to its toes’ (p. 331). (Sausages are doomed signifiers in Black Lamb.) The First World War did not need Princip’s firing pistol – Sarajevo had to realise that its ‘great moment was a delusion, a folly, a simple extravagance’. But the city loses none of its personality. Rather, it ‘took the war and made it a private passion of the south Slavs’ (p. 394). The Slavic forbearance of the adverse forces of history is played out in the townscape of Sarajevo with a kind of speculative, seriousminded amusement, shared by the author.

Invisible cities: Belgrade West begins a chapter on the Yugoslavian capital by saying that no one could guess what has made modern Belgrade by looking at it (p. 519). Although nine of the Serbia chapters are entitled ‘Belgrade’, they are



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largely used as empty vessels into which the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Serbia is poured.52 As the core of the new country of Yugoslavia, Belgrade is where West must hang the story of both a modern independent Serbia and of the south Slav state that then formed around it. But it is a hollow centre, lacking urban substance in the text. Unlike the extravagance of the Sarajevan fantasia, Belgrade – give or take a couple of statues and a Cathedral procession – is something of a tabula rasa. Beograd – which means white city – may have been the New Jerusalem of the nation state but it is not one of West’s spiritual homelands, not the place from which to tell of the black lamb and the grey falcon. That was rather the bloodied rock of Macedonia and the plain of the blackbirds of ‘Old Serbia’. West was ‘looking for Yugoslavia before she found it’ – but she was seeking a core meaning in a decentred country. Thematically, Belgrade cannot provide this core, and so the book moves away, geographically and chronologically, from the developing Yugoslavian state to what is perceived to be its real heart, the medieval Serbian Empire of Stephen Dushan. West admits that ‘[she] did not like Belgrade that evening’ (p. 476). Here she is prompted to feel ‘a sudden abatement of [her] infatuation for Yugoslavia’ (p. 482). Belgrade is not just diminished in Black Lamb because of a personal dislike: it is also a strategy by which we are made aware of the contemporary political vacuum, the ‘pervading air of anticlimax’, of a space where ‘[n]othing real had happened […] since King Alexander had died’ (p. 615). There is something detached and unreal about the city. This relates to its indeterminate position in a spatial and temporal dialectic: it is neither a synecdoche of the Serbian rural idyll nor of the anti-type of the Western European metropolis; it belongs neither to a genuine national Slavic past nor to the wholly compromised, internationally ‘developed’ future. Belgrade is by that time Yugoslavia’s most populated city, though at the beginning of the century, West tells us, there was not a town in Serbia the size of Rockford, Illinois (p. 473). Belgrade, ‘till recently […] a very sacred Balkan village’ (p. 482), is becoming a bad copy of the urban models of industrialised Europe. West notices the pallor of the children in the procession, and is led to discuss the unhealthiness of Serbian adaptation to city life. Belgrade’s increasingly ‘unattractive appearance’ (p. 476) is attributable to the dominance of the capitalist rogues over the enervated professional classes. The emaciation of children and adults alike is presented as a physical manifestation of West’s point that, by living in the city, peasants have had to learn ‘a new technique’ (p. 475).





West is following an orthodoxy of the travel book, in which ‘the romantic’s idea of an unsullied world was replaced by the image of a world overrun by industrialism’,53 and where we associate ‘the pastoral strain in travel books’ with an ‘implicit elegiac tendency’.54 Thus, when she points out that 87 per cent of Yugoslavians are still agricultural workers (p. 481), we infer she would wish it to remain so. The transformation of Belgrade is thus a desecration, but it is not alien empire that is imagined as spreading over the city (although Belgrade, like Sarajevo, had suffered such occupation), but the corruption of the modern machine-age, and the attendant growth of an urban proletariat.55 Felicity Rosslyn has pointed to the author’s failure to extrapolate from her journey the future modernisation of the whole of Yugoslavia – that is, fully to confront the cruel knowledge that peasants will choose the machine and the city if they have the choice and that they will then cease to be peasants, for peasants do not have choice, by definition.56 West recognises that Belgrade – its inhabitants suspended between two worlds – is a city in the process of happening, but she clings on to what remains Serbian about it. Belgrade station is regarded as disappointingly similar to other railway stations – flavourless, international (p. 457), and therefore unfaithful to distinct Slavic essence. In a city-centre hotel, West has lunch surrounded by stocky Serb businessmen and industrialists – the new middle classes who represent the privateering interests of current Yugoslavian politics (p. 476). The men ape the ways of Western financiers, but are still distinct from them in their physical robustness. The hotel wishes to be like the Savoy, the Crillon or the Plaza (p. 483) but still serves proper Serb stews, soups and risottos; it still employs eccentric chambermaids, who claim to be able to identify the nationalities of the guests by smell. Again, the part stands for the whole. The hotel’s identity is that of the city itself. When West says that Belgrade had made an error (p. 482), it is the error of emulation. West’s version of Belgrade and its hotel are rather like Christopher Isherwood’s description of aspirational Weimar Berlin as a ‘sham diamond’, whose buildings – ‘in grand international styles, copies of copies’ – assert the dignity of a capital city.57 The hotel episode in Belgrade does not wholly condemn the scene for its ersatz blandness – its copied internationalism – nor does it commend it for its Yugoslavian archetypicality. The confusion is found in the grammatical mood of the sentences. ‘I could imagine the hotel making the same error […] the hotel would repudiate its good fat risottos […] would become international […] may have longed to slip off its robust character’ (pp. 482–3, my italics).



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West stays in an uneasy conditional mood because she is projecting a future urban landscape which has not quite overlaid the space of the rural past. It is because of this spatial ambiguity that the often-quoted conclusion to the passage is so effective. In a scene unimaginable in the big cities of the world, the ‘hotel doors slowly swing open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms’ (p. 483). We are jolted out of the possibility of future scenes into the confident declarative of the peasant’s arrival: ‘He took up a place’, ‘He looked about him’, ‘Twice he went to the door’ (p. 483). A news-stand sells the Politika, the Continental Daily Mail and New York Herald Tribune, items which are of both national and international print culture. The man’s mass-produced suit is shown up by the careful embroidery of his peasant shirt; his sheepskin jacket is, as one critic has put it, ‘the badge of backwardness of Eastern Europe’.58 Nevertheless, the man carrying the lamb is in fact likely to be related to one of the stocky businessmen he is seeking in the lounge. This is typical of Black Lamb’s many epiphanies; but in this case the textual strategy is also incorporated thematically into the author’s attraction to the Orthodox rite: both are formalised revelations of abstract truths. The peasant is explicitly made as a textual image in stillness, the equivalent of a Serbo-Byzantine masterpiece: ‘He stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco’ (p. 483). The disappointing sameness that has plagued West in Belgrade is for once transfigured. What is unveiled is not the contrast between country and city, but the lack of such a disjunction: peasant and businessman, lamb and hotel bar, are in momentary coexistence. Belgrade is imagined in Black Lamb as an elusive transitional space between Stephen Dushan’s Serbia and industrial Western Europe – but it is nearer the latter. What Belgrade looks like (we are not really told) is concealed in the text by the opposition of what Belgrade was (‘a sacred village’), to what it will be (a modern industrial city). The city crops up throughout the book as a cause for grumbling complaint: it is a corrupt capital draining money from the other parts of the federation; it favours Serbs in government. With the exception of this epiphany, the city is described without transcendent value. Indeed it is because of West’s doubts about the city that the peasant’s appearance is so luminous. Oddly, then, Sarajevo’s ‘plumpness in insubordination’ – the peculiarity of its imperial past – assigns it a confident role in Black Lamb as the leader of Slavic liberation in the First World War; Belgrade, which also has a prior history of imperial occupation and is the putative centre of





the new nation state, is relegated to a hesitancy and intermediacy in which ‘[n]othing real had happened’. Apparently lingering in Sarajevo, and hastening out of Belgrade, West is most patently constructing an idea of Yugoslavia, already purged of Slovenia and grudgingly including a remote Croatia, in her own image.

‘The earth is what is not us’ Black Lamb is sometimes a dense book but it is, above all, long. West doubted her readers would finish its half-a-million words. Structurally, it is pulled between a need to communicate the chaotic, centrifugal, miscellaneous mass of her experience, and an opposite urge to impose order and crystallised meaning upon it. Paul Fussell has somewhat unfairly suggested that the subtitle of Black Lamb – ‘A Journey Through Yugoslavia’ – was added as a publishing strategy to lend coherence to ‘a collection of assorted ethical and historical essays’.59 Though the idea of an ‘assortment’ does not do justice to the purposive focus of the book, it should be remembered that the idea of a single Yugoslavian journey was, as with other travel books, a fiction: West made use of her diaries of three separate visits to Yugoslavia to reconstruct an epic whole.60 Likewise, the eponymous lamb and falcon were ‘backdated’ myths – thematically linking eschatological sacrifice, psychological death-drive and political pacifism – whose prominence as central parables was superimposed on the text.61 The Epilogue reconstitutes a unitary truth – the impulse to be defeated must be resisted – in order finally to condense the work into wartime propaganda. The same tension is at work in the text’s representation of political space: Yugoslavia must emerge as many-splendoured, excessive and disparate – but also as a special whole. The Yugoslavia of Black Lamb is a plenum, ‘[A]ll, all is in Yugoslavia’ (p. 657), where ‘one can never be sure of anything’ (p. 779). At one border in Macedonia, West is unable to visit a lake island because it is heavily patrolled by Greek, Albanian and Yugoslavian soldiers. ‘Macedonia’ is suffocated out of existence: if the distended borders of a Greater Bulgaria, a Greater Serbia, a Greater Greece or a Greater Albania were recognised, there would be no Macedonia, four times over. Nature abhors a vacuum, but neither can it accommodate more than one body in the same place. Black Lamb’s Yugoslavia can be simultaneously polymorphous microcosm and meaningful nowhere. West spoke of taking an ‘inventory’ of Yugoslavia ‘down to its last vest-button’.62 Questions of Yugoslavian ‘moreness’ or ‘lessness’ are ever-present in the book. Felicity Rosslyn has picked up on a point made



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by West in a letter of 1944, in which she writes of a Yugoslavia led by the Serb officer Mihailovic as ‘a world where 2 ⫹ 2 ⫽ 5’ – that is, a world in which Yugoslavian excess is harmonious, in a way inexplicable to Western European rationalism.63 Rosslyn’s response is that Titoist Communism minimised the ethnic conflict among the Partisans, producing an equation more like 2 ⫹ 2 ⫽ 3; and that ‘[m]odern Yugoslavia [persisted] through a kind of homogenisation helped by the very fact that Tito was not a Serb’ (he was reputed to be the son of a Czech Jewish father and a Hungarian mother).64 Importantly, then, the plenitude of Black Lamb is inseparable from its literary-cartographic ‘object’. The form and scope of the book had to correspond to the excess of 2 ⫹ 2 ⫽ 5. This is why Geoff Dyer stresses the necessary vastness of a book which should not be (though it has been) abridged: it needed ‘a form that’s large enough to swim in’.65 However, although plural border territory seems to demand exhaustive enumerative coverage ‘down to its last vest-button’, at the same time it tells atopian stories of dispossession and deterritorialisation. What West ‘can never be sure’ of, in all-containing Yugoslavia, is quite where she is. She asks herself at a certain battlefield, ‘What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that?’ (p. 773). The book is full of wheres that might seem to be the paradoxes and ironies of political space, but are the spatial norms of South-eastern Europe. Space and ethno-national identity are mutual political concepts: if West asks where she is, the Yugoslavs she meets have to ask themselves who they are. The book is also full of leaders who have somehow assumed the mantle of a nation they did not originally ‘belong’ to.66 Black Lamb’s explanation that ‘[a] Serbian is a subject of the kingdom of Serbia, and might be a Croat, just as a Croatian-born inhabitant of the old Austrian province of Croatia might be a Serb’ (p. 13) sounds like an artful conundrum, enjoyed as semantic nonsense. On the contrary, it is the simplest possible way to express the problems of a young confederation which has failed – and will continue to fail – to homogenise and make obsolete its constituent nationalities’ sense of their own ethnicity. Attached though Black Lamb is to the mystique of the Old Serbian nation, it dramatises – sometimes inadvertently – the ironic disjunction between the mythological nations of shared blood and soil, eternal and atavistic, with the expedient constructs of the modern state, those ‘novel entities’ which were assembled at the diplomatic workshops of Versailles, Trianon, St Germain and Neuilly.





The political space of Black Lamb is fitted – sometimes squeezed – into formulas, mechanisms, ideological apparatuses, historical masternarratives, synecdoches of state. The empire may be superannuated, the nation a young man; or the empire may be an upstart newcomer who has ousted a venerable nation from its seat. East may destroy West; West may destroy East. The city may be a semi-colonial fantasia or it may be a blank slate. Some places seem to be everywhere, others nowhere. Paul Ricœur has said that just as ‘there is no political distribution of borders which is adequate to the distribution of languages and cultures, so there is no political solution at the level of the nation state’.67 Lasting territorial symmetries – ‘adequacy’ – can never be found amongst nations. Under the abstract weight of this realisation, any political configuration of borders is unmasked as a temporary expediency. This is something that Black Lamb recognises: The earth is not our mother’s bosom. It shows us no special kindness. We cannot trust it to take sides with us. It makes us, its grass is our flesh, it lets us walk about on it, but this is all it will do for us; and since the earth is what is not us, and therefore a symbol of destiny and of God, we are alone and terrified. (p. 838) This expression of mankind’s alienation from his homeland is more metaphysical than political – not untypical in West’s book, but in this example unusually interfusing a sense of the cruelty of man-made and God-made space. The language of mortality comes from Isaiah, that of isolation from twentieth-century existentialism. The ‘earth’ is a biblical landscape, a blasted heath on which two men wait – an Algerian beach. An Old Testament God disowns people by making them exiles in their own land. The earth on which the narrator stands as she speaks these lines, the site of the Serbian defeat which initiated five centuries of Turkish occupation in Europe, has nevertheless kept the name Kosovo – a place which has continued to show its inhabitants no kindness.

Notes 1. Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta, 2000), p. 366. 2. Ibid., p. 366. 3. Rebecca West, ‘“Rebecca West” (interview with Marina Warner)’, in Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, 6th Series, ed. George Plimpton (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), pp. 1–38 (p. 37).



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4. Felicity Rosslyn, ‘Rebecca West, Gerda and the Sense of Process’, in Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, eds John B. Allcock and Antonia Young (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991), pp. 102–15 (p. 102). 5. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), p. 1100. All following references to this edition will be made within the text. 6. Harold Orel, The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West (London: Macmillan, 1986), remarks upon the ‘artistic cunning’ of the Sarajevo episode, whose ‘structure has been shaped by a novelist’, p. 195. 7. Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, 2 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), II, p. 162. 8. Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 182. Scholars of travel books point to how this sub-genre is itself necessarily hybrid. 9. Vesna Goldsworthy, ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: Rebecca West’s Journey through the Balkans’, in Women: A Cultural Review, 18:1 (Spring 1997) 1–11. Goldsworthy writes that since the time of West’s visits, Yugoslavia had ‘disappeared, been temporarily dismembered under different occupiers and, after 1945, changed beyond recognition by Communist rule’, p. 5. 10. Janet Montefiore, Dangerous Flood: ‘Rebecca West’s book is now a memorial in a sense she cannot have intended – not, as when she wrote it, to a defeated, occupied nation which might yet revive, but to a dismembered country which no longer exists’, p. 181. 11. See Marina Mackay, ‘Immortal Goodness: Ideas of Resurrection in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’, in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 54:3 (2002) 177–95, on how Yugoslavia ‘exemplifies the images of death-in-life that are central to the book’s symbolic texture’, p. 179. 12. Allcock and Young, Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, p. xvii. 13. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) p. 18. 14. Allcock and Young, p. xvii. 15. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 301. 16. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), also cites Mann’s Der Zauberberg as evidence for a newly ironic representation of overmastering Western attitudes to Asiatic Eastern Europe, with reference to the detached characterisation of the anti-Slavic Settembrini, pp. 367–8. 17. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 184. 18. Todorova, p. 19. 19. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 20. Ibid., p. 16. 21. Ibid., p. 17. 22. Montefiore, Dangerous Flood of History, p. 181. 23. Ibid., p. 207. 24. Ibid., p.187. 25. Goldsworthy, Women, p. 10. 26. See Rosslyn, ‘Gerda and the Sense of Process’, p. 112. 27. Mackay, ‘Immortal Goodness’, p. 185. 28. Montefiore, p. 214.





29. A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 272. 30. John Gunther quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (Guernsey: Phoenix, 1998), p. 155. 31. Harold Orel, The Literary Achievement, p. 171; Allcock and Young, eds, Black Lambs, p. xxi; Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, II, p. 150. 32. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 184. 33. Ernest Gellner has probably been the most prominent ‘modernist’ theorist of the nation: see Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), and Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997). 34. Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 262. West was to repeat her quest for the soul of a nation in Mexico 30 years later – once again the sine qua non was (Spanish) colonial occupation, a historical interruption of the growth of a nation. 35. It is hardly that West is uncritical of the militarism of male authority figures – in reference to D’Annunzio in Fiume, she hilariously says that the battle of feminism will only be over if a country allows itself to be turned upside down by ‘a totally bald woman writer’ (p. 124). 36. West cites the relationship between Austria, Hungary and Croatia in the nineteenth century, characterised by irrational loyalty and pathological treachery (p. 54). 37. West is interested in one of the conspirators of the Sarajevo assassination, Chabrinovitch, who blamed his actions upon his father: ‘his revolt against his father and his revolt against the representative of the Habsburgs would seem one and the same […] they who attack the heads of states are not acting as a result of impersonal political theory so much as out of the desire to resolve emotional disturbances set up by childish resentments against their parents!’ (p. 425). West is also drawn to the Kings of Serbia Peter Karageorge and Stephen Dushan, who were both parricides and regicides: they chose life for the nation and death for the father. 38. The idea of the Serbian core followed nineteenth-century examples of European nationalisms: (Bismarck’s Prussia in Germany, Cavour’s Piedmont in Italy). The newspaper of the Serbian nationalist organisation the Black Hand was called Pijemont, deliberately invoking the Italian model of the nation state. See Glenny, p. 300. 39. In considering Spanish colonialism in Mexico in the mid-1960s, West judged it would have been much worse if the Ottomans had occupied Mexico as they had the Balkans, and attributed to them the ‘mess that brought on us the turbulence of Europe and two World Wars’ – a statement which apart from anything else claims too much of historical causality. Quoted in Rollyson, Rebecca West, p. 358. 40. Montefiore cites as one example of this dismissal the fact that West did not appear to meet educated Bosnian Muslims during her trip. The impression she gives is that most of the Sarajevo intellectuals were Jewish, The Dangerous Flood of History, p. 195. 41. Rollyson, Rebecca West, pp. 213–14. 42. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).



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43. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Statues’, in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1985): ‘No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men / That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these / Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down / All Asiatic vague immensities, / And not the banks of oars that swam upon / The many-headed foam at Salamis. / Europe put off that foam when Phidias / Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass’, p. 375. 44. Glenny, p. 635. 45. Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, II, p. 155. 46. Montefiore, The Dangerous Flood of History, p. 205. It is clear that West deliberately made her into a caricature. Gerda looks at the 7000 crosses of the French war cemetery in Macedonia and says, ‘Think of all these people dying for a lot of Slavs’ (p. 766), a slightly though significantly exaggerated rendering of what West recorded Elsa Vinaver as saying in her diary: ‘To think of all these people having fallen for Serbia’: Montefiore, p. 210. It is also clear that West was aware of this potential implausibility: her husband says pre-emptively that ‘nobody who is not like Gerda can realise how bad Gerda is’ (p. 800). 47. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 10. 48. Ibid., p. 10. 49. See James Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 180–209. 50. See Ulysses, when Stephen thinks of Aristotle’s distinction in the Metaphysics between potential and actuality: ‘Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? […] It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible’, p. 21. 51. West observed a similar scene when, as a court reporter at the Nuremberg tribunals, she was in Germany shortly after the Second World War. Visiting the Berlin of Four Power control, she meditated upon the ‘extraordinary misadventures’ of the city’s statuary – the pedestals of Moltke and Roon, the graffiti on the Bismarck memorial – much of which had been moved by Hitler to the Tiergarten. The parkland resembled ‘nothing but a vast potato patch’ in which the Hohenzollern eagles remained, now decapitated by the Red Army. Unlike the inconspicuous ‘queer joints’ discarded in Sarajevo, however, the Berlin statues rose from ‘this naked land […] in starkly inappropriate prominence’. Rebecca West, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens I’, in A Train of Powder (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 3–74 (pp. 35–6). 52. In the Belgrade sections, West describes the founding of the modern Serbian state in the early 1800s, the struggle for complete independence from the Ottomans, and the dynastic dialectic which has seen the country ruled by either a Karageorgevitch or an Obrenovitch, with one exile waiting in the wings to reclaim the throne at the downfall of the other. 53. James Duncan and Derek Gregory, eds, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 7. 54. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 210.





