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ROBERT FRASER Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism Robert Fraser
Literature, Music and
Cosmopolitanism Culture as Migration Robert Fraser Open University London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-68479-6 ISBN 978-3-319-68480-2 (eBook)
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The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland IN EUROPE, AND FOR EUROPE Contents
1 Culture as Migration 1
2 Is There a Gibbon in the House? Migration,
Post-nationality and the Fall and Rise of Europe 17
3 Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads and Myth 31
4 Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells: Hypatia
the Philosopher from Gibbon to Black Athena 51
5 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (1) British
Listeners in Italy 65
6 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (2) Milton,
Ruskin and Religious Longing 79
7 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (3) Purcell,
the Popish Plot and the Politics of Latin 85
8 Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles
Kingsley, Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rising 97
vii viii CONTENTS
9 Beyond the National Stereotype: Benedict Anderson
and the Bengal Emergency of 1905–06 125
10 Migrating Stories: How Textbooks Fired a Canon 161
11 Towards a New World Order: Literacy, Democracy
and Literature in India and Africa, 1930–1965 173
12 World Music: Listening to Steve Reich Listening
to Africa; Listening to György Ligeti Listening to Reich 185
13 A Cultural Cosmopolis 195
Acknowledgements 205
Index 207 ...alas, alas, say now the King... Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you, whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, any where that not adheres to England, Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleas’d To find a nation of such barbarous temper, That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them, what would you think To be thus us’d? This is the strangers case; And this your mountainish inhumanity.
rom the play The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene iv, believed to F be by William Shakespeare, and in his own handwriting British Library Harley Manuscript 7368
ix List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 “Queen Europa” from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia
(2nd ed., Basel, 1588), B.L.Ac.3838/45 34 Fig. 7.1 “Jehova, Quam Multi Sunt Hostes Mei”. Henry Purcell’s fair copy holograph from B.L.Add.Ms, 30930, The Works of Henry Purcell (Dom, 1680) 90 Fig. 10.1 John Constable, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds”, 1823 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 162 Fig. 12.1 Ewe Nyayito Dance. Robert Fraser, West African Poetry: A Critical History (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11, reproducing Jones (1959), Volume Two, 32–33 188 Fig. 12.2 Ewe Agbaza Dance, Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000. Edited with an introduction by Paul Hillier (Oxford University Press, 2002), 62 189
xi CHAPTER 1
Culture as Migration
The theme of this book is a response to that of a far more famous one, published in 1869 by the English poet, educator and visionary, Matthew Arnold. Until comparatively recently Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was read by students of British society as among the most trenchant—certainly the most influential—of those high-minded works of exhortation and prophecy to which mid-to-late Victorian authors liked to treat their read- ers. For much of the twentieth century it also fed into current social and educational debate, influencing at a subliminal level generations of critics, social commentators and teachers. Subtitled “An Essay in Political and Social Criticism”, it portrays culture as a homogeneous and desirable qual- ity. Culture for Arnold is “a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.”1 More straightforwardly, in a later book, Literature and Dogma (1876), Arnold defined culture as “the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world”.2 “Mass culture”, “popular culture”, let alone “pop culture”, would have been incomprehensible to Arnold. Indeed, though admirable in the abstract, culture was not, he reluctantly conceded, very popular in England. In reality the British people distrusted culture, since they associ- ated it with intellectuality, which they hated in principle, and with what Arnold called “curiosity”. Not merely did curiosity kill the cat; according to Arnold it offended the average Briton’s sense of decency and moderation.
R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_1 2 ROBERT FRASER
“I have before now”, he wearily remarked in the first chapter of Culture
and Anarchy, “pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use the word [curiosity] in a good sense as well as a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intel- ligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.” So culture had its enemies in Victorian England, typified for Arnold by materialism, provinciality and middle-class self-satisfaction: everything, in other words that in 1869 went along with British commercial and imperial success. Forces such as these Arnold associated, paradoxically for his time, with culture’s adversary and opposite: anarchy. Culture as such had little to do with such homebred virtues or vices. The work ethic—or Hebraism— owed little to the thought impulse or Hellenism. Despite this, with some and intellectual effort, culture in Arnold’s sense of the word could be acquired by an educated English person—by the whole country, did they but try. The English of all classes, Arnold thought, could do with a lot more of it. Despite—or more probably because of—its improving zeal, the twenty- first-century reader is apt to find Arnold’s celebrated book stuffy and smug. Anachronisms scream from every page. There is, for example, the question of his self-identification with a group called “we”, denoting the British alone. There is also his talk of “foreigners”, enviously though sus- piciously viewed. What is more, Arnold seems to see “culture” as a quality that can be detached from other aspects of a community. Schooled by sociology, we are nowadays apprehensive of using the word in this strange, if uplifting, sense. Arnold’s scenario, moreover, seems to us impossibly value-laden. There is in him too much talk of moral improvement and of “things in the mind”. Bodies, material artefacts, even money, seem to enjoy no place in his picture at all. Most glaringly, for citizens of the so-called multicultural society, there is the fact that Arnold invariably uses “culture” as a singular noun. This is all the odder because the Romans, from whom we derive the word, tended to use it in the plural: culturae. It is tempting to think that Arnold saw culture as a singular quality because he was only aware of one: that of the British or English (in his book he uses the terms synonymously). Yet, as we have already seen, this was very far from being his view. If anything, “culture” for Arnold stemmed from overseas, though it might find a resting place in Britain. One might perhaps broaden the accusation by claiming that the “culture” he advocated was an exclusively European affair, that he saw CULTURE AS MIGRATION 3
Europe as a homogeneous unit with local variations that included “us” and the “foreigners” (that is, other Europeans), whilst sidelining other conti- nents. Yet Arnold, like his headmaster father Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was steeped in the literature and history of the Near East; so he would have had a hard job fitting in even to this expanded stereotype. Arnold’s “culture” is universal, cosmopolitan, elitist. Are there bridges from his ideas to our own?
The Meanings of Culture
So habituated have twenty-first-century people become to travel and com- parative generalisations about different “cultures” that it is difficult to reg- ister how recent the word is as used in our sense. In Roman times Cicero talks of two kinds of culturae: “agri culturae”, cultivations of the fields, and “animi culturae”, cultivations of the spirit or mind. Accordingly, until the 1860s its use in most European languages was confined to agriculture, religion and by extension to education. The first English use as applied to crops in the general sense of “cultivating the soil” is 1420. As applied to religious worship it is 1483, though the derivation is not from Latin cul- turae but from cultus, a cult or sect. Its extension to scholarship and train- ing is a feature of the Renaissance. In 1510 Sir Thomas More talks of the need to apply ourselves “to the culture and profit” of our minds, a sense not a thousand miles from Arnold’s. By 1550 the word appears with this meaning in French. By 1626 the agricultural application has been extended to imply the cultivation of particular crops, from which we get the special- ised uses “arboriculture”, “floriculture”, “horticulture” and in France “viniculture”. Two years later the word embraced the athletic improve- ment of the human body. By 1796, at the height of Britain’s Agricultural Revolution, it is connected with the rearing of livestock. Unsurprisingly, the shift to our modern analytical sense occurs in German. In 1860, with a little-known Zurich publisher, the Swiss histo- rian Jacob Burckhardt issued his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien; it had little impact at first, though it was later to transform scholarly thinking about the Quattrocento. That Renaissance Italy possessed a culture unique to itself, however, was a fresh insight. With it we approach the relativistic notion of one social, political and social organisation as distinct from oth- ers; for Burckhardt the Renaissance Italian state had been an unrepeatable “work of art”. To speak of a “culture” in this sense is close to talking of a “civilisation”; accordingly, when Burckhardt’s book was finally translated into English in 1878, it was as The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. 4 ROBERT FRASER
By 1867, two years before Arnold’s diatribe, the term “culture” was first used in a related sense in English. Significantly, the context is a description of that particular kind of cross-channel migration known as an “invasion”. After the Battle of Hastings, wrote Freeman in his history of The Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxons were confronted by “a language and a culture which was wholly alien to them”. From there it is but a short step to using the word in a scientific, quasi- objective sense, first attributed to that grandad of modern anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor. Tylor was a wealthy Quaker denied a university education because of his religious affiliation. Afflicted with tuberculosis, he instead travelled to Mexico, where he became fascinated by the parallels he could perceive between the customs, myths and rituals of the ordinary people he encountered in his progress and those of the European peas- antry. Gradually the notion of culture as something multiform and spread out began to take shape in his mind. The result was a series of works trac- ing the deep affinities between people and times, the most famous of which, Primitive Culture of 1871, bore a title that seemingly engages with, and challenges, the exclusivity implied by Arnold’s book, published a mere two years before. On the first page Tylor hazards a new definition. “Culture or civilisa- tion taken in its wide ethnographic sense”, he opines, “is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Like Arnold, Tylor always used “culture” as a—frequently capitalised— singular noun, synonymous with its sister substantive “civilization”. For Tylor, unlike Arnold, however, both culture and civilisation were diffused across the world, and across history. Each different society in different ages possessed a character of its own; yet beneath these apparent differ- ences, certain constants were apparent. There was thus both a variety and a certain uniformity. Tylor goes on to dilate about this seeming paradox:
The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, so far as it
is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the unifor- mity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great mea- sure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future.3 CULTURE AS MIGRATION 5
The “laws of human thought” that Tylor identifies in this passage are those of social evolution cross-pollinated from Darwin’s biological theo- ries with the study of society by later Victorians such as Herbert Spencer. For Tylor all societies had evolved, and were continually evolving, from stage to stage. Because all societies were on the same evolutionary journey, which they covered at different speeds, it was possible to compare them. The result was a method of analysis called the “comparative method”, and a science that came to be known as Social Anthropology, the first chair of which in the University of Oxford Tylor came eventually to hold. Yet Tylor says nothing about migration, for two very good reasons. The first is that, like most of the first few generations of anthropologists, he was interested in studying individual societies in situ so that he could observe the interplay in each case between social arrangements and their environ- ment. It was therefore in his interests that each society appeared to stay still, just as a zoological specimen beneath the microscope ideally stays still. The second was that he was anxious to argue that the similarities he discerned between various societies in various places were the products of separate but parallel development, rather than of influence. If it could be proved that they had borrowed from one another, his argument was com- promised, if not ruined. By the mid-1870s, therefore, two contrasting senses of the term “cul- ture” were available, both of which we have inherited: Arnold’s, which stressed culture as an ideal that we might or might not attain; and Tylor’s, according to which all people possess a culture, albeit of different kinds. From Tylor’s comparative use of the singular noun, it was a fairly short step to pluralising it. By the turn of the century, the practice was common- place. The modern cosmopolitan man, declared The Spectator on 27 June 1891, is one who prides himself on “speaking all languages, knowing all cultures, living amongst all races”.
