Europe in the Imaginary

Potentially rich material here in el Gordinao's weekend section. Writers have been asked for their views on Europe. It's a kind of upmarket creative writing exercise where you all sit round in a room and have to write something about 'the moon' or 'my pet'. Useful, I thought for my endless quest to find what it is exactly that Remainists want to keep from the EU. 

As we would expect, lots of cultural baggage has to be bolted on to the concept, so the EU becomes some imaginary Europe, itself then reduced metonymically to a beach, a river, a building etc. In the end the EU becomes only one rather insignificant signifier in a whole chain that probably could have been started by any topic including the moon and my pet

Too much to discuss in detail but try these:

Sarah Perry begins with a memory of playing a piece of Czech music at school, then visiting Prague  in 2016. She felt an immediate 'kinship' 

from the moment I first walked over Charles bridge. The stone apostles, the jackdaws, the violinist with his case open for coins; the beggar who corrected my pronunciation of Jak se máš (“good morning”) and let me give a biscuit to the dog wrapped in his coat [bless!] ; Master Jan Hus’s statue in the Old Town Square; and the good black coffee served with cakes very nearly like those I baked at home, but also nothing like at all: these seemed, in some obscure indefensible way, to belong to me

She knows they will still be there, but she will feel like a visitor not a native. Brexit has limited her imagination?

Bee Wilson: 'Yet when I think of Brexit and food, my objections are less practical than emotional. It feels sad and wrong that we should be shunning European neighbours who taught us so much about how to eat. Is this how we repay all that hospitality? All those oceans of prosecco?' 

It was never a commercial relationship then? They just gave us all that food and drink? We won't be able to experience European cuisine once we leave?

Hari Kunzru becomes a ventriloquist to write on behalf of typical Brit Leavers, no doubt because he knows so many, as we can tell from his mastery of current slang: 'What larks!' He actually seems to be channelling the usual literary reresentations of young male proles in the 1950s. There is quite a lot of contempt and hatred. In a rather strange section, they seem to have it in for linguistic philosophy especially:

We’ve had enough of them coming round here, that’s another thing. Apple picking, changing the bedpan, telling us about the new season’s fashion trends. They can fuck off with their metric system, their Code Napoléon [well-informed proles]. Boney in his tricorn hat [still a bogey man then?], snatching the cook’s leg of mutton [too obscure for this ex-prole I fear]  creeping about in the dead of night. We’ve had experience. Dear Professor Wittgenstein, you are a person with no leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom. You have not given any reason why you should be granted leave to remain.

The reasons Wittgenstein might give would be quite interesting, of course.


Simon Garfield is going to become a German citizen (the nationality of both of his parents).

Afua Hirsch seem to have an interestingly mixed ethnic and national background (with some bourgeois highnotes) but she thinks all the social and cultural changes of the last 40 years are down to EU membership and that somehow time itself will be reversed when we leave. Teddy boys will be back!

...one man I interviewed in the run-up to the referendum told me, incredulous. “As a black man [evidently of about 70 years at least], it was not unusual to have teddy boys chasing you down the street, calling you names. We were not safe. The EU has given us more protection – not just from racists, but from rightwing British governments as well. What black person in their right mind,” he continued, “wants to go back to 1973?”

Val McDermid thinks: 'There’s no doubt that the single market has made publishing across borders much easier' and increased our knowledge of European fiction. Now she says she feels 'kinship with Italians, with Germans, with Greeks. And I like that feeling. Their countries have inspired my work. I’ve set bits of books all over Europe – Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Greece, Italy. And now that’s going to be irredeemably fragmented'. 

This makes her angry: I want to shout, “How could you? How could you be so short-sighted? How could you do this to us?”...

Do what? Prohibit the sale of Scando-noir?
 

Call me simplistic, but I wish they’d all been force-fed [revealing!] a diet of continental crime fiction. If they’d understood nothing else, they might have grasped the underlying concept – bad things happen to people who do bad things.

Robert MacFarlane gets quite poetic about migratory birds and how they mark the seasons in the UK,  'the movement of the birds that bind us beyond borders, a map that unfolds in time each year'. Nice to have the leisure to notice, of course. Sounding a bit like Ted Hughes he describes his feelings and then concludes:

We are related by birds.

Nope -- still not convinced. Ludicrously luvvie bits thinly conceal a good deal of snobbishness and hatred of the lower orders. This is what the EU stands for?