Abstract
Tom Lanoye’s ‘theatre novella’ Fort Europa: Hooglied van Versplintering (Fortress Europe: A Canticle of Fragmentation) (2005) features a range of characters who probe Europe’s possible future by turning to its past. The Eurocentric heritage narratives on which they draw perpetuate an idea of Europe as a civilization founded on Christianity and on the Enlightenment and racially defined as White. The way in which Lanoye stages these conservative narratives and the way in which he employs irony, however, invites critical reflection, thus calling for a postcolonial perspective on Europe and on European heritage. We approach Fortress Europe as a literary text that reflects on and intervenes in dominant heritage discourses. Through close reading, we investigate how this work stages and engages with European heritage and how it thereby explores specific ideas about European culture and identity. Our focus is on the literary means by which Lanoye reflects on the place of heritage in narratives of Europe.
Keywords
‘The timeworn continent’
Tom Lanoye’s (2005) Fort Europa: Hooglied van Versplintering (Fortress Europe: A Canticle of Fragmentation) features a range of characters who probe Europe’s possible future by turning to its past and by obsessing about what they consider to be Europe’s heritage. 1 But while history and heritage feature prominently in this text, Lanoye projects Europe into the future, in the year 2020, now part of our recent past. He introduces seven Europeans who are presented as archetypal figures: a Belgian soldier from the First World War, a Hasidic Jew, a stem-cell biologist, a capitalist and three prostitute graces. They have gathered at an ‘unspecified railway station, somewhere in the hinterlands of the timeworn continent’ and are introduced as ‘an unspecified number of unnamed travellers, but with baggage, who maintain the centre between departing tourists, fleeing refugees and prisoners being extradited’ (p. 2). Their ‘baggage’ comes to hold figurative meaning as that which holds them back and weighs them down, because as the text proceeds, nobody actually succeeds in going anywhere.
Fortress Europe’s opening thus relates uneasily to its title, which denotes mobility for those (with sufficient capital) inside the European Union (EU) but immobility for those (with insufficient capital) seeking to enter the EU from the outside. 2 Here, however, the fortress intended to shut outsiders out seems to lock Europeans in – perhaps we could consider this a first instance of the irony that, as shall become clear, will play a significant role in our reading of the text. The motionlessness with which Fortress Europe opens is especially remarkable considering its setting of a railway station, suggesting movement and travel. 3 This contrast between setting and narrative, too, has an ironic effect: the mobility the station suggests is in contrast to what unfolds (or, more accurately, what does not unfold): almost all characters speak of leaving, but they remain caught between lamentations of Europe’s troubled past and nostalgic narratives of national and regional pride. They contemplate Europe’s future, yet the Europe revealed in their narratives has arrived at a standstill. One character even claims that the future of Europe resides outside of Europe: ‘We have failed. We must leave this place. We no longer have any right to it’ (p. 64). Lanoye’s fortress does not protect but suffocates those inside.
Not only do Fortress Europe’s title and setting frame the text in a way that evokes criticism on the shortcomings of the EU border policies, but so does Lanoye’s reputation as a public figure. He is a famous Flemish novelist, poet, columnist and playwright whose work circulates widely in and beyond Europe, and he is renowned as an outspoken Europeanist who longs for a ‘truly United Europe’ and ‘loves the continent that he hates’ (Vanheste, 2015). In Lanoye’s oeuvre, this ambiguous feeling translates into a provocative mockery of Europe. In 2016, the Forum on European Culture invited Lanoye to its first edition, as one of the writers, artists and intellectuals asked to ‘rethink the future of Europe’ and reflect on ‘the cultural values that unite us’. 4 He performed Fortress Europe, introduced as ‘a razor-sharp commentary on European values’, and took part in a discussion with the Dutch europarliamentarian Sophie in ‘t Veld, the German historian Philip Blom and Caroline de Gruyter, Europe correspondent and columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. 5 As a well-known public intellectual, in short, Lanoye’s ideas about Europe are taken seriously by a large audience.