The Crux of Cosmopolitanism
The notion of cosmopolitanism features prominently in our title and is clearly going to be central to our discussion; again, it is a term whose application has shifted across time. Quite recently it has featured in the title of a stimulating book by the Ghanaian and British-born philosopher (currently resident in New York), Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah is the son of a marriage between an Ashanti noble, onetime Ghana nationalist politician, with a British author and artist, daughter of a former Socialist 6 ROBERT FRASER
Chancellor of the Exchequer. I will be taking a closer look at his back-
ground in the conclusion to the present book, but wish to start by citing what he has to say in his work Cosmopolitism (2010) on the complex ques- tion of the meaning of culture. One of his chapters is headed “Whose culture is it anyway?” and it begins by addressing the fraught issues of “cultural patrimony” and “intellectual copyright”, both of which take their cue from conceptions of local, or else personal, belonging. In 1874, at the conclusion of the second British-Ashanti war, the state capital Kumasi was burned to the ground on the orders of the British commander, Garnet Wolseley, and the palace looted of its contents. A century later, in Mali, thousands of intricate terracotta figures depicting humans and ani- mals were unearthed about three kilometres from the modern city of Djenné by an international team of archaeologists: in contravention of a UNESCO resolution, they were sold to collectors and museums around the world, which are reluctant to return them. Cultural nationalists have urged that they be sent back. It does not need the better-known example of the Elgin Marbles removed from the Parthenon in Athens between 1801 and 1805, and still in the British Museum in London, to underline the issues raised by these episodes. In all such instances, the campaign of retrieval is based on a feasible, if to Appiah questionable, proposition, which he summarises thus: “It is that, in simplest terms, cultural property be regarded as the property of its culture. If you belong to that culture, such work is, in the suggestive shorthand, your cultural patrimony. If not, not.”4 The case is comparatively straightforward when it comes to physical objects, the fact of whose removal is simply ascertained, even if the rights and wrongs of the matter, and the question of ownership, are more diffi- cult to resolve. When it comes to the less tangible products of culture— poems and pieces of music, for example—the relevant questions are far harder to sort out. Most nineteenth- and some twentieth-century com- mentators have assumed that English poetry and English music are the expression of the English nation and its people: they breathe its soul, as it were. In 1937 the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams published a book of essays entitled National Music dedicated to this proposition. Yet nobody for that reason would claim that the works of Edward Elgar should not be performed in Germany (where, indeed, his early reputation was made). And nobody in their right mind would assert that the symphonies of Joseph Haydn should not be performed in England where, in old age, he spent a couple of happy and productive years. To which nation does the CULTURE AS MIGRATION 7
music of George Frideric Handel belong: to Germany, in whose principal-
ity of Hanover he was born; to Italy, where he learned his trade as an opera composer between 1706 and 1712, and in whose language the libretti of all his operas (but not his oratorios) are couched; or to Britain, where he settled for the remaining forty-seven years of his life? Put like this, the question reduces itself to absurdity. Few would dare raise the question as to whether the mathematical discoveries of Srinivasa Ramanujan—born in 1887 in Tamil Nadu, whence in 1914 he moved to Cambridge where some of his best work was achieved—constitute a legacy of India or of England. At one level they belong to Ramanujan alone, and are part of his legitimate intellectual property. At the highest and most realistic level, they belong to humanity. Most fundamentally and triumphantly, they are ground-breaking mathematics. It is Appiah’s contention that all cultural masterpieces, be they sculp- tural, architectural, scientific, literary or musical, belong to humanity in this way. We owe it to one another to be curious about our various tradi- tions, and such curiosity entails rights over them. This is part of what he means by cosmopolitanism. Besides, people move constantly, and culture and its outputs move with them. In support of this view Appiah quotes the verdict of Salman Rushdie, whose instinct in writing fiction has always been to stir the cultural melting pot. In 1988, the year in which his novel The Satanic Verses was subjected to an Iranian fatwa, Rushdie declared that this work “rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I am determined to embrace it.”5 All of that is true though, pace Rushdie, perhaps it is not so new.
“The Strangers’ Case”
Whatever way you look at it, notions of culture and cosmopolitanism are ineluctably tied in with the fact of widespread international migration. It for this very reason that the emergence over the last few decades of an academic discourse stressing the centrality of migration to human cultural formation has proved such a refreshing and revealing change. Increasingly, culture has come to be viewed less as an expression of place than a product of interaction and demographic shift. A recurrent difficulty, however, has been to classify, and to distinguish between, various kinds of human mass movement. If culture is notoriously difficult to pin down, migration and 8 ROBERT FRASER
its analogues are just as elusive. Fifty years ago, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin proposed to his London publisher a grand work to be entitled The Nomadic Alternative, universalising his own temperamental condition of itchy feet. His proposal landed on the desk of the publisher’s reader, Desmond Morris, author of the ethnographic-cum-zoological classic The Naked Ape, who reported back in some puzzlement: “What is a nomad? It gets a little confusing sometimes when I read his chapter headings.” For Morris there was a fundamental difference between wandering away from and back to a fixed base, on the one hand, and wandering from place to place without a fixed base, on the other. He concluded, “As I said in The Naked Ape, the moment man became a hunter he had to have somewhere to come back to after the hunt was over. So a fixed base became natural for the species and we lost our old ape-like nomadism.”6 In the half-century since then, the literature concerning human move- ment has grown exponentially, but the task of classification has proved no easier. Nomadism, exploration, asylum, adventure, tourism, crusading, all constitute varieties of human movement between territories and, as several recent commentators have observed, very often the motivations have been— and remain—mixed. The United Nations reductively defines a migrant as one who has stayed outside his or her country of origin for more than twelve months,7 but such a description encompasses long-term overseas military personnel, diplomats, students on extended gap years, expatriates on long contracts, some international consultants and, histori- cally, practically everyone (notably the pieds noirs of Algeria, or the sahibs and memsahibs of the erstwhile British Raj) who once staffed the various European empires. Useful as it is as a yardstick, the definition also begs the very question of personal and social identity, since it assumes that all of us possess a point of origin and ultimate belonging, which is far from univer- sally true, even in the meanest bureaucratic or legal sense. One matter is certain: the phenomenon is both exceedingly old and pressingly new. The first humans were certainly nomads. In terms of our history, in fact, it is movement that has constituted the rule, and settle- ment and belonging that have been the exceptions. In his influential book Migration: A World History, Michael H. Fisher traces the ramifying itiner- aries of our ancestral wanderings from East Africa outwards towards Eurasia, then by branching lines across to Australasia and the Americas, aided by land bridges exposed during the last ice age and subsequently engulfed. He further recounts tides of movement within the documented past resulting from Alexander the Great’s predations, the Emperor CULTURE AS MIGRATION 9
Constantine’s expansion of the Roman Empire and the proselytising
spread of Islam. The picture is then complicated by the slave trade, the growth of European empires in Asia and Africa, and economic migration since.8 In their strongly argued Exceptional People: How Migrants Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan have charted the impact of these historical perambu- lations on the sending and receiving countries, on families, communities and individuals. They conclude with a plea for migration to be viewed as a normative aspect of human history, and the principal hope for an inte- grated and prosperous global future: “So long as nationalism can legiti- mately trump the more universal claims of international co-operation, world development will be stalled. However, our national myths are grad- ually deconstructed as historical revision lays bare the truth about the cen- tral role of cross-cultural contact in the creation of new societies. When we ask ourselves the perennial question ‘Who are we?’ answering exclusively with nationalism is less and less convincing in the twenty-first century.”9 The controversies surrounding this topic over the last few years have had a tendency to encourage writers on both sides of the debate to frame their arguments in terms of undiluted absolutes. Opponents of migration habitu- ally and drastically exaggerate its detrimental effects, and underplay its con- siderable benefits. Correspondingly, in the face of such bald opposition, those committed to defending and promoting migration have sometimes portrayed it as an uncomplicated good that has invariably benefitted every- body everywhere. A further effect has been to cause historians to project this panacea both backwards and forwards, portraying the whole of human his- tory in the process as one seething and ebullient panorama of restless motion and interchange. In Fisher’s words, “We are all the descendants of migrants and we virtually all migrate during the course of our lives. From the origin of our Homo sapiens species about 200,000 BC until today, we have expanded our range over the entire planet. We have emigrated to seek new opportunities, often driven out by deteriorating social or physical environ- ments. As the earth’s climate has changed and our societies have developed, migration has enabled us to better our lives and those of our children.”10 This is both richly true, and richly untrue. What we observe in reality in the human past is a rhythmic alternation. On the one hand, there have been periods of vigorous population shift, such as the Völkerwandering or migratio gentium of which German historians of late antiquity used to speak when referring to alien incursions into the crumbling Roman Empire.11 For historians such as Fisher, we are living through a second 10 ROBERT FRASER
such age, in which an equivalent scenario is being played out on a global
scale. On the other hand, there have always been comparatively static times during which the cultural demography of individual territories has tended to settle down. Were this not so, it would be impossible for any of us mean- ingfully to speak of national or regional characteristics. Nor would any- body ever experience homesickness, or indeed its opposite, wanderlust. The rhythm is productive. There is a directive towards movement and penetration; there is also a directive towards, and a need for, retention. In order properly to convey and to share customs, attitudes, varieties of spiri- tuality, art forms and idioms, every inward- or outward-bound community needs to possess something to share in the first place. Languages fuse and borrow from one another, but we can still properly speak of Bengali or French, compile separate dictionaries of these tongues, and consider the literatures couched in each, even if we subsequently compare them. The short story form, for example, originated in Bengal and migrated to France. In such circumstances, acquisition and consolidation become twin aspects of an ongoing and fruitful process. Imaginatively viewed, a nation may be conceived of both as an entity and as a conglomeration; a botanical genus, but simultaneously hybrid. Both visions can be found in English literature, for example in Shakespeare. As an epigraph to this book, I quote a scene from the collaboratively authored play The Book of Sir Thomas More, unpublished until 1832 but first drafted between 1601 and 1604 by, it is believed, Anthony Munday (1560–1633) and Henry Chettle, then revised by a number of hands, almost certainly including Shakespeare’s. Written at a time of escalating tension caused by the arrival of a wave of Huguenots (French Protestants) in England, the drama takes as one of its persistent themes hysterical xenophobia. In the scene from which the quoted speech is taken, the manuscript of which survives in Shakespeare’s hand, More is reprimanding a mob of London apprentices bent on burn- ing to the ground the homes of some economic migrants recently arrived from Lombardy. He asks them to imagine themselves as immigrants to another country—“to France or Flanders/To any German province, Spain or Portugal”—and to treat the arrivals with the sort of courtesy that they would then request and require. The point is taken, and the crowd dis- perse. We are all more or less natives (even if of more than one country), and we are all potential migrants. However, Shakespeare also realised, and drew on, a marked and settled sense of national belonging. Twenty years previously, in evoking the roots of the Wars of the Roses which, little more than a century before, had CULTURE AS MIGRATION 11
precariously been resolved in the Tudor Settlement, he had written a piv-
otal scene in Richard the Second, and placed in the mouth of John of Gaunt (whose mother, let it be said, hailed from Ghent) perhaps the clas- sic expression of English patriotism:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…12
It was during the time of the English Renaissance, and more especially following the English Reformation with its repudiation of papal scope and power, that the tension between territorial sovereignty and continental affinities most dramatically played itself out in English life, and for this very reason I have focused in on the period in three of the chapters that follow. (I am not the first to imply historical parallels between the Reformation and Brexit, and the putative cultural ramifications of both.13) In the Renaissance period, English exceptionalism came to an end with the union between the English and Scottish crowns in 1603. A century later, England had been ruled over successively by Scottish and Dutch monarchs. Such royal migration was not universally popular. In 1700 the Whig journalist and poetaster John Hutchin (1660–1707), who had initially welcomed the arrival of King William III from Holland with his English wife Mary as rescuing the country from popery, published a polemic entitled The Foreigners attacking the regal interlopers. The novel- ist Daniel Defoe read the poem (if such it was) “with a kind of rage”, considering it to be a “vile abhor’d pamphlet, in very ill verse”. He responded with a much better poem of his own, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, questioning the very notion of essential Englishness. Who are we English folk anyway if not the products of infiltration and miscegenation?