55. A consistent theme in Black Lamb is that pre-First World War assassins (like Luccheni, the Italian who killed Empress Elizabeth of Austria) and the interwar dictators came from a rootless urban underclass. The city itself, disconnected from tradition, is responsible for totalitarianism, and cities such as Vienna are figured in the book as parasitical (p. 803), and breeding-grounds of extremism (p. 1107). 56. Rosslyn, in Allcock and Young, eds, Black Lambs, p. 114. 57. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 230–1. 58. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, p. 369. 59. Fussell, p. 205. 60. Black Lamb does refer to the first visit, when West contracted dengue fever, and of the idea of it as preparatory to the main journey. Nevertheless, the Macedonian leg of the journey, presented seamlessly, was made separately during a third visit. See Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 194. This corresponds to other travel journals, which compound a number of journeys into the illusion of a single and definitive experience. See Duncan and Gregory, Writes of Passage, which recognises the importance of ‘the physicality of representation itself [which] involves attending to the multiple sites at which travel writing takes place and hence to the spatiality of representation’ (p. 3). They cite the published record of Captain Cook’s third voyage, a composite account in which ‘the writing is progressively distanced from the events and scenes it purports to convey’ (p. 3). Flaubert’s record of his journey down the Nile is another composite which ‘folds into itself a series of different spatialities that entered into its own construction’ (p. 4). 61. Montefiore’s comparison of the diary in the Beinecke library at Yale University and the finished text bears this out: ‘Most notably, the diary says nothing about two key scenes: the throat-cutting of the lamb in the “Sheep’s Field”, and Constantine’s recitation of the “grey falcon” poem’, The Dangerous Flood of History, p. 209. 62. Rosslyn, ‘Rebecca West, Gerda and the Sense of Process’, p. 112. 63. Ibid., p. 113. 64. Ibid., p. 113. 65. Geoff Dyer, ‘Journeys into History’, Guardian Review (5 August 2006), quotes Auden. 66. For example, the nineteenth-century Croatian nationalist Starchevitch (p. 97), who loathed Serbs, had a Serb mother himself; Kossuth, the Hungarian leader of Slovak blood, was revolted by the idea of a Slovak speaking anything other than Magyar (p. 53); the saintly Bishop Strossmayer, another Croatian nationalist, ‘loved Austria, and indeed was himself of Austrian stock’ (p. 106). In a typical Macedonian episode, West meets a lawyer who everyone takes to be a Bulgarian patriot, but is not even Bulgarian – a fact he can be sure of, because his father, a Serbian schoolmaster, was murdered by Bulgarians because ‘he was not of their blood’ (p. 797). Constantine, always voicing the Serbian perspective and a kind of ambassadorial poet of Yugoslavia, was the son of Polish Jews: ‘by adoption only, yet quite completely, a Serb’ (p. 41). The examples stretch outwards. Napoleon ‘was a French imperialist, but he was completely detached from French nationalism, which was natural



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enough, as he was not a Frenchman’ (p. 1101). (Here West is rather trapped in the empire/nation dialectic.) West had heard that Tito – the architect of a post-War Yugoslavian state with a Serbian core – was thought to be of Czechoslovakian-Jewish-Hungarian blood: Rosslyn, ‘Rebecca West, Gerda and the Sense of Process’, p. 112. Elsewhere, she remembered the importance of Stalin’s roots as a Georgian, a provincial who would become the most ferocious of Russian centralists, Rollyson, Rebecca West, p. 285. 67. Paul Ricœur, quoted in States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, ed. Richard Kearney, p. 34.




Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space

‘Then he caught the europicolas …’ The book now turns to another text composed throughout the interwar period of border change, and also completed in the shadow of the Second World War, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.1 Joyce had moved across Europe (Dublin, Pola, Trieste, Zürich, Trieste and Paris), while Europe had redrawn itself, replacing its Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman dynasties with the narrowed borders of the new USSR, the successor states of Central Europe, a reduced Weimar Germany and a newly secular Turkey. For Joyce, modernist exile did not take place on a European map of steady states – rather, the unhoused ‘extraterritorial’ writer travelled over newly fractured political spaces.2 Finnegans Wake does not forget the ethnographic medley of Joyce’s earlier life on the Habsburg border of Trieste. Shem the Penman would ‘far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea’ (171:5–6). The biblical brotherly theme is present – Shem as Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage of lentils – but the riven, incomplete nation is contrasted with the tureen of the continent, melding its races together. Shaun’s later version of his brother’s disgrace points to the same model of Europe. A new Slavic identity is invented for the scrivening penman as ‘Shem Skrivenitch’ (a name based on a Croatian student of Joyce’s in Trieste called Alois Skrivanich),3 an Irish exile and honorary Central European: Then he caught the europicolas and went into the society of jewses. With Bro Cahlls and Fran Czeschs and Bruda Pszths and Brat Slavos’. (423:35–424:1)

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6

This is a repetition of the idea of the miniature European microcosm (Italian: Europa piccola), where Jesuits (from the Society of Jesus) live with Jews. Joyce is living with brothers – not only Stanislaus, that pest, but Frantisek, the Czech brother-in-law.4 This jostling family life (Joyce claimed there were 12 under one Triestine roof in 1919) is a molecule of the community of Mitteleuropa, where Czechs and other ‘Slavos’ are brothers – sometimes warring – in those Habsburg cities of Budapest and Bratislava.5 At the level of its portmanteau words, Finnegans Wake’s significations are of course multiple and omni-directional. The same is true for its topography: although Ireland is ubiquitous (with particularly symbolic locations such as Howth Head, the Liffey, Clontarf, Chapelizod and Phoenix Park), the book’s other world-spaces are ‘hashed’ together. This chapter now considers the ways in which a section of the Wake constitutes the borders of ‘Euro-piccola’, and how the text reacts to imperial and international transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. To many modernists the new Europe of the self-determined nations seemed like a wasteland entre deux guerres – or in Wake-time a Europe of ‘THE BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM’ (281:R7–9). Joyce too evokes the imminence of war through allusions to the contested borders of Slavic Europe. The Butt and Taff dialogue and its surrounding text, in the middle of Part II chapter 3, purport to tell us ‘How Buckley shot the Russian general’ during the Crimean War. Joyce had thought at an early stage of amplifying his father’s anecdote about how Buckley shot the Russian general in the Crimean War into one of the paradigmatic confrontations of Finnegans Wake, but struggled to integrate the story into the rest of the book. It is worth repeating Richard Ellmann’s summary of the story in full: Buckley […] was an Irish soldier in the Crimean War who drew a bead on a Russian general, but when he observed his splendid epaulettes and decorations, he could not bring himself to shoot. After a moment, alive to his duty, he raised his rifle again, but just then the general let down his pants to defecate. The sight of his enemy in so helpless and human plight was too much for Buckley, who again lowered his gun. But when the general prepared to finish the operation with a piece of grassy turf, Buckley lost all respect for him and fired.6 Consistent with the untraceable origins of Wake narrative, this is a tall tale, an apocryphal version of the one about the Irishman, the Englishman and



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the Russian.7 This is why it is delivered by the vaudevillians Butt and Taff, in somewhat similar style to the gossiping washerwomen’s ‘O tell me all about Anna Livia!’ (196:1–3). The story has no basis in fact, offering itself as a universal allegory of human behaviour. Ellmann tells us that Joyce related it to friends in Zürich during the First World War, and was ‘convinced that it was in some way archetypal’. This archetype has been interpreted as explicitly colonial by Ellmann, who also notes that as ‘early as 1920 Joyce saw Buckley in his own role of the ordinary Irishman in combat with imperial authority’.8 When Beckett was told the story, he reputedly remarked ‘Another insult to Ireland’: in any case, that comment is worked into Finnegans Wake as ‘At that instullt to Igorladns!’ (353:18–19). Recurrent political and psychological meanings cluster around the idea of the Ould Sod. Oedipal taboos form a matrix of the postcolonial (the four green fields of the Irish earth fouled by the coloniser), the scatological (the thunderous cannonade of the Father-God which for once unites his sons in parricidal disgust) and the anal-sexual (sodomy). Shooting and shitting coalesce: Margot Norris refers to ‘Buckley [shooting] the Russian general in the ass’, and Richard Beckman to the appropriateness of Butt shooting ‘the father-surrogate in the rear, in the “great big oh in the megafundum of his tomashunders” (229:20–1)’.9 When this Freudian relief is concluded, everything will end again (in the posterior) and thus, a posteriori, begin again. In this Hiberno-Anglo-Russian triangle of colonial politics, the order to shoot the enemy of one’s enemy should, in one sense, be disobeyed. This connects to the infamous dereliction of duty immortalised by Tennyson in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ – ‘Someone had blunder’d’. The blunder that sent the 600 into the valley of death was committed by the Earl of Lucan, an Irish peer, and a Captain L.E. Nolan of the Fifteenth Hussars, also an Irishman. (Nolan insolently questioned Lucan’s authority, and went to his death ahead of the whole brigade, charging wildly at the guns.)10 The breakdown of the chain of command is an Irish wish-fulfilment, a lapse which no longer conceals the collective suppression of the colonial subconscious. The British army conscripted a particularly heavy number of Irishmen for the Crimean War, which took place only a few years after the Great Famine. Buckley’s historical role is that of the intermediary Irish soldier, unwilling to carry out an order (to shoot the enemy of the English) from which the Empire will benefit, but also riding rashly into the fray to liberate Ireland. Some of these elements in the Buckley story are dramatised in the text: a sort of description of the parodied gallant, a uniformed general



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who is ‘some garment-guy!’ (339:21–2); frequent expressions of fear and outrage at his disgusting behaviour (‘I was bibbering with vear’ (343:35); ‘The lyewdsky so so sewn of a fitchid!’ (340:2); Butt’s shocked sight of the shitting general: ‘But when I seeing him […] expousing his old skinful self tailtottom by manurevring in open ordure’ (344:12–17) and ‘I seen his bricashert offensive’ (352:4–5); his alternation between reluctance (‘I adn’t the arts to’ (345:2–3)) and the resolution to raise his rifle and fire (‘I gave one dobblenotch and I ups with my crozzier’ (353:20–1)). Bearing in mind the story’s own ambiguous vacillation between hesitation and resolution, it is interesting to note that Derek Attridge wonders whether the shooting can ever be said to have taken place.11 Indeed, he seems to suggest the ‘heart’ of the Buckley episode is a nonevent: ‘the memorable moment when Buckley finds he does not have the heart to shoot the defecating Russian general’.12 This would turn Butt’s tale into a shaggy dog story – an appropriate sub-genre in this book of unspecified crime and unsubstantiated slander. I would argue that Butt-Buckley’s exclamation ‘I shuttm, missus’ (which could be a miss, but is also a shot (352:14)) or ‘Sparro!’ (approximating to ‘I shoot’ in Italian, as well as the sparrow that killed Cock Robin with an arrow (353:21)) claims some sort of status as monologic narrative climax. The latter is immediately followed by the ‘abnihilisation of the etym’ (353:22), which indicates that a temporary destruction – whether atomically or etymologically – has taken place, presumably generating new life ab nihilo. Taff’s congratulation of Butt, ‘bullyclaver of ye, bragadore-gunneral’ (352:23), expresses approbation at the clever deed of the gun-wielding son, but alerts us to the possibility that in dethroning the father, the son has simultaneously become another bullying Brigadier-General (Russian general), thereby initiating another Oedipal cycle.13 Joyce marks the modernity (indeed future possibilities) of this passage by reporting some of the action on a television set. The dialogue between Butt and Taff is interpolated with three italicised television intervals: ‘an admirable verbivocovisual presentment’ (341:19–20), ‘this swishingsight teilweisioned’ (345:36), and in a nod to John Logie Baird, ‘a metenergic reglow […] the bairdboard bombardment screen’ (349:7–8). In addition, and like the double acts of Beckett’s plays, the music hall patter of Butt and Taff is equally rooted in popular culture, as well as in the tradition of the Irish pub raconteur and his willingly gullible audience. Therefore, the present mode or medium (the text is on a TV set, in a music hall) primes us to a chronological disjunction with the historical





‘content’ of the story. This makes possible an interplay of reversible possibilities, in which the conflicts of the Crimean War can accelerate into the modern age. This chapter does not examine the central thematics of the BuckleyRussian general confrontation as they might be reconstituted throughout the book. Instead, I extricate, and to some extent isolate, a single ‘plane of meaning’ (to use Clive Hart’s phrase) from the local and particularly dense text of II.3.14 The Crimean or Russian properties of the Buckley passage emerge as a synecdoche of a greater Europe, where a history of national and linguistic contact and confrontation, between East and West, empire and nation, is encoded. Many of the signifiers of place in these 20 or so pages draw on a nebulous type of Russian-ness or Eastern European identity – and it is this textual slippage, or geographic contiguity, which this chapter attends to. Surprisingly, the Buckley passage was one of the last set-piece encounters Joyce composed, and was the final fragment published in transition.15 He had the Buckley episode in mind well before finishing Ulysses, let alone starting Finnegans Wake, but this long period of gestation has important consequences. This lateness of composition and revision gives the text a telescopic awareness of twentieth-century Europe, and of the gathering danger of the interwar period in particular. While the Buckley passage conflates many battle locations (the Boyne, Waterloo, Balaklava and Verdun) in its universal family war, it also brings the Wake conspicuously up to date (1938–9), and through the medium of political space relocates its historical truths in a precarious present. An interpretation of these threatened places – with their expanding and contracting borders, their cycles of annexation and secession – opens up a series of historical parallaxes which also offer proleptic glimpses of history to come.

Defining the Buckley section Is it possible to identify a demarcated Buckley text in Finnegans Wake? First, just as Joyce never appears as ‘Joyce’, so the exact story paradigm ‘How Buckley shot the Russian general’ never appears in that form (to clarify: we do find ‘Buckley’ and ‘Russian generals’ separately written as such, but never the complete formulation). The text is not reducible to this single story, and is never written like that: we recognise the invisible phrase only through its permutations. In a book without centre or periphery,16 without what Joyce called ‘goahead’ plot, we are never too distant nor too close to the lurking presence of the Crimean pairing.17 They are typical of Wake ‘summary titles’ which recur throughout the



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book.18 As befits Bruno’s theory of interlocking and fusing oppositions and Vico’s theory of historical cyclicity, Buckley can merge with other figures (Lord Burghley, Bishop Berkely, Edmund Burke or the young Gaelic bouchaleen), but is scrupulously kept from matching with himself. Second, the recircling phrase promises, as it does everywhere in the Wake, mode or process (how) – not fact (what), fixed temporality (when) or fixed identity (who). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that this ‘story’ is given the limelight within part II, chapter III. The summary title ‘How Buckley shot the Russian general’ is repeated much more intensively over this stretch of text, deep in the middle of the Wake, than at any other time in the book. Petr Skrabánek, a specialist who studied the infusion of Slavonic languages in Finnegans Wake, identified over 1,200 words and phrases in the Wake of direct Slavonic origin or with strong Slavonic overtones. He observed a relatively even dispersal of the book’s Slavic elements, except for what he calls a ‘massive’ accumulation in II.3.19 It appears from linguists like Skrabánek, then, that Joyce deliberately ‘Slavified’ the heteroglossia of the Buckley passage. We attribute the intensification of Slavonic-influenced words to the hidden magnet (to use Hodgart’s interpretative metaphor) of the Russian general, noting that such an overlayering process is presumably aimed at making the reader perceive this part of the Wake as more ‘Crimean’ or more Russian than other parts.20 This density of iron filings (to continue with Hodgart’s metaphor) tells us, if nothing else does, that the antagonists are here given their dominant space in addition to an abbreviated recurrent function: they are more present than elsewhere in the book.

Crimean site It would seem critically regressive to be overly concerned with the Russian-ness of the general, or to be too literal-minded about an Irish redcoat fighting on a peninsula in the Black Sea in the mid-nineteenth century. (Presumably described on the radio or TV of a Chapelizod pub by the vaudevillians Butt and Taff, the Crimea is in any case a secondary site.) The text exfoliates from an explicitly archteypal, universal story, and is spoken by mythic avatars or sigla-types in composite, overlaid places. In any case, the Crimean references often seem to advertise themselves as deliberately superficial (that is, without depth) and stagy – empty signifiers skimmed from an encyclopaedia in an afternoon. Perhaps this is why there might be a tendency to give up on the Wake’s dialogues of history a little too easily.





From a rigorous post-structuralist position, a geographic textual resting-place is not possible. But even here we may put the historical fact ‘under erasure’,21 tarrying with the geo-historical possibilities of a ‘setting’ – in this case, attempting to locate the dispersal of the original Crimean story. This does not equate to a desire to reinstate the stability of realism. The momentary anchoring of Europe-in-Crimea, a bloodyminded historicist search for signification, releases further potentialities in the semantic interstices between familiar motifs, or in the curious local inflections which interact with the macro-systems of the text. The locus of Butt and Taff’s story is established in various ways. Portmanteaux are built on ‘Crimea’ and ‘Crimean War’: for example linking to colourful uniform (‘Chromean fastion’ 339:9–10) or to the Humpty-Dumpty, Cromwell and King William themes (‘Crimealian wall’ 347:10; ‘Crummwiliam wall’ 347:32). The pun on the Crimean crime (‘crimm crimms’ 334:25) does not appear as explicitly as we might expect in these pages, rather lingering as a silent confirmation of our universal sinfulness and warring tendencies. The specific battle locations are of course prominent: ‘Sea vaast a pool’ (338:14: Sevastopol), ‘alma marthyrs’ (348:11 which neatly places the martyrs of the Alma Mater at the river Alma), ‘balakleivka’ (341:9: Balaclava and balalaika), ‘an overthrew of each and ilkermann of us’ (356:1–2 Inkerman), ‘malakoiffed’ (339:11: the Malakoff fort); and nearby places like ‘A hov and az ov’ (346:20–1: the Sea of Azov). And the important Crimean protagonists are recuperable: MacMahon, Wolseley, Menshikov, Scarlett, Cardigan, Raglan, Todleben and Lucan. The Irish Captain L.E. Nolan of the Fifteenth Hussars (Tennyson’s ‘someone’ who ‘had blundered’), fell into Joyce’s lap as another avatar of the bookseller and the heretic (respectively, Browne and Nolan and Giordano Bruno the Nolan). So, it would seem at this point of the Wake that ‘the fictionable world in Fruzian Creamtartery’ (345:25–346:1), or the fashionable fictionworld of scarlet cardigans and Raglan coats, is in Krim Tartary – on the peninsula of Tartars, Ukrainians and Russians. If not there, then surely somewhere in a general Russia – a place like Nijni Novgorod (or ‘neatschknee Novgolosh’ 346:2), perhaps. Further investigation shows, however, that the Russian-ness of the general and of the Crimean text scatters outwards from the epicentre, and into a wider Slavic Europe. There are many specific references to the mid-nineteenth-century theatre of war, to be sure, but they blend into a more nebulous sense of Central and Eastern European place: the conflated geography of ‘Igorladns’ (353:19: the omnipresent Ireland and the temporary foregrounding of Igor’s lands).



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To illustrate the scope of this geopolitical diffusion, I will firstly concentrate on two pages which actually come well before the Butt and Taff dialogue but which, I would argue, are best interpreted as early soundings of the Crimea. Parts of this stretch of text, locatable in Central Europe, have an edgily contemporary, sometimes proleptic, relevance to Nazism, Czechoslovakia and the German-Polish border. The following lines have often been noticed because of their conspicuously decontextualised allusion to the Gestapo: ‘Gestapose to parry off cheekars or frankfurters on the odor. Fine again, Cuoholson! Peace, O wiley! (332:7–9). We notice the Buckley cynosures (the Finn-father’s frank farting out of the culo-hole can have malodorous consequences for the son), but what about that part of the text which advertises its own contemporaneity? The presence of the Nazi secret police is confirmed (if it needed to be) by that of German Frankfurt, not so much Frankfurt am Main as what is now the border town of Frankfurt an der Oder (the Oder is a river which separates Germany and Poland). ‘[C]heekars’ could refer to the CheKa, the Russian Extraordinary Commission and the name first given by the Bolsheviks to the Soviet Secret Police. ‘CheKa’ and ‘cheekars’ may not be homophones, but the proximity of the counterpart body ‘Gestapo’ seals the connection. Lest there be any doubt, we find elsewhere in the Wake ‘sleuts of hogpew and cheekars’ (442:35), which pairs up the sleuths of the CheKa, the Soviet secret police, with its successor the OGPU, itself absorbed into the NKVD, the so-called ‘People’s Commisariat for Internal Affairs’.22 These echoes have previously been noted by Skrabánek, but how can we gloss this line syntactically? One reading (taking ‘frankfurters’ as object) would suggest that the Gestapo are defending themselves against either the aggressions of the CheKa or those of the inhabitants of Frankfurt. This would seem to reverse, in 1938–9, what was actually happening in Hitler’s Germany, which was soon to be unsuccessfully parried rather than parrying. However, the fencing match (‘parry’) or the game of diplomacy (checkers for ‘cheekars’) ‘pairs off’ rather than parries off the Gestapo and the CheKa. This does make sense: we think of the negotiations which led to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pacts and which eased Germany and Russia’s secret plans to effect another partition of Poland, which had been an independent modern nation for a mere 20 years. The presence of what would soon become the German-Polish border of the Oder-Neisse line (the USSR’s western frontier at the end of the Second World War) is thus proleptically significant. If we read ‘frankfurters’ as



Early soundings of Central Europe


joint subject rather than object of ‘Gestapose’, in a grammatically incomplete sentence, then we understand that while the Gestapo is fighting off the Cheka, the Frankfurters are moving furtively over future Polish territory towards Russia, perhaps about to commit a territorial theft (Latin: furtus). If Persse O’Reilly’s ear-piercing ‘Peace, O wiley!’ is addressed to the barking dogs of warlike Europe, it is evidently a hopeless cry for peace. Thus, one component meaning of these lines is that Central and Eastern Europe is implicitly threatened by the ‘Gestapose’, or at least sandwiched between the secret police of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The text’s late 1930s political sensibility is strengthened by the linguistic allusions introduced at the bottom of the same page: Enterruption. Check or slowback. Dvershen […] Why, wonder of wenchalows […] The aged crafty nummifeed confusionary overinsured everlapsing accentuated katekattershin clopped, clopped, clopped, darsey dobrey, back and along the danzing corridor. (332:36–333:8) The main impression is of a seemingly arbitrary multilingual playfulness, a sample of a ‘Czechoslovak version’, generated by the pun on ‘Check or slowback’, and followed by the Czech word for door (dverBe, pronounced ‘dvershe’), and then to King Wenceslaus (‘wenchalows’). But the political nature of these geographical references should not be discounted. Czechoslovakia, a newly sovereign interwar territory, like Poland, was soon to be overrun and occupied. Hitler defied the Munich appeasers by marching into Prague in March 1939. The reference to the Danzig corridor was inserted at a late date: Joyce struck out the original lines referring to Kate as she ‘clopped clopped clopped back and along the lane’ (my italics) and replaced them with a clopping ‘darsey dobry [which is near to Czech], back and along the danzing corridor’.23 The Danzig corridor was a kind of isthmus which gave Poland access to the Baltic at the Free Port of Danzig (now G’dansk), and had been created at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Danzig area was under ineffectual League of Nations control, and satisfied neither the new greater Poland, nor the reduced Germany.24 We know, though Joyce did not at the time of writing, that the city was claimed by the Germans on 1 September 1939, one of the last events to precipitate the Second World War. Kate may dance along the corridor of the pub, but the pas de deux back and along Danzig is less convivial – a point confirmed by the presence here of the ‘deathdealing allied divisions’ (333:10–11).25