Lanoye fittingly describes Fortress Europe’s setting of the railway station as an ‘arena’ (p. 2), a word connoting the theatrical space around which spectators are seated and the space of debate, but also suggesting a space of conflict. While the battle that takes place in Fortress Europe is rhetorical, the stakes are nonetheless high: the future of Europe. In testimonial monologues, the characters relate different stories about and interests in Europe and reflect on European culture and identity. The Europe they project is rotten and obsolete, burdened by its violent past and in need of but lacking a future. The monologues alternate with dialogic chapters, titled ‘What shall I miss’, in which various characters discuss what they will miss most about the Europe they intend to leave. 6 They celebrate the cathedrals, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and Italian Parma ham, a selection representing Europe’s religious, intellectual and cultural heritage. Their instrumentalization of heritage, used to construct a collective ‘European’ identity and demarcate who does and does not belong in this community, illustrates Verena Stolcke’s (1999: 25) observation that while the rhetoric of exclusion previously centred on race, it now emphasizes cultural identity, tradition and heritage. The heritage narratives on which Lanoye’s characters draw perpetuate the ‘old Idea of Europe’ (Amin, 2004: 2) as a civilization founded on Christianity and on the Enlightenment and, since race is certainly not absent from this text, racially defined as White. Their Eurocentric conceptions of European heritage emphatically exclude Europe’s postcolonial legacies. 7
The way in which Lanoye stages these conservative heritage narratives, we argue, invites critical reflection, thus calling, albeit indirectly, for a postcolonial perspective on Europe and on European heritage. This is achieved first, by including various monologues that oppose simplistic celebrations of European heritage and identity and that instead call attention to Europe’s violent past, referring not only to the two World Wars that tore Europe apart but also to the atrocities Europe committed as a colonial power; second, by including dialogues between characters who do not always see eye to eye about what would and what would not constitute ‘European heritage’, thereby calling on the audience to contemplate their own position in relation to the positions of the characters; and third, by employing irony to simultaneously reflect and intervene in European heritage discourses. We are interested in how irony is used to investigate the construction of Europeanness, but also in whether the text’s reliance on irony might compromise its critical potential.
With its focus on Europe’s history and heritage, Fortress Europe exemplifies how in the last couple of decades, as Sharon Macdonald (2013: 1) describes, ‘Europe has become a memoryland – obsessed with the disappearance of collective memory and its preservation’. Macdonald (2013: 5) speaks of ‘the European memory complex’, a ‘shorthand for something like “the memory-heritage-identity complex” for these are all tightly interwoven’, as our discussion will indeed show. 8 While her focus is not on literature, Fortress Europe demonstrates how the European memory complex also resonates in and through literature. Literature can be studied as a cultural representation of how the European memory complex works. It can construct, elaborate and reinforce specific narratives of the past and in this sense actively participate in the construction of heritage. Heritage, after all, ‘only emerges when something is narrated, defined, and/or treated as heritage in the “right” sociocultural context’ and it is this narrative nature that gives heritage its ‘ability to produce reality, action, and affect’ (Van Huis et al., 2019: 8–9). Literature also holds the potential to reflect on and intervene in dominant heritage discourses. In what follows, we approach Fortress Europe from this perspective. Through close reading, we investigate how this work stages and engages with European heritage and how it explores specific ideas about European identity. Our focus is on the literary means by which Lanoye reflects on the place of heritage in narratives of Europe.
‘What I shall miss’
One dominant heritage narrative that features in Fortress Europe is that of Europe as Christian. It makes an explicit appearance in Chapter II, titled ‘What I shall miss (p. 1) – The cathedrals’, and is announced auditorily through the sound that concludes the preceding chapter, which features a reincarnated Belgian soldier from the First World War. The soldier’s monologue ends with the stage description ‘The church bells start to ring, deafeningly’ (p. 9). This ‘deafening’ sound concludes other chapters as well, so that Europe’s Christian heritage is repeatedly signalled. To the main character in the ‘Cathedrals’ chapter, the sound of the cathedrals is not deafening at all, however, and instead functions as an affective reminder of what he will miss once he will have left Europe: ‘I shall miss them the most of all! Oh dear God in heaven! . . . The cathedrals. Our mighty, powerful cathedrals . . . How I shall miss them’ (p. 10). His focus is not on religious practice (the character does not recollect sitting in church praying, for example, or spiritually connecting with God), but on the private memories the cathedrals evoke. His celebration of Europe’s cathedrals demonstrates how in Europe, as Gerard Delanty explains, despite the process of secularization ‘the vestiges of Christianity remain’ and that this ‘residual Christianity . . . is largely symbolic’ (Delanty, 2013: 81). The character nostalgically reminisces:
Lying in your bed? . . . You lie waiting, waiting . . . And then suddenly, yet still unexpectedly, they start to ring, to ring . . .? You are relieved you are lying down, that is how overwhelming the chimes from our cathedrals can be. Has there ever been anything in human history that can begin to compare to our cathedrals when they ring out on a Sunday morning in Spring? . . . (weeps). (pp. 10–11)
The character’s weeping reflects a longing for a Europe that is past yet that continues to manifest itself affectively through tangible heritage. It illustrates that the past is not only narrated but also ‘felt, experienced and expressed’ through objects and practices (Macdonald, 2013: 79). The character’s weeping conveys an individual sense of loss about past experiences that can be remembered yet never fully retrieved, but also establishes a specific community that identifies with the possessive case ‘our’ in ‘our cathedrals’. Indeed, as Sara Ahmed (2004: 92–93) reminds us, emotions such as the nostalgia expressed here are not simply possessed or produced by individual bodies, but circulate in the public sphere. She stresses how historical, social and cultural reasons cause particular objects, sites and symbols to become saturated with affect, creating ‘sticky objects of emotion’ (Ahmed, 2004: 16). This ‘stickiness’ pertains to how affects are attached to such objects, evoking emotions in people and playing a crucial role in our understanding of identity, memory and place. 9 As tangible heritage is given value over time through conservation, narrativization and institutionalization, its affective value increases and vice versa, ‘expand[ing] the mobility of some bodies and contain[ing] others’ (Ahmed, 2004: 79). Affective nostalgia, then, not only works to create a community but also inevitably works to exclude people from that community.
