The United States of Europe
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© 2011 Salvatore Pappalardo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE: MUSIL, SVEVO, JOYCE AND THE LITERARY INVENTION OF A POSTCOLONIAL COMMUNITY by SALVATORE PAPPALARDO A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature Written Under the direction of Professor Fatima Naqvi And approved by _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey MAY, 2011 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The United States of Europe: Musil, Svevo, Joyce and the Literary Invention of a Postcolonial Community By SALVATORE PAPPALARDO Dissertation Director: Professor Fatima Naqvi This dissertation is a comparative study of literary Europeanism in the late-Habsburg Empire. The biographies and aesthetic projects of Robert Musil, Italo Svevo and James Joyce are deeply embedded in the multinational fabric of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and their novels become part of what might be defined as a ―transnational Habsburg literary canon.‖ Their works create a highly politicized, fictional projection of multicultural Austria–and by extension, of a multicultural Europe–anchored in the polyglot border town Trieste. The primary texts I examine are Musil‘s The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), published between 1930 and 1942, Svevo‘s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience (La Coscienza di Zeno), and Joyce‘s Finnegans Wake of 1939. I read these texts against the background of Austrian history and in combination with current theoretical debates on nationalism. I argue that the origins of a cultural and political Europeanism in the Habsburg Empire can be traced back to forms of early modern regional patriotism, which was divorced from national identity and characterized by loyalty to the local ii traditions of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous territories or cities. The rise of nationalism in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions largely replaced these earlier forms of regional allegiance. I examine the survival of vestigial remnants of this pre-national logic in the literary representations of Trieste, a city at the crossroads of German, Italian and Slovene cultures. The high modernist fiction of Musil, Svevo and Joyce conjures an image of Trieste as a microcosm of the multinational empire and an urban experiment of a future United States of Europe. Their fictional characters not only subscribe to a cultural and political Europeanism, but refuse, through their flexible loyalties and shifting allegiances, to fully commit to the concept of nation. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a journey of self-discovery. It has been, among many other things, an attempt to make sense of my own experience. I was looking for answers to many questions about my multicultural upbringing and about the meaning of European identity. I grew up as the son of Italian immigrants to Germany, speaking Sicilian at home and the Southern German dialect of Baden at school and with my friends. As a result, I feel at home in both Italian and German, as well as in the dialects and regional cultures in which I grew up. I started thinking about Europe when I was a teenager, when it was not always easy to define oneself. Trieste, where I went to college, was the ideal habitat for me: an Italian city with solid roots in the German-speaking world, which is also home to a large Slovene community. Living and studying there was an important step in getting to know myself. I would like to thank all the people that have helped and encouraged me along the process of this dissertation. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Fatima Naqvi, the best Doktormutter I can imagine. She has guided me with her exemplary scholarship and dedication as a teacher, with great generosity and warmth, unfaltering optimism and an uplifting sense of humor. I would also like to thank my committee: Professors Paola Gambarota, Elizabeth Leake and Jean-Michel Rabaté. All four professors have provided me with constant support, generous encouragement, and challenging criticism. Among the many things they have taught me is the fact that getting a doctorate is a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun to share, enjoy and celebrate. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Elin Diamond, for her constant support and encouragement as Director of Comparative Literature at Rutgers. I would like to thank her for everything she has done for Comparative Literature in all these years. My deep iv gratitude also goes to Professor Richard Serrano, who welcomed me to the Program and to the Rutgers community. Grazie mille also to Professor Alessandro Vettori, who taught and guided me as Acting Director of the Program. I would like to thank Uri Eisenzweig and the Transliteratures Project for the very generous support during my graduate studies. The fellowship provided me with the time to read and research, as well as the opportunity to gain invaluable teaching experience. I would also like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the generous support of my research. A research summer grant and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship have helped me tremendously in this project. I would like to thank the German and Italian departments at Rutgers, who have very generously welcomed and adopted me, each providing an additional home for me. In the German Department I would like to thank Martha Helfer, Nicholas Rennie, Michael Levine, and Peter Demetz. In the Italian Department my gratitude goes to Laura Sanguineti White, Andrea Baldi, and David Marsh. In Comparative Literature I would like to thank Janet Walker, Andrew Parker, César Braga-Pinto, Jorge Marcone, Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, and Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregi. I would also like to thank Timothy Martin, from the English Department at Rutgers Camden. In Italy, I would like to thank Giuseppina Restivo and John McCourt for encouraging me to pursue my graduate studies in the United States. Finally, I would like to thank my fellow graduate students at Rutgers, from Comparative Literature and other disciplines. I would like to thank especially Roberto Nicosia, Maria Kager and Lara Santoro. v Parts of this dissertation have been accepted for publication and are forthcoming in 2011. A section of my third chapter will appear as ―Waking Europa: Joyce, Ferrero, and the Metamorphosis of Irish History‖ in the Winter 2011 issue of the Journal of Modern Literature. Parts of my conclusion will appear as ―Dockings on Danubio: Claudio Magris and the Rhetoric of Submerged Europe‖ in a volume of essays Re-Mapping Europe: History, Memory, Identity in Claudio Magris’s Narratives and Plays edited by Sandra Parmegiani and published by the University of Toronto Press. vi DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Elizabeth. She has helped, encouraged and supported me in every possible way. Her emotional support, intellectual challenge, and loving generosity are the backbone of this dissertation. This dissertation is also dedicated to Hector, who has been physically, emotionally and playfully present at every stage of my writing. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Dedication vii Table of contents viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Robert Musil and the Janus-faced Empire: Old and New Europe in The Man without Qualities 31 Chapter 2: Trojan Trieste: Italo Svevo and the Epistemology of the Vernacular in The Confessions of Zeno 122 Chapter 3: ―And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver!‖: James Joyce and the Construction of Europe in Finnegans Wake 199 Conclusion 286 Bibliography 291 Curriculum Vitae 305 viii 1 Introduction At the outbreak of World War I, a remarkable diversity and mixture of languages, local cultures and religions characterized the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. The imperial provinces extended over a vast territory that today includes the modern states of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro. With the formation of nation-states in Central Europe, literary works from this heterogeneous area began to be studied within the compartments of national literary traditions. The empire has consequently been perceived as a fragmented space, containing a variegated mosaic of national literatures. Nevertheless, the multilingualism of the Habsburg Empire should not be considered a challenge to its literary cohesion: a thematic unity within a multiethnic and polyglot context can be found in Habsburg literature, which invites comparative approaches. One reason for a comparative study is, among many others, the presence of consistent concerns that emerge from the very multiplicity of languages. An important topic of this Habsburg literary culture that crosses linguistic and national boundaries is the conceptualization of Europe. Europe and the theorization of a European persona is a crucial topos in a common literary culture that extends well beyond the crumbling of the empire and continues in the (also problematic) memorialization of its legacy. A transnational Habsburg literary canon presents the idea of Europe as a central topic. Inherent in the canon is a debate about the coexistence of the diverse ethno- linguistic groups and conceives of a future United States of Europe as the democratic continuation of the multicultural and multilingual empire.