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The pun, further down the page, on Bohemia – ‘farabroads and behomeans’ (333:15) – now takes on interest. Bohemia (or Böhmen) was historically a name given by the Austro-Germans to the mainly Czech lands: the word did not exist in Czech.26 What is discernible within this phrase, in which we hear that being at home in Bohemia feels mean, like far abroad, is the idea of the usurpation of Slavic territory in an expanding Mitteleuropa: another version of the familiar metaphor of strangers in the house. Kate is also seen here whitening her underwear or ‘blancking her shifts for to keep up the fascion’ (333:21: my italics). We have just noted Gestapo on the facing page: now the fellow Axis presence of Italian fascism, which is all the fashion, flits into the orthography of the text. So, taken together, these place names – Danzig, Czechoslovakia, Bohemia and the Oder – interact with ‘Gestapose’, ‘cheekars’ and ‘fascion’ in mapping the vacuum in Central Europe which may soon be filled by the expansionist nations. We may say, then, that the ‘ruption’ of Czechoslovakia (‘Enterruption. Check or slowback’) refers in part to the fault line of Europe’s Western and Eastern halves. The first intimations of Crimean geography are to be found in the most Western of Slavic countries, a Czech door (dverBe) or diversion to ‘Igorladns’. The writing is moving us eastwards and Czechoslovakia is the first staging post in this journey. Reading the text in the late 1930s context in which it was completed, we sense that the Czech rupture and the movement into Poland are, perhaps subliminally, perhaps directly, linked to the appearance on the same pages of the forces of totalitarianism. This is a textual foretaste before the Butt and Taff dialogue; but also a historical aftertaste of a European war which will supersede the Crimean conflict. Here too we return to the ‘mewseyfume’ (that is, ‘museyroom’) of a Peninsular War in the Crimea; but there are now ‘new uses’ in the museum of warfare (336:16) – related not only to the story to come of Buckley in the next 20 pages, but also to the oblique hints of a sinister new battlefield.27

Russian border geography in the early Butt and Taff dialogue The early part of the Butt and Taff dialogue seems to place the participants of the Crimean War, those tailor’s dummies, in the Irish Crimea: ‘Sea vaast a pool’ is that part of the vast Black Sea, or Black Pool (or dubh lin, black pool) around Sevastopol, which is also a cesspool (‘cesspull’ 338:15). However, a selective list of place names taken from





the same pages fans outwards from the Crimea to a concentric Slavic Europe. ‘Malorazzias’ connotes the asymmetrical political relationship between the Russian Bear and ‘Little Russia’ (the meaning of Malorossiya in Russian), or Ukraine, of which the Crimea is a part. (It may be remembered that Ukraine was independent between the wars, soon to be absorbed by the USSR.) While Taff is a pessimistic ‘blackseer’ (340:13) from the Black Sea, Butt points out ‘in rutene’ and is ‘in the rut’ (340:5,14). Some of the Ruthenian (or Ukrainian) phrases, such as ‘mistomist’ (which means town (misto) and bridge (mist): 340:5) or ‘selo moy’ (my village: 340:16), are also words for places. We are on the Steppes, (‘steppes’: 339:30), but also find ourselves in places like the ‘Djublian Alps’ (340:6), which combines the now Slovenian capital of Ljubljana with its mountain barrier of the Julian Alps, and fixes a more southern Slavic border. ‘Bugleglarying’ (339:19) for Bulgarian is flimsy enough, but ticks off another Eastern European country. ‘Baltiskeeamore’ (338:19) suggests the Baltic Sea and its nations. We also travel to Norway (‘Osro’: we remember perhaps that Joyce had written to Ibsen when Oslo was Christiania – that is, part of the Swedish monarchy) and to Finland (‘Finnland’: 340:24). This is a map of Russia’s Western border, from top to bottom: a map of a continental frontier. Ireland coexists with Eastern European geography in a number of the examples: Baltimore, Co. Cork is part of ‘Baltiskeeamore’; Dublin is obviously visible in ‘Lubliner’ (339:31) and ‘Djublian’; the village of Lusk in Co. Dublin in ‘lusky’ (339:31); and the Dublin suburb of Crumlin in ‘Krumlin’ (339:34). Irish places appear separately from the Slavic context: the green hills or isles of Eire (‘grain oils of Aerin’, Lough Neagh (‘laugh neighs’: both 338:36); Rathmines (‘Oh day of rath! Ah, murther of mines!’ 340:16); and Moore’s Aughrim (‘Oghrem’ 340:9). There is a fantastic randomness, too: another song alludes to Loch Lomond (‘boney boney braggs’, ‘lomondations’ 340:3,9) and we travel to a magnificent or grossartig Arctic (‘grozarktic’ 339:31), and perhaps to Maida Vale (‘Meideveide’ 340:21). At this molecular level, these geopolitical annotations make clear that place should not be disregarded as backdrop in the Buckley passage. The contours of landlocked Europe are smuggled into the Irish landscape, which is thus transformed by this unexpected overlay. The specific meanings of the coordinates of the European map are often unstable – because they are inter-national, mutable and renamable. For example, many of the Buckley place names function as items of Crimean or Russian geography without falling within these contemporary



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TAFF (strick struck strangling like aleal lusky Lubliner to merumber by the cycl of the cruize who strungled Attahilloupa with what empoisoned El Monte de Zuma and failing wilnaynilnay that he was pallups barn in the minkst of the Krumlin befodt he was popsoused into the monkst of the vatercan, makes the holypolygon of the emt on the greaseshaper, a little farther, a little soon, a letteracettera, oukraydoubray). (339:31–340:1) Without the Slavic shadings, then, Taff is portrayed as a stay-at-home. Unlike his brother whose tale he avidly listens to, Taff is a loyal Dubliner, a real ale-drinking Dubliner (‘aleal Lubliner’), born in the midst of the suburb of Crumlin (‘barn in the minkst of the Krumlin’) and baptised by the Irish Catholic monks of the Vatican (‘ popsoused into the monkst of the vatercan’). But he is a laggardly fellow (‘lusky’ in colloquial Hiberno-Irish) and, at this stage in the dialogue at least, is somehow struck, stricken and struggling – a combination of shock and fear at the account of the outrageous behaviour of the general. He soon exclaims, ‘The lyewdsky so so sewn of a fitchid!’ (340:2), one meaning of which is ‘The lewd son of a bitch/polecat’ (archaic: fitchet). Taff is the amazed listener to Butt’s story, less-travelled and less-educated – he struggles to remember Macaulay’s schoolboy history (who strangled Attahualpa and who imprisoned Montezuma). There seems to be an uncertainty and inbred inferiority about the little colonial, as both father and son, (a little farther, a little soon) who feels equivocal (willy-nilly), and feels a failure (failing) about his origins – that he was born (‘barn’ and befodt, Danish for ‘born’) in a district of Dublin, Crumlin.28 Taff is in spiritual need, presumably because he is scandalised: he may make the sign of the cross (‘the cycl of the cruise […] makes the holypolygon’) and is purified by and soused in the baptismal water from the patriarchal Vatican watercan (‘popsoused […] vatercan’: ‘Pop’ slang for father, Vater: German for father). The religious theme is also continued by ‘pallups’: the pallium is conferred by the pope on an archbishop. We might separately note the geometric mise-en-abîme of ‘cycl […] cruize’: the accustomed combination of the cross and circle, which represents the mandala of the Wake itself (a circular book divided into four parts). The holy polygon is another shape entirely. These are some lines of meaning that are available in this description of Taff. How do we integrate the Slavic cluster of place names, though?



borders. The point is perhaps best illustrated in the following italicised description of Taff:


Butt has just described the Russian general stepping and stuttering on the ‘s s steppes’; here Taff is a Lubliner from Luts’k (‘lusky Lubliner’), a Wilnan born in Minsk or in the midst of the Kremlin (‘wilnaynilnay […] in the minkst of the Krumlin’). The obduracy of these lines makes interpretation difficult, but the geopolitical plane of meaning remains mandatory.29 Although Joyce certainly enjoyed the auditory punning on Central and Eastern European place names at the phonological level, the latent semantic possibilities of Taff’s temporary Russo-Polish identity are worth teasing out. Luts’k, Lublin, Vilna/Wilno (now Vilnius) and Minsk were typical of the Slavic borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe in having been sites of national contestation – in this case between Russia, Poland and Lithuania (in three of the four cities). Although Minsk is well to the east, it had been part of Lithuania and then Poland for centuries, passing to Russia in 1793. In Joyce’s time the city, whose population would have been approximately 40% Jewish, was quite close to the new Polish border of interwar Europe – thus, hardly ‘in the midst of’ any nation. Lublin, in South-east Poland, and also a centre of Eastern European Jewry (which would also be exterminated within a few years), had been jointly Polish and Lithuanian, briefly Austrian and then Russian in the nineteenth century. It was given to Poland at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), and temporarily made the seat of a Polish socialist government. In this treaty Russia lost Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine. Wilna was also switched from Russia, but was then disputed by Poland and Lithuania, the latter to whom it had been assigned at the Paris conference. Recapture and plebiscites followed; a state of war existed between Poland and Lithuania until 1927. Luts’k, too, was Polish in the interwar years, and was absorbed by the Ukrainian Soviet in 1939. Its Jewish population was also exterminated during the Second World War.30 We find, on the same page, the same sort of geographic allusiveness in the gnomic phrase ‘Molodeztious of metchennacht’ (339:5) which though containing a number of foreign linguistic structures, also hides the town MoBodeczno.31 Luts’k, Lublin, Wilno and MoBodeczno all belonged to the Russian Empire during the nineteenth century – (i.e. during the Crimean War). Soon after the publication of Finnegans Wake, they would become part of the USSR (with the exception of Lublin). While Joyce was writing this late passage, however, they would have appeared on his map as Polish towns. But like the ‘Danzing corridor’, they would not remain Polish for long. These Slavic iron filings seem to play a trick of history. The Buckley text is littered with Russian place names, because of the general’s presence.



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Making the text exactly Russian in the late 1930s, at the time of composition, would have excluded our seeing Taff as a ‘lusky Lubliner’. But as the adopted son of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, which included all these places within its borders, Taff is reinstated as a real and loyal (‘aleal’) Russian subject during the Crimean campaigns. Naming these places as coterminous with the boundaries of Tsar Nicholas I’s empire makes the passage more historically precise, and would therefore seem to make it more distant. At the same time, however, the text names the disputed edges or ‘lands between’,32 which are constantly being threatened by greater empires. The presence of these place names thus cannot avoid communicating, as with the earlier examples from five pages earlier, with a contemporary resonance, too. Bernard Benstock noted that the Victorian conflict allowed ‘Czarist Russia and the USSR to share the spotlight’.33 It is in this stretch of text that the transformation of St Petersburg into Petrograd and then into Leningrad (1914, 1924) is hinted at: ‘Petricksburg’ (326:25); ‘flank movemens in sunpictorsbosk […] on their reptrograd leanins’ (351:19–29). Butt and Taff pledge a fistic friendship which might be a 1930s bringing together of the Fianna Fail and the Third Communist International: they ‘pugnate the pledge of fiannaship, dook to dook, with a commonturn oudchd of fest man and best man …’ (354:19–20). Thus, these localised micro-readings of Taff as temporary Slav are sanctioned elsewhere in the Buckley text. In the quoted passage, the Kremlin suggests not the imperial Russia of the Crimean Tsar but the new Soviet Union: the godless ideology rubs against the Church of Rome in Ireland. Is Crumlin-born Taff in the midst of the Kremlin or the Vatican? What if he is really struggling like a Lubliner, feeling like a citizen of Wilna, or as if he had been born in Minsk? I think an extension of the Irish colonial centre-periphery reading, already implied in the Crumlin/Dublin – Vatican axis, is possible. Geopolitically, the centre of Moscow is counterbalanced by places which are not at all in the midst of Russia, or not even in Russia at all. What Ireland is to Rome or to London, so Lublin is to the Kremlin. Taff, a citizen of the ‘semicolonial’ border city of Dublin/Lublin, is an Irish or Polish national living in the shadow of the British or Russian Empire. The shady twentieth-century context also balances us between ideological nodes. In Wake time, we may also reverse historical teleology, so that Taff is born in the Communist midst of the Kremlin before (‘befodt’) his immersion in Roman Catholicism. The historical names seem to stand out with portentous contemporary meaning, only to be miniaturised and parodied by the language





which constitutes them. Lenin is reduced to a linguistic cipher: ‘reptrograd leanins’. But Joyce’s evident enjoyment of these Eastern European phonemes nevertheless should not disguise their semantic weight. Though the Wake’s grand serio-comic manner may force us into a position which feels like overdetermination, we must, as Hart says, make an attempt to account for all its semantemes.34 Although the compound word ‘sunpictorsbosk’ might be a bewildering crossword (a sunny, sylvan picture book of St Petersburg?), it remains a most curious yoking together of concepts. We are reminded again that the entire field of the crime in the Crimea, which merges into the other major Wake paradigms, is only present because of the pun. Hardly to be dismissed as indulgent phonetic play for its own sake, the pun is the most important generator of meanings in the Wake.

‘The Finn again wakes’ One of the single coordinates of Butt and Taff’s European Wake-map is ‘Finnland’: ‘Guards, serf Finnland, serve we all!’ (340:24). The Wake reader may first think of universal Ireland, the land of Finnegan and Finn MacCool. The song ‘God Save Ireland, say we all’ would be the nationalist cry of Butt as Buckley. All of Finn’s men have been in servitude or serfdom: this is an invocation that the British guards are now at the end-land or Celtic finisterre of colonial occupation. The British-Irish plane of meaning tends to overshadow other postcolonial possibilities – that the subaltern Buckley is also crying ‘God save Finland!’ or ‘Guards, serve the Finnish serfs’. The national pun is certainly recognised by the Wake elsewhere: here it crops up in conjunction with Lapps, a transliteration of ALP: in this chapter as ‘that hun of a horde, is a finn as she, his tent wife, is a lap’ (362:12–13) and earlier as ‘Lapps for Finns This Funnycoon’s Week’ (105:21).35 We can go on to interpret ‘Finnland’ as Finland within the political map of this text, in which Buckley is pitted against an all-too-general Russia. After the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, the patrician incompetence and occasional brutality of the Tsardom was directed at serf-nationalities like the Finns. The exhortation is to the little nations, like Finland and Ireland, to rise up against the empires of Russia and Britain. Re-examining an earlier paragraph, we find further covert allusions. One paraphrase of ‘The gubernier-gerenal in laut-lievtonant of Baltiskeeamore’ (338:19) might be: ‘The Governor-General is LordLieutenant of the Baltic Sea’. The most notorious Governor-General of



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the (Balto-) Finnish Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire was Nikolai Ivanovich Bobrikov. Bobrikov worked ardently, not to say ruthlessly, for the Russification of Finland. He was assassinated by Eugenii Shauman, the son of a Finnish senator, on 16 June 1904, an event which is registered by Ulysses: - Paris, past and present, he [the professor] said. You look like communards. - Like fellows who had blown up the Bastile, J.J.O’Molloy said in a quiet mockery. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between you? You look as though you had done the deed. General Bobrikoff. - We were only thinking about it, Stephen said.36 This Bloomsday assassination of the lord lieutenant of Finland, the Russian ‘General’, is jokingly linked in the newsroom to both successful and unsuccesful revolutionary activity in France (1789, 1870). Bobrikov’s assassination was soon followed in 1905 by the establishment of a Finnish Diet, but from 1910, Russian repression recommenced. The Finns took advantage of the Russian Revolution to claim their independence, and founded a democratic constitution in 1919. Like Czechoslovakia and Poland, Yugoslavia and the Baltic states, Finland – as the last chapter made clear – was another nation to gain autonomy at the end of the First World War. The same paragraph of the Wake ends: ‘Sing ching lew mang! Upgo, bobbycop! Lets hear in remember the braise of. Hold!’ (338:32–3). Although Bobrikoff is hardly homophonous with ‘bobbycop’, the above mentioned Baltic Governor-General, and the later reference to serfFinland, put us on the alert. The allusion is secured by the strange collocation ‘Upgo’. Bobrikoff, the imperial policeman (Finland’s bobby, its cop), is being (or has been) urged to get up and go. ‘Upgo’ is OGPU (the Soviet Secret police) spelt backwards. Moore’s song urges ‘Erin [to] remember the days of old’. But if Finns remembered the likes of Bobrikoff and the OGPU, they would sense that their borders would soon be threatened again. The figure of the Irish Governor-General – a representative of the country’s ‘semicolonial’ politics – also has significance in the Wake. De Valera famously relegated the position of Governor-General to that of a shopkeeper in a suburban villa, and removed it from the constitution in 1936.37 The last Governor-General was Donal Buckley – a coincidence which Joyce takes full advantage of in this passage. The text, therefore,





offers a link between the Irish and Russian Governors-General: the ‘gubernier-gerenal […] of Baltiskeeamore’, Nikolai Bobrikoff, and ‘the lost Gabbarnaur-Jaggarnath’ (342:13–14), Donal Buckley. A well-known postscript to the Russo-Finnish theme extended beyond the publication of Finnegans Wake. In a letter written in January 1940, Joyce refers to one specific response to his last work: You talk of a certain ‘novel’ I wrote. Here no one has breathed a word of its existence. I have received some more reviews among which is one very odd ‘contribution’ from Helsinki where, happily and as the prophet foresaw, the Finn again wakes.38 Finnegans Wake predated the fifteen-week war between Russia and Finland from November 1939 to March 1940, a border dispute over the Karelian isthmus near Leningrad and one of the early engagements of the Second World War. Clive Hart points to the way in which Joyce’s enjoyment of his text’s autonomous production of meaning is axiomatic to our reading of the Wake: Is not, by his own admission, the Finno-Russian conflict in the Second World War a minor theme in FW? Joyce wanted to be a prophet; the meaning of his book projects forwards as well as backwards, as the text repeatedly insists.39 Historically, the reason for the prophetic capacity of the text is its punningly global awareness of the developing relationships between empires and nations. Joyce did not know that Finland was to lose this local conflict, though it would resist a repetition of nineteenth-century subjugation. But he knew that the devil was in the scrap heap (the Wake-pit, dump, litter) of fallen historical detail. The Finn was not put to sleep again, but in the mini-corsi of post-Second World War Europe, most of the other small nations were to be dominated by another Russian general, and, after the end of the Cold War, to awake to national consciousness again. It was wholly fitting to Joyce’s purpose that the latest changes to the world’s political order and borders should be foretold, or more accurately should always be present, in the language of his cyclical book. The Wake generates text out of the Crimea by devolving into other Russian borderlands. By pinpointing these historical allusions to Central and Eastern Europe, a powerful degree of proleptic historical signification is revealed.



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Kevin M. McCarthy has pointed out that the many Turkish references in the Wake, as well as thematising the meeting of Christianity and Islam, broaden the book and make it more ‘Europasianised’ (191:4).40 McCarthy has picked out isolated notations of the Levant and the Near East which are scattered throughout the Wake.41 It is noticeable, however, that a high concentration falls within the Buckley section. The magnet of the Russian general ‘Slavifies’ this part of the text, but one of his historical Crimean opponents, the Turk, also attracts a cluster of iron filings. The general Eurasian cultural contact is intensified, spreading outwards, both spatially and temporally, from the text’s transient Crimean site. The Crimean War was caused by the jostling of national interests in the declining Ottoman Empire, ‘the sick man of Europe’. Russia wished to protect the rights of Christians under Turkish rule; Britain and France wanted to prevent Russian influence extending to Constantinople and beyond. We have seen how the Buckley passage exploits other Crimean contiguities. The arena of Russo-Turkish, Orthodox-Islamic, Slav-Arab or Eurasian contestation is a still more direct geopolitical context which can be reconstructed from Butt’s war reports. An early description of Butt has him carrying ‘the sickle of a scygthe but the humour of a hummer’ (341:10). He is a vaudevillian armed with rapier-wit, hammer-humour or even a surrealist lobster (German: Hummer = lobster) and also an ancient Scythian brandishing the Communist red flag, with its symbols of proletariat hammer and peasant sickle. Scythia was an ancient kingdom north of the Black Sea; Butt is jokingly made into a hybrid Irishman, named Persse O’Reilly, of Asia Minor – or into a really Irish Milesian from the Chersonese or Crimean peninsula (‘Reilly Oirish Krzerszonese Milesia’ 347:8–9). Butt goes on to say of the general: I seen him acting surgent what betwinks the scimitar star and the ashen moon. By their lights shalthow throw him! Piff paff for puffpuff and my pife for his cgar! The mlachy way for gambling. (341:14–17) The Russian acting-sergeant is also acting a little too ‘surgent’ – swelling, overweening – for Butt’s liking. The son, sounding parricidal and Syngelike (‘I seen him’) shall recognise the father’s sinfulness by the lights of



Russo-Turkish borderlands


his actions. ‘Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them’ (St Matthew 7:20): that is, by his lights shalt thou know and overthrow him. This Soviet flag (‘sickle […] hummer’) takes a Turkish form. Both have red fields, but the sickle becomes the white crescent (suggested by the ‘moon’ and ‘scimitar’, the weapon of the Janizarries); the Soviet star is transformed into the Ottoman five-pointed star. These symbols also connote the night sky of winking stars (‘betwinks’) and moon (‘ashen moon’), ‘lights’, and the Milky Way (‘mlachy way’). The tobacco motif, visible in the puffing, pipe, cigar (‘puffpuff […] pife […] cgar’) explains why the Turkish moon is ‘ashen’, like cigar ash. It suggests the Tsar or Czar (‘his cgar’) smokes cigars to Butt’s pipe (‘my pife’).42 As befits the template of John Joyce’s anecdote, Butt-Buckley is caught between regret for the vulnerability of the ageing imperial father (a fierce authoritarian, but now with his trousers down), and disgust at what he feels are his filthy perversions and colonialist contempt. The moral hesitancy is also expressed through Butt’s political ambivalence in the Crimea, choosing between the Russian and the Turk, as he complains: Correct me, pleatze commando, for cossakes but I abjure of it. No more basquibezigues for this pole aprican! With askormiles’ eskermillas. I had my billyfell of duckish delights. (350:20–3) Butt/Buckley Butt has had enough, has had a bellyful (‘I abjure of it’, ‘No more’, ‘I had my billyfell’). He is in need of command and correction from these Turkish delights: ‘Correct me, pleatze commando’. Militarily, we have the police and a commando force (‘pleatze commando’), the Russian cossacks (‘cossakes’) and also the bashi-bazouks (‘No more basquibezigues’) – the irregular Ottoman militia used in the 1870s RussoTurkish war. If Buckley is thus a soldier (possibly, Latin: miles for soldier in ‘askormiles eskermillas’) then whom is he renouncing? He is appealing to the Russian cossacks, as well as for God’s sake, in giving up the Turkish bashi-bazouks. He has had a bellyful of the delight of fighting for the Turks. This poor leprechaun (‘pole aprican’) is saying, ‘No more!’ We might take this to be a soldier’s general homesickness and alienation, but archetypal colonial politics are visible: ‘my ramsbutter in their sassenacher ribs’ (350:25). Butt, in his incarnation as nationalist Isaac Butt, is the Irishman headbutting the Englishman (or, in Gaelic, Sassenach: ‘sassenacher’); he has had enough of fell King Billy (‘billyfell’), or William of Orange, who is about to fall. In rejecting the Turks, Buckley