In Fortress Europe, the celebration of Christian Europe leaves no room for different religious cultures. We could understand this in light of Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand’s (2013: 146) assertion that the interest in Europe’s Christian heritage should be ‘read against the backdrop’ of the construction of Islam as an external other. They emphasize how religion is used as ‘an identity marker’ that creates a problematic opposition between a Christian European Self and a non-Christian, non-European other. In Lanoye (n.d.), this is reflected, for example, in the second ‘What I shall miss’ chapter, which we turn to later, in which one of the characters makes explicitly racist comments about Arabs and Africans.
The ‘Cathedrals’ piece reflects European discourses of nostalgia that are ‘entangled in the growing memory phenomenon, and especially the expansion of “heritage”’ (Macdonald, 2013: 87). Lanoye’s addressed audience is not only invited to identify with the nostalgia presented but also to reflect on it critically. This is achieved in various ways. First of all, the ‘deafening’ sound of the church bells could serve as a metaphor for the dominant place of Christianity in conceptualizations of Europe, a signal that perhaps audience members are not to take the words of the weeping character too seriously and that invites them to reflect on the characters’ exaggerated nostalgia critically. Second, the question marks that end each sentence put everything that is being said into question. The Beckett-like dialogue, finally, brings an absurd quality to the dialogue, which, too, creates distance:
Yes! Good heavens! Of course!
(The church bells continue to ring)
What? I shall miss them the most of all! Oh dear God in heaven! Huh? What’s the matter? The cathedrals! The cathedrals! Huh? What about them? I will miss them most of all. What? Who? The cathedrals. Our mighty, powerful cathedrals. What about them?
(The sound of church bells finally stops)
How I shall miss them. (p. 10)
The repetitive ‘Whats’, ‘Whos’ and ‘Huhs’ reflect misunderstanding and disagreement; there’s no consensus here on what to feel about leaving Europe’s cathedrals behind.
The romantic ruminations of the first character are, moreover, continuously frustrated by the second character, who also remembers lying in bed with the sound of church bells, but in winter this time, hearing the ‘snow crackling . . . beneath the feet of the sanctimonious hypocrites who, come what may, must attend mass?’ (p. 11). This character is far from nostalgic. Clearly, the cathedrals evoke very different memories for both characters, demonstrating that
What a particular site ‘is’, and how it feels, can become highly variable. What space ‘is’ and how it occurs are crucially rendered unstable and shifting, with matter and relations in constant process. It may be felt to be constant, consistent and uninterrupted, but that feeling is subjective and contingent. (Crouch, 2015: 186)
This subjectivity and contingency of how heritage is experienced and felt is further illustrated when the second character suggests that the wool under which the first character was lying might have been from Kashmir or Chile (p. 10), thus calling attention to Europe’s place in a postcolonial, global world and to the fact that global capitalism tends to obscure where and how products are manufactured. This evokes a strong response from the first character, who emphatically tries to hold on to the idea of local and authentic heritage and stresses that the wool was ‘from sheep that once lived on the other side of your very own village. Real wool’ (p. 10, emphasis in text). Macdonald expands on this centrality of place, which entails ideas about ‘home’ that in Europe are ‘highly affectively and politically charged’ but that are also ‘multiply challenged–by mobility, migration, those with “homes” in more than one place and those with no homes at all’ (Macdonald, 2013: 96). Here, the main character denies such contemporary realities, as these would challenge his belief in origin and authenticity.