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman: 12 ROBERT FRASER
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot. Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame. In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran, Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane. While their rank daughters, to their parents just, Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust. This nauseous brood directly did contain The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.14
The English have continued to quarrel about their identity ever since.
“Whither Would You Go?”
In his informative and crisp International Migration: A Very Short Introduction, Khalid Koser summarises the consequences of our age-old patterns of migration thus: “Migration has been a critical and influential feature of human history. It has supported the growth of the world econ- omy, it has contributed to the evolution of states and societies and it has enriched many cultures and civilisations.”15 It is with the third of these consequences that the chapters comprising the present book are con- cerned. In my conclusion I shall attempt to theorise it by drawing on the related fields of philosophy and anthropology. In the meantime, I offer a series of inter-related case studies exploring how migration has assisted bodies of knowledge, schools of literature, art and music. The examples are drawn from England, from mainland Europe, from Israel, Egypt, West Africa, America, India and the Caribbean. In the light of recent events, I return constantly to the matter of Britain, partly because it is best known to me, and partly because Britain is a group of islands whose encircling sea might be expected to have exempted it from some of the influences described. Yet during the chequered course of the country’s history, no portion of the earth’s surface has been more affected by the movement of peoples, both inward and outward, than this “scepter’d isle”. The object throughout is to assess three competing panaceas. The first—long since discarded—is Arnold’s view that human culture repre- sents a single refined entity at which all should aim. The second—call it Burckhardt’s paradigm—is the version of cultural nationalism which has it CULTURE AS MIGRATION 13
that intellectual formations are inevitably and primarily an expression of
the places that produced them. The third is the much more recent idea that globalisation has now diluted this understanding in the interests of an inclusive and heterogeneous norm. By harking back to the classical period, and by negotiating freely between that and the more recent past and pres- ent, I demonstrate the partiality of all these beliefs, the first two being a preoccupation of the nineteenth century, the third of the twentieth and twenty-first. Concentrating for the most part on the complementary arts of litera- ture and music, I attempt to show how the constant movement of peoples and ideas over many centuries has nourished and sustained human culture in a diversity of ways. There are certain constants to this process, tenden- cies that have spearheaded cultural diffusion and its effects. One is nomad- ism, a challenging aspect of demography that I examine through a case study of the Roma people as they have wandered across Europe. The sec- ond is language, the divagating and yet unifying effects of which I examine by focusing on some uses of Europe’s traditional lingua franca, Latin, then on English which—even as the English themselves seem bent on “leaving Europe”—appears to have become Latin’s modern equivalent. The third is empire, analysed here in a number of different contexts, including colonial administration and education. A fourth is religion, whose disseminating ideological effects are illustrated though four case studies, three from the early modern period and one from the nineteenth century. A fifth is travel and tourism, and the ways in which these are reported and in which they have influenced artistic styles: this I illustrate via a study of the diffusion of Italian music beyond Italy, and another of an American and a Hungarian composer as they witness, and draw on, African drumming. The last is scholarship, and the tendency of academics to group themselves in communities transcending location and language, which I examine under a number of different headings, including the ways in which classical scholarship has shaped our sense both of interdepen- dence and of belonging. Along the way, I examine certain iconic migrating individuals: the fifth- century Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher Hypatia; the Italian Jewish-born Calvinist scholar Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580), whose career straddled Italy, England and the Low Countries; the Apulia-born, internationally feted castrato known as Farinelli (1705–1782); the Hungarian-born composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt (1811–1886); and the singularly cosmopolitan, and variously talented, writer Violet 14 ROBERT FRASER
Paget (1856–1935) a.k.a. Vernon Lee, each of whom can be seen to have epitomised the cultural plasticity of an age. I end by taking a closer look at Appiah. All of these factors have combined historically to undermine the cen- tripetal effects of place. And all of them call into question notions of the purism of cultures. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to this ongoing debate about collective cultural identity by placing it in a broad and variegated historical perspective that will, it is hoped, inform discus- sion across disciplines and fertilise an area of discourse too often confined to the contemporary scene. In contemporary Europe these issues are very much alive, even more so in the light of the ongoing refugee crisis provoked by events in Syria and Iraq. As I researched this chapter, a boatload of thirty-five refugees came to grief while attempting to reach the Greek island of Kalolimnos from Turkey. In Britain, concern about our long history of migration is very much to the fore, and informs our literature at every point. In Helen Macdonald’s 2014 memoir H Is for Hawk, the narrator, who is recovering from the death of her father by training Matilda, a goshawk, travels from Cambridge to her parental home in Surrey. With her goes Matilda. They come across a tract of open country haunted by a lone hare and a pack of deer, inhabitants of what to the untrained eye appears to be a changeless and indigenous rural idyll, “the terra incognita of our mythical English past”. In this dream of apparent eternal authenticity they are joined by an elderly couple out for a walk. “Doesn’t it give you hope?” the husband enquires with reference to the landscape that surrounds and seemingly enfolds them. “Hope?” she demurs. “Yes,” he persists, “Isn’t it a relief that there are still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in.” The stability thus serenaded is an illusion, the countryside as Macdonald invokes it the product of unceasing disturbance and transition. “Ten years ago, there were turtle-doves on this land. Thirty years ago there were corn buntings and enormous flocks of lapwings. Seventy years ago there were red-backed shrikes, wrynecks and skype. Two hundred years ago, ravens and black grouse. All of them are gone.” She concludes:
Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts,
films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change CULTURE AS MIGRATION 15
too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.16
The chapters that comprise this book represent a minor exercise in the restoration of scale, of history cleansed of sentiment. I would like to open with a scenario set in that ancient theatre of conflict and migration: the Middle East, as ancient in the tale it has to tell as is the Talmud.
Notes 1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), 44–45. 2. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London: Smith, Elder, 1876), xiii. 3. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Culture (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. i, 1. 4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2006), 118. 5. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 394, quoted by Appiah, 112. 6. Quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1999), 219, citing Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 22 and 36. 7. Cited in Khalid Koser, International Migration: A Very Short Introduction, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 14. 8. Michael H. Fisher, Migration: A World History (Oxford University Press, 2014), passim. 9. Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future (London and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 284. For an equivalent vote of support for migration as a future paradigm for humanity, see Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity (London: Harvil Secker, 2014), 231. See also Theodore Zelkin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future (London: MacLehose Press, Quercus, 2015), especially his intriguing sug- gestion that, in future, each of us writes his or her own passport. 10. Fisher, xii. 16 ROBERT FRASER
11. For a summary and critique of this view, see Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). On p. 14, Goffart sounds a warning note: “The peoples of the north and east of the Roman frontier were no more ‘wan- dering’ than the Celts or Greeks or Thracians. They were agrarian villagers like the other sedentaries mentioned, and like them, and us, they moved every now and then.” 12. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (First Folio, 1626), page 28. Act Two, Scene One, ll 659–669. 13. Listen, for example, to the conductor David Hill in BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, Friday, 19 August 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b07nmqgb 14. The True-Born Englishman (1700), in Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural by Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, The True-Born Englishman and Other Poems, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 94 (ll. 334–347). 15. Khalid, 2016, 9. 16. Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (London: Vintage, 2014), 265. CHAPTER 2
Is There a Gibbon in the House?
