Transnational Tolstoy by John Burt Foster Jr

Author:John Burt Foster, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Between the West and the World
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The critiques of nationalism in Walnut Trees and The Leopard no doubt mesh with the sentiments that have led to greater European unity since 1945. In the intertextual background of both novels, War and Peace joins with La Chartreuse to evoke earlier ideals of national community even as the contrast between those ideals and the narrative present shows how drastically nationalism had failed in the first half of the twentieth century. In a still broader transnational sense, however, the mainly European focus of this chapter does not exclude the wider vistas associated with postcolonial studies and world literature.

In this broader context, the border writing in these four novels has drawn attention to the larger border issue of a European “inner edge.” This term refers to the areas within Europe that were not yet absorbed into the system of sovereign, culturally distinct nation-states that started to emerge following the French Revolution. As a result of the liminal status of these areas, they resist being labeled as Eurocentric as readily as the countries with overseas empires like Spain, England, France, or the Netherlands. In fact, Europe’s inner edge often has affinities with areas at the other, more obvious edge of the European international system. This imperial outer edge has been the arena for postcolonial criticism.

As the choice of words suggests, the term “inner edge” can include the empire-building practice of “inner colonization,” as in the Anglicization of Ireland or the effort to Magyarize Hungary’s borderlands. But inner edges take many other forms. Thus the Italy of La Chartreuse, as a stateless nation with boundaries imposed from abroad, anticipates the arbitrary borders of Europe’s overseas colonies, especially in Africa and the Caribbean. As a nationless state, the Russian Empire in War and Peace has affinities with the West’s far-flung colonial regimes, so that Anderson (for example) can liken the Tsar’s realm to Queen Victoria’s.26 For Tolstoy, moreover, when this Russia intervened in post-Napoleonic Europe, it broke faith with an incipient, potentially non-Western sense of nationhood.

Inner edges in Malraux and Lampedusa are associated with confrontations or deadlocks arising from a strong sense of regional identity. Sicily in The Leopard typifies the situation of peripheral regionality. Cherished local differences reinforce the island’s marginality within Italy or even, in Don Fabrizio’s outburst, in a Europe whose center has shifted from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. Similar geocultural shifts in authority led to tensions when upstart colonial powers intervened in ancient civilizations like China, Persia, or the Fertile Crescent. Malraux’s Alsace, as a flashpoint among major powers in the nation-state system, is a classic example of the contested region. As a Franco-German hybrid, it reveals the system’s inability to allow for mixed cultures outside its grid of recognized identities, and, as a bone of contention between great powers, it mirrors conflicts over newly colonized areas, like France’s rivalry with England for Egypt, or Russia’s with England on the Northwest Frontier of the Indian subcontinent.

On both inner and outer edges, national feeling swings between extremes. The sense

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