The notion of authenticity returns more explicitly in Chapter VII, titled ‘What I shall miss (p. 3) – Parma ham’. The main character in this dialogue explains how he will miss ‘[r]eal Parma ham’ with ‘a melon grown in the Cavaillon region. A real cavaillon’ (pp. 47–48, emphasis in text). Such an attachment of food to the locations where it is produced, Macdonald (2013: 90) explains, creates ‘affective links with place’ and generates ‘longings for locations as well as times when a particular food was consumed’. Lanoye’s character’s nostalgia for the home-grown and local points to the relationship between food and globalization, a relationship characterized by homogenizing tendencies of globalism, on one hand, and by the new forms of identity politics this invigorates, on the other hand (DeSoucey, 2010: 433). The hyperbolic sentimental celebration of Parma ham in Lanoye serves to illustrate that food is a matter of identity. In Europe, the European Commission (EC, 2022) has institutionalized this through its Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), which ‘guarantees that all parts of the production, processing and preparation process take place in the specific region’. The EC’s promotion of Parma ham (one of many regional products that received PDO status) sounds like a food commercial:
Who hasn’t heard of Parma ham, or Prosciutto di Parma PDO? This raw, aged Italian meat can be found in delis and restaurants around the world. You have probably been offered it with a slice of melon during summer or as a topping on an Italian pizza. Its unique flavour comes from a mix of traditional know how and unique ecological and environmental conditions, specific to the Region of Parma, Italy. (European Commission, 2022)
Paradoxically, the designation meant to protect local products from the forces of globalization markets these products by celebrating their consumption ‘around the world’. Because in Europe, Vassiliki Yiakoumaki (2003: 8–10) explains, food is not only an index of cultural ‘diversity’ and regional heritage but also a form of cultural capital that supports Europe’s economic status as a growing market.
The gaze of Lanoye’s character, however, remains directed inwards, as he completely ignores the effects of the global market on Europe’s position in the world. His celebration of Parma ham illustrates how regionally produced food tends to get promoted explicitly as not part of mass-production, as Macdonald (2013: 126) explains, and how at the same time ‘the authenticity value of being outside the market is itself a marketable resource, deployed . . . as part of ongoing appropriations and reappropriations that contribute to the dynamism of “tradition”’. For Lanoye’s character, too, authenticity seems key: he will miss the ‘real’ Parma ham, ‘[n]ot Parma ham from Sweden’, and the ‘real’ melons that ‘come from Cavaillon and not from Krakow’ (p. 48). It shows how debates about heritage’s authenticity are also ‘identity contests’ that ‘mobilise ideas about origins’ and that are, for this reason, always also political: ‘which pasts – and whose – will endure?’ (Macdonald, 2013: 119–120). The character’s celebration of authentic Parma ham demonstrates the complex ways in which regional, national and European attachments can become intertwined. His belief in authenticity is directly ridiculed by the second character who, in response to an exposé about Camembert (another product, à propos, that was awarded the PDO), exclaims that he ‘cannot stomach Camembert’, ‘[e]specially not the genuine article. An imitation, it can pass . . . But real Camembert? . . . It should be outlawed’ (p. 49). This ironic response could be read as a criticism of the commodification of authenticity in the European heritage industry, or even of authenticity in general.
Through dialogic pieces such as these two ‘What I shall miss’ chapters, in which nostalgic ideas about heritage are juxtaposed by ironic provocations of such ideas, Lanoye invites his audience to interpret the emotional celebration of Europe’s cathedrals and Parma ham for what they ultimately are: a desperate denial of a changing Europe. That Lanoye is known for his use of irony further stimulates such an interpretation. 10 But irony not only depends on the author, or ‘ironist’, as Linda Hutcheon cautions but it also relies on the perspective, convention and community of the interpreter so that the critical assessment that gives irony its ‘edge’ is never guaranteed (Hutcheon, 2005: 10–11). The success of Lanoye’s irony depends in part on a presupposed shared experience of heritage by the audience. In the ‘Cathedral’ piece, the repetitive words and verbal cues that exaggerate the characters’ beliefs about Christian heritage address viewers who recognize and potentially identify with these beliefs. Similarly, the celebrations of Parma ham and Camembert presuppose viewers to whom these references make sense. 11
‘Culture is what it is all about’
A third strand of heritage narrative that Lanoye probes is that of Europe as the birthplace of modernity. In this narrative ‘the origins of this specifically modern way of life, with its corollaries of individualism and democracy’ are placed in ‘the convergence of capitalist economy, territorial state, and modern science, all of which began in sixteenth-century Europe’ (Bottici and Challand, 2013: 100). In Lanoye, the central character that represents this idea of Europe is the stem-cell biologist. In the prologue, she announces the arrival of the ‘New Man’, whom she describes as the ‘perfect European’, ‘Europe at its best’ and ‘practical’ and ‘necessary’ (p. 4). In her later monologue, she contends that ‘the European has . . . discovered mankind. The first to do so, and as yet without successors’ (Lanoye, 2005: 34). According to the stem-cell biologist, Europe takes the leading position when it comes to science:
What would the world be without our science? What would the world be without us? Globally, my best colleagues are the Japanese. When they go home, they are Japanese. But when they arrive in their laboratories, they become European. (p. 34)
The stem-cell biologist’s belief that Japanese scientists are Japanese at home but become European as soon as they practice science, evidences an essentialization of European identity that constructs ‘Europe’ as synonymous to progress and modernity.