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is siding with the Russians, the enemy of the English enemy – thus the request for correction from the cossacks. If this is the case, then it matches that stage in the Crimean story when Buckley despairs of his loyalty to the English cause, and thus utters the non serviam of the Irishman fighting for the British. While Butt intends to abstain from the excess of his appetites, or from putting up with those of the general, he is also absolving himself from any responsibility to the British in Crimea. David Hayman, in his close study of the early manuscript of the Butt and Taff dialogue, argues that ‘offensive’ (‘his bricashert offensive’ (352:4–5)) contains a reference to the Turk (or effendi) and concludes that as ‘an anti-Russian soldier in the Crimean War, Butt is identified with the Turk, his ally’.43 I argue that it is not quite this clear-cut. The text responds to the more vacillating loyalties of the Irishman fighting for Britain against the Russian. The troublesome Turkish border with Armenia is recorded in the following confession from Butt: But, meac Coolp, Arram of Eirzerum, as I love our Deer Dirouchy, I confesses withould pridejealice when I looked upon the Saur of all the Haurousians with the weight of his arge fullin upon him from the travaillings of his tommuck […] I adn’t the arts to. (344:31–345:3) Butt/Buckley looks upon the Russian general with his full arse-load and mucky stomach work (as a soldier, he has marched on his stomach too long). He mutters a mea culpa (‘meac Coolp’), and confesses that he has decided against shooting, either because he does not have the heart or the artfulness to go through with it (‘adn’t the arts to’). As narrative, this may be read as the stage at which Buckley lowers his rifle, withholding his anti-imperial pride, jealousy or prejudice (‘withould pridejealice’). Linguists have identified an Armenian cluster at the phonetic level (in words like dirouhi, sour and Haroutioun), but the context of contested political space is also locatable. The place name Erzurum, given the customary Irish typography of ‘Eirzerum’, was the base of the Turks during the Crimean War. It is thus consistent with the precise historical setting of the text. What is now Turkish Erzurum had been an ancient Armenian town, whose king was Aram, son of Shem (‘Arram’). There is thus a three-way epochal struggle here involving the Armenians, the Turks who succeeded them, and to the north, in a definition which invites dissent from the satellites of the Russian Empire, that ursine bully of the Black Sea, the Tsar of all the Russians (‘the Saur of all the Haurousians’).44





In a borderland sandwiched between Turkey, Russia and Armenia, the Russian general is equated with the imperial Tsar, but he could also be the deposed Armenian king, son of Shem’s son (alternatively, ‘Arram’ could be addressed to Taff, Butt’s fellow Armenian subaltern). Cyclical colonial politics are not fixed to binary confrontations. Turkey may cease to be the victim of a general Russia and become an aggressor itself. In a broader context, as McCarthy has pointed out, the Wake recognises Atatürk’s resistance to Greece and oppression of Armenia in the 1920s in such collocations as ‘Armenian Atrocity’ (72:11), ‘tuckish armenities’ (530:36) and, in a reworking of Oscar Wilde’s definition of fox-hunting (‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’), ‘not even the Turk, ungreekable in purscent of the armenable’ (181:22–3).45 In this passage, the main point is that this burst of Armenian is not simply linguistic exuberance or obscurantism. As part of the geographical site of Buckley’s hesitation, it voices the territorial abrasions of the Crimea and its hinterlands. Following Butt and Taff’s final univocal speech as ‘one and the same person’ (354:8), the text conflates Slavic and Islamic Europe in time and space: Vociferagitant. Viceversounding. Namely, Abdul Abulbul Amir or Ivan Slavansky Slavar. In alldconfusalem. (355:10–11) After the deed is done, an aftershock of Crimean hybridity is to be found in these lines. In the first excerpt, the sound of the subjective voice (‘vociferagitant’) is named as that of Abdul and Ivan, sworn enemies in the sounding verse of a nineteenth-century song (which pitted Abdul the Bulbul Ameer against Ivan Slavinsky Skavar) – as history showed, sworn enemies in battle. The diametric stereotypes, representing Arab and Slav, are for a moment indistinguishably hybrid – ‘Tuff ’ and ‘Batt ’ (349:8–9) are ‘vice-versa sounding’. The Crimean War had been sparked in part by a dispute in the Christian Holy Places of Palestine between the wishes of the French Catholic clergy and the Russian Orthodox ministry. This is part of the ‘alldconfusalem’ or all the confusion in old Jerusalem. The Slavs of ‘Igor’s lands’ have their Turkish counterparts. (Even the ministering angel of the Crimea, alluded to in a more distant Crimean iron filing as ‘(floflo floreflorence) […] lightandgayle’ (360:2), is present in Turkish. (McCarthy tells us that bulbul (‘Abulbul’) means nightingale.) The Abduls and Ivans mentioned here seem to be more rooted in the Crimea than we might expect. Certainly the family confusion



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(‘alldconfusalem’) of the Oedipal triangle – who is the father now the father is dead? – is deepened by those conflicts between Slav and Arab; Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant; and Christian and Muslim, through which the Crimean War exposed the religious and ethnic divisions of Eastern Europe.

Post-dated signs The sort of geopolitical overlayering that is evident in the Buckley passage – resonating with the contemporary threat of what Auden called a ‘low, dishonest decade’ – has also been noticed by Thomas Hofheinz elsewhere in the Wake. In one genetic reading he cites the following example. The letter, the ‘mamafesta’, the Book of Kells, the Gutenberg incunabulum or more broadly the typographic surface of the Wake itself, is visualised as a map on which ‘half of the lines run northsouth in the Nemzes and Bukharest directions while the others go westeast in search from Maliziies with Bulgarad’ (114:3–5). The letter ‘has its cardinal points for all that’ (114:7) – we are not to ignore the place names. Hofheinz is attracted to this example because these cardinal points (which partly connote an Eastern European configuration of Bucharest, Belgrade, Bulgarian Bolgrad and Bukhara – now part of Uzbekistan) were added to the text only during proof revision in May 1938.46 Although writing about writing, about the scriptural or scriptoral ‘directions’ across and down the page, Joyce decided at a late stage that we should also read the marching, halting words (114:8) as cartographic text. Although Hofheinz does not explain how these place names interact with the surrounding text, he argues that they nevertheless elicit some sort of apprehensive shiver, derived from the contemporary reader’s fear of the Reich’s eastward expansion: he comments that Joyce, at the eleventh hour, ‘seems to have measured his work against the nightmare of Europe in his time’.47 Like the manuscript change to ‘danzing corridor’, soon-to-be annexed, this sort of late revision locates the text in a contemporary European medium. One of the more entertaining debates about the contemporaneity of the Wake was carried out in A Wake Newslitter in the 1960s. A competition was set to the readers of this now defunct journal to find an allusion in the Wake to the latest historical event of the 1930s. The relative merits and flaws of ‘Gestapose’ (which we have analysed in its local context), ‘anschluss’ (95.28), as an allusion to the union of Germany and Austria in March 1938 and ‘appeasement’ (610:27), as a direct response to the Munich Pact in September 1938, were considered.





The claim of ‘berial’ (415.31), however, has since become a hobbyhorse amongst Joyceans. It had been argued that the word might refer to the Soviet functionary, Lavrenti P. Beria, who came to the wider world’s attention in December 1938 – when Joyce was possibly making the very last changes to the printer’s proofs. But Nathan Halper pointed out that ‘berial’ existed in this form in a manuscript of 1929 and therefore could not refer to Beria. Halper made his position clear: There is a theory that FW is prophetic. Thus although ‘berial’ appeared ten years earlier, it does refer to Beria. I think that this is nonsense. If we are going to go in for these prophecies, it becomes impossible to find a ‘last historical event’.48 What might look like a provincial wrangle amongst Wake sleuths in fact turns upon larger theoretical questions about both the intentionality of the author and of the work. Umberto Eco, in The Limits of Interpretation, thinks that the ‘Berial’ example is ‘a good conclusive parable’ which illustrates the hermeneutic need for ‘respect of the text as a system ruled by an internal coherence’.49 Jean-Michel Rabaté has added to the ‘Berial’ debate by finding notebook evidence from the 1920s ( Joyce had consulted a book called Red Terror in Russia (1926)) which pointed to Joyce’s interest in post-Revolutionary Soviet repression. Halper’s contention that ‘Berial’ could not mean Beria seems less secure – at least, as Rabaté says, it is ‘extremely misleading to take this as an indisputable example of what Joyce did not intend’.50 He continues: ‘If the only rule we are left with is that we cannot accept historical events posterior to the publication […] then we have not really progressed toward a definition of the intentio operis’.51 Certainly, when we remember Joyce’s delight in the reawakening of the Finn in the early years of the Second World War, it seems that, pace Halper, such a prophetic or proleptic approach is sanctioned by the author, who gloried in the continuing capacity of his work to communicate with history. From the interpreter’s point of view, this in turn seems to validate the continuing exegesis of that work as historical, as a production or process which extends into future history. The textual setting of the Buckley section transforms ‘the Crimea’ into a geographical synecdoche of Central and Eastern Europe. Next to this, we have a number of examples of a proleptic strain to this latecomposed part of the Wake. I have sought to link these two ideas: political space within the text is animated by the historical succession of territorial transgressions, but also by the threat of newly drawn borders. Thus the Crimea, the site of an old Victorian story about a past war,



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urgently maps a contemporary Europe – where ‘sunpictorsbosk’ has become ‘reptrograd’ and then Leningrad, where Frankfurters will soon be on the Neisse-Oder line, or clopping along the Danzig corridor, where Taff is a Lubliner, and the people about to be exiled in their homelands are the ‘behomeans’. The pun produces historical meaning. The crime in Crimea allows us to travel from misdemeanour in Phoenix Park to a battle on a Ukrainian peninsula. This would seem to confirm that Joyce manifestly used words as weightless, depthless signifiers. The historical locus of the Crimean War has no primary ontological status; it has only been generated by the book’s inner codes. But once the pun was established, a new field – or battlefield – of knowledge was open for plundering. The wider the scope of reference, the greater the chance of a type of predetermined serendipity, and the more likely that the accidents of language (crime, Crimea) might come to offer new ways of looking at history itself. It is certainly true that in the Wake, and particularly in the Buckley text, we constantly see by trans-historical light. Butt witnesses the stinking deed of the general, based in his headquarters beyond the Caucasus or the ‘herdsquatters beyond the carcasses’ (344:18–19), ‘by the veereyed lights of the stromtrooping clouds and in the sheenflare of the battleaxes of the heroim’ (344:23–4). The Very Lights of the St Quentin trenches illuminate the glinting combat of Anglo-Saxon battle. The kenning (‘sheenflare’) coexists with a German compound (‘stormtrooping’) which connotes twentieth-century war.52 The Wake itself tells us – no matter how opaquely – that European politics are changing. Joyce scattered his Crimean passage with potentially meaningful details in the safe knowledge that the political borders of a turbulent Europe would continue to shift after the book’s publication. The agglomeration in the Buckley passage of these geographical particulars bears the post-dated signatures of successive incarnations of the Buckley/Russian general confrontation. It should not be found surprising that the in-built Viconian mechanisms should grind into motion once more, alter the balance of power in contemporary Europe and in doing so disclose a new historical parallax to the future reader. Another work of late modernism, Four Quartets, begins, ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future in time past’.53 The conflicts of time future are present in the past battles narrated by the Wake. In time future we are beaten back to the Crimea, a place which as well as being a hidden magnet in the text of the Wake, briefly became a historical epicentre. It was here that the Powers converged to redraw the European map. Six years after the publication of





Finnegans Wake, history returns us to Crimean Yalta, and the summit of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. It was at Yalta that the new borders of Cold War Europe were fixed. Not long afterwards Churchill would declare, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’ – a reminder to the Joycean that the city of the author’s early exile would eventually be perceived as an edge between two different Europes.54 Joyce had moved across the Europe of the empires as it became the Europe of the nations; as he finished the Wake in the late 1930s, the continent was about to reconfigure itself again.

Notes 1. All following references will be made within the text to the following edition: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). 2. See George Steiner, ‘Extraterritorial’, in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), for the eponymous term, and for the distinction between the nationalist mystique of the writer enraciné and modern ‘unhoused’ multilinguists like Beckett and Nabokov. Joyce’s European movements fit the paradigm: ‘A great writer driven from language to language by social upheaval and war is an apt symbol for the age of the refugee,’ p. 21. 3. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), p. 208. 4. Eileen Joyce was married to a Czech bank cashier who lived in Trieste, Frantisek Schaurek. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 384–5, 471–2. 5. James Joyce, Letters, 3 vols, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1966). II, p. 467. 6. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 398. 7. See Kelly Anspaugh, ‘How Butt Shot the Chamber Pot: Finnegans Wake II.3’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31:1, 1994, 71–81, makes clear that the Buckley story is ‘not a “true” story, in that the incident described, a soldier named Buckley shooting a defecating Russian general, never happened’, p. 71. 8. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 398. 9. Margot Norris, The Decentred Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 63. R.D. Beckman, ‘An Idea as to why Buckley Shoots the Russian General’, unpublished notes on a paper given at the XVIII International James Joyce Symposium (16–22 June 2002), p. 1. 10. Marquess of Anglesey, A History of the British Cavalry 1851–1871 (London: Leo Cooper, 1975), p. 92. 11. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): ‘Buckley is a common Irish soldier in the Crimean War who comes upon a Russian general with his pants down, in the act of defecating, and either does or does not shoot at him,’ p. 204.



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12. Ibid., p. 213. 13. There are transitional moments of violence between the brothers in the Wake, notably when Kev knocks down Dolph in the ‘Nightlessons’ chapter. See Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), on this section of the Wake, a period when ‘the father ceases to be a full presence’ but is also preserved by Kev (the Shaun figure) against the mockings of the Shem-figure, Dolph, pp. 144–5. Be it after the sexual initiation of II.2 (seeing ALP’s delta) or the parricide of II.3 (the shooting of the Russian general), the brothers tend to war or merge with each other, in order to become the next father. 14. Clive Hart and Fritz Senn, A Wake Digest (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968), p. 8. 15. James Joyce, ‘Fragment from Work in Progress: Part II, Section 3’, transition, ed. Eugene Jolas, 27 (April–May 1938) pp. 59–78. 16. Attridge, Peculiar Language, p. 234. Attridge argues that the distinction between narrative centre and backbone is elided in Finnegans Wake. 17. James Joyce, Letters, III, p. 146. 18. Attridge, Peculiar Language, p. 216. 19. Petr Skrabánek, A Wake Newslitter, IX, 4 (Aug 1972) p. 51. See also the posthumous revised collection of Skrabánek’s Slavonic lists: Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake, eds. Louis Armand and Ondrej Pilny, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2000. 20. The metaphor of the magnet and the iron filings is M.J.C. Hodgart’s: quoted in J.S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 69. 21. For Jacques Derrida’s practice of placing terms sous rature or ‘under erasure’, see Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976, p. 19. Spivak explains in her introduction that ‘[t]his is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.)’, p. xiv. 22. Petr Skrabánek, A Wake Newslitter, VIII, 1 (Feb 1971) p. 13. Also noted by Bernard Benstock in Joyce-Again’s Wake, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1965. I acknowledge that this and following close exegeses have made use of the well-known available secondary sources. For many of the cultural, historical and foreign-language allusions, I have consulted Roland McHugh, Annotations of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). The book is a concordance of the work of many specialists. For more detailed Slavic references, I have consulted A Wake Newslitter, together with the Slavonic lists in Petr Skrabánek, Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake, ed. Louis Armand and Ondrej Pilny (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2000). 23. David Hayman, A First Draft Version of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). 24. Whereas the city had a mostly German population, the Polish corridor, a narrow strip which connected Poland to a Baltic port, had a mixed German and Polish population, though the latter were in a majority. 25. ‘[D]anzing’ also recalls ‘Are you not danzzling on the age of a vulcano?’ (89:28). 26. Ivan Klíma, The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (London: Granta, 1998), p. 41. 27. We might see a textual aftertaste in the part allusion to Modern Germany, ‘Moltern Giaourmany’ (355:21), soon after the shooting. Is this compound a




28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

Narratives of the European Border comment on a modern state now molten by its bellicosity, Europe’s new pariah land of Giaours – that is, of raiding infidels? An allusion to ‘Marx and their Groups’ (365:20) seems to connect with Russian followers following the Russian general text; although it would be overstating it to claim that the frequently-noted ‘Nazi Priers’ (375:18) is also a faint Crimean echo, it is enough to say that this part of II.3 is urgently contemporary. Is there an echo here of Wellington’s shame at being born an Irishman, made notorious in his comment that being born in a barn or stable does not make one a horse? Joyce added to the manuscript Butt and Taff’s italicised stage directions or descriptions, which include some of these place names, at a later date – further evidence, perhaps, along with the addition of ‘danzing corridor’ and Thomas Hofheinz’s ‘Bulgarad’ example (see conclusion), that he might have been more attentive to the European map as the 1930s went on. See Saul B. Cohen, ed., The Columbia Gazetteer of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). It seems to refer to a town in the Crimea (Molodezhnoye) or another in Ukraine by the same name. But another town called Molodechno, now in Belarus, was in the interwar years part of Poland and known as Molodeczno. The word ‘Molodeztious’, as a compound geopolitical semanteme, has a double status as both exactly Crimean and Belarus-Polish. Phrase taken from title of Alan Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of EastCentral Europe since the Congress of Vienna (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). Benstock, Joyce-Again’s Wake, p. 51. Hart and Senn, A Wake Digest: ‘An explication is lacking unless it accounts for every syllable and justifies every letter’, p. 12. Most, if not all, explications would fail this test. The latter example mentioned by Benstock, Joyce-Again’s Wake, p. 125. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 111. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 550. Letter to Jacques Mercanton in Joyce, Letters, III, p. 463. Hart and Senn, A Wake Digest, p. 8. Kevin M. McCarthy, ‘Turkish References in Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly, 9 (1972) 250–58, p. 257. Ibid., pp. 250–8. We remember the specific site of Crim Tartery in ‘Creamtartery’: in the same interlude, ‘Alibey Ibrahim’ names two Sultans; ‘Learn the Nunsturk’ contains the Turk as well as Le Fanu’s Sturk, perhaps. Butt is seen ‘deturbaned’ and Taff has the Norwegian Captain from Galway wear a ‘Galwegian caftan’ – a Persian garment. ‘Artaxerxes’ (337:36) is a compound of Persian kings. Taff is described as ‘all Perssiasterssias’ (339:18). Phoenix Park and its Wellington monument is memorably a place ‘where obelisk rises when odalisks fall’ (335:33): the harem is matched elsewhere in the passage by the ‘houroines’, the heroic houri, or Muslim maidens. The motif of smoking, conspicuous in the Buckley passage, is one of the touchstones of the sexual crime in the park (the Cad is a pipe-smoker) – with its overtones of phallic and oral gratification. One of the globally circulating phrases of the Wake makes its appearance here as ‘still smolking his fulvurite turfkish in the rooking pressance of laddios’ (347:36–348:1) (compare, for



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43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

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instance, with the variation in ‘Nightlessons’: ‘raucking his flavourite turvku in the smukking precincts of lydias’ (294:20–1)). Turkish tobacco is taboo, and particularly illicit if enjoyed in and around Lydia in Asia Minor. The Russian general is described as ‘smooking his scandleloose at botthends of him!’ (343:23–4): the butt of his cigarette, glowing like a candle, is transferred from mouth to his other butt-end. (Parnell, whose childhood nickname was Butt-head, was preceded by Isaac Butt as nationalist leader: the butt-end of leadership succession in Irish politics becomes the interfused ‘bothends’ of Wake agency.) Here, Butt-Buckley, the shat-upon son, speaks of the scatological crime against Ireland as a scandalous loosening of the bowels. David Hayman, ‘Dramatic Motion in Finnegans Wake’, Texas Studies in English, 37 (1958) 155–76, p. 171. We might also remember the phrase ‘Setanik stuff’ (338:23) in Taff’s second speech, which combines Satanic with Sethanik, the mythical Armenian queen, and the Russian sotnik, military captain: another Russo-Armenian implication. McCarthy, ‘Turkish References’, p. 253. Thomas Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: ‘Finnegans Wake’ in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 183. Hofheinz does not account for ‘Nemzes’ and ‘Maliziies’, but the former is glossed in McHugh’s Annotations as ‘Nemc’, meaning Austrian or Hungarian in Albanian. Perhaps more importantly, Skrabánek finds the Russian Nemtsy, meaning Germans, Night Joyce, p. 17: an appropriately antagonistic ‘nemesis’? Nathan Halper, ‘Notes on Late Historical Events’, A Wake Newslitter, II, 5 (1965) pp. 15–16. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 150–1. Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 199–200. Ibid., p. 201. The reference to the Stormtroopers (perhaps confirmed a couple of pages later in ‘sneezturmdrappen’ (346:30), though this is mainly a snowstorm of sneezes) has a Nazi connotation, particularly remembering the Gestapo allusion 12 pages earlier. Hitler chose the name for his brown-shirted paramilitary squads. However, it is equally consonant with the Stosstruppen of the Sturmabteilung of the First World War trench-warfare setting, as the élite units were created and first deployed in 1915, in response to the stalemate in Northern France. The Germans ended up by relying almost completely on the stormtroopers by the end of the War. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, London: Faber and Faber, 1944, p. 7. Churchill made this comment in an address to Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946.



