Notes
The Literary Channel uses la manche, a body of water, as a figurative model for Anglo-Continental literary relations in the period coinciding roughly with the historic “rise of the novel” (1750–1850). In establishing important links between gender and genre, the book points to the formative impact of cross-Channel sentimentality on the history of the novel. Sentiment, sexuality, same-sex intimism, hitherto relegated to the ancillary critical terrain of “themes” or “feminist approaches,” now assumes centrality as the very fiber of the novel’s self-definition in post-Revolutionary modernity. Meanwhile, the space between the Isles and the Continent becomes rife with significance for literary criticism, calling for renewed attention to the role played by international dialogism in the invention of narrative form.
There have always been logical and substantive comparisons of England and France, two nations distinguished by reciprocal competition as global power brokers in the realms of trade, finance, and imperial expansion; two traditions aligned by their common export of law, standards of universal right, linguistic patrimony, bourgeois subjectivity, and the aesthetics of realism. But the present collection’s emphasis on the Channel rather than on the discretely bounded territory of the nation-state shifts the focus away from influence studies and toward a paradigm of “Anglo-Euro” cultural topography that questions the very ground of cross-cultural comparison. The fluid space of the Channel becomes a metaphor for a zone of mutual refraction where Britain defines itself through its incongruent reflection of Frenchness, and vice versa, from the “Brussels” of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette to the “London” of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours.1 Whether the genre is in the sentimental novel, the novel of ideas, or the historical novel, national consciousness is captured in the making in a two-way mirror, with Britain’s islandness defined through its noncontinentalism and France’s hexagonality defined through its noninsular regionalism, or multisided rayonnement. The geomorphic boundaries that define national self-image thus become coextensive not only with national mythologies of bedrock and soil but also with the watery in-between of a “channel effect” that over time, and in the contemporary era, has evolved into what one might call a “Chunnel effect,” a nation-neutral cultural condition that is part Isles, part Continent.
The narrative Chunnel, at least to my way of thinking, picks up where the literary channel leaves off in suggesting a focus on the relationship between Anglophone and Francophone literary history in the New Europe. The Chunnel imaginary assimilates Britain to Europe and connotes Europe to Europe or intra-European narrative forms that, at their most radical, obfuscate national borders in the Isles and on the Continent. The literary Chunnel might be construed as a middle-management subgenre located in the space of the link—in the network paths of transportation, information, and capital, in the viscous netherworld of “global” identity. In contrast to transnational literature, which, I would submit, preserves the nation in emphasizing minority relations in the novel, Chunnel literature points to a state of postnational borderlessness that sublates regionalist and minority claims in the future history of the novel.
Transnational paradigms, in this scheme, thus stand in stark opposition to the paradigm of the Chunnel. One could imagine a transnational sequel to The Literary Channel with chapters devoted to the comparative status of British and French minoritarian languages (Irish, Welsh, Breton, Basque), to comparative pastoral (Scottish highlands versus alpine France, North Sea Atlantic maritime culture versus Mediterranean coastal life), to the impact on the novel of “anomalous states” or interiorized colonies (along the lines of David Lloyd’s work), or to postcolonial comparisons between British and French literature beyond the metropole, contrasting Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean and West African literatures, say, or taking up the cultural iconoclasm of a French-speaking enclave on the Indian subcontinent, such as Pondicherry.
Here, transnationalism calls for new paradigms and approaches to literary history that take account of how colonialism and postcolonial theory have altered the shape of European studies, not just in terms of theme criticism (war, world economics, imperial oppression) but internally, in terms of the kinds of questions now asked by disciplines that grew out of national traditions. The issue, for example, of what happens to national literatures when nationalism no longer serves to anchor them impinges with increasing urgency upon discussions of the literary field, from Rey Chow’s framework of diaspora studies, to Franco Moretti’s paradigms of “distant reading” informed by world systems theory, to Perry Anderson’s new cartography in The Origins of Postmodernity (1998), which organizes the genealogy of postmodernity according to a map of global cities and intellectual capitals: Lima-Madrid-London; Shaanxi-Angkor-Yucatan; New York–Harvard–Chicago; Athens–Cairo–Las Vegas, and so on. Diasporic canons, distant reading, and cartography all may be seen as representative of a new kind of literary history that circumvents nation-based criticism even as it recognizes that no general theory of literature can dispense with the nation as a crucible of historical and aesthetic comparison.