A similar feeling of European superiority is expressed in the second dialogic piece, titled ‘What I shall miss (p. 2) – Schopenhauer’, although here Europe is celebrated in somewhat more ambiguous terms. The characters in this chapter turn to the past and single out the German philosopher Schopenhauer as the representative of European intellectual heritage. They mention other philosophers too, but only to discredit them: Nietzsche is a mere ‘polyp in Schopenhauer’s intestines’ and Kierkegaard, Erasmus and Thomas Aquinas are all ‘no Schopenhauer’; ‘I shall miss him most of all!! Oh dear God in heaven!’ (pp. 23–24). The name Schopenhauer is repeated no less than 56 times, yet what his philosophy consists of is not addressed and, for these characters, does not seem to matter. The celebration of Europe as a continent and culture of philosophy and intellectualism is thus ironically undermined: the characters celebrate a particular aspect of European heritage, yet seem clueless about the actual history behind it. It is ironic, also, that they would celebrate Schopenhauer, who is often categorized as an Enlightenment philosopher, but whose ‘grim’ metaphysics, Mathijs Peters (2014: 78) explains, at the same time ‘pierce[s] through enlightenment ideals like freedom, self-constitution and progress and show[s] us that in most cases people are merely driven by self-preservation or the preservation of their species’. 12 Perhaps Fortress Europe thus communicates the message that the European superiority claimed by Lanoye’s characters, via reference to Schopenhauer as their token philosopher, amounts to little more than the self-interest in the philosopher’s most pessimistic passages.
Not only are European philosophers mentioned; politicians feature too, especially those who played a role in the process of European integration: Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Waldheim, and Winston Churchill. But here these figures are not celebrated as heralds of peace, on the contrary: the main character describes Churchill, famous for calling upon Europeans to build a ‘United States of Europe’ so that Europe could ‘dwell in peace, safety and freedom’ (Churchill, 1946), as the person who, ‘barely having returned home from the trenches around Ypres’ and ‘nearly snuffed out in a gas offensive himself’, ‘as Colonial Minister, ordered a gas attack in Iraq’; ‘They never mention that when they speak of the cigar and the peace sign that came twenty-five years later’ (p. 25). The text suggests that there are other sides to the story of European integration. In this way, it responds (implicitly) to the prevailing representation of the European project as one of peace and reconciliation, a representation that from a postcolonial perspective, Gurminder Bhambra (2009: 73) warns, ‘effaces the history of domination in the past, as well as exclusions (of both territories and citizens) in the present’.
Not that this character is the advocate of such a postcolonial perspective. Indeed, far from it. His rhetoric registers as populist, with his criticism of European politicians, his scepticism about European integration, and his obsession with European culture: ‘Culture is what it is all about. The culture! Our culture!’ (p. 27, emphasis in text). Unable to define what this culture is, he tries to define it by what, according to him, it is not: African culture, described in terms of civil wars, aids, ‘dancing and singing’ and ‘legions of blacks’ with ‘an AK-47 slung over the shoulder and half an erection swinging between the legs’ (pp. 27, 31), and Arab culture: ‘in the case of an Arab, you cannot see whether he has an erection. That is the good thing about the jellaba’ (p. 33). His racist views are challenged by his conversation partner: ‘You want science? Fine. The first human was black’ and ‘We are all Africans’ (p. 28). But this response is put aside as mere ‘politically correct prattle’: ‘What do I care who the first human was? Provided that, at this present time, I am not a black. Is that racism? No. I simply do not wish to be black – who does? . . . Is that hatred? No. That is freedom of expression’ (p. 28). When his conversation partner objects that such extreme freedom of expression ‘only protects the rights of the strongest’, this earns him the label of ‘cultural relativist’ (p. 29).
