SUSAN
RUBIN SULEIMAN
When I first
proposed the subject of this special issue of Comparative Literature to George
Rowe a few years ago, I had no particular definition of “the idea of Europe” in
view. The novels of Henry James, with their endless fascination for the
encounter between American naiveté and the wiles as well as the charms of “old”
Europe, must have been somewhere in my mind, as was, no doubt, Thomas Mann’s
Dr. Faustus, which I had first read around the same time as Portrait of a
Lady. What could be thought of as mere social commentary (albeit a profound
one) by James, the quintessential American gentleman abroad, became an anguished
meditation when treated by Mann, an exiled German observing Europe from America
after the devastation of World War II: both writers saw that European culture,
for all its weight and beauty, harbored in its heart appalling depths of cruelty
and evil.
In an essay titled “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy),” delivered at a
conference in Berlin just one year before the fall of the Wall, Susan Sontag
reflected on what “the idea of Europe” meant to her as an American writer. “The
diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture constitute
an Archimedean point from which I can, mentally, move the world. I cannot do
that from America, from what American culture gives me.” But this
apparently binary opposition between Europe (civilized) and America (“more
barbaric,” she says) is immediately complicated in several ways. First, Sontag
recognizes that Europe itself has changed—the “Euro-business” community is not
her idea of Europe. Nor is this change simply due to the “Americanization” of
Europe, as some anti-Americanists would claim; rather, she sees it as part of
the pressure of a “modernity” that should not be confused with Americanism.
Second, European culture cannot itself be seen, today, without an awareness of
the “barbarism that was (need it be said?) entirely generated from within the
heart of Europe.” Although she does not name the Holocaust, she is clearly
referring to it: European culture, for all its density and seriousness, for all
its high-minded notions of civilization, produced the greatest barbarity in
history. And before Hitler, who claimed to be defending Europe against the
Bolshevik “Asian” hordes, there was colonialism, which claimed to be bestowing
“civilization” on those it dominated and whose cultures it destroyed. Sontag
writes: “virtually every act of colonization in the nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries by a European people was justified as an extension of the
moral boundaries of ‘civilization’—considered identical with European
civilization—and a rolling back of the tides of barbarism.”
Sontag was no blind admirer of European civilization, as her sharp critique of
colonialism shows. What I find wonderful is her ability to keep this critique in
her mind at the same time as she voices her admiration—indeed, love—for a
certain idea of European culture: “One might think that the notion of Europe
would have been thoroughly discredited, first by imperialism and racism, and
then by the imperatives of multinational capitalism. In fact, it has not. (Nor
is the idea of civilization unusable—no matter how many colonialist atrocities
are committed in its name).” Here, she put her defense of “civilization”
between parentheses. A few years later, asked by a French journal to define her
conception of the intellectual’s task, she wrote (without parentheses) that it
is two-fold: on the one hand, to promote dialogue, skepticism about received
ideas, and resistance to nationalist or tribal ideas masquerading as “ideals”;
on the other hand, to refuse the facile discrediting of “idealism, of altruism
itself; of high standards of all kinds.”
The rejection of false ideals, but also the rejection of the rejection of
idealism and universal values—that is not an easy line to walk. But that kind of
dialectical thinking—which can also be called a thinking nourished by paradox
and ambivalence—is, I think, entirely pertinent to any reflection on “the idea
of Europe” after 1989, and after 2001.
The contributors to this special issue, although they had no opportunity to
discuss their work with each other, nevertheless converge around some important
points in their arguments; furthermore, both individually and as parts of the
whole, their arguments display a strong sense of the paradoxes and ambivalences
I have been evoking.