Migration, Post-nationality and the Fall and Rise of Europe
At the beginning of Linda Grant’s Orange Prize–winning novel When I
Lived in Modern Times, published on the crest of the millennium, Evelyn Sert, a seventeen-year-old Jewish migrant from London, waits to disem- bark at Haifa in the then British-mandated territory of Palestine. The period is 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War, two before the inception of the independent state of Israel, and the arrival in Southampton, England of MV Empire Windrush bringing immigrants from the West Indies. Evelyn is filled with a sense of an unprecedented event, a tabula rasa on which her own embarkation will write an individ- ual and generic story. “I was a daughter of the new Zion,” she recalls, “and I felt the ship shudder as the gangplank crashed on the dock. I put on my hat and white cotton gloves and, preparing my face, waited to go ashore at the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.”1 Several kinds of perspective cross in this carefully worded paragraph. Evelyn’s adventure is both private, and part of a politically propelled movement. She is one highly individualistic young Jewish woman, and yet she is also all Jewish women, a member of a great and diasporic race. Evelyn’s arrival is an act of homecoming that recalls ancient and tragic departures: to Babylon, to Latvia, to England. Appropriately, beneath her tentative celebration there surges a recall of the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah with its cadences of mourning: “And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.”2 Against
R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_2 18 ROBERT FRASER
this backdrop of displacement and peregrination, in a gesture that is
cosmetic and existential and political, Evelyn now “prepares” her face. What face, we are moved to ask, confronting what dangers? Evelyn views herself as an utterly modern, post-war person. Palestine is her opportunity, where she will re-invent her destiny. Yet at the very moment when all links with metropolitan and European culture seem deliberately to have been severed, her testimony makes nodding acknowledgement of that master text of Western deformation and reformation, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Grant’s references to the Bible and Gibbon are not mere stylistic flour- ishes. If Lamentations epitomises her sense of displacement, Gibbon relates importantly to her reading of culture. Published between 1776— the year of the American Declaration of Independence—and 1789—the year of the American Constitution and the official end of the first, transat- lantic British Empire, Gibbon’s History foreshadowed amongst other things the growth, fall from grace and collapse of Britain’s second, Asian and African, colonial enterprise. It is at the culmination of this process that Evelyn awaits her uncertain future. Her conjuring with Gibbon’s title is itself in a long tradition. For 220 years Decline and Fall has been inter- preted in the light of society’s changing circumstances. It has been seen as an apologia or elegy for empire, even a concerted attack on the imperial ideal. It has been understood to applaud heroic virtue or bemoan human futility, as a reactionary or as a revolutionary text. In the mid-Victorian period it became a cautionary tale of empire. Even when unread, its leather-bound six volumes graced every gentleman’s bookshelves. The case of Archdeacon Julius Hare may be extreme. A Broad Churchman and patron of the Christian socialists, he treated Decline and Fall as a second Bible. To avoid rising from the dinner table when entertaining guests, he trained his house spaniel to run backwards and forwards from the library to check references to Gibbon’s footnotes. In the late Victorian high noon of empire, Gibbon was taken for a jingoist. The young cavalry officer Winston Churchill read him between polo matches in India, imbibing the ignorant lesson that the Romans submitted to decline only because they were not English. In the twenty-first century we are far more likely to agree with Evelyn’s distillation of this classic text: that empires, continents and nations are artificial compounds moulded from shifting sands, from peoples, lan- guages and faiths. Gibbon’s theme, after all, is how Rome—at once a polis and an empire—was swept away by successive tides of peoples flooding IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 19
from Asia and Africa across central and southern Europe. It is no accident that, as generations of his readers have attested, Gibbon’s narrative recounts no substantial decline, and that the “fall” in his title is difficult to locate, in either time or place. Instead he shows how, as a direct result of successive migrations, displacements and appropriations, there gradually arose that cluster of interests he lauds in his third book as the “One Great Republic” of Europe. Before we turn to address late twentieth-century migrations and their consequences, it is as well therefore to recognise that in the Age of Enlightenment, even as the foundations of the modern world were being laid, there existed this sense of migration as the metal out of which societies are forged. As Gibbon very well knew, and as seventeen-year-old Evelyn Sert obscurely suspects, empires are forever fall- ing to make room for something unexpected. What is more, it is those very factors that sometimes look as if they are about to undermine the empires, nations or cultures that habitually build them up. There is an additional twist, of course, since Evelyn in the passage quoted is also ironically contrasting herself with that Gibbonian and clas- sical figure: the barbarian at the gates. She is able to question this tradi- tional trope since as a woman she is relatively powerless, and because her purpose is personal discovery, not conquest. Her shifted perspective uncovers what is one essential division between ancient and modern per- ceptions of migration: the distinction between an invader and a refugee. Compare two acts of migration at different historical periods but at a common physical crossing point: the narrow stretch of sea between North Africa and Spain. The ancients knew this place as the Pillars of Hercules— the furthest point of the settled world—on the southern shore of which were supposed to lie the Gardens of the Hesperides with their golden apples. We know it, more prosaically, as the Straits of Gibraltar. This is how, in his fifty-first chapter, Gibbon leads up to the invasion of Spain by the Arabs in AD 709, across the straits to the coast of Andalusia:
In the progress of conquest from the north and south, the Goths and the Saracens encountered each other on the confines of Europe and Africa. In the opinion of the latter, the difference in religion is a reasonable ground of enmity and warfare. As early as the time of Othman their piratical squadrons had ravaged the coast of Andalusia, nor had they forgotten the relief of Carthage by the Gothic succours. In that age, as well as in the present, the kings of Spain were possessed of the fortress of Ceuta; one of the columns of Hercules, which is divided by a narrow strait from the opposite pillar or point of Europe.3 20 ROBERT FRASER
The questionable aspects of this passage lie on its surface. All meaning- ful historical movement is seen as operating from north to south. Religious intolerance is viewed as the prerogative of the Muslims, and this by a Christian sceptic who a few chapters later will tell us about the Crusades. Arab exploration along the southern coast of Spain is interpreted as the work of “piratical squadrons”. These barbs are all the more piercing for Gibbon’s belatedly expressed recognition that the Spain created by this and other conquests was—and is—culturally part Arab. Consider now a fragment from the modern fiction of migration. In his short story “Once in the Garden of Plenty”, the contemporary Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub describes how Majid, an unemployed labourer from North Africa, buys his way to a dream by escaping in an open boat towards the Spanish coast. The boat overturns, and Majid struggles up a beach in Andalusia. He falls among a fellow group of migrant workers without papers living thirty to a shack at the mercy of their Spanish employer. All of these people, he notices, seem haunted by melancholy. At nightfall, he approaches one of the older labourers and asks him why this is so. The man answers that, like the others, he will soon learn how to be sad:
Majid shifted his weight on the cardboard matting. “But they made it. They made the crossing. They are free. They are working. They are here.” “Four hundred years ago we ruled all of these lands, from Granada to the gates of Vienna. Now we come here as fugitives begging for a few crumbs.” “I know nothing about all that. All I want is a chance to make a decent living.” “You have a wife and child, right? You are blessed. But you are also a fool if you think anything is given away for nothing. You want to feed your family then you have to take what you want. In this world, no one, not even the birds are given something for nothing.”4
Majhoub’s title ironically refers us to the myth of the Hesperides, whose
paradisal garden he displaces before pointing us to its non-existence. Majid’s reference to migrant birds, meanwhile, points us in another direc- tion: to a categorical uncertainty hovering over the vocabulary of migra- tion. When is a migrant an immigrant, and when is he or she a visitor? Are economic migrants authentic immigrants or birds of passage? Ought we to think of migrant workers as swallows, seasonally returning to a different nesting? What is the exact status of the refugee? When is infiltration inves- tigation, and when is it conquest? When may settlers consider themselves settled? At what point can landowners from a different clime legitimately IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 21
be treated as interlopers? To what extent does mass migration redefine the
host culture? What are personal roots? After how long does a homeland cease to be a homeland? These questions haunt the world from the Middle East to Ireland, from Serbia to Zimbabwe, Paris, the Greek islands, Dover and London. And yet I would claim they are but sub-compartments of deeper and broader issues: What is a people? What is a nation? What is a culture? These primary questions are germane to all of our purposes because during the colonial period there existed an effective, and sometimes crush- ing, collusion between the available answers. A culture was widely held to be embedded within a nation whose ethnic foundations were themselves clear and unambiguous. This was a time-bound triple equation, but it was very widespread during the nineteenth century, lasting well into the twen- tieth, and surviving into the twenty-first in the rhetoric of both right- and left-wing politics. So pervasive have been its suppositions as to form the ideological bedrock running beneath the varieties of imperialism, and the nationalist movements that opposed and supplanted them. A mere sixty years ago, Sir Antony Eden, Conservative Prime Minister during the Suez crisis in 1956, and Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader whose nationalisa- tion of the Suez Canal he so much resented, may have been bitterly opposed to one another, and indeed may have had little in common. Yet on this particular score they would surely have agreed: in the one case, that there existed an English people with its own language, traditions and cul- ture embodied in the English nation; and, in the other, that there was such an entity as the Egyptian people with its language, traditions and culture, effectively enshrined within the country known as Egypt. To this extent the ideological profile of national resistance movements constitutes the mirror image of what it opposes. Attention in each case is focused on what one might call the mirage of essentialism, the Platonic idea or essence of the nation. The hotter the political climate, the sharper the mirage. In places where national groupings are even now forming out of the ruins of crumbling empires, the mirage still retains its allure. Yesterday it was Kosovo, today it is Syria or—to return to the beginnings of this chapter— the running sore of Israel or Palestine. The theoretical position outlined above may be obscure and contingent on circumstances, but in the time you take to read this paragraph, a child somewhere will die defending it. These are broad historical observations, but it is well worth re-iterating them because they have a deep effect upon—and are in turn fed by—the production and reception of literary texts. Imperialistic nations bring into 22 ROBERT FRASER
being an imperialistic literature while interpreting their canon of existing