The main character continues unhindered by explaining what according to him enabled ‘[o]ur Renaissance, our Enlightenment, our industrialization in all its facets – first wave, second wave, third wave’:
Do you really believe we would have attained all that had we drowned ourselves in cassava wine and – albeit in perfect rhythm – collectively hopped around an elephant skull on a pole? By circumcising women, our women, and then sewing them back up to the glory of the so called ‘complete life?’ (p. 33)
The narrative presented here, of Europe as a distinct civilization with a superior heritage, reflects the narrative promoted by European identitarian movements and right-wing populist parties across Europe. As has been noted,
beyond ‘the national’, these movements and parties also commonly identify with a shared European heritage particularly when they feel threatened by non-European others – immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The idea of a common European heritage is used by these movements and parties to justify their xenophobic, anti-immigration, Islamophobic, and monocultural political attitudes and actions, as well as their selective defence of ‘us’ Europeans. (Lähdesmäki et al., 2020: 5)
In Fortress Europe, a similar prejudice is presented but in hyperbolic form. The extremity of the character’s words is likely to have a distancing effect on the audience. And yet, repeating racist ideas, even if to ridicule them, also risks resolidifying them. In other words: Lanoye’s ‘irony signals’ may successfully invite viewers to interpret the character’s racist words as ironic, but do not necessarily prevent these words from having an injurious effect as well. As Judith Butler (2013: 4) explains, the ability of hate speech to ‘wound’ stems from its social and linguistic contexts and from the way in which words have been used before. The degrading comments about ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ of Lanoye’s fictional character draw on and reiterate existing power structures beyond the narrative. According to Butler (2013: 14), however, terms of abuse can be recited and recontextualized in ways that subvert their original violent intention; hate speech can be ‘returned to its speakers in a different form’. The nature of irony makes a definite answer to the question if Lanoye’s deployment of irony is such an instance of reframing and challenging structural racism impossible. Irony, Hutcheon (2005: 59) explains, is never a simple antiphrasis; in an ironic instance, different or even opposing meanings can exist simultaneously, and the ‘literal’ meaning of the utterance does not need to be rejected for the ironic meaning to be processed. This means that the harmful racial biases expressed in Fortress Europe could be simultaneously challenged and reinforced.
The same goes for the idea of Europe as the centre of civilization, in which such racial biases tend to take centre stage. In Lanoye, this idea is not only tackled through irony, though, but also through the text’s structure and order. The prologue, for example, in which the stem-cell biologist proclaims the arrival of the ‘New European’, who is ‘Europe at its best’ (p. 4), is directly followed by the monologue of a traumatized Belgian soldier from the First World War, who understands the notion of the ‘New European’ in very different terms: ‘[t]he new European, given the breath of life by the internal charlatans all around us!’ (p. 5). The soldier’s ‘new Europe’ is a place marked by lawlessness, violence and destruction:
That was the new age: no tree was left standing, and no stone left upon another. Europe’s youth, trembling in fear and lying on its side, defenceless, legs tied together, the fine fleur, had its throat cut open on the altars of our marshes, its heart carved out from its chest, its face shredded by shrapnel, and its entrails chewed up by the continent’s only eternal survivor: our rat . . . the only one to endure. (pp. 8–9)
To describe Europe’s youth as the ‘fine fleur’, usually denoting society’s elite, and present this youth through the image of a torn and desecrated body, effectively undermines the optimism with which the stem-cell biologist started the text. The monologue of the Hasidic Jew similarly works to undermine the celebrations of Europe by other characters. He describes how during the Second World War Europe turned against a large part of its population, against ‘the heart of Europe, the roaming heart- transported under compulsion’ (p. 17). Through his own personal history, the Hasidic Jew invites reflection on the persisting anti-Semitism in Europe.
Not only the lamentations of the Belgian soldier and the Hasidic Jew undermine the idea of Europe as a place of progress and civilization, but so do references to Europe’s colonial past, interestingly primarily provided by the capitalist. Feeling ‘[flushed] down like radioactive industrial waste’, he, too, intends to leave Europe, to Buenos Aires in his case (p. 44). His position towards Europe’s colonial history is paradoxical. On one hand, he wishes to ‘carry [his] fortunes back to the graves of the Indians from whom we pilfered the new silver in exchange for the old smallpox germs, in exchange for their slaughter’ (p. 46). Acknowledging the violence Europe committed under colonialism, the capitalist seeks to ‘serve penitence’ and to make ‘atonement’, words that hold the religious meanings of repenting committed sins and reconciling with God. His plans for the future, it is suggested, are primarily based on (White) guilt. On the other hand, he wishes to go to Argentina for a banal and egocentric reason: he yearns for the tango, he keeps repeating; ‘If I must die, let it happen in a city where the tango rules’ (p. 43). The capitalist, then, is far from altruistic. His obsession with the tango, moreover, suggests that he is only able to view Argentina in terms of its most famous stereotype. While the capitalist acknowledges the effects of European capitalism in the colonies, his belief in the superiority of the capitalist system remains unhampered: he considers himself ‘a herald of organic peace’ and claims that without people like him European civilization will perish, because ‘[w]e invented the community’ and ‘[p]eople like me forged a global peace’ (pp. 44–45). Through this rhetoric, the capitalist detaches global capitalism from colonialism and upholds the narrative of Europe as the place of peace and prosperity. Within the framing of the play, though, the audience is invited to consider his perspective critically. The Europe he celebrates is, after all, still the Europe he too wishes to leave.
