Sphinx

As mentioned at the end of my last post, I spent several days last week at a conference in Serbia on Imperialism and Identity at the Edges of the Roman Empire – perhaps appropriately, held at a conference centre in the middle of nowhere, with no bar, twenty minutes’ walk from the nearest supermarket, reminding us what it must have been like to be stationed on the Roman frontier in the early days before the local culture began to change and familiar foodstuffs (tea, proper coffee, beer…I mean, wine, olive oil and garum) became more readily available…

Actually the whole thing was a salutary and productive experience, both encountering research on regions that I don’t normally think about much (my default when it comes to the Roman Empire tends to be Italy and Westen Europe) and seeing how the debate shifts in multiple ways when it gets out towards the margins. There’s the persistence of older practices and concepts, not yet fully subjected to reflexivity and self-evaluation through the encounter with alien ideas – at least some people still want to talk about Romanisation – and also the fact that this reflexivity operates in both ways, and we have to think about ‘Roman Globalisation’ differently and more critically when looking at encounter zones between different cultural systems rather than at regions already fully incorporated into the Empire.

The edges of the empire are always also the edge of something else – not nothingness or a barbaric wasteland, whatever Roman ideology might persuade us to believe (interesting that the word “barbarians” also persists in some of these debates). Further, the frontier is not just something permeable, shaping and perhaps limiting but never preventing movement and exchange, but also something created; the “divergent” cultures on either side were not always so. Borders may move backwards and forwards, and then the attractions of one set of cultural practices may look very different compared with another.

It was especially interesting to be thinking about such issues in the Balkans, precisely a region of shifting frontiers and identities, and arguably *the* region of Europe most affected by the encounter of different cultures; and at the same time to be reading the Croatian novelist Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste, set in a region tossed backwards and forwards between different states, with towns changing their names half a dozen times in a few decades.

Along that border, as along all borders, deep into the soil is thrust the steel axis of a Ringelspiel, a merry-go-round, a lively carousel doomed to repeat eternally the invidious drama of family sagas. History – that lying, traitorous mother of life – continues, logorrhoeically, to spin its tiresome story, secretly dreaming up new borderlands one after another. And a border, like every long, Deep wound, even if it heals and does not turn into a wellspring of putrid stench, is streaked with proud scar tissue that separates the living from the dead.

The tragedy of Drndić’s book is not just the pointless warfare and displacement, but what happens to the hybrid, interwoven populations of such places with the rise of regimes that want to draw hard distinctions between different races; specifically, what happens to a family of mixed Jewish, Slovenian, Italian and German stock, long converted to Catholicism, in the face of Fascism and Nazism and the insistence that one part of that inheritance trumps all the others, and especially to the son that the daughter of the family has with a handsome SS officer, deputy commander of the local extermination camp, who is then kidnapped to be brought up as a good Aryan by a Catholic couple in Austria.

The book is, I must admit, horribly overwritten in places. It echoes Sebald in some respects, besides the subject matter, especially the blurring of fact and fiction and the inclusion of little pictures; but, where he is all about silences and evasions and the uncanny, Drndić piles up information and overwhelms with horror and outrage. It’s sometimes very effective, and one has to admire the audacity of devoting forty-three pages, each with four columns in small type, to the names of c. 9,000 Jews who were deported from or killed in Italy between 1943 and 1945 – a moral challenge to the reader, who will of course not read every name, or certainly not with the same attention, but will be all too conscious of their guilt in skipping forward.

What disappointed me slightly in the novel was the failure also to engage with the more recent past in that region, the latest spasm of ethnic hatred and violence released by the break-up of Jugoslavia in the early 1990s – though admittedly Gorizia and its satellite in Slovenia, Nova Gorica, were well away from any fighting. But perhaps there were quite enough contemporary resonances last week to be going on with. As my fellow speaker Andrew Gardner observed, here we were in the middle of a gathering of scholars from multiple countries, using English as common means of communication, engaged with same issues, at a time when the British as a nation seem determined to cut as many ties as possible.

Locating the periphery is always a matter of perspective. It’s interesting to see how different the world looks from a different region; as Swedes tend to focus on the Baltic, as Poles get very cross at being described as ‘eastern’ rather than ‘central’ Europe, so in the real east the west, so convinced of its own centrality to everything, feels a long way away. Britain was definitely marginal in the Roman period; it seems determined to reclaim that identity. It’s interesting that we conventionally think of the withdrawal of the legions, and the subsequent decline of Romano-British culture, as basically a bad thing, condemning the region to irrelevance for a couple of centuries. It can only be a matter of time before someone  insists that it was really just taking back control, the necessary prelude to a glorious new era of independence.