The quest for transcendence

Contemporary authors seem to ignore it: a self-defined “European” literature is called to revive its quest for transcendence, namely, man’s openness to metaphysical questions. This, in short, is the thesis of Hungarian László Földenyi, professor of European Literature at the State University of Budapest, member of the Academy of the German Language and Literature. In an essay published on the pages of “Vita e pensiero”, cultural by-monthly of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Italy), Professor Földenyi reaffirms “the need for metaphysics” of European literature. The alternative is its decline. The three faces of the “European man”. Földenyi retraced the development and the contradictions of all those features that characterised the literature produced in the Old Continent as “European Literature”, starting with the myth of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and ending with 20th century literature. On these grounds, the Hungarian scholar claims that “the history of Europe is the history of the discovery of the human person – which, since the onset, was identified in the ‘European man’, the protagonist of European literature”. The man thus described “is to be found in Ulysses and in Leopold Bloom, in Achilles and in the ever-absent Godot, in Oedipus and Josef K”. Conversely from the literature of other continents, Földenyi underlines, “European literature identifies a man” whose face is at the same time “divine, human and cosmic”, where “are to be found the traces of a metaphysical being”. Thus European literature can be three-faceted when these three facets coexist. Moreover, when they appear in separate forms then the term ‘European’ starts to loose its force”. Nonetheless, cautions the author of the article, “the disintegration process is an ever-present threat. Not only as a result of the acceleration of the secularization process, but even before it”.Defending freedom. Thus for Földenyi, “European literature starts with the birth of a man that is open to metaphysical questions. And simultaneously with the gradual disappearance of such a man even European literature is nearing its decline”. This process started already at the end of the 18th century, “with a remarkable acceleration at the closing of the second millennium”. In fact, according to the scholar, “the task of literature has always been that of nourishing man’s metaphysical bonds”. Hence the reference to a path begun “with the Greeks and with the Romans”, marked, among others, by medieval epics and by the poetry of Italian Renaissance, by Elizabethan literature and by French classics, by romanticism, by eighth-nineteenth- century epical literature in England and France, “by the great innovators of the 20th century, by Kafka and Beckett, from Proust to Gombrowicz”, without neglecting “the great Russians” like Gogol and Cechov, Dostoevskij and Tolstoj. Today “this literature – points out Földenyi – which is European not because it was written in Europe , but because it was interwoven with the spirit of European metaphysics”, is tasked “not with nourishing man’s metaphysical bonds”, but with “defending them, if necessary by force”; in other terms, European literature must “defend man’s freedom within a European setting”.“Vertical” reading. “But why – is the central question of the reflection – should we expect from literature something that the globalized world rejects ever more blatantly?” Why should we defend the yearning for metaphysics in an epoch that “wishes to rescind ever more abruptly all its metaphysical bonds?” Because, Földenyi replies “without measure and without a moral code, without the knowledge of his place in the cosmos, man takes nothing at heart, and thus instead of influencing events as they unfold, he is subjected to them”. In the 20th century, continues the scholar, “European literature has objectively failed”. It was “unable to prevent the major crimes of the 20th century”. And today, “as the subjugation to the logic of consumerism” and “globalisation” “continues to thrive”, we should ask ourselves “whether it is still possible to speak of a European literature” before the appearance of a literary genre that does not yearn to satisfy “genuine needs” but “artificial ones” created for market reasons. “Europe – he warns – is at a crossroads. It offers its spirit abroad taking European interests and expectations as its stakes. Its literature assumed the mask of global literature”. However, “this spirit is wounded but it’s not destroyed”. Recalling the thought of Leszek Kolakowski (Polish philosopher, 1927 – 2009, Editor’s note), Földenyi claims that in spite of opposing cultural currents, man “is doomed to come to terms with metaphysics from the moment he is born, at least “in his attempt to find an answer to his mortality”. Since if “global literature is horizontal”, he concludes, “then European literature is vertical”. For this, “a literature that defines itself European has just one task: to keep alive the quest for transcendence”.