‘Shanghai: here I come!’
In Fortress Europe’s concluding chapter ‘The three graces sing’, the girl requiring reconstruction, the death artist and the misshapen mother lament Europe’s fate. As a chorus, they bemoan the verdict of the tarnished Europe that they simultaneously allegorically represent: woman is a ‘violated paradise/from which no man every truly departs’ (p. 51), a bleak observation that the preceding chapters underscore. The representation of Europe as female references the continent’s well-known myth of origin, in which Europa was abducted by an enamoured Zeus, who, disguised as a bull, seduced or even raped her. Lanoye’s three graces, however, are far from innocent or virginal: they are old, disillusioned and licentious prostitutes. ‘Why let yourself be weighed by just two hands’, the girl requiring reconstruction asks, ‘when there are twice six billion hands at hand on our planet? And if you can get paid a modest fee for it – where is the shame in that?’ (p. 54). While in Greek mythology the Three Graces function as the embodiment of beauty, charm, nature and fertility, in Lanoye they are presented in negative and blatantly sexist terms. The first desires to have her young body back again; the second longs to die, but nobody lets her; the third wishes to breed more children, but is too old to do so. The description of these prostitutes as graces calls attention to and could be seen to ironically undermine Europe’s heteronormative mystical birth. 13
Although the three graces differ in ambitions and dreams, each of them asks the same question: does Europe, violated and torn, still have a future and, if so, where does this future lie? From a postcolonial perspective, the emphasis on the violation of Europe discounts Europe’s own history as a violator. At the same time, though, Fortress Europe plays with the ‘implicit structuring metaphors that undergird colonial discourse’, which, Ella Shohat (1991: 51) explains, tend to project Europe’s ‘civilizing mission’ by ‘interweaving opposing yet linked narratives of Western penetration of inviting virginal landscape and Western taming of resisting libidinous nature’. In Lanoye, the sexual imagery is ambiguously projected back onto Europe itself; here, it is Europe that has been brutalized and although Europe still wishes to travel East, its motivations to do so have changed: Europe is old and barren and no longer holds power.
The girl requiring reconstruction wants her ‘body back when it was still taut’ (p. 52). Remembering what her body used to look like, she turns herself into a ‘memoryland’ (Macdonald, 2013: 1), personifying the European obsession with recollection and preservation. Arguably, her lamentation also echoes that of ‘the millions of Europeans anxious to preserve their ethnic and regional identities and cultural heritage in fear of “external dilution”’ (Amin, 2001: 281), for the younger version to which she wishes to return could represent a Europe unchanged by external influences or by the passing of time. To have her body reconstructed, the girl requiring reconstruction wishes to ‘tote all I own to the East, where the sun truly does rise, where the Enlightenment truly has been reborn: come, give it to me. In Shanghai, Singapore, if need be in Surabaya’ (p. 61). Europe, the suggestion is, can only be revived outside of Europe. This projection of a rebirth of the European Enlightenment in Asia holds problematic neo-colonial implications, especially in combination with the phrase ‘give it to me’, as if Europe can still take or expectantly request what it wants or needs. Interestingly, though, the imagery of the ‘Western fertilization of barren lands’ (Shohat, 1991: 52) is reversed here: Europe seeks youth and fertility someplace else.
The misshapen mother, too, looks east to fulfil her wish: to bear a child at her ripe age: ‘Is it destination Shanghai? Destination Surabaya? Whether it is Shanghai, or Surabaya, or Singapore . . . I am going! To where women are permitted to bear children as long as they can bear to bear them, with or without help’ (Lanoye, 2005: 56). The east, then, is exoticized as fertile (Said, 1985: 5), but it is also occidentalized, so to say, as the place of progress and science. ‘The latest chapter in the story of mankind is being written in the East’, the girl requiring reconstruction states, but the writer of this story remains Europe itself (p. 61). The death artist, too, plans to leave Europe behind: ‘I no longer want to die here. . . . I will go to Shanghai. Lovely city, large city – Shanghai? Delightful summers, impressive skyline, a great many people. Shanghai is the future’ (pp. 62–63). The picture she paints of Shanghai stands in sharp contrast to how she depicts Europe:
Here? A pretentious graveyard for automobiles. Here? A café that opens its doors five times in a row – a new owner, a new name – and each time it goes bankrupt. . . . Worn out, neglected, deep in debt, furniture unchanged since five owners back. (pp. 63–64)
Europe is presented as dead and buried. The image of a bankrupt café presents a wry response to George Steiner’s romantic consideration of the café as a place to read, write, and discuss politics, literature and philosophy. ‘So long as there are coffee houses, the “idea of Europe” will have content’, Steiner (2004: 18) mused, but for the three graces nothing good can come out of Europe anymore; it has become desolate and sterile.