Buckley in a General Russia

Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe

A prehistory to writing nowhere The trajectory of Kazuo Ishiguro’s earlier work and the critical response to it accounts for the deliberateness with which his fourth novel is set nowhere – in a mysteriously unnamed and unnamable European city. After the reception of his first two ‘Japanese’ novels, Ishiguro expressed his annoyance with a certain type of misreading which took their value to be the insider’s view they gave of post-war Japanese life, as if the author were a ‘mediator to Japanese culture’.1 Ishiguro said, ‘I am not essentially concerned with a realist purpose in writing. I just invent a Japan which serves my needs.’ That there was something deliberately ‘inauthentic’, in realist terms, about his recreation of Japanese life – that it was imagined rather than reported – should have been clearer from the start. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the hinges of realism are unfastened in a well-known crux.2 The negotiation between realist and fabulist codes, so stark in The Unconsoled, has been a consistent preoccupation from the start of Ishiguro’s career.3 Setting The Remains of the Day in England, however, simply shifted the problem from East to West. Again, Ishiguro was dissatisfied with reviews which claimed the book was ‘about’ the end of the British Empire. Remains was being read as a historical novel; Ishiguro was still suffering from those lovers of an ideal of verisimilitude, of ‘reflectionist’ realism. Poised between the uneasy success of Remains and the new project of The Unconsoled, Ishiguro identified his main struggle as making a particular setting actually take off into the realm of metaphor.4 He saw himself in the middle ground between ‘straight realism’ and ‘out-andout fabulism’, claiming that in Remains he had already moved a couple of stages away from realism.5 There is in this sense a continuity between 156



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Stevens’s imagined, mythical England, and Ryder’s mitteleuropäisch nowhere, although it was the express purpose of the latter to leave the reader in no doubt of its unreality. The Unconsoled was, in part, an attempt to escape the tyranny of retentive historical particularists in waiting, an answer to those who would limit the metaphorical potential of his fictional worlds. The hyper-realist reader – who did not care to linger over the ontological jolt of the final pages of A Pale View, or who enjoyed picking him up for getting the butler to pass the port or for omitting to mention the Suez Crisis in Remains – is set traps. The most obvious is a reference to Clint Eastwood stalking the corridors of the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey – a blatant, deliberate but inconsequential blooper. It is Ishiguro’s way of saying that dreams and imagination have free rein to make mistakes – that he will respect most of the laws of life if the reader respects the autonomy of fiction. In On the Art of Poetry, Aristotle makes a partial defence of the error. ‘If [the poet] describes the impossible, he is guilty of an error; but the error may be justified, if the end of the art be thereby attained […] [D]oes the error touch the essentials of the poetic art, or some accident of it? For example, not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically’.6 In terms of importance of function, then, Ishiguro’s getting the film actor wrong, like describing a hind with horns, is a ‘probable impossibility’ rather than an ‘improbable possibility’: it would not dilute the Aristotelian lifeblood of the plot.7 The Eastwood error is a point at which the authorial contract with the reader is made most brazenly explicit. This assertion, through deliberate error, of unreality – that we are within the fabulist and metaphorical domain – is articulated through the novel’s elusive setting. The city in The Unconsoled must be ‘unnamable’ or ‘unidentified’, as the blurbs and reviews had it, in order to avoid the stability which discrete nominalism would bring to the novel. Ishiguro said of The Unconsoled, ‘you could almost set that thing down anywhere. It was by and large a landscape of the imagination’.8 He has asserted that this and other settings were of little importance, and compared the decision to find a setting to ‘the way that a film director might search for locations, for a script he has already written’.9 The decision to use Germanic names in the novel came very late in the day – he has also claimed that they could have been exchanged with Scandinavian or French names. The initial strategy, at least, was to make place less substantial, more like two-dimensional backcloth. The Unconsoled consistently tells us where we are not. A non-setting is established through a process of subtraction or hollowing-out. A local



Nowhere, in Particular


company supplies distinguished customers ‘as far afield as France and England’ (p. 379). Gustav’s family ‘went to Switzerland’ on holiday (p. 5). Stephan spent his ‘college days when he had been living in Germany’ (p. 65). Ryder remarks upon ‘a plump young woman of Nordic appearance’, the ‘plump Scandinavian girl’ (pp. 165, 199). One important location is a Hungarian café, where most of the regulars cannot speak Hungarian. There is a street known for its Italian cafés (p. 321). This, then, at a stroke ‘eliminates’ France, England, Germany, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, Hungary and Italy, because such comments assume a conspicuous, a priori difference from the indigenous setting. The realist geographer could take this as encouragement – a helpful narrowing down which allows the ‘real’ place to emerge coyly. What is more, the city is not hybridised in a balanced, pan-European way: it is overwhelmingly Germanic in its nomenclature. Does this leave us, the tenacious reader might ask, with the Austrian cities of Linz, Graz and Klagenfurt? (Vienna is too large.) Good cases can be made against these and all individual cities. Ishiguro’s attempt to elude geographical (and thus, political, cultural and historical) fixity is successful: it is clear that the city is not only unidentified but unidentifiable.10 We eliminate places from the realist map, because certain coordinates will never match. Where are the Alps? Why is a Swedish radio channel recommended (p. 80)? There will always be irritants to a precisely realist cartography of the text. We indeed seem to be left with ‘anywhere’, nowhere, a cardboard cut-out Euro-land.

Critical responses to setting in The Unconsoled Although nearly all commentaries agreed that the city of The Unconsoled is Central European,11 there were three main types of critical response to the placeless setting. First, there were those commentaries which mentioned it only in passing: in this case, there was simply a lack of interest in the geographic, cultural and political space of the novel. Second, some critics were disappointed by the spatial disconnectedness of the novel, its lack of particulars or determinants (these reviews sometimes related this to a failure to emulate Kafka). Third, there were those who felt that its Central European-ness (also connected to Kafka) was integral to the novel. It is the relationship between these last two responses which this essay expands upon. One of the central shortcomings, it was argued, is that while Ishiguro’s novel attempts what Erich Heller characterised in Kafka as a ‘simple, lucid and “real”’ narration of the ‘shockingly unbelievable’, it



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fails to make the surreal concrete, and vice versa – whereas it is the essence of Kafka to make these categories indistinguishable.12 There is, in what seems to be a paradox, not enough naturalistic detail in Ishiguro to suggest allegorical, metaphysical depths. Admiring critics of the earlier novels were disappointed by The Unconsoled because it represented ‘a bizarre and entangled tale whose parables are no longer those related to identifiable place, situation and history’.13 The novelist Amit Chaudhuri based his criticism of the novel on its being ‘Unlike Kafka’: ‘Ishiguro, although surely capable of [Kafka’s] minuteness of observation, denies himself the joy of fidelity to detail; the world hardly impinges on his dreamscape, except as generalised settings and landmarks – a lake, a motorway, a theatre.’ To Chaudhuri, the Kafkan allegory is informed by – though does not directly represent – the life of the early twentiethcentury bourgeois individual, and by the ‘part stunningly ordinary, part terrifying’ nature of contemporary European bureaucracy. The Unconsoled, in contrast, is ‘a strangely ahistorical book […] without any discernible cultural, social or historical determinants (surely fatal to any novel)’; it refuses ‘to allow its allegory to be engaged, in any lively way, with the social shape of our age’.14 As James Wood reminds us, Kafka described the effect of his work as like ‘seasickness on dry land’ – and it is the fact that we have dry land (that we are, importantly, landlocked) that identifies the disorientation of the narrative as Kafkan. Wood feels that the narrative effect of The Unconsoled is simply like ‘seasickness at sea’.15 To these critics, Ishiguro’s novel fails largely because of its lack of sociohistorical grounding, and because there is no metaphysical ‘pressure’ to compensate for it.16 Others have taken Ryder’s dislocation and inner torture to have a vaguely intimated political counterpart in Central European history. Stanley Kauffmann recognises that Ishiguro’s fourth novel moves from Japan and Britain ‘to the heart of Middle Europe’ and goes on: ‘Previously, he dealt with the psychological and spiritual aftermath of World War II in Japan, then with English confusions and self-betrayals in that war. Now he moves to the continent, to the involuted psyche and spirit that was the root of much of that war, that bred most of our culture and also of our horror’.17 Here Kauffmann is interestingly claiming a historical, semi-realist space in The Unconsoled. Barry Lewis does not examine the Central European dimensions of the novel, but nevertheless remarks that this novel and Kafka’s are both set in ‘societies that sift like sand beneath waves’.18 Merle Rubin seemed to sense a kind of characteristic kitschiness, taking the ambience of the novel to be ‘as overwhelmingly Central European as a vat of steaming goulash with dumplings’.19





A more sophisticated model of space is needed to clarify the relationship between the last two groups – those commentaries which are critical of the blankness of the canvas and the socio-historical detachment of the novel, and those which value, as Kauffmann does, the ‘scent of Middle Europe in the atmosphere’.20 On the one hand, we have the author’s denial of place, the avoidance of realist fixity and the soi-disant carelessness with which the scenery is hastily thrown up at the last minute. Yet the book has to be somewhere. In order to avoid being pinned to the map, Ishiguro reaches towards the landlocked, cosmopolitan, contested borderlands of Europe. Responses to the novel are lacking if, in universalising space into a bland dream world, they automatically ignore the Central European shadings of the novel. But before bringing out the Central European character of the novel, I shall first show how, theoretically, an idea of particular space can be recovered from an ostensibly anti-realist novel.

Barthes’s ‘reality effect’ Barthes’s definition of the ‘reality effect’, and in particular his analysis of Flaubert’s Rouen, help to conceive of how the setting of The Unconsoled is initially predicated on aesthetic rather than mimetic imperatives: In Madame Bovary, the description of Rouen (a real referent if ever there was one) is subject to the tyrannical constraints of what we must call aesthetic verisimilitude, as is attested by the corrections made in this passage in the course of six successive rewritings. Here we see, first of all, that the corrections do not in any way issue from a closer consideration of the model. Rouen, perceived by Flaubert, remains just the same, or more precisely if it changes somewhat from one version to the next, it is solely because he finds it necessary to focus an image or avoid a phonic redundancy condemned by the rules of the beau style, or again to ‘arrange’ a quite contingent felicity of expression […] [W]e see that the descriptive fabric, which at first glance seems to grant a major importance (by its dimension, by the concern for its detail) to the object Rouen, is in fact only a sort of setting meant to receive the jewels of a number of rare metaphors […] as if, in Rouen, all that mattered were the figures of rhetoric to which the sight of the city lends itself.21 The ‘object Rouen’, despite being the most real of referents (a joke – about s(t)olid provinciality? – only fully appreciable to the French), is



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not a representational setting but, for Flaubert, a backcloth for metaphor. The city setting of The Unconsoled is also depicted only insofar as it might release its metaphorical potential. As we have seen, the unnamed city is conjured up to avoid the constrictions of realist representation. But Ishiguro comes at it the other way from Flaubert, not only because he is not constrained to the traditional rhetoric of descriptive style or scene setting, but because he disposes of the problem of representing space altogether. Rather than choosing a Central European Rouen – say, Graz or Brno – and refining it out of mimetic existence in multiple redrafts, Ishiguro starts with nowhere (‘you could set that thing down anywhere’), and eventually fills in place with a set of seemingly arbitrary signs. Although Flaubert’s Rouen ‘depends on conformity not to the model but to the cultural rules of representation’, Barthes argues that in the very process of filling the text with supposedly unimportant spatial notation Flaubert nevertheless practises a ‘new verisimilitude’ in the realist novel: All the same, the aesthetic goal of Flaubertian description is thoroughly mixed with ‘realistic’ imperatives, as if the referent’s exactitude, superior or indifferent to any other function, governed and alone justified its description […] [B]y positing the referential as real, by pretending to follow it in a submissive fashion, realistic description avoids being reduced to fantasmic activity (a precaution which was supposed necessary to the ‘objectivity’ of the account).22 In The Unconsoled Ishiguro has fewer superfluous, ‘filling’ notations, fewer ‘useless’ details without a function – and aims precisely for a certain ‘fantasmic activity’ (there are spectres of place, such as the hotel room which does not merely resemble but is said to be the bedroom Ryder had on the English-Welsh border as a boy). We do not ‘see’ Graz (or wherever) as we ‘see’ Rouen; we are not shackled to a single place; we are not permitted to gather up those minutiae of place characteristic of other long novels; there is no self-contained referent, like Rouen, which the text pretends to describe. Barthes’s formulation for the ‘reality effect’ of the new verisimilitude is that, with the denotation of useless, concrete detail, ‘the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism’.23 This does not fit Ishiguro’s novel, which does not have much in the way of futile description or ‘brand-naming’ of place and which, as critics such as Chaudhuri pointed out, avoids ‘the joy of





fidelity to detail’ in favour of ‘generalised settings and landmarks’. In fact it is this very avoidance, the lack of ‘collusion of a referent and a signifier’ in the denotative sign, which marks this novel out as antirealist. Whereas in realist description ‘the signified is expelled from the sign’,24 Ryder’s dream world is one in which the referent – the ‘outside’ – is expelled from the sign. However, the setting of The Unconsoled is still made up of a congeries of some recognisable particulars – trams, hotels, high-sided streets, monuments, housing estates, an Old Town, a Hungarian café – drawn from diverse places; to most readers this diversity is nevertheless circumscribed in an area which signifies ‘Central Europe’. It is inevitable that in a text that avoids ‘out-and-out fabulism’, the mists clear, and some sense of historical and cultural target comes into focus. There is a creeping back of the referent. While writing The Unconsoled (after the publication of Remains), Ishiguro commented: ‘I feel like I’m closing in on some strange, weird, territory that for some reason obsesses me, and I’m not sure what the nature of that territory is’ (author’s italics).25 The writer’s imagination anticipates some sort of territorialisation. There is a different sort of clandestine convergence of signifier and referent. The master-signified of space is atopia, that version of Foucauldian heterotopia in which the ‘placeless place’ is not utopian or purely discursive, but imaginable as a territory, ‘virtual’. This translates, in Ishiguro’s terms, to ‘setting that thing [down] anywhere’ but having to set it somewhere. The atopian signified nevertheless has to marshall, ‘collude with’, some referents, perhaps a minimum of them – names, place names, cultural, social, architectural ‘clues’. As we have seen, critics – even those uninterested in place because they regarded it as ‘outside’ of the narrative – consistently sited the book in the heart of Europe. The process of collusion could not stop these few nominalist particulars from pointing, stubbornly and enigmatically, to a vague somewhere. What this chapter now asks is how The Unconsoled accommodates atopia and ‘Central Europe’ as mutual ideas of space.

An allegory of Mitteleuropa: silence and history Ishiguro laughed at the idea that The Unconsoled could be read as a thinly veiled allegory about the collapse of Communism.26 The laugh is directed against a crude application of the reductively mimetic ‘about’; but twentieth-century Central and Eastern European history – of the Second World War, the Cold War and the post-1989 period – nonetheless



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casts a long shadow over the novel. Barry Lewis has noted that Ishiguro’s novels ‘are often located in transitional moments of history, when one set of values is replaced by another’ ( Japan after the Second World War, Britain in the 1950s) and that in ‘times of flux, societies are threatened with chaos until a new equilibrium can be reached’.27 In his fourth novel, too, the backdrop remains transitional if more signally allegorical; we are placed in the heart of Europe in what could be contemporary time. To close off any interpretative connection between this civic space and the post-war or post-Cold War transformations to Europe is unnecessarily restrictive. That the indigenous, discredited historical community in The Unconsoled is Austro-Germanic in nomenclature is no accident. The city’s past is Manichaean, and a divisive issue to the citizens – thus the tension over the Sattler building, which some citizens regard as a fitting memorial and others as a reminder of their shameful past. The political inheritance is completely unspecified but these monuments act as a kind of objective correlative for the city’s obsession with its (anonymous) history. The novel is redolent of a Germanic and/or mitteleuropäisch history which has vacillated between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac – producing, for example, Bach and Wagner, Kant and Nietzsche, Metternich and Bismarck, Emperor Franz Josef and Hitler. In Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, set in the German-Polish border city of Danzig (now G’dansk), Oskar learns to read by choosing two books, Goethe’s Elective Affinities and a volume entitled Rasputin and Women. He claims that their ‘conflicting harmony’ has shaped his life: he fluctuates between ‘the faith healer and the man of the Enlightenment, between the dark spirit who cast a spell on women and the luminous poet who was so fond of letting women cast a spell on him’.28 Through the struggle between Christoff and Brodsky for the soul of the city’s musical identity, The Unconsoled follows the same Nietzschean concept of art as polarised and locked in perpetual conflict. It is not a question of making the particulars of Mitteleuropa ‘fit’ the novel as a stable backdrop, but rather of not denying the powerful but murky implications of superimposing such a narrative of history. In a similar manoeuvre to that made in recuperating the Crimean setting of the Buckley passage, the reader may profitably think of one allegorical potentiality – the Central European anxieties of Ishiguro’s novel – while at the same time placing it ‘under erasure’. This single historical locus does not explain the hyper-sensitivity of the citizens to their identity – how to memorialise or forget their pasts, to decide between them, and how to present a new face to the world; nor does it account for the strange





mixture of Old European custom (the Porters’ Dance) and New European modernism (the post-Schönberg music programmes, the huge housing estates) – which converge in the passive-aggressiveness of some of the characters, like Hoffman. But it cannot help but act – pace Chaudhuri – as a historical paradigm which at least the European reader, coming to the novel at the end of the twentieth century laden down with that continent’s ‘culture and horror’ (Kauffmann), may validly bring to the novel. The cultural crisis is aligned on a tension between natives and outsiders which has peculiarly German-Slav coordinates. Slavic names, though not exclusively, connote artistic accomplishment, daring, and aesthetic triumph and despair – but the cultural identity of the city is always imported.29 Those, like Brodsky, Christoff and Ryder himself, are said to have arrived in the city from somewhere else, all messiahs carrying hopes of an artistic revival which cannot come from within. Even if talent is native, such as Stephan’s, it is not encouraged. The former confidence in an Austro-Germanic tradition (Enlightenment, Romantic) has drained away; outsiders are needed to revivify it. The provincially introspective city is a site of factional and individual feuding. The Central European matrix (with its history of interpenetration and conflict between Germans, Slavs and Jews) deepens our appreciation of universal questions of community and belonging – or, in anthropological terms, of the battle between endogamous and exogamous instincts. It is a specific case history – the one nearest to hand, as it were – by which we can orient our understanding of the failure of acculturation or integration. Michael Wood’s analysis of The Unconsoled in Children of Silence does not directly consider what he takes to be the novel’s German setting, but his notion of unspeakable history in Ishiguro indicates the relevance of his argument here. Both The Unconsoled and A Pale View of Hills are concerned with ‘drastic denials and what happens when the denied material comes back to haunt you’.30 Nagasaki, in Pale View, is a historically ‘loaded’ sign that ‘provides the richness, fills the silence’. It comes to mean ‘not the dropping of the atomic bomb or the experience of its fall, not the politics or the morality or the shock of that, but the landscape of feeling created by the bomb, or more subtly, named by the bomb. A place where everyone has seen horrors, and no loss, large or small, can be properly mourned’.31 Wood signals the convergence of personal and historical trauma, unspoken of and unspeakable, in Etsuko’s narrative, and argues that national stereotypes such as Japanese inscrutability are complicated by



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its silences. While stating that The Unconsoled ‘doesn’t have the concentration of A Pale View of Hills or its violent and poignant historical background’, Wood nevertheless goes on to say that ‘there are other, western countries of the unspeakable – the Germany that is the setting of The Unconsoled, for example’.32 This seems to admit the diffuseness of the setting, but also that the denied or repressed history of Mitteleuropa is not a wholly irrelevant consideration. The citizens of The Unconsoled live in a synthetic, paper-made Europolis without a particular history. This lack of history, however, is itself a marker of Central Europe. As we saw earlier, 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’; and that its people ‘represent the wrong side of this History: its victims and outsiders’.33 The opposition to history offers a way of understanding the guilty historical silence of The Unconsoled. To Kundera, Central Europe is ‘not a state but a culture’ that, during the Cold War, has ‘bowed out’.34 The paranoia of Hoffman, the defeated mentality of Brodsky, the apprehensions of Stephan: that the sense of loss which they all share is located in music is germane to Kundera’s argument that Central European culture has been forgotten during the Sovietisation of Europe. He emphasises the dominant position in Central Europe of the development of music and ‘formalist’ musicology, from the baroque to the atonal. Stephen Benson, comparing the Cageian music of Ishiguro and Kafka in modernist terms, argues that these writers ‘do not enter into the wager of literary music, opting instead productively to employ the silence of the text in the face of its music as an integral part of the construction of that music’.35 More generally, then, the featurelessness of the novel can be seen as a guilty expunging of history, in which local colour must be disposed of, almost as evidence. Individual guilt, displacement, forgetting – this is the primary ‘landscape of feeling’ which Ishiguro consistently aims for. But the novel is only superficially ahistorical. Central European history is a latent content which we can profitably ascribe to the dreamwork of the narrative.

Concrete and kitsch Although the labyrinth of The Unconsoled is partly that of myth and fantasy (Theseus and Ariadne’s web; Lewis Carroll’s dream- or mirrorworld), it also suggests more recent configurations of European political space: the materialisation of geopolitical stalemates which have led to





surreal but nightmarishly concrete urban topographies. In one episode, Ryder is dropped off close to the concert hall but gets lost in narrow side-streets – back-tracking or repeating himself, he is punished by the labyrinth. A broad, brightly lit street then offers the concert hall dome at its end but, just as Ryder seems certain of reaching his destination, a brick wall, which completely seals the street for no apparent reason, suddenly bars his way. He is cheerfully told by a local lady that the wall is a folly, built by a late nineteenth-century eccentric. The wall’s purposelessness enrages him: it represents all the obstacles which have been littering his path throughout his stay; he regards it as a symbol of the city itself (p. 388). The short distance between Ryder and the concert hall becomes a piece of intractable space which contemptuously forces man backwards, denying progress. It is the Parmenidean space of Zeno’s second paradox, whose infinite divisions prevent Achilles from reaching the tortoise. Ryder, who is unable ever to get to the end of things (like Svevo’s Zeno), cannot even get to the end of the street. That the goal-less stasis of existence should be celebrated by the citizens is the final straw for this superlative pianist, this bereft human being. This sort of wall has also had a history of aggressively delineating sovereignty in Europe. Rebecca West has written of how a visit to the contested city of Rijeka (Croatia)/Fiume (Italy) between the wars had ‘the quality of a dream, a bad headachy dream’. An ‘impeded city’, ‘hacked about by treaties into surrealist form’, Rijeka was a place where adjacent houses, divided by brutish walls, sent one on needless half-hour detours, and where officials checked passports in the middle of the town square.36 Neighbouring Trieste, which was connected to mainland Italy by an isthmus – a Danzig corridor of the Adriatic – was also ‘hacked’ into zones after the Second World War. Vienna was quartered after the Second World War – a setting that the producer of The Third Man, Alexander Korda, exploited by enlisting the services of Graham Greene and Carol Reed. An international border, though friendly, still runs through the Italo-Slovenian city of Gorizia/Nova Gorica. The Berlin Wall is perhaps the most obvious example of such partitions in Europe. The surrealist consequences of geopolitical diplomacy, in their illogical disfigurations of landscape, confirm Robert Byron’s comment that ‘there is something absurd about a land frontier’.37 This absurdity is increased when the border runs through a city. Iron Curtain settings have a potentially heightened metaphoricity, as spy thrillers such as John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold reveal. In Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper, for example, the narrator imagines seeing the Berlin



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Wall from the moon, and fails to meet an invisible cousin and doppelgänger in the East. With its spectres, and its shadowy, Platonic ‘other half’, Berlin is like one of Calvino’s invisible cities.38 Ishiguro exploits these Cold War predecessors by disuniting space in a (supposedly superficial) Central European context: the ambiguity of the political border thus gives a certain historical value to the dreamlike setting. The unnecessary wall carries the idea that self-bounded communities are riven for macro-political reasons. We bring to our reading of The Unconsoled the knowledge that the twentieth-century sequestering of political territory has contributed to the ‘nightmarish quality’ of absurdly divided cityscapes in Central Europe. There is another Central European element to Ryder’s bemusement at the wall – the continued local delight in its obstructiveness is an example of kitsch. I am thinking less of the everyday usage of kitsch but of how the term has been applied politically by Milan Kundera (after Broch and Adorno). To Kundera, kitsch is ‘the absolute denial of shit [which] excludes everything from its purview which is completely unacceptable in human existence’; it is ‘a folding screen set up to curtain off death’, or ‘the beautifying lie’; it ‘papers over the complexities and contradictions of life’.39 Ryder’s fury is with the false consciousness of the local lady: ‘Do you all get annoyed? Do you demand it’s pulled down immediately […] No, you put up with it for the best part of a century. You make postcards of it and believe it’s charming’ (p. 388). In showing how Czechoslovakia was, like other Eastern bloc countries, programmed to respond positively to what he calls totalitarian or Communist kitsch, Kundera reminds us of the mutuality (in Ryder’s words) of the ‘utterly preposterous’ and the ‘monstrous’ (p. 388).