texts imperialistically. Resistance movements then struggle against imperi- alism to replace it with new nations. These in turn manufacture texts of self-justification while viewing their heritage of folklore as a coherent and supportive tradition. In 1854, at the height of the Crimean War, the novelist, social activist and priest Charles Kingsley produced a historical romance called Westward Ho! It described the resistance of the English of Elizabeth I’s reign to the Catholic powers of their own day, and culminated in a stirring description of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.5 So effective was it in stimu- lating patriotic and militaristic sentiment amongst the Victorian reading public that it became a surprise bestseller, on whose financial success the flourishing publishing house of Macmillan was largely founded. In 1968, shortly after Kenyan independence, a postgraduate student at the University of Leeds called Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o wrote a novel called A Grain of Wheat.6 In graphic and moving detail, it narrated the course of the Mau Mau movement, whose resistance to British imperialism during the 1950s had helped bring the Kenyan nation into being. Very different in style and bearing, these books are both masterpieces, though I would say qualitatively—and from most other points of view—Ngũgı ̃’s has the edge. They also draw their strength from congruent sources. Westward Ho! is a book about Englishness, which it portrays as a property worth defending. A Grain of Wheat concerns what it means to be Kenyan, the importance of bolstering that allegiance against all comers, whether from without or within. Despite the considerable merits of each book, neither has much room for insights that might complicate its conception of the nation’s essence and will. Migration, and the resulting heterogeneity, plays little part in these works. A people is a people is a people. To prove how politically driven culture becomes under such pressures, take a look at the evolution of English literature. There is a widespread impression to the effect that the British had a longstanding literature, a stable and teachable canon, that they then exported during the centuries of imperialism to condition and influence subject populations. The history of the subject as investigated by scholars such as Robert Crawford, Chris Baldick, Terry Eagleton, Gerald Graff and Franklin Court, however, pres- ents a somewhat more complicated picture, in the light of which it might be truer to state that the English evolved the idea of English literature in a colonial context, and then imported it. The first chair of “Rhetoric” as it was then known was created in St Andrews in 1720, mid-way between the IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 23
two Jacobite risings; from Scotland it rapidly spread to colonial America
and then to India. At the time of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, English lit- erature was not a subject commonly taught in England. It began to be taken seriously because in 1835 Lord Macaulay, historian and administra- tor, had prescribed it for Indians. It was examined in no British university until well on in the century, though from the 1890s it was a compulsory element in the qualifying examination for the Indian civil service. English was adopted as a degree course in most colleges in the empire at their foundation; in England it caught on slowly. The University of Ghana appointed its first lecturer in English in the late 1940s. Trinity College Cambridge did not elect a fellow to teach it until 1956, 120 years after one of the college’s favourite sons—Macaulay—had passed it for Indian con- sumption. The University of Oxford did not create a chair in the subject until 1904, Cambridge until 1911. When the scrutiny of English literature entrenched itself as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century, it was frequently presented as a fleshing out of a perceived core of national identity, one worthy of presen- tation to foreigners. It is no coincidence that the English folklorist move- ment headed by figures such as Cecil Sharp coincided in time with the age of jingoism. At much the same period, Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose compositions draw extensively on folk melodies, could entitle a prose exposition of his methods National Music. Under such pressures texts, both literary and musical, came to be read as parables of—even manifestos for—the nation. The Bible—that anthology of ancient migrations—was used to keep people in their place. Chaucer, whose most famous poem recounts a journey, became a poet of fixed point, a terminus post quem. Shakespeare with his European imagination and affinities became “the Bard”. Milton with his wide-ranging and international learning was the English poet par excellence. The resulting regionality of interpretation extended even to classical works. Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, are poems of physical and spiritual journeying. In the period in question they were fre- quently refashioned as national myths. The Aeneid, of course, is both these things, but the emphasis on the latter produced results that were sometimes inappropriate, and on occasion far more serious. The most notorious instance of such biased reading occurred in the city of Birmingham in 1968 when Enoch Powell, Tory Shadow Defence Secretary, classical scholar and sometime brigadier in the British army in India, cited Virgil during an inflammatory speech on immigration. “I 24 ROBERT FRASER
seem”, he declared, “like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foam- ing with much blood.” The supposed source of this allusion was a passage in Aeneid Book Six. Turn to that passage and you will find, as Powell himself later unapologetically admitted, no Roman, no river and no car- nage. Instead you will discover a passage in which the Sybil of Cumae, a Greek prophetess, welcomes Aeneas—a Trojan prince—to Italy. Journey on, she exhorts him, settle in Latium and there you will found a great city with the tribute of your foreign blood. The co-opting of Virgil’s meaning for ideological ends meant less to Powell’s victims than the insult offered by the speech to their migrant presence. The point I wish to make is that Powell’s appropriation of a text and the resulting panic were integrally related. A partisan reading of literature chimed balefully with a partisan reading of culture. It is an object lesson for those who condemn literary criticism as a marginal subject when the misprision of a passage in ancient epic causes havoc on the streets. It is with such instances in mind that one urges the theoretical and practical consequences of the literature of migration. Migration is one of the main facts of the modern, as it was of the ancient, world. Possibly we migrate more than we ever did: the significant fact for our present pur- poses is that we have learned to view ancient and modern migrations dif- ferently, as sources of continuing enhancement rather than as the crude materials out of which the fortress of nationhood comes to be built. The accession of this fresh insight into human affairs is the latest and arguably the most promising phase in a long process of de-colonisation that has enabled us to see all human culture in a different light. It affects the litera- ture that we write, more and more of which addresses this phenomenon more or less directly. It also liberates our constrained perceptions of the literature of the past. Moreover, it prompts us to interrogate the identities of nations and continents, whose capacity for endless self-invention it highlights. In the process it cannot but enrich of our sense of who we are, and our consequent attitude to others. The process, however, has been a gradual one. In the year 1948 was published in London a classic of migration: All About H. Hatterr by a young Bengali writer, G.V. Desani. It fell stillborn from the press in an England still recovering from the patriotic efforts of the Second World War. In the year 1969 it was revived and won for Desani a brief celebrity. Two writers, both in a sense migrants, played a significant role in this new climate of reception. The first was a polyglot Irishman, born in Manchester: Anthony Burgess, who wrote an introduction for the new edition. The IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 25
second was a young writer from Bombay living in London: Salman
Rushdie, who read the book with eagerness. Burgess’s introduction has much to tell us about the atmosphere of resistance which Desani’s novel had faced on its first publication, and the insights which had made it newly acceptable to liberal members of his own generation. Typically he bases his essay on the analysis of a French word: métèque. This is not a term commonly employed in contemporary English, but it had recently been used by the British critic F.W. Bateson—Oxford’s answer to F.R. Leavis—to describe foreign residents in Britain who had contributed something to the country’s culture: people, I suppose, like Joseph Conrad. As Burgess himself was aware, the term had relevant ori- gins in metoikos, the Greek for “migration”, applied by Athenians to aliens who enjoyed no civil rights but who were permitted to stay within the city boundaries provided they paid a special tax, the metoikion. Bateson himself had defined a métèque as a “writer with a non-English linguistic, racial or political background” who, ignorant of “the finer rules of English idiom or grammar” was led to “attempt effects of style, sometimes successfully, that an English writer would feel to be a perverse defiance of the genius of the language”. If Bateson was describing a British syndrome why, one might well ask, had he used a French word? The reason is evident from the Petit Robert dictionary, which defines métèque as “wop” or “wog”. Having made his point about Bateson’s covert racism, Burgess springs to the attack:
Most of us would say that the “finer rules” are essentially the property of non-creative pundits who, at a higher level, compile manuals of usage and, at the lower, scold children for constructing verbless sentences. As for “the genius of the language”, it is doubtful if English has a tutelary spirit or an immanent form. It is plastic, and indeed as ready to yield to the métèque as to Mr Bateson.7
Burgess’s philippic was, of course, as illuminating of the period in ques-
tion as Bateson’s coy diatribe. Most of us are products of a particular decade: Bateson’s had been the 1930s that had also produced Powell; Burgess’s was the 1950s that had given us in France Albert Camus’s L’Etranger and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and, in England, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, as well as the Beatniks and the Teddy Boys, originals of the “Droogs” in A Clockwork Orange. Burgess’s discourse, in other words, is one of insiders and outsiders, and the advantages and positive pain of being 26 ROBERT FRASER
one of the latter. It was a binary vision, powerful and liberating at the time. It is not this, however, that inspired Rushdie, who perceived in Desani’s work something quite different: the possibility of a culture and a mode of writing lying neither “inside” nor “outside”, but in a creative space in between. The possibility, too, of a use of English that in Rushdie’s own work would take it way beyond Burgess’s plasticity to a molten grace elud- ing any notion of belonging. Roll forward twenty years, to 1992. Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient is about the damage done by nations, and what to do about it. Set in a war-devastated Italy, it centres on a disfigured patient who is not English at all, and whose sense of meaning is gleaned from a systematic re-reading of books that are important to him. One of these is Kipling’s Kim; the patient persuades Hana, his Canadian nurse, to read it to him. He tells her to take the book slowly and not to jump to conclu- sions. There is beauty beyond its imperialistic politics, if only she will listen. Far more important to the patient, however, is an ancient copy of Herodotus’s Histories, which he uses as a kind of commonplace book, pasting into it snippets and extracts from elsewhere that have caught his fancy. Unusually, Ondaatje specifies the edition and translation used, a matter of evident concern to the patient himself, who has compared the available versions and talks to Hana about the advantages of this one. His care seems excessive until one recognises an important fact which, like so much in this evasive novel, is never spelled out. At the period when the book is set, students of Herodotus who took this classical author at all seriously would have turned not to any of the translations on offer, but to its most celebrated source for exegesis: the A Lexicon to Herodotus pub- lished in 1938 by Enoch Powell. In 1944, by common consent, Powell— who had resigned his Chair in Classics in order to fight in the war—was the leading international authority on the Histories. Had the patient waited another ten years he could have read Powell’s own translation, rendered, as its Preface carefully explains, into the antique prose style of the King James Bible in order to give it an air of resonant, archaic Englishness. Throughout, it is couched in that peculiar, rolling rhetoric that fifteen years later would feature in Powell’s racist speech in Birmingham. And what of the patient’s own attachment to Herodotus? This is how he explains it to Hana: IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 27