Though we are far from living a postnational condition in the contemporary world, and though emergent nations still clamor for national status, in academic criticism the nation has come increasingly under attack as the harbinger of Eurocentric values or as the official regulator of a public sphere of letters. The European nation-state’s raison d’être has also been challenged by the arrival of large immigrant communities within its borders. France’s relationship to its former colonies, particularly Algeria, is being negotiated today as an internal problem of the state, while its integrity as a singular culture has been thrown into question by the increasingly palpable prospect of a “United States of Europe,” with its own peculiar brand of “Euro-culture.” Euro-culture homogenizes nations and subsumes regionalisms, producing an export-ready cultural product that may one day truly rival its American counterpart. And it is here that England’s peculiar status within Europe proves to be particularly important because the linguistic common bond with America, together with the shared legacy of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism (so distinct from the statist models prevalent in the rest of Europe), makes England the obvious mediator of U.S. and European cultures.
And this brings me to the pressing issue of what this Americanized Euro-culture will look like—what shape and form it will take—for it is obvious that the Euro, even if it is ultimately abandoned, has far more wide-reaching cultural implications than its simple designation of a common currency would suggest. Implicit in the notion of the Euro is a homogenized Europeanism, increasingly stripped of national particularisms and increasingly governed by the emergence of virtual communities or cybernations. Some have viewed this move toward postnational identity as a positive advance, hailing the transcendence of cultural parochialism as leading to new forms of cultural cosmopolitanism, or better yet, to a “cosmopolitical” republic of international law and soft-border hospitality. But others see this Euro-culture as a dismal aesthetic prospect, a zone of generic fiction confirming a New European identity that really is no identity at all.
In Euroland, technological transport blurs the cartography of regions, with “in flight” or “below sea level” modes of transport serving to efface the colorful trade routes of medieval Christendom. The romantic tradition of in genius loci, hallowed by Britain and France alike, yields to online exoticism and downloaded vignettes. The idea of the Chunnel—a fast train speeding under water with no view from the window—affords the image of a smooth, unmarked spatial continuum, a cross between the blurry walls of the birth canal and an antiseptic test tube. The typical Chunnel traveler is a “netizen,” attention riveted to a laptop, undistracted by external scenery. Time supplants place as the measure of subjective experience; antihistoricist chronotypes displace the map, implicitly disorienting historical memory.
This is perhaps why much recent best-selling Euro-fiction may strike readers as being situated in a historical as well as a geographical and political vacuum. Like the NGO or corporate multinational, the literary form of the Chunnel may be associated with posthistorical, postnational fictions. Consider Iain Banks’s The Business, which traces the airborne peregrinations of a top-level female executive named Kathryn Telman as she negotiates her company’s effort to become a nation-state by purchasing a country in the Himalayas, thereby securing a bargaining position as a world power in the United Nations.2 In Telman’s jet-lagged consciousness there is no right time by which to set a watch. She inhabits a no-time zone, moving between bivouacs in London, California, Switzerland, and Kuala Lumpur. The novel devotes more space to describing the quality of takeoffs and landings, in-flight amenities, and hotel accommodations than it does to the specific charms of a given locale. If Banks’s The Business is any indication, regional loyalties in the Euro-novel will be kept to a minimum. Though born of Scottish lower-middle class parents, the heroine loses her roots when she is adopted in childhood by a wealthy businesswoman, given a new name, sent to a Swiss boarding school, dispatched to America for a final entrepreneurial makeover, and then assigned to far-flung geographical outposts in the corporation’s vast financial empire. When the dowager queen of the remote Himalayan country of Thulahn asks her where she is from, her stumbling response reveals the condition of the Euro-citizen with no abiding allegiances: “I’m British—Scottish—by birth. I have dual British-US nationality.” “I see,” the queen responds and then adds: “Well, I don’t see, really. I don’t see how one can be of dual nationality, apart from purely legally…. I mean to say, who are you loyal to?” … “Are you loyal to the Queen, or to … the American flag? Or are you one of these absurd Scottish Nationalists?” “I’m more of an internationalist, ma’am,” replies Telman.