‘The place must be the problem’, the death artist concludes, ‘[i]t is dilapidated. Africa is pouring itself into us? Let them come. They have more of a right to it than we do. We had our chance. We blew it’ (p. 63). Perhaps we could understand this bleak conclusion positively, as the much-needed ‘re-grounding of Europe, no longer as the centre, but as one of the many peripheries in the world today’ (Braidotti, 2015: 99). The Europe these characters plan to leave has clearly run its course. And yet, by projecting the future of Europe in Asia and by imagining their cities of destination – Shanghai, Surabaya, Singapore – the three graces essentially repeat the colonial gaze. They wish to leave Europe behind, but they hold on to a specific idea of Europe, even if they project this idea elsewhere. Their focus is entirely on their own bodies and their own pasts. In their projections, the ‘old Idea of Europe’ (Amin, 2001), and the universalist assumptions on which this idea is built, remains unchanged. The graces imagine how Europe could go global, but not once reveal a more global understanding of Europe itself.
As our discussion shows, Fortress Europe presents ‘Europe’ in ambiguous terms, both as a continent that has seen too much violence and destruction for it to have any future, and as a superior culture that might be able to survive elsewhere. The stem-cell biologist is an interesting character in this regard. She emphasizes Europe as the stable origin of progress and modernity, and yet she is described as ‘in transit’ (p. 34), a phrase referring to the process of being transported to a final destination. This description, commonly used for packages and goods, not persons, could literally refer to the stem-cell biologist’s plan to move to Dubai: ‘[t]hat is where my Europe lies’ (p. 35). The phrase also holds meaning in relation to the ‘New Man’ she seeks to create, envisioned in the prologue as the ‘perfect European’ who is ‘not yet for today’ but who ‘draws near’ (p. 4). This New Man will ‘[live] long enough to acquire true knowledge’ and will be ‘all at once mother, daughter, wife, mistress, granddaughter and grandmother’ and ‘father, son, husband, lover, grandson and grandfather’ (p. 4). The futuristic vision conveyed here, of a super-human European ‘transitioning’ the limits of age and gender, is in stark contrast to the allegorical projections of Europe with which the text concludes: for the three prostitute graces, their age and gender have clearly worn them out. Finally, ‘in transit’ could be understood to refer to Europe itself; the ‘Europe’ the characters give such a central position in their narratives but that no longer seems at home in the continent bearing its name. In the characters’ ruminations, Europe ‘transitions’ between a geographical region, on one hand, and a cultural idea that is no longer bound to a specific continent, on the other hand. Europe may be revived, but only outside itself. 14
In the neo-colonial projections of the three graces, the capitalist and the stem-cell biologist, ‘Europe’ can travel – to Shanghai, Dubai or Buenos Aires – but the idea of Europe is not revised or scrutinized. While they talk of leaving Europe and while they ponder on Europe’s future, the European culture and identity they imagine remains directed inwards and focused on the past. The audience is invited to take a critical perspective on this, since as Fortress Europe proceeds, the characters who announce their departures from Europe remain stuck at the station somewhere in ‘the hinterlands’. The setting and title thus function as critical frames to the characters’ nostalgic lamentations and future projections of Europe. Moreover, while some of these characters simplistically celebrate European heritage and identity, others paint a much darker picture of Europe, a place wrought by violence and destruction.
Through the use of irony, dialogue and composition, Fortress Europe thus continuously constructs and deconstructs essentialist ideas about European culture, heritage and identity. Although it does not offer alternative narratives that reflect more postcolonial and global understanding of Europe and of Europeanness, Fortress Europe does (often ironically) point to the importance of such narratives. Its critical potential primarily depends, then, on how it invites the audience to reflect on their own preconceptions and concerns about European heritage and identity. That this potential, in turn, partly relies on how viewers are themselves positioned complicates but does not necessarily compromise Fortress Europe’s intervention in the dominant heritage discourses that circulate in Europe today. In 2018, Lanoye expressed his concern about how topical Fortress Europe, originally written merely as a ‘nasty and wry parable’, had become. 15 Now, four years later, when populist and identitarian discourses abound, Lanoye’s text seems more relevant than ever.