I see him…as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piercing together a mirage. “This history of mine,” Herodotus says, “has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.” What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how peo- ple fall in love.8
For the patient, as for Ondaatje, Herodotus is a nomad. He travels
between civilisations; he barters insights, he charts failings, he records vio- lence. He is a man of no allegiance. Herodotus with his boundless curios- ity into customs and beliefs offers a view of the world that confounds the late war, opening up a new—because an unaccountably old—way of seeing. The English Patient is a story about the re-invention of Europe written at two removes: by a Sri Lankan writer who had taken his abode in Canada. Its lesson is that the old Europe of boundaries, rivalries and divisions has to die for a new one to be born, a continent fit for the crowd of inspired nomads who people the novel. Its enemy is patriotism, an emotion that nonetheless it struggles to understand. Dissolving old loyalties, it points us towards a serendipity of revelation dependent on travelling, a state of affairs well known to hitchhikers. As Ondaatje reminds us, people migrate, and so do texts, including his own. In the process they break down barriers between cultures, historical periods and intellectual disciplines. Migrant texts interrogate loyalties and fixed perceptions. Effective subversive agents, they refuse to show their passports. With postcolonial perspicacity, they read one another. Furthermore, they alter and enrich our sense of place. London, for example, has never looked the same since Samuel Selvon’s affectionate but trenchant portrait, The Lonely Londoners of 1956. To see the city through the eyes of its protagonist Moses is to glimpse possibilities undreamed of in the metropolitan fiction of the time. Selvon transforms the city, partly by his use of Trinidadian creole, and partly by his evocation of an underclass whose very presence interrogates a confident urban cul- ture, reflecting back to it an image which it was at first reluctant to recog- nise, but which is now seen as an inalienable aspect of its changing identity. Selvon’s book is, of course, a study of the difficult cultural relations in the Notting Hill of the 1950s, but it is also a profound—and at times hilari- ously funny—love song to London, a hymn to its hybrid essence. The 28 ROBERT FRASER
London of the 1980s found in Ben Okri’s stories is a place in which the contingent, the neglected and the apparently squalid have become sources of aesthetic delight, in which the vagrant becomes a seer, a watcher at the city gates.9 Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in the same year as Linda Grant’s novel, possesses something of this same ambivalent quality. It also depicts a town in which a new version of childhood makes its appearance, where memories of shuffling leaves on November afternoons become a possession shared by those whose birth right harks back to Jamaica or Bangladesh. Take all of these Londons, add to them Dickens’s London, Defoe’s London and Blake’s London, and you have a setting where the locale of Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography extends to embrace humankind, without for a moment ceasing to be itself. Or take that supposed heartland of English ethnic identity: the deep countryside. Perhaps the most moving portrait of rural England written in the closing years of the twentieth century was V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival of 1987, set near Salisbury.10 Its migrant protagonist subjects Wiltshire to a scrutiny the more incisive for stemming from one who at first admits his bafflement. As the story progresses he learns to interpret the country through its minutest signs: tiny changes in the landscape, the slow change of the seasons, inflections of voice and attitude, inhibitions, secrets. He reads Wiltshire like a palimpsest, layer upon layer. He perceives the feudal order behind the modern face, the deference or contempt beneath everyday conversations. This is a picture that mirrors something of the protagonist’s own reticence and discretion. Like The Lonely Londoners, The Enigma of Arrival is a searching account of a difficult place that manages also to be an idyll. It is also a panorama of rural life at odds with the acrimonious nostalgia of Roger Scruton: a view larger, more responsive and—for all its alertness to parallels with Trinidad—truer to the actual, rather than the supposed, qualities of Englishness. The ultimate effect of such texts is to collapse the damaging binaries that sustain ideologies of confrontation: immigrant and emigrant, home and abroad, self and other, town and country, ancient and modern, main- stream and fringe. To embrace migrancy, moreover, is to signal an end of that long procession of stereotypes by means of which cultures protect their self-image against the single or collective challenge of the other: nomad, barbarian, conqueror, métèque, refugee, foreigner, asylum seeker. As all of us know, and the instances already cited suggest, all acts of migra- tion are far more complicated than any such list of arrivants would sug- gest. To embrace migrancy as a positive force, furthermore, is to propose IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 29
a way out of the apparently endless reactive cycle described by Gibbon
through which empires break down to give rise to new nationalisms, which then re-group to form different amalgamations that in turn dissolve in violence. So that the Roman Empire fragments to give rise to the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires, which themselves dissolve in rancour. So that the Hapsburg Empire collapses, involving the whole of Europe in war, only to form new balkanised states which then cohere into the Warsaw Pact, this in turn breaking down into the chaos and extremity observable in parts of Eastern Europe to this day. So that the United Kingdom recasts itself in the light of re-born national groupings, and everywhere the Romany is regarded as unwanted. If only we could learn to see the migrant not as the enemy, but as the creator and generator of culture. Lastly because of the authenticity of its historical perspective, the litera- ture and critique of migrancy help us to read all texts and all cultures in a different way. As a result the present looks different, but so does the past and its literature. Virgil is no longer the champion of heroic nationalism, but a lyrical essence informing the work of, say, Christopher Okigbo, the great African poet, whose proclaimed master he was, and of Ben Okri, who learned Latin in order to read the Eclogues and whose novel Songs of Enchantment bears an epigraph from the Georgics. In Ondaatje’s work, Herodotus is released from the bookshelves and becomes a window onto migrant or convergent cultures. Gibbon shakes off his neo-classical dust, providing a clue to the future: to cultural death and renewal. Shakespeare’s The Tempest becomes a universal allegory of power, and a recurrent ingre- dient in the literature of the West Indies, rather than the possession of an insular and repressive people. Viewed through such a lens, perhaps all culture is migrant culture. The fact that we can start to see it like that owes much to the authors or musi- cians we will be looking at in the following ten chapters. With their assis- tance, we all become migrant people by virtue of being readers or listeners. For truly regarded, all reading or listening—like all writing—is a kind of travelling.
Notes 1. Linda Grant, When I Lived in Modern Times (London: Granta, 2000), 4. 2. Lamentations 1:6. 3. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–1788] (London: 1820), vol. 9, 468. 30 ROBERT FRASER
4. “Once in a Garden of Plenty”, in Wasafiri 31 (Spring 2000), 7–8.
5. Charles Kingsley, Westwood Ho! Or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh (London: Macmillan, 1854). 6. Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1968). 7. G.V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr with an introduction by Anthony Burgess (London: Penguin, 1969), 7. 8. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 126. 9. See especially Ben Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (London: Heinemann, 1986), Stars of the Late Curfew (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988) and Songs of Enchantment (London: Jonathon Cape, 1993). 10. V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Viking, 1987). CHAPTER 3
Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads
and Myth
The Hungarian-born composer and pianist Franz Liszt was fascinated by
Gypsies. In his eyes—part admiring, part contemptuous—they appeared to belong nowhere. More than that, they seemed not to possess, or even to need, any sense of belonging. “The Laplander, or the native of Samoa,” he wrote in his book Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie of 1859, “equally with the hunters of the Alps or the Pyrenees, the Cossacks of the Steppes equally with the sailor of Britany, languish and decay if an attempt is made to transport them to scenes other than those in which they have been brought up.”
But with the Gipsies, all this is not so. All notions of country, property and social institutions are specially repudiated by them. They form no local habit, deny the attraction of childhood reminiscence, desire no conquest and, having no past, frankly challenge the future. The entire earth is their country, the ground is their own, while every climate pleases them in which they can wander freely and move without restraint. The tribe, formed and collected by chance though it may be, is their family; a tent, though a mere covering extended from tree to tree, their sufficient habitation, and any object of present momentary enjoyment their undisputed property.1
Naturally, for Liszt, the prime “object of momentary enjoyment” was
music. In 1853 he had imitated what he took to be the Gypsy or Bohemian style in nineteen “Hungarian rhapsodies” for solo piano, following what
R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_3 32 ROBERT FRASER
he believed to be the essentials of its distinctive form, “divided”, as he
states in his book, “into two parts: the first corresponding to the slow dance and the second to the animated dance that follows”, and flaunting the quiddities of Gypsy melody with its purported minor scale containing an “augmented fourth, diminished sixth and augmented seventh”.2 Added were many a twist and turn suggestive of the movements of the dancer. Thus had Liszt taken Europe by storm. Yet there lay a paradox at the core both of this music and of his book. At one level, both were expressions of Liszt’s own restless temperament. At another, they bodied forth political and aesthetic energies stirred, throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire as elsewhere across the conti- nent, by the national revolutions of 1848. For Liszt, this was pre-eminently Hungarian music: Hungarian because bestowed and preserved by the Roma. It was also imbued with the spirit of the Roma by virtue of being Hungarian. The contradictions involved in this double view had in turn been aroused by the turmoil of the mid-century. Romanticism, after all, had striven both to express the aspirations of the emergent national state and to move beyond them. In the music of Liszt, a sense of place strains towards the ubiquitous, the itinerant, the universal. A century later, the foundations of Liszt’s thought and practice were vociferously challenged by mid-European musicians and researchers of a differently minded generation, led by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Liszt, declared Bartók in 1931, had fallen victim to “false terminology”. He had furthermore been deceived by the advertised self-identification of the Roma themselves. What Liszt had been listening to—what he had unwittingly evoked—was not, according to this fresh paradigm, “Gypsy music” at all. It was rather “a recent type of Hungarian popular art music composed practically without exception by Hungarians of the upper mid- dle class” and obligingly echoed by Romany musicians mindful of the tastes of their hosts.3 Liszt’s rhapsodies had, therefore, been imitations of imitations. There existed an authentic Romany music, to be sure, but it was performed in private, for no ears but their own, and certainly not for the likes of Liszt. There was also a bona fide Magyar folk music, on which Bartók and Kodály themselves were resolved to, and did, draw. This, in turn, had little to do with the Roma. As musicians, the Roma thus flourished in two different capacities. First, they were custodians of their own, jealously guarded, traditions. But they also acted as accomplished absorbers, and gracious purveyors, of cer- tain facets of the musical heritage of the societies through which they ROMA AND ROAMING: BORDERS, NOMADS AND MYTH 33
passed. The vogue for “Gypsy” music severally evinced by Brahms in his Hungarian dances and Bizet in Carmen was therefore one way in which Europe had romantically listened to itself or, more precisely, to a reflec- tion of that otherness, that wild exoticism, that decadent ideal, present within, and epitomised by, the late nineteenth-century cult of “The Bohemian”.