The “internationalism” of Banks’s heroine leaves her free to act without fealty to a single nation or principality. In this regard, she is the perfect capitalist tool for a transglobal conglomerate that traces its beginnings back to a time prior to the Holy Roman Empire. The Business is a pseudo-sovereign order, not unlike the papacy or a Freemasonic association, traducing national borders in its exercise of power. And as with these shadowy institutions, there are wild speculations about who and where it is. Depending on which fallacious website is consulted, the Business appears to be:
(a) the major force behind the New World Order …;
(b) an even more extreme, hideous and sinister branch of the International Zionist Conspiracy (in other words, the Jews) …;
(c) a long-term deep-entryist group of dedicated cadres charged by the Executive Council of the Fourth International to bring down the entire capitalist system from within by gaining control of lots of shares and then selling them all at once to produce a crash …;
(d) a well-funded cabal of the little known Worshippers of Nostradamus cult intent on bringing about the end of the financial world …;
(e) the militant commercial wing of the Roman Catholic Church …;
(f) a similarly extremist Islamic syndicate sworn to out-perform, out-deal and out-haggle the Jews …;
(g) a zombie-like remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, which has risen from the grave, unspeakably putrid but grotesquely powerful, to re-impose European dominance over the New World in general and the USA in particular through sneaky cosmopolitan business practices and the introduction of the Euro…. (98)
It is surely no accident that Banks’s narrator, in referring to paranoid projections of what the Business “is,” refers to the Euro as the paramount symbol of an Anglo-Continental desire to rescind the reach of American hegemony. The Chunnel is a comparable symbol, an image of superior European technological know-how that affirms intra-European alliance over and against the special fraternity that has existed between Great Britain and the United States ever since the two countries rescued Europe in World War II. This Euro identity, incubating within what we are calling Chunnel narrative, must be read, in this context at least, as a clear counterpoint to the “Anglo” (British-U.S.) cultural nexus.
But of course what is specifically “Euro” about this highly Americanized, virtually postnational Euro-culture is far from clear. And that, ultimately, is what may distinguish Chunnel narrative, at least at the present moment, for it is constantly battling the prospect of its own nebulousness against the backdrop of eroding national traditions. Take, as an illustration of this, Michel Houellebecq’s 1994 novel Extension du domaine de la lutte (mystifyingly translated into English as Whatever), which paints a portrait of the modern European citizen as a subject nationally adrift on the infobahns of the EU.3 Though the notoriously misanthropic, political correctness–baiting Houellebecq has been billed as a classic new French author—“L’étranger for the info generation” reads a quotation attributed to Tibor Fischer on the cover of the English edition—his short novel belongs to a nation-neutral genre of Euro-existentialism. Whatever’s protagonist is a middle-management employee in a computer technology firm whose principal client is the Ministry of Agriculture, itself in constant negotiation with the Common Market. In this world of dairy wars, the Breeder takes the place of God, offering a data-processing plan that promises “the development of a more competitive para-agricultural sector at the European level” and bestowing on humanity the offering of a golden calf, the hyper-bred Breton cow. Regionalism survives in this depiction of Euroland as a geographically dislocated marketing label affixed to the name of a farm animal. The corporate culture of Euroland revolves around motivation seminars, the traffic in acronyms and logos, and the flow of cash, information and technology. Even though the “Maple program,” designed for farm subsidy payments, is written in the computer-programming language “Pascal,” the narrator only dimly recalls that Pascal is the name of the French seventeenth-century author of the Pensées. Mathematical memory thus triumphs at the expense of cultural heritage and patrimoine, just as the technobabble of social hierarchy according to data manuals—“a system of global information promulgated by the integration of diversified heterogeneous subsystems”—triumphs over the nostalgic rhetoric of national community (27).