Kafkan-Schulzian space-time: modernist Central Europe Critics have repeatedly remarked that the objectively impossible distortions of space and time in The Unconsoled suggest those of the dream. Not only does Ryder experience classic dream anxieties (unwittingly exposing himself before an audience, able only to grunt when urgently required to speak) but he is constantly frustrated by the oneiric laws of maze-like space and subjective time. Lifts take 20 minutes to go up a few floors; brick walls or long forgotten friends suddenly appear in front of him; dawn breaks twice during the novel’s anti-climax – a concert which Ryder performs in front of a cleared auditorium at breakfast time. When the space-time of dreams is given a hybrid European, Germanic backdrop, however, an old literary-cultural inheritance emerges – that





of Central European modernism. Some of the aesthetic effects of space in The Unconsoled are directly Kafkan, rather than nebulously Kafkaesque. Kafka’s first novel, America, illustrates this particularly well. The novel never gives the impression of wide-open American spaces.40 The landlocked mentality of an Old European claustrophobe is carried straight into the opening scene, when Karl gets lost in the labyrinthine bowels of the docked liner, where there are countless corridors but no short cuts. Karl, the disgraced European, later finds himself immured in a spacious upstate country house where he wanders down unlit corridors, runs into dead ends, and thinks that he is going round in circles.41 Karl is unable to escape the prison of the country house before the spell of his rich uncle’s patronage is broken, Cinderella-like, at midnight. Karl is trapped in time (the hour before midnight) and in space (within the maze of the many-chambered house). His movements do not obey the unities of time or space: one quarter of an hour elastically accommodates Karl getting lost and having separate discussions with a servant and his host. A ‘remarkable short cut’ is nothing of the sort, whereas a piano recital occupies no time at all.42 After hearing the strokes of midnight, he receives the fateful message that will thereafter condemn him to a hand-to-mouth existence. The hour is thus divided into four, but unequally; time is squandered like the space of the house, and by it: there is no sweet convergence of space and time as Bakhtin shows there to be in the chronotope of folk tale. Kafka reveals how narrative space-time is carefully deconstructed within the labyrinth. These labyrinthine motifs are common in The Unconsoled: as we have seen, Ryder is obstructed by a wall in an open street. In addition, the corridor encircling the auditorium comes to an unexpected end; he walks repeatedly round a kidney-shaped lake, and around a busy reception room milling with people; he goes round and round the city in a tram. The maze is the site of time both distended and compressed. Ryder’s travels around the city and its environs describe absurd circles which destroy the aspiration for the linear connection of destination and arrival. For instance, having just returned to the city centre hotel after a late-night film show, an exhausted Ryder is woken by Hoffman. He has not slept – apparently – for ‘more than a few minutes’ (p. 117). The city centre is now clogged with traffic, with crowds milling about its illuminated shops and restaurants (p. 119) and the wee small hours have been transformed into an early evening scene. As with Kafka, time has gone missing. A core/periphery mapping of city space is then destroyed. Ryder and Hoffman ‘drive out of the city’ into dark open spaces – seemingly from the



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city to the country (pp. 120–3). But for them then to turn off the open road and into a ‘salubrious residential district’ is a near-impossibility: in what world can the haute bourgeoisie have a suburban enclave in the middle of the countryside? Perhaps, entering the room where the Countess’s reception is taking place, we may still cling to a possible though improbable (realist) space, but this is shattered at the end of the evening: Then, as I looked past the clusters of standing and seated dinner guests, past the waiters and the tables, to where the vast room disappeared into darkness, it suddenly dawned on me that we were in the atrium of the hotel. I had not recognised it because earlier in the day I had entered it – and had viewed it – from the opposite end. (p. 148) This arbitrary dawning of realisation, familiar from the selective blind spots and sudden perceptions of dream logic, is typical of Ryder’s negotiations of space, in which he keeps getting lost and found, separated and reunited with people. In this example, he ‘returns’ to the hotel lobby he never left by walking through a corridor, like Alice through the looking glass. (A character in Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, another book of labyrinths, needs to repeat to himself that ‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points’, even though he is continually forced to turn left or right.43) Hoffman’s long drive is a 359-degree anti-clockwise redundancy, where the tiny straight line is a walk through a corridor from A to B. But this is still to attempt a realist mapping: the text has in any case foreclosed this by impossibly placing the city hotel in the country. The fiction of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who like Joseph Roth came from Galicia, also illustrates how the space-time continuum of literary realism is destabilised in Central or Eastern European narrative. Schulz’s story ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass’ takes place in a dark warren-like hotel where Joseph, ‘in that labyrinth of rooms, archways, and niches’, has ‘difficulty remembering which door led to the restaurant’.44 But it derives more of its imaginative strangeness from the decomposition of time. The sanatorium proposes a cure for Joseph’s father by turning back the clocks, so that the lost possibilities of the past are ‘reactivated’. Although his father might have already died in his own country, in this corner of Eastern Europe – the last stop on a branch line, a remote corner of Schulz’s Galician home – his death is yet to happen and thus might be averted. With the recent confidence of Einstein’s age (the story was published in the 1930s but set back before the First World War), the doctor explains that it is all ‘a matter of simple relativity’.45





The sunless, timeless town has a hypnotic effect on Joseph, who falls asleep and wakes up at any time and place, in the midst of narratives with deleted ends and beginnings. He goes to a restaurant to observe his apparently healthy father ostentatiously over-eating, and returns to the bedroom of the sanatorium only to find him sickly complaining that he has been unattended for two days. This is not a cheap narrative trick; it conveys a new sense of how time is no longer meticulously divisible, but rather runs discontinuously and subjectively lost and can be lost, as Schulz puts it, in ‘whole chunks’.46 Schulz’s story and the episode in America both rework old stories of familial rupture within these changed dimensions of a new cosmology. Joseph’s time is incompatible with his father’s; a failure to penetrate space alienates Karl from his uncle. Locked within our own perceptions of space-time we are out of kilter with others, even those closest to us. This pattern is established in The Unconsoled, too, in which Ryder is estranged from his family – both from his parents, whose imminent arrival preys on his mind throughout but who never arrive in the city, and from his unacknowledged wife and son, Sophie and Boris, whom he cannot reach either emotionally or, in certain episodes, physically. Having gone round a vast circular housing estate more than once, Ryder and Boris meet a neighbour-figure who, having told them the flat they are looking for is empty, describes the behaviour of the former tenants, particularly of the cruel, emotionally abusive and drunken father (pp. 214–16). Ryder cannot tolerate hearing about the sordid details; he is tormented by an unaccountable guilt for past misdemeanours with which he otherwise feels no connection. Ryder is like Oedipus getting lost in the forking paths between Thebes and Corinth, returning to an unremembered home, where he is both esteemed guest and absent husband and father, in order to find the answer to the riddle, ‘Who am I?’ Barthes pointed out, in reference to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that the first-person narrator, concealing ‘the profound darkness of the existential “I”’, can be the one ‘whodunit’.47 The guilty narrator, encircling his own home, is also suffering from the Freudian unheimlich, ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.48 Indeed, Freud used the labyrinthine idea of ‘unintended recurrence’ – beginning to make familiar what seemed unfamiliar through involuntary repetition – in his original essay.49 Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, set on the rectilinear, unexpectedly bifurcated streets of an unnamed North Sea town, is an example of how the Oedipal theme is aptly sited in the labyrinth – a grid-like space which, though promising a solution at its heart, is bafflingly decentred. In The



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Unconsoled, however, there is no specified crime to atone for, no metaphysical grappling with original sin; Ryder seems to evade that insight which blinds – Oedipal self-knowledge. The neuroses, repressions and psychopathologies that centre on the family in the novel apply to the other dysfunctional families as well: Hoffman–Christine–Stephan, Sophie and Gustav, who have not spoken for years, and the warring Brodsky and Miss Collins. Of course, the main point is about the universal applicability of this and other Freudian paradigms. But again, is it not to the detriment of the book to forget how those prolix talkers (Hoffman, Brodsky) who endlessly expatiate upon their guilt to Ryder, are descendents of the original subjects of Freud’s couch? It is as if Ishiguro invokes Mitteleuropa because, with its history of ethnic and national transmutability, it was the Freudian cradle of what W.G. Sebald has called the Unheimliche Heimat. This is where, to use Julia Kristeva’s formulation again, people feel most strange to themselves. Schulz’s ‘Sanatorium’ concludes in a train, The Unconsoled in a tram – transitional spaces similar to what Foucault, in describing a ship, called ‘a floating piece of space’.50 In both cases, the interior assumes Tardislike proportions. Ryder has great difficulty getting to Sophie and Boris – the inside of the crowded tram, divided in two by an exit area, disunites the family and threatens, like the city itself, to continue the pattern of obstruction, incompletion and non-arrival. After their rejection, however, the tram further expands to include at its very rear a magnificent breakfast buffet – a compensatory comfort. The inside of Joseph’s train is archaic and somehow accommodates corridors which ‘cross the empty compartments at various angles, labyrinthine and cold’: it too has an unfeasibly spacious interior (‘compartments, enormous as rooms’), which houses nobody but the narrator.51 There is a sense that both the tram and the train will be homes for the homeless. Joseph escapes the sleepy, deathly, atemporal town he has visited – in which his father has died and revolution or conflagration is breaking out – by getting on a train which moves away without a whistle, as if waiting for his departure. On the outward journey, Joseph had been in the company of a man with a swollen face, dressed shabbily as a railwayman. At the end of the story he becomes that man, a continuous traveller who lives in the train and ends up as a derelict. This suggests Ryder’s fate: how the hospitality and amicability of the tram are illusory. The tram runs two circuits – in the morning and evening – and it is clear that some of the passengers, such as the electrician who consoles Ryder (he who has been nominated to console the whole city), plan to ride for a number of circuits, such is the conviviality





of the atmosphere. The novel ends with Ryder imagining how pleasant it might be to remain on the sunny side of the tram, making repeated circuits of the city, enjoying an undemanding conversation with the electrician. Ryder is unwilling to get off the tram whose route – a scaled-down, above-ground Circle Line – offers him a moving home, regrettably spatial (fluid, in-between) and not place-bound. He will, we suppose, eventually get off the tram, check out of the hotel and go on to Helsinki. But this itself is the next stop on the closed, circular super-highway of the international concert tour. Either circuit might lead to a mental and physical disintegration like Joseph’s. Although both are escaping ( Joseph from his father’s death, a burning town; Ryder from a terminal break with his family, from his non-contribution to the cultural wellbeing of the city), they have nowhere to go. The train/tram operates within a closed system, a structure which repeats itself ad infinitum. When translated to textual self-generation – habitual in postmodernist narrative – these sorts of cyclical figures (such as the Möbius strip) offer not the warmth and protection which Ryder feels but the prospect of lunacy, ontological involution, of a hellish Sartrean continuum where even the false comfort of the end-stopped straight line – that is, the telos – is missing. Generally, Ishiguro’s narrative gains a particularly modernist disorientation from the way the two categories of space and time are shown to be interdependent, inseparable facets of the same dimension; from how Euclidean straight lines are bent round into circles. Bergson’s indivisible durée, Proustian memory, Einstein’s cosmos: modernism and modern thought provide one way of understanding how, for example, Ryder can see a burnt-out car which is an old family car from his English childhood, and how the country house is, impossibly, in the city. The collapsing of space and time, which these examples from Kafka and Schulz show to have Central European inflections, is part of what constitutes the characteristic isolation, disorientation, Heideggerian ‘thrownness-into-being’ (Geworfenheit ins Dasein), of the modernist hero – and here, of Ryder.

Rethinking the Kafkan influence Ishiguro did not want The Unconsoled to be interpreted as representing a single society, a limiting ‘social shape’; the carefully wrought nowhere setting disengaged the novel. However, some critics regretted that the



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post-Kafkan allegorical form had been denuded of details and determinants. By comparison, a Marxist critic like Georg Lukács, otherwise critical of Kafka’s nihilistic diagnosis of modernist alienation, has shown how Kakfan detail, though non-realist and of a ‘basically allegorical character’, is locatable within a historical dialectic: What [Kafka] described and ‘demonized’ was not the truly demonic world of Fascism, but the world of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Angst, haunting and indefinable, is perfectly reflected in this vague, ahistorical, timeless world, steeped in the atmosphere of Prague. Kafka profited from his historical position in two ways. On the one hand, his narrative detail gains from being rooted in the Austrian society of that period. On the other hand, the essential unreality of human existence, which it is his aim to convey, can be related to a corresponding sense of unreality and foreboding in the society he knew […] [Kafka’s] wonderfully suggestive descriptive detail points to a transcendent reality, to the anticipated reality – stylized into timelessness – of fully developed imperialism. Kafka’s details are not, as in realism, the nodal points of individual and social life; they are cryptic symbols of an unfathomable transcendence.52 The ‘corresponding sense of unreality and foreboding’: this is the atopian idea of Roth’s ‘empire of signs’, of Musil’s fantastical Kakania, which this book has been defining. To Lukács, the base of Kafka’s society is the surreal nowhere of a moribund Habsburg Central Europe with its labyrinthine imperial bureaucracy; it is more precisely a janiform Czech-German city: in space, neither one place nor another (in the vacuum between empire and nation); in time, caught between Old Europe – dynastic, etiquette-ridden – and New Europe – democratic or demagogic. The aesthetically conceived superstructure – the world of Kafka’s imagination – will consequently seem to be ahistorical, transcendentally allegorical, even though it is to Lukács a ‘perfect’ reflection of a materially unreal society. A very different type of critic, J.P. Stern, has also argued that the stories should not be interpreted as shunning or sealing themselves off from the actual – rather, the Kafkan otherworld is all too associable with the terrifyingly ordinary this-world.53 But is Ishiguro’s novel guilty of Lukács’s barbed comment against epigones of Kafka, those who had ‘later visions of a diabolical, angstinspiring world’ in which the ‘desired ahistorical, timeless image’ was only achieved by fetishising form, and at the expense of social reality?54





The Unconsoled tries to escape history but its form is not, in Lukács’s terms, fetishistically innovative: the example from America shows how Ishiguro’s narrative replicates the spatio-temporal distortions of a modernist poetics. The way narrative and language are mutually constitutive may be said to be an example of how the novel is like a Kafkan labyrinth in its form. The surreal is reported as objectively ‘real’ with linguistic formality: the limited palette of either Kafka’s bureaucratic German (the deterritorialised officialese of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’), or the buttoned-up, non-vernacular English which has come to be associated with Ishiguro’s narrators. Fabulist elements are starkly conspicuous precisely because they do not emerge from polyphonic exuberance, from the Joycean carnivalesque of the word. As Michael Wood has written, the novel is ‘beautifully controlled, even-paced, deadpan in spite of all extravagances’; its ‘determined equanimity of tone makes you drowsy’.55 This colourlessness is matched by an unremittingly circuitous mode of speech which, wearing the reader down, is connected to the narrative structure as a whole. Ryder is waylaid by storytellers whose invariable long-windedness further slows him – and the syntagmatic narrative – down. The Castle is the same: K. is never able to reach his destination but has to hear out a lot of interlocutors: this is, in Kundera’s phrase, the ‘boundless labyrinth’ not only of a depersonalised, totalitarianist bureaucracy (of totalitarian power) but also of the decentred, deferred narrative itself.56 The Unconsoled engineers a point of particular exasperation when such sustained importunacy not only describes how an emotional rapprochement has been impeded (between Stephan and his parents, Gustav and his daughter, Brodsky and Miss Collins) but in its very slowness is responsible for Ryder’s irrevocable breakdown. There is, in Russian Formalist terms, a deceleration or retardation effect; long conversations, like labyrinth walls and wrong turnings, obstruct linearity. The limited cast of characters is wheeled out to frustrate Ryder in his missions, to add another digressive narrative unit. A formulation in Russian Formalism, where a is equivalent to the narrative ‘content’, is ‘a ⫹ (a ⫹ a) ⫹ / a ⫹ (a ⫹ a) / ⫹ etc’: that is, ‘the form creates content for itself’.57 The schematic repeating structure of the novel is the narrative counterpart of the by-now recognisably Ishiguran voice – and if both grate, that is part of the intended nightmarish accretion which the reader, like Ryder, experiences. If we think of Kafka’s novels rather than his crystalline parables or short stories, there is a similar formal interdependence of blankly non-figurative voice and digressive structure.



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With its Kafkan meta-language, The Unconsoled borrows its setting from a second-hand literary-cultural map. It reaches back dimly, at one stage removed, to Central and Eastern Europe – through being the form of a labyrinthine form. The novel inherits (and thus does not need to spell out) that abolition of the boundary between the public and private which is totalitarian and thus prophetic in Kafka.58 The claustrophobia of hotel corridors, obstructed streets and circular buildings has, as its vaguely intimated backdrop, a strangely international though parochial space, full of Germanic and Slavic characters. Physical, political and narrative space is combined in The Unconsoled to give us the belated or postKafkan. Critics of the novel have not seen the mutuality of these ideas of labyrinthine space – the surreal physics of dream or fantasy, the miscegenated, landlocked European backdrop, the circuitous narrative structure. Kafka’s Central Europe is a signified of aesthetic space which haunts the text, though does not ground it mimetically. To ignore that ‘scent of Middle Europe in the atmosphere’ is to detract from the novel. Ishiguro said that ‘international books are rooted in a very small space’ – that the allegorical book of the widest possible appeal pushes for, but in the end can never quite reach, a kind of consensual or global homogeneity.59 One type of small space is the small nation, defined by Kundera as ‘one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment’ – as a country that can disappear and knows it.60 It is not so unhelpful, then, to think of The Unconsoled as ‘rooted’ in a Central European city overrun by big neighbours who are responsible for a nightmarish World History. Alternatively, we might prefer to view the citizens of the unnamed city as more complicit, guiltily repressing a mitteleuropäisch History for which they themselves feel accountable. Either way, historicising the outwardly ahistorical in this way protects the novel from charges that it is utterly detached from social and political determinants, or that it has nothing to say about history. Ishiguro took off from the mimetic into the pure realm of the metaphorical, and in doing so fell back to earth – somewhere between Berlin and Budapest. The very unmaking of its realist setting intensifies the Central European-ness of the novel. Ishiguro has gathered an impossibly pan-European congeries in one place, but Kundera has shown us that ‘the greatest variety within the smallest space’ is a Central European norm. The Unconsoled inherits a Central European nowhere that this book has shown to have a distinctive aesthetic tradition. It is a setting where microcosmic border cities, lacking recognisably contiguous hinterlands, are both excessively named and unnamable; they




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Notes 1. Dylan Otto Krider, ‘Rooted in a Small Space: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Kenyon Review, 20 (1998) 146–54 (p. 148). 2. See Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 173. 3. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 98. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 4. See Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger, ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mississippi Review, 20 (1991) 131–54, p. 138. 5. Ibid., p. 141. 6. Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 70. 7. Ibid., p. 68. 8. Krider, ‘Rooted in a Small Space’, p. 151. 9. Barry Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 77–8. 10. See Mike Petry, Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 129. 11. Barry Lewis refers to ‘an unnamed town, somewhere in the heart of Europe’: Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 104; Brian W. Shaffer refers to an ‘unidentified but apparently middle European city’: Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), p. 92; James Wood to ‘a nameless Central European town’: ‘Ishiguro in the Underworld’, Guardian (5 May 1996), p. 5; Stephen Benson to ‘an unnamed central European city’, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 143; Brooke Allen to ‘a small and obscure city somewhere in Central Europe’, ‘Leaving behind Daydreams for Nightmares’, Wall Street Journal (11 October 1995), p. 12. Mark Wormald thinks of ‘a more or less contemporary central European city’, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro and the Work of Art’, in Contemporary Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 234. Richard Eder refers to ‘a nameless European city, German or Swiss in feeling’, ‘Meandering in a Dreamscape’, Los Angeles Times Book Review (8 October 1995), pp. 3–7. Mike Petry observes that the reader conjures up ‘images of German or Scandinavian cities’ and that ‘the extraordinary atmosphere […] has similarities with that of Vienna, Budapest (there is, for example, much talk of coffee-houses and of an “Hungarian Café”), or, indeed, with Kafka’s hometown Prague’: Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 128. 12. Erich Heller, Kafka (London: Fontana, 1974), p. 81. 13. Cynthia F. Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), p. 67. 14. Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Unlike Kafka’, London Review of Books (8 June 1995), pp. 30–1. 15. James Wood, ‘Ishiguro in the Underworld’, Guardian (5 May 1996) p. 5. 16. To Michael Wood, Ishiguro’s work lacks the ‘pressure of the Kafkaesque parable’: ‘Ryder’s acquiescence strips the novel of the metaphysical pressure



are provisional places where people merge into one another and where narratives are truncated or distended. Such places are, in short, like the over-determined space of dreams.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

177

that would make it into real parable rather than confusing dream’ (quoted in Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 125). Kauffmann, quoted in Shaffer, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 91. Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, pp. 124–5. Merle Rubin, ‘Probing the Plight of Lives “Trapped” in Others’ Expectations’, Christian Science Monitor, 87 (4 October 1995), p. 14. Stanley Kauffmann, ‘The Floating World’, The New Republic, 213:19 (6 November 1995), pp. 42–5. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 141–8 (p. 145). Ibid., ‘The Reality Effect’, p. 145. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 147. Vorda and Herzinger, ‘Interview’, p. 149. Krider, ‘Rooted in a Small Space’, p. 149. Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 144. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Vintage: 1998), p. 76. Mrs Tilkowski is a revered piano teacher (p. 71). Dr Lubanski, Christoff’s former friend, is a voice of musicological sedition (p. 194). The art exhibition takes place at the Karwinsky gallery (p. 226). Ryder is an avatar of visiting performers such as the exacting Igor Kobyliansky (p. 251) and the more easy-going Jan Piotrowski (p. 350); Mrs Hoffman keeps an album on Kosminsky (p. 506). The renowned Kazimierz Studzinski (p. 99) taught Christoff. Michael Wood, Children of Silence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 177. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 177. Kundera, ‘A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out’, Granta, 11 (1984) p. 108. Ibid., p. 106. Benson, Literary Music, p. 155. West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, p. 123. Byron quoted in Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 34. Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper, trans. Leigh Hafrey (London: Penguin, 2005). Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 248, 253; Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London and Boston: Faber and Faber), 1988, p. 135. See Austin Warren, ‘Franz Kafka’, in Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, Ronald Gray, ed. (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963): ‘Even Kafka’s imagined America is not a land of broad cornfields shining in the sun but a chiefly metropolitan affair, already stratified, weary and hopeless – a land of hotels and slums’, p. 123. Franz Kafka, The Complete Novels: The Trial, America, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 166. Ibid., p. 172.





43. Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers, trans. Richard Howard (London: Calder and Boyars, 1964), p. 13. 44. Bruno Schulz, ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass’, in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska (London: Picador, 1980), p. 120. 45. Ibid., p. 116. 46. Ibid., p. 125. 47. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 32. 48. Shaffer also relates the uncanny to The Unconsoled, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, pp. 98–100. 49. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 217–56 (p. 237): Freud tells of getting lost in, and endlessly circling, the prostitute district of an Italian provincial town. 50. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 27. 51. Schulz, ‘Sanatorium’, p. 140. 52. Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, pp. 77–8. 53. J.P. Stern, On Realism (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 136. 54. Lukács, Contemporary Realism, p. 78. 55. Michael Wood, Children of Silence, pp. 175–6. 56. Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p. 107. 57. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, eds, Russian Formalism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academy Press, 1973), pp. 56, 59. 58. See Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p. 110. 59. Ishiguro in Krider, ‘Rooted in a Small Space’, p. 154. 60. Kundera, ‘A Kidnapped West’, p. 108.



178

1900

Riga

SWEDEN DENMARK

Vilna Königsberg Maladzyechna Danzig Stettin NETHERLANDS

GERMAN EMPIRE

Minsk

RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Berlin

Warsaw

Frankfurt-an-der-Oder Lublin

Breslau

Luts'k Brody

Prague

LUXEMBOURG

Brünn

Metz

Lemberg

Crakow

Vienna

Strassburg FRANCE

Pozsony Budapest

Zürich SWITZERLAND

AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE Laibach Görz

ITALY

Trieste

Agram

Bucharest

ROMANIA

Belgrade Zara

Sarajevo

SERBIA BULGARIA

Spalato

Sofia

MONTENEGRO

OTTOMAN EMPIRE Salonica

Smyrna

GREECE

TUNISIA GEL 2007

Map I: Central and Eastern Europe in 1900

179



Appendix: Maps


Riga

SWEDEN DENMARK

1925

LATVIA

LITHUANIA FREE CITY OF DANZIG

Wilno

Königsberg Danzig

Mo odeczno

GERMANY

Minsk

Stettin Berlin

NETHERLANDS

Frankfurt-an-der-Oder

GERMANY

Luck

POLAND

Brody

Crakow

Prague

, L wów

Brno

CZECHOSLOVAKIA Vienna

Bratislava Budapest

AUSTRIA

Zürich

Brzesc

Lublin Breslau

BELGIUM LUXEMBOURG SAAR Metz Strasbourg FRANCE

USSR

Warsaw

HUNGARY

SWITZERLAND

ROMANIA

Ljubljana Gorizia

ITALY

Trieste

Zagreb Zara (It) Sarajevo Split

Bucharest

Belgrade KINGDOM OF THE SERBS, CROATS AND SLOVENES

BULGARIA Sofia

Thessaloniki ALBANIA

TURKEY

GREECE Izmir

TUNISIA GEL 2003

Map II: Central and Eastern Europe in 1925



180

1954

Riga

SWEDEN

181

DENMARK

Vilna Kaliningrad , G dansk East & Szczecin West Berlin POLAND

NETHERLANDS

Maladzyechna

BELGIUM LUXEMBOURG

USSR

Warsaw

Frankfurt-an-der-Oder

E GERMANY

Brest

Lublin

, Luts k

Wroclaw

Metz

Brody

Crakow

Prague

Minsk

, L vov

Brno

W GERMANY

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Strasbourg FRANCE

Vienna

Bratislava Budapest

Zürich SWITZERLAND

AUSTRIA

HUNGARY

ROMANIA

Ljubljana Gorizia

ITALY

Zagreb Free City of Trieste Zadar

Bucharest

Belgrade Sarajevo Split

BULGARIA

YUGOSLAVIA

Sofia

Thessaloniki ALBANIA

TURKEY

GREECE Izmir

TUNISIA GEL 2003

Map III: Central and Eastern Europe in 1954



Appendix: Maps

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Ahmad, Aijaz, 36, 39 n.77 Alexander, King of Yugoslavia, 100, 117 Allcock, John B., 102, 123 n.4, n.12, n.14, 124 n.31, 126 n.56 allegory, 3, 9, 89, 130, 159, 162–163, 173, 175 Allen, Brooke, 176 n.11 Altenberg, Peter, 93 n.15 Améry, Jean, 93 n.15 Amis, Martin, 115 Anderson, Benedict, 1, 113 n.1, 80, 97 n.60 Andric, Ivo, 41, 60 n.6 Anglesey, Marquess, 152 n.10 Anschluß, 68, 71, 86, 89, 98 n.83, 144 Anspaugh, Kelly, 152 n.7 anti-history, 40, 59 n.1 apolide, 4, 43, 72 aporia, 33, 48 Appadurai, Arjun, 10, 16, 29, 30, 39 ns.58–61, n.63 Aristotle, 125 n.50, 157, 176 n.6 Armenia, 147–48, 155 n.44 Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal), 114, 148 Atherton, J.S., 153 n.20 atopia, 1, 6, 7, 10, 12, 34–35, 43, 59, 66–71, 102–04, 121, 162, 173 Attridge, Derek, 15 n.39, 131, 152 n.11, 153 n.16, n.18 Auden, W.H., 126 n.65, 149 Ausgleich, 69 Austria, 1, 2, 4, 10, 35, 50–53, 56–57, 59 n.4, 60 n.24, 63 n.46, n.56, n.58, 66–99, 100–101, 104, 106–07, 109–12, 114–16, 121, 124 n.29, n.32, n.36, n.37, 126 n.55, n.66, 128–29, 140, 149, 155 n.47, 158, 173, see also Austro-Hungarian Empire Austro-Hungarian Empire, 3, 11, 40, 50–52, 63 n.51, 66–67, 69, 73, 75, 79, 87, 92 n.2, 105–06, see also Austria

A Wake Newslitter, 149, 153 n.19, n.22, 155 n.48 Bachelard, Gaston, 34 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7–8, 28, 39 ns.53–54, 168 Balkanism, 102–03 Balkans, 5–6, 13 n.6, 102–04, 108, 122 n.1, 123 n.9, n.13, 124 n.39 Balzac, Honoré de, 8, 43 Bann, Stephen, 178 n.57 Barthes, Roland, 6, 12, 14, 74, 82, 94, 97, 160–61, 170, 177, 178; Elements of Semiology, 74, 94 n.35; A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 6, 14 n.29; The Pleasure of the Text, 6, 14 n.30, 82, 97 n.65; ‘The Reality Effect’, 12, 160–61, 177 ns.21–24; Writing Degree Zero, 170, 178 n.47 Bashi-bazouks, 146 Beckett, Samuel, 44, 59, 61 n.26, 130–31, 152 n.2 Beckman, Richard, 130, 152 n.9 being-in-place (Heidegger), 10, 16–18, 24, 26–29 Belgrade, 12, 116–20, 125 n.52, 149 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 17, 32, 36, 39 n.64, 90, 99 n.103 Benson, Stephen, 165, 176 n.11, 177 n.35 Benstock, Bernard, 141, 153 n.22, 154 n.33, n.35 Bergson, Henri, 42, 172 Beria, Lavrenti P., 150 Bering Strait, 31 Berlin, 78, 92 n.2, 118, 125 n.51, 126 n.57, 167, 175 Berlin Wall, 9, 13, 31, 166–67 Bettiza, Enzo, 4, 14 ns.14–15, n.18, 72, 106

191



Index

Index

Beug, Joachim, 88, 99 n.94 ‘beyondness’, 21–22, 36, 72 Bhabha, Homi K., 10, 16, 20–22, 26–27, 37, 37 n.19, 38 ns.20–22, ns.24–26, 39 n.80, 72, 102, 123 n.15 Bildungsroman, 8 Bobrikov, Nikolai Ivanovich, 143 Bohemia, 69, 76, 80, 82, 137 Boland, Rosita, 26 border, see border place, border space, borderland, borderlessness, borderline, boundary, frontier, Grenze, margin/marginality border place, 10, 16, 19, 32, 36–37, 66, 82, 86 border space, 1, 18, 36, 43, 102–03, 110 borderland, 2, 3, 31, 45, 58, 71–72, 76, 85, 93, 102, 140, 144–45, 148, 160 borderlessness, 10, 22, 24, 29, 35–36, 56, 89, 112 borderline, 3, 8, 21, 31, 71–72 Borges, Jorge Luis, 33, 62 n.43, 82 Bosnia (Bosnia-Hercegovina/ Herzegovina), 30, 63 n.51, 73, 76, 80, 94 n.32, 96 n.56, 100, 105, 113–15, 124 n.40 boundary, 8, 12, 17, 21, 26–27, 36, 102, 175 Bowlt, John E., 178 n.57 Breslau, see WrocAaw Broch, Hermann, 70, 90, 93 n.15, 99 n.106, 167 Brody, 11, 25, 66, 77, 81, 83, 85, 90, 96 n.56 Bronsen, David, 90, 99 n.102, n.105, n.106 Bruno, Giordano, 61 n.26, 133–34 ‘Buckley and the Russian General’ (Joyce, Finnegans Wake), 12, 128–55, 163 Buckley, Donal (Governor-General of Ireland), 143–44 Burke, Edmund, 106, 133 Butt and Taff, 12, 129–31, 133–35, 137–42, 145–48, 151–52, 154 n.29, n.41, 155 n.42

Butt, Isaac, 146, 155 n.42 Byzantium/Byzantine/ Serbo-Byzantine, 3, 5, 11, 58, 107–09, 112, 119 Cacciaglia, N., 60 n.8, n.14, 62 n.34 Calvino, Italo, 113–14, 116, 125 n.47, 167 Camerino, Giuseppe Antonio, 41, 60 n.8 Caporetto retreat, 52–53, 56 Capuchin crypt, 68, 84 Carey, John, 5, 56, 64 n.70 Carroll, Lewis, 165, 169 cartography, 7–8, 12, 31, 104–05, 158 Central Europe, 2–3, 5, 12–13, 26, 35, 40–43, 68–69, 91, 107, 128, 135, 137, 156–78, see also Mitteleuropa Cerneca, Domenico, 47, 62 n.34 Chabrinovitch, 124 n.37 Chamberlain, Neville, 112 Chambers, Helen, 73, 76, 82, 74 n.30, n.44, 97 n.64, 99 n.94 Chaudhuri, Amit, 159, 161, 164, 176 n.14 CheKa, 135–36 Chojnicki, Count (character in Roth’s fiction), 70, 76, 79, 83, 89 Chotek, Countess Sophie, 114 Christie, Agatha, 5, 170 chronotope, 7–8, 28, 90, 168 Churchill, Sir Winston, 116, 152, 155 n.54 Cleary, Joe, 8–9, 14 n.34, n.38, 22, 24, 38 n.35 Clifford, James, 10, 17, 30–32, 39 n.62, 104 Coetzee, J.M., 42, 47, 60 n.17, 62 n.35, n.38 Cohen, Saul B., 154 n.30 Cold War, 9, 12, 13, 18, 31, 144, 152, 162–63, 165, 167 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 8 Conrad, Joseph, 88, 99 n.93 Constantine (character in Black Lamb), 11, 126 n.61, n.66 ‘contact zones’ (Pratt), 26, 38 n.44



192

contiguity, 11, 28, 35, 67, 73–74, 76–77, 132, 175, see also metonymy, synecdoche Corpus Christi procession, 73, 88 Cosini, Zeno (character in Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno), 10, 26, 40–65, 72, 166, see also Svevo cosmopolitanism, 2–4, 23, 30, 38 n.41, 41, 54, 59, 83, 160 Crakow, 76, 80 Cretan Liar paradox, 48 Crimea, 12, 129–30, 132–35, 137–38, 140–42, 144–52, 154, 163 Crimean War, 12, 129–30, 132, 134, 137, 140, 145, 147–49, 151, 152 n.11, 154 n.27, n.31 Croatia, 4, 80, 96 n.52, 100, 105, 109–10, 120–21, 124 n.36, 126 n.66, 128, 166 Cronin, Michael, 16, 22–26, 38 ns.28–33, n.41 Crown Lands (Kronländern), 67, 76–77, 86, 93 n.10, 94 n.33, 95 n.46, 99 n.99 Czechoslovakia, 1, 100–01, 127 n.66, 135–37, 143, 167 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 47, 58, 124 n.35 Dabrowska, Maria, 14 n.26 Dalmatia, 2, 61 n.24, 80, 100, 105–06 Danzig/Danzig Corridor, 25, 136–37, 140, 149, 151, 154, 163, 166 Daviau, Donald G., 97 n.73 Davies, Norman, 13 n.7, 14 ns.23–26, 92 n.1 Deane, Seamus, 23–24, 38 n.34, 152 n.1 death-drive, 12, 107, 120 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 59, 65 n.87, 174 Derrida, Jacques, 153 n.21 deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), 2, 7, 11, 29, 31, 36, 59, 70, 121, 174 dialect (dialetto), 10, 43–45, 47–48, 51, 57–58, 61 ns.26–27, 29, 62 n.34, 64 n.75 diaspora, 5, 16, 22, 29–31, 38 n.38, 70 Dickens, Charles, 8, 43

difference, 19, 21–23, 25–26, 29, 32–33, 36, 39 ns.58–59, 59 n.1, 67, 72, 77, 83, 92 n.1, 102–03, 152 n.11, 158 différance, 23, 25 diversity, 22–24, 33, 79–83, 162 Doppler, Alfred, 86, 88, 98 n.82–84, 99 ns.91–92 Double eagle, 70, 75, 78, 84, 87–88, 93 n.10 Dual Monarchy, 11, 69, 84, 90, 94 n.43 Dublin, 59, 115, 128, 138–39, 141 Duncan, James, 125 n.53, 126 n.60 durée (Bergson), 42, 49, 172 During, Simon, 39 n.58 Dushan, Stephen, 117, 119, 124 n.37 Dyer, Geoff, 121, 126 n.65 dystopia, 7, 55 Eagleton, Terry, 5, 7 Eco, Umberto, 150, 155 n.49 Eder, Richard, 176 n.11 Einstein, Albert, 169, 172 Elden, Stuart, 29, 37 n.1, 38 n.48, 39 n.51, n.57 Eliot, T.S., 73, 91, 94 n.31, 109, 125 n.42, 151, 155 n.53; Four Quartets, 151, 155 n.53; Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 109, 125 n.42; ‘objective correlative’, 8, 104, 13; ‘The Waste Land’, 91, 94 n.31 Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, 126 Ellmann, Richard, 60 n.18, 64 n.71, 129–30, 152 ns.4–6, n.8 empire, 1, 3, 4, 6, 11–12, 21, 26, 30, 36, 49, 51–52, 63 n.51, 66–99, 100–01, 105–14, 117–18, 122, 124 n.29, 127 n.66, 130, 132, 140–45, 147, 152, 156, 173, see also imperialism Erewhon (Samuel Butler), 103 Erzurum, 147 Europolis, 3, 13 n.7, 165 exile, 5, 36, 42, 71, 79, 89–90, 92 n.2, 97 n.73, 11, 122, 125 n.52, 128, 151–52 extraterritorial, 43, 60 n.22, 128, 152 n.2



Index 193

Index

Fava Guzzetta, L., 60 n.8, n.14, 62 n.34 Fifteenth Hussars, 130, 134 Finland, 100–01, 110, 138, 140, 142–44 First World War, 8, 40, 56, 88–89, 100, 115–16, 119, 130, 143, 155 n.52, 169 Fischer, Ludwig M., 97 n.73 Flaubert, Gustave, 126 n.60, 160–61 Fort Ross, 17, 32, 40 Foster, R.F., 154 n.37 Foucault, Michel, 10, 17, 28, 32–35, 37, 39 n.66, n.68, n.72, n.76, ns.79–80, 73, 80–81, 171, 178 n.50; ‘Of Other Spaces’, 17, 32–35, 39 n.66, n.72, 171, 178 n.50; The Order of Things, 17, 32–35, 39 n.68; ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’, 35, 37, 39 n.76, n.79 France, 4, 35, 72–73, 143, 145, 155 n.52, 158 Francis, Mark, 93 n.7 Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, 135–36, 151 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 83, 114–15 Franz Josef, Emperor, 35, 63 n.53, 67–68, 73, 75–76, 84–85, 90, 107–07, 163 Franzstal, 111–12 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 22, 41, 45, 49, 71, 79, 107, 130, 170–71, 178 n.49 frontier, 3, 6, 7, 21–23, 31, 35, 36, 41, 49, 51, 54, 66, 73, 88, 90, 102–03, 113, 135, 138, 166 Furbank, P.N., 47, 51, 53, 55, 63 n.54, n.59, 64 n.68 Furst, L.R., 63 n.62, 64 n.63, n.75 Fussell, Paul, 120, 126 n.54, n.59, 177 n.37 Galicia, 2, 11, 66–68, 75–78, 80, 82–88, 90, 107, 169 Garton Ash, Timothy, 2, 13 n.14 Gatt-Rutter, John, 62–64 G’dansk, see Danzig Gellner, Ernest, 106, 124 n.33 geopolitics, 12, 17 geopolitical, 5, 6, 12, 30–31, 35, 53, 60, 69, 73, 76, 83, 101, 111, 135, 138, 140–41, 145, 149, 154, 165–66

Gerda (character in West’s Black Lamb), 11–12, 123 n.4, 125–27 Germany, 1, 18, 72, 89, 93 n.9, 110–12, 124 n.38, 125 n.51, 128, 135–36, 149, 153 n.27, 158, 165 Gestapo, 135–37, 149, 155 n.52 Ghosh, Amitav, 31 Gilroy, Paul, 30 Glendinning, Victoria, 124 n.30 Glenny, Misha, 100, 110, 122 n.1, 124 n.38, 125 n.44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 28, 163 Goldsworthy, Vesna, 5–6, 14 n.27, 102–03, 123 ns.9, 17, 25 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 22 Gorizia, 50, 52–53, 166, see also Nova Gorica Grass, Günter, 163, 177 n.28 Gregory, Derek, 125 n.53, 126 n.60 Grenze, 11, 16, 26, 66, 71–72, 93 n.21, n.26, 94 n.27, n.29, 97 n.64, 98 n.76, see also cognates of border Guagnini, Elvio, 42, 60 n.14 Guattari, Félix, 11, 59, 65 n.87, 174 Habsburg empire, see Austria, Austro–Hungarian Empire Hackert, Fritz, 95 n.47, n.49, 98 n.82 Hall, Stuart, 25, 38 n.38 Halper, Nathan, 150, 155 n.48 Handke, Peter, 93 n.15 Hardy, Thomas, 88 Hart, Clive, 132, 142, 144, 153 n.14, 154 n.34 Harvey, David, 10, 16, 18–19, 30, 31, 37 n.6 Hašek, Jaroslav, 51, 70, 84, 97 n.72 Hayman, David, 147 n.23, 153 n.43, 155 Heer, Friedrich, 70 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 16–23, 26–29, 34, 36, 37 ns.2–4, 38 n.45, n.49, 39 n.52, n.55, 172 Heller, Erich, 158, 176 n.12 Heller, Joseph, 62 n.41 Hemingway, Ernest, 52 Herzinger, Kim, 176 n.4, 177 n.25 Herzl, Theodor, 70 Hesse, Hermann, 91



194

heterotopia, 10, 17, 26, 28, 32–35, 66, 77, 80, 81, 87, 101, 162 Hobson, J.A., 105 Hodgart, M.J.C., 133, 153 n.20 Hofheinz, Thomas, 149, 154, 155 ns.46–47 Hohenzollern dynasty, 125 n.51, 128 Holland, 72 homo austriacus, 4, 78, 106, see also Bettiza Howes, Marjorie, 15 n.39 Hughes, Jon, 5, 92 n.2 Hungary, 1, 69, 72, 80, 96 n.52, 124 n.29, n.36, 158 hybridity, 15 n.39, 20–21, 27, 60 n.24, 72, 101, 107, 123 n.8, 145, 148, 149, 158, 167 Ibsen, Henrik, 41, 138 Illyria, 5, 80, 105 imperialism, 9, 14 n.27, 24, 105, 109, 173, see also empire in-between-ness, 16, 20, 21, 27, 72, 102, 172, see also hybridity Ireland, 12, 14 n.34, 24, 26, 129–30, 134, 138, 141–422, 154 n.37, 155 n.42 Iron Curtain, 1, 13, 152, 166 irredentism, 2, 4, 56–58, 61 n.24, 63 n.58 Isherwood, Christopher, 118, 126 n.57 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 12–13, 156–178 The Unconsoled, 12–13, 156–78; A Pale View of Hills, 156–57, 164–65, 176 n.2; The Remains of the Day, 156 Isonzo, 52, 53 Italy, 10, 11, 40–41, 43, 49–54, 56–58, 60 n.7, n.18, n.20, 61 n.26, n.33, 63 n.46, n.49, 64 n.75, 110, 124 n.38, 158, 166 Jakobson, Roman, 73–74 Jakubek, Eva Maria, 14 n.24 Japan, 156, 159, 163, 164 Jarry, Alfred, 4, 14 ns.19–22 Jaspers, Karl, 71, 93 n.22 Jászi, Oscar, 97 n.60