* * *
But why “Bohemian” at all? Bohemia was and is both a wild, imagined place—a sort of antidote to urbanity—and a geographical location in the very midst of Europe, in what would eventually emerge successively as Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. In the first capacity it has never found a location on any earthly chart; in the second, it has featured in a multitude of maps from the post-medieval period. All maps, of course, are mental as well as physical projections. Early maps have a strong tendency to assume that physical and political geogra- phy are alike static, in which case the clue is where the centre or heart lies. The circular Mappa Mundi, kept in Hereford Cathedral and inscribed in around 1290 on one sheet of vellum, admits of three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa, arranged around the main artery of the Mediterranean, above which, drawing on Christian iconography, it situates the centre of the world at Jerusalem, with Christ shown hanging above it on the cross. As the Renaissance dawns with its human and secular preoccupations, a marked shift of attention occurs. Pierre Desceliers’s famous World Map of 1550 places the focus somewhere around Mauritania, but with the scale of Europe to the north already discernibly enlarged in relation to its actual size. Over the next few centuries, the disproportion intensifies. By the late sixteenth century, with the continent’s increasing mercantile dominance over the rest of the globe, Europe’s appearance is frequently portrayed— or even personified—as regal. On the title page of geographical encyclopae- dia Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwep, 1570), as Sir John Hale notes in his The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, Europe sits sternly on her throne beneath a tree: “In one hand she holds the sceptre of world domination. The other extends over an orb, of globe-like dimensions, marked with the Christian cross. Below, and subservient to her, are three other female characters, a richly clad Asia, a semi-naked Africa, and a nude America holding up a human head in relation to her cannibalism.”4 34 ROBERT FRASER
Fig. 3.1 “Queen Europa” from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (2nd ed., Basel, 1588), B.L.Ac.3838/45 ROMA AND ROAMING: BORDERS, NOMADS AND MYTH 35
When we come to maps of Europe itself, an analogous mode of allegory
prevails. Look at the woodcut of “Queen Europa” featured in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (Fig. 3.1), first published in Basel in 1544 and re- issued in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada.5 It features an upended topographical design with the shorelines distorted into the figure of a well- proportioned monarch, and the compass bearings re-jigged to place Spain, then at the height of its imperial success, as the crowned head. In her left hand the figure holds the orb of Sicily and in her left—itself composed of Denmark—a sceptre, from which flutters a pennant made up of Scotland, England and Ireland. France composes her upper chest and Germany her stately bosom. The rest of her limbs languish in cartographic uncertainty caused by an absence of national boundaries, not to feature on any map of Europe until 1607. What look like borders in Münster’s projection turn out, on closer inspection, to be rivers, each representing an artery feeding Europe’s generous body: the Seine her rib cage, the Danube her calves, the Volga her left thigh. The most previous artery of all, the Upper Rhine, springs from her heart, made up of the enclosed grove of Bohemia. I want us to think about two related consequences stemming from the upright carriage of this figure and the arrangement of her inner organs. Because of her orientation, it is very difficult to form a sense of an East– West axis and, even if there is a compensating North–South fulcrum, it is not where we would put it. Forty years before William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (1628), moreover, there is in this analogical body no sense of cir- culation of the blood. Instead there is a one-way outward flow quite con- sistent with Tudor notions of the arteries as conduits carrying the vital or intellectual spirits to each and every part. The source of the continuous flux on Münster’s chart is the sylvan heart of Bohemia. This is remarkable in itself, since topographical ideas as to the whereabouts and extent of Bohemia were notoriously vague at the time. The most celebrated culprit in this respect was Shakespeare, who set Act Four of The Winter’s Tale there, but managed in the process to equip Bohemia with a seashore. “Shakespeare in a play”, crowed his friend and rival Ben Jonson, “brought in a number of men, saying that they had suffered ship-wrack in Bohemia, where there is no sea near by 100 miles.”6 Over one fact, however, the Elizabethans were consistent. Bohemia— wherever that was—was the immediate, though not the original, home of a people who had first appeared on the highways of western Europe in the fifteenth century, and in the rural lanes and city streets of England and Scotland from about 1507: the Roma, or as they were then—and are still—commonly called, the Gypsies.7 36 ROBERT FRASER
On why the Roma had come to be associated in the public mind with Bohemia, again our best informant is Münster, who had met a troupe of them in Eberach near Heidelberg.8 When he asked them how they trav- elled so freely, they showed him a document of safe conduct from the former Holy Roman Emperor, King Zigmund of Bohemia. As it happens, a copy of this document has survived. Signed at Spissky [Spisska Bela] Castle in what is now the Slovak Republic on 17 April 1423, it enjoins all it may concern to treat “Ladislav, Duke of his Gypsy People” and his fol- lowers with courtesy: “We recommend that you show to him the loyalty which you would show to Us. Protect them, so that Duke Ladislav and his people may live without prejudice within your walls.”9 Believing the Romas’ own explanation that they were Egyptians on a seven-year pil- grimage of penance for having rejected Christ, Zigmund had clearly taken on himself a role as their protector. Indeed, it was on account of this tale of origin, adopted to appeal to late medieval Catholic sympathies, that the Roma were already—and confusingly—known as “Gypsies”. Sceptical as always, Münster asked his Heidelberg friends where their homeland was, and was told it lay beyond the Holy Land, beyond even Babylon. He learnedly replied: “Then your Lesser Egypt is not Africa near the Nile but in Asia along the Ganges or the Indus.” The Gypsies, who had long for- gotten their place of ultimate origin, dissolved into mirth. From contemporary documents we can follow the progress of the Roma westwards across Europe with a fair degree of precision. Entering Bohemia (that is to say the eastern part of the Hungarian empire, corre- sponding to what used to be known as Czechoslovakia) from Asia by way of Turkey and the Balkans, they eventually advanced through Germany in dribs and drabs to Holland, Italy and France. In 1420 a band of Gypsy folk were reported at Leiden.10 On 18 June 1422 a group of about a hun- dred arrived in Bologna, where their leader Duke Andrea stayed in style at the royal inn while his companions camped before the Galeria gate.11 On 3 July the Bolognese asked them all to move on. The following year, four from the date on King Zigmund’s letter, yet another group produced a copy of this document as a passport in Paris. It was signed by the roi de Bohème, and so earned them the nickname les Bohémiens. Yet the imperial letter did them little good: outraged by their ragged appearance, the authorities locked them up in La Chapelle.12 The most successful appear- ance by any Roma detachment was probably in Scotland. Their reputation had preceded them, since from 1536–7 James V of Scots had spent eight and a half months in northern France, where he had been cured by a Another random document with no related content on Scribd: The Project Gutenberg eBook of The decline of the West This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The decline of the West
Volume 1, Form and actuality
Author: Oswald Spengler
Translator: Charles Francis Atkinson
Release date: December 6, 2023 [eBook #72344]
Language: English
Original publication: London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926
Credits: Tim Lindell, KD Weeks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
DECLINE OF THE WEST *** Transcriber’s Note: Footnotes have been collected at the end of each chapter, and are linked for ease of reference. There are frequent references to Volume II of this translation of Spengler’s work. The second volume has not yet been provided to Project Gutenberg, so those references are left unlinked. Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation. Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the note at the end of the text. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST THE DECLINE OF THE WEST FORM AND ACTUALITY BY
OSWALD SPENGLER
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION WITH NOTES BY
CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED TO ELLINOR JAMES A FRIEND
Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe
Sich wiederholend ewig fliesst, Das tausendfältige Gewölbe Sich kräftig ineinander schliesst; Strömt Lebenslust aus allen Dingen, Dem kleinsten wie dem grössten Stern, Und alles Drängen, alles Ringen Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Herrn. —Goethe. TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
It must be left to critics to say whether it was Destiny or Incident—
using these words in the author’s sense—that Spengler’s “Untergang des Abendlandes” appeared in July, 1918, that is, at the very turning-point of the four years’ World-War. It was conceived, the author tells us, before 1914 and fully worked out by 1917. So far as he is concerned, then, the impulse to create it arose from a view of our civilization not as the late war left it, but (as he says expressly) as the coming war would find it. But inevitably the public impulse to read it arose in and from post-war conditions, and thus it happened that this severe and difficult philosophy of history found a market that has justified the printing of 90,000 copies. Its very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment—the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to the world of authoritative learning. Spengler’s was not the only, nor indeed the most “popular,” philosophical product of the German revolution. In the graver conjunctures, sound minds do not dally with the graver questions— they either face and attack them with supernormal resolution or thrust them out of sight with an equally supernormal effort to enjoy or to endure the day as it comes. Even after the return to normality, it is no longer possible for men—at any rate for Western men—not to know that these questions exist. And, if it is none too easy even for the victors of the struggle to shake off its sequelæ, to turn back to business as the normal and to give no more than amateur effort and dilettantish attention to the very deep things, for the defeated side this is impossible. It goes through a period of material difficulty (often extreme difficulty) and one in which pride of achievement and humility in the presence of unsuccess work dynamically together. So it was with sound minds in the post-Jena Germany of Jahn and Fichte, and so it was also with such minds in the Germany of 1919- 1920. To assume the rôle of critic and to compare Spengler’s with other philosophies of the present phase of Germany, as to respective intrinsic weights, is not the purpose of this note nor within the competence of its writer. On the other hand, it is unconditionally necessary for the reader to realize that the book before him has not only acquired this large following amongst thoughtful laymen, but has forced the attention and taxed the scholarship of every branch of the learned world. Theologians, historians, scientists, art critics—all saw the challenge, and each brought his apparatus criticus to bear on that part of the Spengler theory that affected his own domain. The reader who is familiar with German may be referred to Manfred Schroeter’s “Der Streit um Spengler” for details; it will suffice here to say that Schroeter’s index of critics’ names contains some 400 entries. These critics are not only, or even principally, general reviewers, most of them being specialists of high standing. It is, to say the least, remarkable that a volcanically assertive philosophy of history, visibly popular and produced under a catchy title (Reklamtitel) should call forth, as it did, a special number of Logos in which the Olympians of scholarship passed judgment on every inaccuracy or unsupported statement that they could detect. (These were in fact numerous in the first edition and the author has corrected or modified them in detail in the new edition, from which this translation has been done. But it should be emphasized that the author has not, in this second edition, receded in any essentials from the standpoint taken up in the first.) The conspicuous features in this first burst of criticism were, on the one hand, want of adequate critical equipment in the general critic, and, on the other, inability to see the wood for the trees in the man of learning. No one, reading Schroeter’s book (which by the way is one- third as large as Spengler’s first volume itself), can fail to agree with his judgment that notwithstanding paradoxes, overstrainings, and inaccuracies, the work towers above all its commentators. And it was doubtless a sense of this greatness that led many scholars— amongst them some of the very high—to avoid expressing opinions on it at all. It would be foolish to call their silence a “sitting on the fence”; it is a case rather of reserving judgment on a philosophy and a methodology that challenge all the canons and carry with them immense implications. For the very few who combine all the necessary depth of learning with all the necessary freedom and breadth of outlook, it