Houellebecq offers a thoroughly pasteurized version of late capitalist everyday life: success is measured by the ability to argue the profitability of a “thyratron inverter” capable of stabilizing “the incoming voltage of the current feeding the server network” (60), and the rural socialist makes good with a book called Cheesemaking and the Challenge of New Technologies (33). Existence is hyper-automated and functionalized; dinner can be programmed in advance and delivered by Minitel. Human relationships are “effaced” (posing something of a problem for the novel, as the narrator notes with tongue-in-cheek textual reflexivity), but the absence of intimacy has been redefined as the “multiplication of degrees of freedom” by the resident “information technology thinker,” Jean-Yves Fréhaut. The sex drive ebbs, but the narrator manages to suppress his fleeting desire for a “fuck on the moquette” by giving in to the superior satisfaction of throwing up in the toilet (44–45). When the news station flaunts too much human dignity in its report of a political demonstration, he switches to the porn channel or contemplates the grotesque indignity of a man who falls dead in a supermarket amidst congested trolleys and trills of Muzak (61). The decadent depletion of experience portrayed here recalls the sepulchral, simulacral environments of Des Esseintes in Huysmans’s A Rebours or the blander bouts of spiritual anomie that French writers excel in capturing, from Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, a chronicle of post-Revolutionary malaise, to Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, a testimonial to liberty as sickness, to Albert Camus’s posthumously published Le Premier Homme, documenting the peculiar flavor of the pied noir’s colonial identity crisis during the Algerian war. Each of these narratives represents a literary cornerstone of French existential ennui, and the critics are justified in placing Houellebecq’s novel in the same edifice, but whereas Constant, Huysmans, Sartre, and Camus abstract their characters from history only to mark them, through language and location, as indelibly French, Houellebecq’s fictive universe is more anonymously “Euro.” Perhaps only Michel Butor’s La Modification, recording the weak pulsations of a businessman’s vacant consciousness as he travels by train between Paris and Rome, or Georges Perec’s Les Choses, with its modern couples yoked to statistical charts and product surveys, really anticipates the late industrial vacuity of Houellebecq’s generic Eurocitizen.
In offering complementary intimations of the diffuse and ultimately confused cultural legacy that awaits the next generation of readers and writers in the era of postnational Europe, the work of Michel Houellebecq and Iain Banks presages the next turn in literary history, in which time travel into the future takes precedence over historical reconstructions of the past, in which literary historians attempt to graph a literary field no longer reliant on the coordinates of discrete national archives, and in which the Channel gives way to the Chunnel as a narrative trope for the European novel.
Notes
1. Villette captures the enchantment-effect of the Channel (a mix of seasickness, euphoric wish fulfillment, and imperial ambition), with Brontë’s description of Lucy Snowe’s crossing: “I was not sick till long after we passed Margate, and deep was the pleasure I drank in with the sea-breeze; divine the delight I drew from the heaving channel-waves, from the sea-birds on their ridges, from the white sails on their dark distance, from the quiet, yet beclouded sky, overhanging all. In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe, like a wide dream-land, far away. Sunshine lay on it, making the long coast one line of gold; tiniest tracery of clustered town and snow-gleaming tower, of woods deep-massed, of heights serrated, of smooth pasturage and veiny stream, embossed the metal-bright prospect. For background, spread a sky, solemn and dark blue, and—grand with imperial promise, soft with tints of enchantment—strode from north to south a God-bent bow, an arch of hope.” Charlotte Brontë, Villette (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 117.
2. Iain Banks, The Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
3. Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), originally published in French as Extension du domaine de la lutte (n.p.: Éditions Maurice Nadeau, 1994).