National Solidarity, Toxic Nationalism, European Inner Edges: Stendhal and Tolstoy in Malraux’s Les Noyers de l’Altenburg and Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo

Abstract

"In their distinctive ways...Lampedusa and Malraux confirm the dual attitude toward the nation articulated so forcefully on the eve of World War II in W.H. Auden’s elegy to William Butler Yeats, himself no stranger to the peaks and craters of national feeling: “And the living nations wait, / Each sequestered in its hate” (243). “Living” nationality can be a vital and healthy affirmation of human sociability; but “sequestered in...hate” it can cut people off from each other, even poison the very sources of fellow feeling. In the last analysis, however, even as Malraux’s and Lampedusa’s novels dramatize this sharp duality by highlighting special borderline situations in the European system of nation-states, they suggest affinities between these “inner edges” of Europe and its imperial “outer edge.” They thus serve to promote dialogue between comparative literature in a traditionally Eurocentric guise and the wider world of postcolonial studies."