will not be the accuracy or inaccuracy of details under a close magnifying-glass that will be decisive. The very idea of accuracy and inaccuracy presupposes the selection or acceptance of co-ordinates of reference, and therefore the selection or acceptance of a standpoint as “origin.” That is mere elementary science—and yet the scholar-critic would be the first to claim the merit of scientific rigour for his criticisms! It is, in history as in science, impossible to draw a curve through a mass of plotted observations when they are looked at closely and almost individually. Criticism of quite another and a higher order may be seen in Dr. Eduard Meyer’s article on Spengler in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, No. 25 of 1924. Here we find, in one of the great figures of modern scholarship, exactly that large-minded judgment that, while noting minor errors—and visibly attaching little importance to them—deals with the Spengler thesis fairly and squarely on the grand issues alone. Dr. Meyer differs from Spengler on many serious questions, of which perhaps the most important is that of the scope and origin of the Magian Culture. But instead of cataloguing the errors that are still to be found in Spengler’s vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably bears testimony to our author’s “erstaunlich umfangreiches, ihm ständig präsentes, Wissen” (a phrase as neat and as untranslatable as Goethe’s “exakte sinnliche Phantasie”). He insists upon the fruitfulness of certain of Spengler’s ideas such as that of the “Second Religiousness.” Above all, he adheres to and covers with his high authority the basic idea of the parallelism of organically-living Cultures. It is not necessarily Spengler’s structure of the Cultures that he accepts—parts of it indeed he definitely rejects as wrong or insufficiently established by evidences—but on the question of their being an organic structure of the Cultures, a morphology of History, he ranges himself frankly by the side of the younger thinker, whose work he sums up as a “bleibendez und auf lange Zeit hinaus nachhaltig wirkendes Besitz unserer Wissenschaft und Literatur.” This last phrase of Dr. Meyer’s expresses very directly and simply that which for an all-round student (as distinct from an erudite specialist) constitutes the peculiar quality of Spengler’s work. Its influence is far deeper and subtler than any to which the conventional adjective “suggestive” could be applied. It cannot in fact be described by adjectives at all, but only denoted or adumbrated by its result, which is that, after studying and mastering it, “one finds it nearly if not quite impossible to approach any culture-problem—old or new, dogmatic or artistic, political or scientific—without conceiving it primarily as ‘morphological.’” The work comprises two volumes—under the respective sub-titles “Form and Reality” and “World-historical Perspectives”—of which the present translation covers the first only. Some day I hope to have the opportunity of completing a task which becomes—such is the nature of this book—more attractive in proportion to its difficulty. References to Volume II are, for the present, necessarily to the pages of the German original; if, as is hoped, this translation is completed later by the issue of the second volume, a list of the necessary adjustments of page references will be issued with it. The reader will notice that translator’s foot-notes are scattered fairly freely over the pages of this edition. In most cases these have no pretensions to being critical annotations. They are merely meant to help the reader to follow up in more detail the points of fact which Spengler, with his “ständig präsentes Wissen,” sweeps along in his course. This being their object, they take the form, in the majority of cases, of references to appropriate articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is the only single work that both contains reasonably full information on the varied (and often abstruse) matters alluded to, and is likely to be accessible wherever this book may penetrate. Every reader no doubt will find these notes, where they appertain to his own special subject, trivial and even annoying, but it is thought that, for example, an explanation of the mathematical Limit may be helpful to a student who knows all about the Katharsis in Greek drama, and vice versa. In conclusion I cannot omit to put on record the part that my wife, Hannah Waller Atkinson, has taken in the work of translation and editing. I may best describe it by saying that it ought perhaps to have been recorded on the title page instead of in this place. C. F. A. January, 1926. PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
At the close of an undertaking which, from the first brief sketch to
the final shaping of a complete work of quite unforeseen dimensions, has spread itself over ten years, it will not be out of place to glance back at what I intended and what I have achieved, my standpoint then and my standpoint to-day. In the Introduction to the 1918 edition—inwardly and outwardly a fragment—I stated my conviction that an idea had now been irrefutably formulated which no one would oppose, once the idea had been put into words. I ought to have said: once that idea had been understood. And for that we must look—as I more and more realize —not only in this instance but in the whole history of thought—to the new generation that is born with the ability to do it. I added that this must be considered as a first attempt, loaded with all the customary faults, incomplete and not without inward opposition. The remark was not taken anything like as seriously as it was intended. Those who have looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought will know that it is not given to us to gain insight into the fundamental principles of existence without conflicting emotions. A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical. This symbolism is the one essential, the vessel and the expression of human history. The learned philosophical works that arise out of it are superfluous and only serve to swell the bulk of a professional literature. I can then call the essence of what I have discovered “true”—that is, true for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time; not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible. But what I wrote in the storm and stress of those years was, it must be admitted, a very imperfect statement of what stood clearly before me, and it remained to devote the years that followed to the task of correlating facts and finding means of expression which should enable me to present my idea in the most forcible form. To perfect that form would be impossible—life itself is only fulfilled in death. But I have once more made the attempt to bring up even the earliest portions of the work to the level of definiteness with which I now feel able to speak; and with that I take leave of this book with its hopes and disappointments, its merits and its faults. The result has in the meantime justified itself as far as I myself am concerned and—judging by the effect that it is slowly beginning to exercise upon extensive fields of learning—as far as others are concerned also. Let no one expect to find everything set forth here. It is but one side of what I see before me, a new outlook on history and the philosophy of destiny—the first indeed of its kind. It is intuitive and depictive through and through, written in a language which seeks to present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering an army of ranked concepts. It addresses itself solely to readers who are capable of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read. Difficult this undoubtedly is, particularly as our awe in face of mystery—the respect that Goethe felt—denies us the satisfaction of thinking that dissections are the same as penetrations. Of course, the cry of “pessimism” was raised at once by those who live eternally in yesterday (Ewiggestrigen) and greet every idea that is intended for the pathfinder of to-morrow only. But I have not written for people who imagine that delving for the springs of action is the same as action itself; those who make definitions do not know destiny. By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich-philosophy of idealism propounds. Those who refuse to be bluffed by enunciations will not regard this as pessimism; and the rest do not matter. For the benefit of serious readers who are seeking a glimpse at life and not a definition, I have—in view of the far too great concentration of the text—mentioned in my notes a number of works which will carry that glance into more distant realms of knowledge. And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty—and if I were asked to find a formula for my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his “outlook” (Ausblick) an “overlook” (Überblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a disciple of Leibniz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy. Oswald Spengler. Blankenburg am Harz, December, 1922. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The complete manuscript of this book—the outcome of three
years’ work—was ready when the Great War broke out. By the spring of 1917 it had been worked over again and—in certain details —supplemented and cleared up, but its appearance in print was still delayed by the conditions then prevailing. Although a philosophy of history is its scope and subject, it possesses also a certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed. The title, which had been decided upon in 1912, expresses quite literally the intention of the book, which was to describe, in the light of the decline of the Classical age, one world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we ourselves are now entering. Events have justified much and refuted nothing. It became clear that these ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and in Germany, and, more, that the war itself was an element in the premisses from which the new world-picture could be made precise. For I am convinced that it is not merely a question of writing one out of several possible and merely logically justifiable philosophies, but of writing the philosophy of our time, one that is to some extent a natural philosophy and is dimly presaged by all. This may be said without presumption; for an idea that is historically essential—that does not occur within an epoch but itself makes that epoch—is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It belongs to our time as a whole and influences all thinkers, without their knowing it; it is but the accidental, private attitude towards it (without which no philosophy can exist) that—with its faults and its merits—is the destiny and the happiness of the individual. Oswald Spengler. Munich, December, 1917. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
Translator’s Note ix
Author’s Preface to the Revised Edition xiii
Author’s Preface to the First Edition xv
Chapter I. Introduction 1 Scope of the work, p. 3. Morphology of World-History, a new philosophy, p. 5. For whom is History? p. 8. Classical and Indian mankind ahistorical, p. 9. The Egyptian mummy and the burning of the dead, p. 13. The conventional scheme of World-History (ancient, mediæval, modern), p. 15. Its origin, p. 18. Its breakdown, p. 22. Europe not a centre of gravity, p. 23. The only historical method is Goethe’s, p. 25. Ourselves and the Romans, p. 26. Nietzsche and Mommsen, p. 28. The problem of Civilization, p. 31. Imperialism the last phase, p. 36. The necessity and range of our basic idea, p. 39. Its relation to present-day philosophy, p. 41. Philosophy’s last task, p. 45. The origin of this work, p. 46.
Chapter II. The Meaning of Numbers 51
Fundamental notions, p. 53. Numbers as the sign of delimitation, p. 56. Every Culture has its own Mathematic, p. 59. Number as magnitude in the Classical world, p. 64. Aristarchus, p. 68. Diophantus and Arabian number, p. 71. Number as Function in the Western Culture, p. 74. World-fear and world-longing, p. 78. Geometry and arithmetic, p. 81. The Limit idea, p. 86. Visual limits transcended; symbolical space worlds, p. 86. Final possibilities, p. 87. Chapter III. The Problem of World-history. (1) Physiognomic and Systematic 91 Copernican methods, p. 93. History and Nature, p. 94. Form and Law, p. 97. Physiognomic and Systematic, p. 100. Cultures as organisms, p. 104. Inner form, tempo, duration, p. 108. Homology, p. 111. What is meant by “contemporary,” p. 112.
Chapter IV. The Problem of World-history. (2) The
Destiny-idea and the Causality-principle 115 Logic, organic and inorganic, p. 117. Time and Destiny, p. 119. Space and Causality, p. 119. The problem of Time, p. 121. Time a counter-conception to Space, p. 126. The symbols of Time—tragedy, time reckoning, disposal of the dead, p. 130. Care (sex, the State, works), p. 136. Destiny and Incident, p. 139. Incident and Cause, p. 141. Incident and Style of existence, p. 142. Anonymous and personal epochs, p. 148. Direction into the future and Image of the Past, p. 152. Is there a Science of History? p. 155. The new enunciation of the problem, p. 159.
Chapter V. Makrokosmos. (1) The Symbolism of the
World-picture and the Problem of Space 161 The Macrocosm as the sum total of symbols referred to a Soul, p. 163. Space and Death, p. 165. “Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis,” p. 167. The space problem (only Depth is space-forming), p. 169. Depth as Time, p. 172. The world-idea of a Culture born out of its prime symbol, p. 174. Classical Body, Magian Cavern, Western Infinity, p. 174.
Chapter VI. Makrokosmos. (2) Apollinian, Faustian, and
Magian Soul 181 Prime symbol, architecture, divinities, p. 183. The Egyptian prime symbol of the path, p. 188. Expression-language of art: Ornamentation and Imitation, p. 191. Ornament and early architecture, p. 196. The window, p. 199. The grand style, p. 200. The history of a Style as organism, p. 205. On the history of the Arabian style, p. 207. Psychology of art-technique, p. 214.
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