in or out of Europe
Posted by Gordon on November 10, 2008
In Australia we have been trying to cut our last tie with Europe – our formal adherence to the English monarchy – for 15 years or so. In 1998 we temporarily lost our nerve, ostensibly over a squabble about what kind of republic to become. For a much longer time intellectual traditions on the periphery of Europe have conversely anticipated and often sought some kind of union:
For people like me , who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has figured always as a dream, vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared. … A future but never a memory. (Orhan Pamuk ‘Where is Europe’ Other Colours* 2007 p 190.)
What we share on the other hand is an ‘away from the centre’ consciousness. In an essay about Vargas Lhosa, Pamuk ascribes this, finding no other common bond, to Third World literature:
If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics or social turmoil of the country from which it issues but rather the writer’s awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers* where the history of his art-the art of the novel-is described, and he reflects this distance in his work. What is crucial here is the Third World writer’s sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centers. [... an exile not cured by relocation to] ‘one of the cultural centers of Europe, for the writer’s exile is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.
No well-read Australian can read this without thinking of fifty years of cultural cringe, of writers hiding from, or playing to, their Australian-ness. For only a few Australian writers is it never an issue, an issue worn lightly or otherwise.
* The title is anglicised for the Australian edition but not the spelling inside..