Jewishness, Jewry, Jews, 11, 31, 40, 66–71, 77, 80–81, 84, 86–91, 92 n.2, 93 ns.11–12, 98 n.88, 99 n.102, 121, 124 n.40, 127 n.66, 128–29, 140, 164, see also Herzl, Zionism Johnston, Otto W., 84, 89, 92 n.2, 97 n.73, 98 ns.74–75 Joyce, James, 12, 15 n.39, 42, 43, 47, 56–57, 59, 60 n.18, n.21, 61 n.26, 64 ns.71–72, 81–82, 97 n.62, 103, 125 n.49, 128–55, 174; Giacomo Joyce, 56, 64 n.71, Finnegans Wake, 9, 12, 15 n.39, 34, 44, 61 n.26, 103, 128–55; ‘Fragment from Work in Progress: Part II, Section 3’, transition, 153 n.15; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 42; Ulysses, 39 n.78, 56, 64 n.72, 81, 97 n.62, 115, 125 ns.49–50, 132,143, 154 n.36 Joyce, John, 146 Kafka, Franz, 11–13, 41, 59, 60 n.6, 65 n.87, 70, 91, 93 n.15, 158–59, 165, 167–68, 172–75, 176 ns.11–12, n.14, n.16, 177 ns.40–41 Kakania, 3, 4, 13 n.12, 69, 85, 91, 106, 173 Karst, 52, 110 Katowice, 72, 93 n.26 Kauffmann, Stanley, 159–60, 164, 177 n.17, n.20 Kessler, Michael, 95, 98 Kime Scott, Bonnie, 111, 123 n.7, 124 n.31, 125 n.45 kitsch, 12, 159, 165, 167 KAan´ska, Maria, 77, 86–87, 95 n.49, 96 n.58, 97 n.63, 98 n.79 Klíma, Ivan, 153 n.26 Korda, Sir Alexander, 166 Kosovo, 112, 115, 122 Kossuth, Lajos, 126 n.66 Krider, Dylan Otto, 176 n.1, n.8, 177 n.26, n.59 Kristeva, Julia, 71, 93 n.14, 171



Index 195

Index

Kundera, Milan, 2–3, 13 n.3, n.8, 26, 38 n.43, 102, 165, 167, 174–75, 177 n.33, n.39, 178 n.56, n.58, n.60; The Art of the Novel, 167, 174–75, 177 n.39, 178 n.56, n.58; ‘A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out’, 2, 8, 13 n.8, 26, 38n.43, 165, 175, 177 n.33, 178 n.60; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 167, 177 n.39 Kunze, Heinz–Rudolf, 14 n.25 labyrinth, 12, 62 n.43, 165–75 Lavagetto, M., 48, 62 n.40 Lawrence–Zúñiga, Denise, 39 n.61 Le Carré, John, 166 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 154 n.41 League of Nations, 1, 54, 101, 136 Lebowitz, Naomi, 41, 46, 49, 58, 60 n.10, 61 n.32, 65 n.81 Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 20, 34, 37 Lemberg (L’wów/L’vov/L’viv), 2, 35, 66, 83 Lewis, Barry, 159, 163, 165, 176 n.9, n.11, n.16, 177 n.18, n.27 liminality, 16, 21, 22, 26, 29, 102 lists, 11, 67–68, 77–83 literary geography, 7–9 Ljubljana, 110, 138 Localität, 17, 18, 28–29, see also Ort, ‘platial’ Lodge, David, 73–74, 74 n.34, ns.37–38, n.40 Lopatyny (Roth, ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’), 68, 78, 83–84, 96 n.56 Low, Setha M., 39 n.61 Lublin, 138–41, 151 Lucan, Earl of, 130, 134 Luccheni (assassin), 126 n.55 Lucinico, 50, 53, see also Gorizia, Nova Gorica, Trieste Lukács, Georg, 13, 41–42, 60 n.6, n.19, 77, 91, 95 n.47, 99 n.109, 173–74, 178 n.52, n.54 Luts’k, 140 MacCabe, Colin, 153 n.13 Macedonia, 105, 109, 117, 120–21, 125 n.46, 126 n.60, n.66

Mackay, Marina, 104, 123 n.11, n.27 Macmillan, Margaret, 95 n.44 magic realism, 58 Magris, Claudio, 2, 13 n.5, 22, 38 n.27, 40–41, 59 n.2, 60 n.7, 107 Maier, Bruno, 67, 59 n.5, 64 n.75 Mamelukes, 51, 63 n.51 Mandelbrot, Benoît B., 25 Manger, Philip, 89, 93 ns.7–8, 99 n.95 Mann, Thomas, 55, 63 n.62, 64 n.75, 123 n.16 Márai, Sándor, 70 margin/marginality, 8, 16, 19–21, 37 ns.18–19, 38 n.41, 67, 77, 102 Maria Theresa, Empress, 111 Marks, Dennis, 13 n.2, 83, 97 n.71 McCarthy, Kevin M., 145, 148, 154 n.40, 155 n.45 McCourt, John, 60 n.21, 152 n.3 McHale, Brian, 74, 94 n.39 McHugh, Roland, 153 n.22, 155 n.47 McLeod, John, 20, 37 n.15, 38 n.23 Menhennet, Alan, 97 n.72 metaphor, 2, 5, 7, 8, 22, 26, 31, 35–37, 40, 52, 56, 71, 73–76, 87, 93 n.21, 94 n.34, 102, 104–07, 113–14, 133, 137, 153 n.20, 156–57, 160–61, 166, 175 metonymy, 35, 67–68, 73–77, 81–82, 85, 94 n.34, 95 n.50, 97 n.64, 114, see also contiguity, synecdoche metropolis, 22, 66, 68, 73, 75–76, 83, 91, 110, 117, 177 n.40 Metternich, Prince Klemens Wenzel von, 68, 163 Metz, 71 Mexico, 32, 124 n.34, n.39, see also US/Mexico border microcosm, 3, 13 n.5, n.7, 14 n.23, 38 n.27, 40–41, 59 n.2, 92 n.1, 113, 120, 129, 175 Middle Europe, see Central Europe Mihailovic, General Drazha, 121 mimesis, 5, 8, 11, 12, 31, 43, 46, 77, 82, 85, 104, 108, 160–62, 175 ‘minor literature’, see also Deleuze and Guattari, 11, 59, 65 n.87, 174 Minsk, 140–41



196

Mitteleuropa, 3, 26, 41, 59, 60 n.6, n.8, 76, 77, 107, 110–11, 114, 129, 137, 157, 162–63, 165, 171, 175, see also Central Europe Möbius strip, 4, 172 modernism, 10, 13, 19, 37 n.5, 42, 57, 59, 91, 99 ns.108–109, 123 n.7, 124 n.31, 125 n.45, 151, 164, 168, 172 modernity, 8, 37 n.5, n.13, 39 n.71, 58, 76, 91, 92 n.2, 131 MoAodeczno, 140, 154 n.31 Moloney, Brian, 46, 49, 52–55, 61 n.25, ns.30–31, n.33, 62 n.45, 63 n.55, ns.57–58, 64 n.62, ns.64–65, n.69 Mongia, Padmini, 20, 37 ns.17–18, 38 n.36–38, 39 n.77 Montale, Eugenio, 11, 41–43, 57–58, 60 ns.11–12, n.20, 64 ns.78–79, 65 n.80, n.85 Montefiore, Janet, 102–04, 108, 11, 123 n.8, n.10, n.22, 124 n.28, n.40, 125 n.46, 126 n.61 Montenegro, 100 Moorhouse, Roger, 13 n.7, 14 n.23, ns.24–26, 92 n.1 Moravia, 73, 75, 80 Moretti, Franco, 7–8, 14 n.32, n.33, 57, 58, 64 n.73, 65 n.83 Morris, Jan, 4, 14 n.13, 40, 59 n.2 Morstin, Count (character in Roth’s ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’), 68, 77, 79, 83–85, 96 n.55, n.56, 98 ns.74–75 Munich Pact, 136, 149 Musil, Robert, 3–4, 13 n.10, 14 n.15, 41, 60 n.61, 69–70, 83, 91, 92 n.5, n.6, 97 n.70, 106, 173 Nabokov, Vladimir, 6, 14 n.28, 152 n.2 Nacheinander, 28, see also Nebeneinander Nagasaki, 164 Napoleon, 105, 127 n.66 nation, see nation state, nationalism, nationality, transnationality

nation state, 1, 7, 8, 10, 14 n.34, 18, 30, 38 n.35, 44, 68, 69, 73, 91, 101, 114, 117, 120, 122, 124 n.38 nationalism, 13, 18, 28, 38 n.34, 70, 97 n.60, 105–06, 122 n.1, 124 n.33, n.38, 127 n.66 nationality, 2, 7, 69–70, 72, 74, 79, 118, 121, 142 Nebeneinander, 28, see also Nacheinander Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47, 163 Nightingale, Florence, 12, 148 NKVD, 135 Nolan, Captain L.E., 130, 134 Norris, Margot, 130, 152 n.9 Northern Ireland, 8 nostalgia, 4, 5, 25, 56, 68, 80, 86, 91, 98 n.82 Nova Gorica, 50, 166, see also Gorizia novel of ideas, 58 nowhere, 1–15, 20, 30, 34–35, 40–41, 59 n.2, 67, 70, 72, 120, 122, 156–58, 161, 172–73, 175, see also atopia, heterotopia, placelessness, utopia Nürnberger, Helmuth, 94 n.30 ‘objective correlative’, 8, 104, 163, see Eliot, T.S., Oder–Neisse line, 5, 135 Oedipus, 107, 170 OGPU, 135, 143 Orel, Harold, 123 n.6, 124 n.31 Orientalism, 9, 11, 103, 105, 107 origin, 2, 16, 17, 24–25, 33, 48, 57, 64 n.75, 85, 91, 121, 129, 139 Ort, 17, 24, 27, see also place Ottoman empire, see Turkey, 1, 11, 63 n.51, 105, 106, 108–09, 112–16, 124 n.39, 125 n.52, 128 Ould Sod, 12, 130 Oz, Amos, 8, 9 Pacifici, Sergio, 42, 60 n.16 Palmer, Alan, 154 n.32 paradox, 18, 41, 45, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 62 n.43, 78, 121, 159



Index 197

Index

Paris Peace Conference (1919), 1, 72, 100, 136 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 155 n.42 Parry, Benita, 24, 25, 38 n.36 partition, 1, 5, 8–9, 14 n.38, 18, 24, 30, 31, 36, 38 n.35, 135, 166 periphery/peripheral, 6, 7, 9, 10, 29–30, 41, 44, 48, 58, 66, 70, 76, 77, 80, 89, 93, 103, 132, 141, 168 Petry, Mike, 176 n.10, n.11 Piave, 53 PiAsudski, General Józef, 94 n.45 Pirandello, Luigi, 58, 65 n.84 Pizzi, Katia, 40, 59 n.3 ‘platial’, 16–19, 21–22, 24, 26, 29, 33, 37 n.1, 85, see also spatiality/spatial placelessness, 6, 34–35, 158, 162 Podolia, 80–81 Poland, 1, 2, 4–5, 77, 83, 84, 94 n.45, 96 n.56, 135–37, 140, 143, 153 n.24, 154 n.31 polis, 17, 34, 36, 72 polity, 43, 77–78, 90, 100 Pope, Alexander, 6, 14 n.28, 104 post-colonialism, 11, 20, 24, 26, 29, 108 postmodernism, 24, 94 n.39, 172 post–structuralism, 10, 16–17, 20, 23–26, 33, 37, 71, 134 Pratt, Mary Louise, 38 n.44 Princip, Gavrilo, 114–16 prolepsis, 89, 132, 135, 144, 150 Propp, Vladimir, 7 Prussia, 59, 70, 124 puns, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142, 144, 151 Rab, 109 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 150, 155 n.50 Raum, 17, 27, see also space ‘reality effect’, 12, 160–61, 177 ns.21–22, see also Barthes ‘recursive self-similarity’ (Leibniz), 26, 78 Ricoeur, Paul, 122, 127 n.67 Rijeka/Fiume, 124 n.35, 166 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 11, 58, 65 n.82, n.86, 82, 169–70, 178 n.43

Rollyson, Carl, 124 n.34, n.39, n.41, 126 n.60, 127 n.66 romance-across-the-divide, 8 Romania, 1, 69 Romanov dynasty, 1, 66, 128 Rosenfeld, Sidney, 86, 89, 98 Rosslyn, Felicity, 101, 118, 120, 121, 123 n.4, n.26, 126 n.56, n.62, 127 n.66 Roth, Gerhard, 93 Roth, Joseph, 11, 15 n.40, 26, 34, 35, 66–99, 106–07, 169, 173; ‘Die Büste des Kaisers’ (‘The Bust of the Emperor’), 11, 67–68, 77, 83–84, 92 n.3, 96 n.52, n.53, n.55, 97 n.73, 98 ns.74–75; ‘Erdbeeren’ (‘Strawberries’), 77, 95 n.48; Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews), 70, 93 n.11, n.13; Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb), 11, 67–68, 76, 78, 83, 86–89, 92, 94–99; Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March), 11, 67, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85–90, 92–97, 99 Rouen, 160–61 Roussel, Raymond, 33 Rubin, Merle, 15, 177 n.19 Rumiz, Paolo, 103 Ruritania, 5, 14 n.27, 102–04, 123 n.17 Russia, 3, 6,12, 31–32, 58, 66, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 83, 85, 89, 90, 101, 128–55, see also USSR Russian Formalism, 174, 178 n.57 Ruthenian, 69, 138, see also Ukraine Said, Edward, 9, 20, 105 sameness, 11, 23, 26, 29, 67, 73, 75, 77–79, 119 Sarajevo, 12, 25, 30, 83, 96 n.56, 97 n.72, 109, 112–120, 123 n.6, 124 n.37, n.40, 125 n.51 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 172 Sattler building (Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled), 163 ‘scapes’ (Appadurai), 16, 24, 29 Schächter, Elizabeth, 40–42, 47, 60 n.9, n.15, 62 ns.39–40 Schaurek, Frantisek, 152 n.4



198

Schmitz, Ettore, see Svevo Schneider, Peter, 31, 166, 177 n.38 Schnitzler, Arthur, 91 Schulz, Bruno, 13, 70, 167, 169–72, 178 n.44, n.51 scolorazione (Magris), 107 Scott, Sir Walter, 8 Scythia, 145 Sealsfield, Charles, 93 n.15 Sebald, W.G., 70–71, 88–90, 93 n.13, n.15, ns.18–19, 99 n.90, ns.97–101, n.103, 171 Second World War, 1, 5, 11, 12, 40, 88, 102, 112, 125 n.51, 128, 136, 140, 144, 150, 162, 163, 166 self–determination, 1, 4, 6, 72 ‘semicolonial’, 9, 15, 103, 113, 122, 141, 143 Senn, Fritz, 153 n.14, 154 n.34, n.39 Serbia, 100, 103, 106–08, 111–12, 116–22, 124 ns.37–38, 125 n.46, n.52, 126 n.66 setting, 4, 5, 9, 12, 43, 56, 66, 77, 83, 86, 89, 134, 147, 150, 155 n.52, 156–67, 172, 175 Sevastopol, 134, 137 Shaffer, Brian W., 176 n.11, 177 n.13, 178 n.48 Shakespeare, William, 5, 97 n.61 Shattuck, R., 14 ns.19–21 Shauman, Eugenii, 143 shtetl, 88 Siebenburgen, 111 Sipolje (fictional town in Roth’s fiction), 76, 79, 80, 83, 96 n.54, n.58 Skrabánek, Petr, 133, 135, 153 n.19, n.22, 155 n.47 Slataper, Scipio, 42 Slawinski, Ilona, 93 n.9, n.20 Slovenia, 76–77, 83, 100, 110, 120, 138, 166 Sluga, Glenda, 40, 59 n.1 Smith, Stan, 99 n.108 Socrates, 6 Solferino, 67, 88, 90 South-eastern Europe, 1, 5, 11, 102, 113, 116, 121 Soviet Union, see USSR, Russia

spatiality/spatial, 7, 10, 16–22, 25–26, 28, 32–33, 37 n.1, 39 n.71, 53, 56, 71, 108, 117, 119, 121, 126 n.60, 145, 158, 161, 172, see also ‘platial’ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 20, 37 n.18, 153 n.21 St Petersburg, 141–42 St Vitus’s Day, 115 Stalin, 127 n.66, 152 Starchevitch, 126 n.66 state, see polis, polity, statehood, statelessness, successor states, nation state statehood, 1, 69, 74 statelessness, 7, 9, 24, 70 Steiner, George, 60 n.22, 152 n.2 Stern, J. P., 173, 178 n.53 stilismo, 58 ‘strategic essentialism’, 25 Strelka, Joseph P., 93 n.9, n.20 ‘successor states’, 101, 128 supranationalism, 3, 4, 7, 20, 52, 68, 72, 77, 79, 83, 91, 112 Svevo, Italo, 10–11, 26, 40–65, 66, 70, 72, 166; La coscienza di Zeno, 10–11, 40–65, 72; ‘Profilo autobiografico’, 41, 46, 59 n.5; Senilità, 41; ‘Sulla teoria della pace’, ‘Pace e guerra’ e ‘Sulla guerra’, 54, 63 n.60; Una Vita, 41–42, 60 n.14 Swabia, 40, 58, 59 n.4, 61 n.24, 80, 82, 11 Switzerland/Swiss cantons, 54, 69, 158, 176 n.111 synecdoche, 11, 26, 35, 73–77, 84, 90, 109, 111, 117, 122, 132, 150, see also contiguity, metonymy Taylor, A.J.P., 104, 206, 124 n.29, n.32 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 12, 130, 134 Thacker, Andrew, 19, 34, 36, 37 n.5, n.12, ns.13–14, 39 n.71–72 Thompson, Bruce, 78, 95 n.51 Tilllinghast, Richard, 108 Timms, Edward, 11, 71–72, 89, 93–94 ns.20–29, 99 n.96 Tito, Marshall, 40, 121, 127 n.66



Index 199

Index

Todorova, Maria, 13 n.6, 102–03, 123 n.13, n.18 Tomizza, Fulvio, 40–41, 59 n.2, 60 n.6 toscano, 44–48, 57, 61 n.26, 62 n.29, see also dialect transition, 132, 153 n.15 translocalities, 17, 30 Transylvania, 72–73, 76, 80, 111 travel writing, 26, 101, 103, 111, 125 n.53, 126 n.60 Trebinje, 106 Trianon, Treaty of, 13 n.2, 70, 101, 121, see also Paris Peace Conference Trieste, 4, 10–11, 14 n.13, 25, 40–63, 66, 80, 94 n.43, 128, 152 ns.3–4, 166 Trilling, Lionel, 106 Trotta, Carl Joseph (character in Roth’s Radetzkymarsch), 67, 73, 75–76, 84, 86–88, 94 n.30 Trotta, Franz Ferdinand (character in Roth’s Die Kapuzinergruft), 68, 76, 78, 80, 86–89, 98 n.79, n.82, ns.83–84 Turkey, 101, 108–09, 111, 128, 148, see also Ottoman empire Ukraine, 2, 11, 35, 66, 96 n.56, 138, 140, 154 n.31 ‘under erasure’ (Derrida), 134, 153 n.21, 163 unheimlich, 9, 22, 71, 79, 93 n.13, n.15, n.19, 99 n.97, 170–71 US/Mexico border, 22, 31–32 USSR, 2, 128, 135, 138, 140–41, see also Russia utopia, 7, 17, 23, 30, 33–36, 54, 70, 73, 77, 80, 83, 89, 102, 112, 162 Vanvolsem, Serge, 62 n.34 verisimilitude, 12, 156, 160–61 Versailles, Treaty of, 101, 121, see also Paris Peace Conference Vico, Giambattista, 61 n.26, 133, 151 Vienna, 4, 67–70, 73, 75–76, 83, 88, 92 n.2, 94 n.43, 97 n.70, 126 n.55, 154 n.32, 158, 166, 176 n.11 Vonnegut, Kurt, 115

von Wolzogen, Hanna Delf, 94 n.30 Vorda, Allan, 176 n.4, 177 n.25 Wagner, Richard, 109, 163 Warren, Austin, 74, 94 n.37, 177 n.40 Watson Taylor, S. 14 n.19, n.22 Weiss, Beno, 49, 62 n.42, n.44, 64 n.64 Wellington, Duke of, 154 n.28, n.41 Wendel, Hermann, 71 Werfel, Franz, 69, 84, 93 n.7 West, Rebecca, 11–12, 30, 100–27, 166, 177 n.36; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, 11–12, 100–27, 166, 177 n.36; ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens I’, 125 n.51; ‘Rebecca West’ (interview with Marina Warner), 100–01, 122 n.3 Wilden, Anthony, 62 n.42 Williams, Raymond, 37 n.19 Wilno (Vilna, Vilnius), 3, 140 Wilson, Woodrow, 72 Witze, 47 Wolff, Larry, 102, 123 n.16, 126 n.58 Wong, Cynthia F., 176 n.13 Wood, James, 80, 90, 96 n.59, 97 n.72, 99 n.104, n.107, 159, 176 n.11, n.15 Wood, Michael, 14 n.28, 164–65, 174, 176 n.16, 177 n.30, 178 n.55 Wormald, Mark, 176 n.11 WrocAaw, 5, 13 n.7, 25, 92 n.1 Yalta, Treaty of, 1, 152 Yeats, W.B., 99 n.108, 109, 125 n.43 Young, Antonia, 123 n.4, n.12 Yugoslavia, 1, 11, 40, 100–27, 143 Zagreb, 78, 96 n.52, 109 Zaira (in Calvino’s Invisible Cities), 112, 114 Zembla, 6, 104 Zeno Cosini, 10, 26, 40–65 Zeno of Elea, 26, 48–49, 53, 57, 166 Zionism, 70 Zlotogrod (Roth’s Die Kapuzinergruft), 68, 76, 78, 83, 86–89, 96 n.54, 98 n.79, n.87 Zweig, Arnold, 95 n.47 Zweig, Stefan, 70, 90, 97 n.72



200

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