Abstract
As we approach the turn of our century, efforts to create a political community called Europe involve not only law and commerce, but necessarily also culture and history. The institutions that represent the peoples of the European Union have already begun to function, yet a European identity remains to be created. Without such an identity, it is difficult or impossible to act legitimately in common, because it will remain unclear what is meant by the ‘we’ in sentences such as ‘we that act in common’. In this essay, I discuss some of the connections between the creation of a political identity (‘us’) and the writing of history (what ‘we’ have done). I focus on the work of the Swedish novelist Eyvind Johnson, whose novels offer us a reading of how identities are formed in time. Notably, he shows how the past is never closed off from the present, but remains with us, or even ahead of us. It appears that the past is not just a sequence of events, but rather a multitude of possible stories that continue to engage the present. This means that any democratic efforts to make us into Europeans will have to negotiate continuously with the past, and thus that European history should be something other than a univocal series of events that necessarily lead to the creation of a European political community.
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Notes
Johnson’s life before his decision to be an author is the subject of his novel Romanen om Olof (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1935). The standard biography is in two volumes: Örjan Lindberger, Norrbottningen som blev Europé (Stockholm, 1986), and Människan i tiden (Stockholm, 1990). See also Gavin Orton, Eyvind Johnson (New York, 1972).
Lars G. Warme, ‘Eyvind Johnson’s Några steg mot tystnaden: an Apologia,’ Scandinavian Studies 49 (1977): pp. 452–63, here p. 452.
Hans nådes tid (Stockholm, 1960) p. 72. All quotations from Johnson’s novels are my translations.
For an interesting study of the times of the others, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993).
Derek Heater, The Idea of European Unity (Leicester, 1992), p. 2.
Michael Walzer, ‘On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought’, Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967): pp. 191–204, here p. 194.
Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London, 1960), p. 71. Or, as Frank Kermode says,’ sequence goes nowhere without his doppelgänger, or shadow, causality.’ ‘secrets and Narrative Sequence’, Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): pp. 83–101, here p. 84. Cf. Helga Nowotny, ‘Time and Social Theory: Towards a Social Theory of Time’, Time & Society 1.3 (1992): pp. 421–54.
For a critique, see George C. Bond and Angela Gilliam, eds, Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power (London, 1994); or John G. Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization 47.1 (1993): pp. 137–74.
Cf. Ole Waever, ‘Europe since 1945: Crisis to Renewal’, The History of the Idea of Europe, eds K. Dussen and J. van der Dussen (London, 1995), pp. 151–210, here p. 152: ‘the promise of Europe — which might mean the possibility of freeing oneself from the old Europe’.
Janerik Gidlund and Sverker Sörlin, Det europeiska kalejdoskopet (Stockholm: SNS, 1993), p. 22.
Cf. the Yugoslavian state, which ‘was born in 1918, upon the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, in the name of the principle of self-determination of nations. It died in 1991 in the name [my emphasis] of the same principle’. Unfinished Peace: Report of the International Commission on the Balkans (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1996), p. 28. For a philosophical analysis, see Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), pp. 87–99. See also Alain Boureau, ‘L’adage vox popoli, vox dei et l’invention de la nation anglaise (VlIIe–XIIe siècle)’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Cultures 4/5 (1992): pp. 1071–89. On the uses of history as a way of proving theory right, see the debate between Markus Fischer and Bruce Hall & Friedrich Kratochwil, International Organization 43 (1993), pp. 479–500.
See, for example, Dominick LaCapra, ‘History, Language and Reading: Waiting for Crillon’, American Historical Review 100.3 (1995): pp. 799–828.
Maureen Whitebrook, ‘Taking the Narrative Turn: What the Novel has to Offer Political Theory’, Literature and the Political Imagination, eds. J. Horton and A. Baumeister (London, 1996), pp. 32–52. Cf. Michael Shapiro, ‘Literary Production as a Politicizing Practice’, Political Theory 12.3 (1984): pp. 387–422.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), pp. 28–40.
Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation’, Legislations: the Politics of Deconstruction (London, 1994); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994).
Sven Hedin, Kriget mot Ryssland: Minnen från fronten i öster, mars — augusti 1915 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1915), p. 38. Hedin, just like today’s Swedish skinheads, seems to ignore Voltaire’s comment: ‘Certainement, il n’y a point de Souverain, qui en lisant la vie de Charles XII. ne doive être guéri de la folie des conquêtes.’ Charles XII: Roi de Suède, p. 31, from Collection complette des ouvres (Geneve, 1757).
Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 2.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 112, English trans, of Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik Geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1979).
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, 1981) pp. 84–258, here p. 84, English trans, of Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moskva, 1975). Without using this concept, Niklas Luhman also writes about the importance of a fusion of time and space for the maintenance of’ social systems’, for example, ‘Complexity, Structural Contingencies and Value Conflicts’, Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, eds. Heelas, Lash, Morris (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); see also Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, eds, Reflexive Modernization (Cambridge, 1994). All these authors want to avoid defining structures too rigidly. For a more closed model of European integration, see Staffan Zetterholm, ‘Why is Cultural Diversity a Political Problem?: a Discussion of Cultural Barriers to Political Integration’, National Cultures and European Integration, ed. Zetterholm (Oxford, 1994), pp. 65–82. For a discussion of the limits of openings, see Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula: La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (Milano, 1979).
Stuart Allen, ‘“When discourse is torn from reality”: Bakhtin and the Principle of Chronotopicity’, Time & Society 3.2 (1994): pp. 193–218, here p. 210; Bakhtin, p. 255.
Bo G. Jansson, ‘Självironi, självbespegling och självreflexion: den metafiktiva tendensen i Eyvind Johnsons diktning’, diss: Uppsala University, 1990, p. 125.
Jansson, passim. Cf. Hayden White, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’, History and Theory 23.1 (1984): pp. 1–33.
Michal Peled Ginsburg, Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 81.
Ingrid Öberg, ‘Upprepning och variation i Eyvind Johnsons roman Hans nådes tid’, Svensklärarföreningens årsskrift (1972): pp. 122–43.
For example, Hallberg regards Johnson’s playfulness as a limbering-up movement, a preparation for the deed of poetry: Peter Hallberg, ‘Eyvind Johnson, ordet och verkligheten’, Bonniers Litterära Magasin 27.7 (1958): pp. 538–48, here p. 539.
‘Anteckningar om romanförfatteri’ (1949) in Personligt, politiskt, estetiskt (Stockholm, 1992), pp. 176–82, here p. 181.
Monica Setterwall, ‘The Unwritten Story’, diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979 (Ann Arbour, 1981), p. 67.
Livsdagen lång (Stockholm, 1964), p. 12. In Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities a winecask really breaks, and announces the coming of the French revolution. See Jansson, 109f.
Favel ensam (Stockholm, 1968). Cf. Paul Turner’s remark on Thomas More’s characters, quoted in Jansson, p. 88: ‘It is clear from an ironical passage in a letter […] that More expected the educated reader to understand these names.’ On the Utopian in Favel ensam, see also Thure Stenström, Romantikern Eyvind Johnson (Uppsala, 1978), pp. 73–196.
Lägg undan solen (Stockholm, 1951), p. 96.
‘Att dröja vid det förflutna’ (1967) in Personligt, politiskt, estetiskt, pp. 209–220, here p. 217.
With particular reference to Lessing and his allegories, Carol Jacobs warns against the too-abrupt interpretation, ‘Fictional Histories: Lessing’s Laocoön’, Telling Time (Baltimore, 1993) p. 118.
Stig Bäckman, ‘Den tidlösa historien: En Studie i tre romaner av Eyvind Johnson’, diss., University of Lund, 1975.
Quoted in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 134. Johnson often defines his writing in terms of a construction of pictures. See Ulf Linde, ‘A Trip to Gotland’, Artes: an International Reader of Literature Art and Music 3 (1996): pp. 27–34, here p. 31.
Staffan Björck, Romanens formvärld (Stockholm, 1953), pp. 186–226; Göran Rossholm,’ sub Specie durationis: En Studie i Eyvind Johnsons roman Hans nådes tid i ljuset av Henri Bergsons tidsmetafysik’, Horisont, 21.6 (1974): pp. 119–33; Hallberg.
Cf. Jean-Francois Battail, Le mouvement des idées en Suède à l’âge du bergsonisme (Paris, 1979); Bäckman; Ann Game, ‘Time, Space, Memory, with reference to Bachelard’, Global Modernities, eds Featherstone, Lash, Robertson (London: Sage, 1995) pp. 192–208; Rossholm.
Portrait du Jouyeur (Paris, 1984: Gallimard Coll. Folio, 1986), p. 241, my trans.
Några steg mot tystnaden (Stockholm, 1973), p. 206.
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Hugoson, R. (1999). Eyvind Johnson and the History of Europe: Many Times in One Place. In: Fendler, S., Wittlinger, R. (eds) The Idea of Europe in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27496-3_10
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