European crisis,fragmentation and cohesion: The contribution of ectopic literature to Europeanness

Crisis in Europe

In recent years a significant crisis has arisen, not only in Europe but also across the whole world, due to a number of causes (Álvarez Peralta et al., 2013), from economic circumstances to worldwide issues, including globalization, lack of jobs, health problems, dictatorships, wars, etc. The world economic crisis of recent years and the increase in migration towards Europe from areas where poverty and war do not allow human beings to have decent living conditions have caused one of the most serious humanitarian situations in Europe since World War II and the wars fought in the former Yugoslavia in the decade following 1991. The rise of nationalism and populism alongside this situation has become part of the European crisis. European society has been shocked by this set of issues, which are combined in a perfect storm. New phenomena like the Brexit vote have added to the crisis, strengthened it and no doubt exerted influence all over Europe. The crisis has surprised an over-confident and often vain society, producing an important shock in a number of European countries.

The current European crisis has taken the form of a network of chains. The economic crisis has acted as the starting point of a chain of events that has generated a political crisis. The bailouts of peripheral economies as well as of financial systems (Álvarez Peralta et al., 2013: 196–205) have provoked the impoverishment of numerous citizens. This core chain is connected to another chain, whose starting point is poverty, war and dictatorships in countries outside Europe, generating migration by many people from these countries looking for better living conditions or even simply for continued life. In some European countries the arrival of migrants has been fertilizing populism and egoism, which have grown quickly, producing a lack of solidarity among communities. This situation has fed nationalist and populist political parties, distorting the democratic foundations of some European countries through the rise and growth of those parties and the decrease in, and even the loss of, respect for the principles of democracy and solidarity.

These two chains of crisis are not independent of each other: they are convergent, with populism connected to economic crisis and migration related to the rise of xenophobia in territories where the crisis has produced a loss of jobs. Therefore, the current European crisis is very complex, and its circumstances and causes are varied, but they are acting jointly, and require a wide perspective to understand them and to search for solutions. The analysis of metaphoricity can decisively help to interpret and to explain the crisis and to activate the construction of linguistic tools as part of the responses to and solutions of the crisis (Valdivia et al., forthcoming). The European economic crisis has exerted an intense influence on culture in its different manifestations, including literature (Catalá-Carrasco et al., 2017a; 2017b; Valdivia, 2017; Jiménez, 2017).

As can be seen, European countries are currently overcoming the economic crisis, but it has not yet been definitively surmounted. The bailouts are coming to an end and the creation of employment is increasing, although with a high rate of precariousness. However, although the present economic situation is better than the preceding one, the crisis is not over, since a lot of concomitant circumstances and components of the economic crisis continue to be present in such a way that it has become a crisis of the European Union, of its political institutions, of its policies, and, of course, of European identity – a crisis of Europeanness. Europeans distrust the European Union and the decisions taken in Brussels and the other seats of European institutions. Previous trust in a united Europe has disappeared or has significantly decreased. Recent events, like the cuts due to the bailouts, or certain national interpretations of the European Arrest Warrant, have forced many citizens to distrust these financial and legal devices and, most importantly, the capacity of the member states of the European Union to really function as a whole. It is obvious that Europe is wider than the European Union, but the loss of trust in the institutions and political structures of the European Union has spread to all of Europe.

The fragmentation of European society is one of the consequences of the current crisis in Europe. The member states have become divided between North and South, and between states that favour immigration and those which hold a strong position against it. In addition, it has also divided the societies of many member states into those who are in favour of remaining in the European Union and those in favour of leaving it. The crisis has not only helped the rise of nationalism within some European countries but has also encouraged separatism in some territories that are parts of member states of the European Union, such as Scotland in the United Kingdom and Catalonia in Spain (Elliot, 2018). Paradoxically, this fragmentation coincides with the most advanced state of current and future advantages for citizens of the member states in the so-called ‘Europe of citizens’, with a top level of human rights protection (Rainey et al., 2014), the highest increase of mobility due to the disappearance of border controls within the Schengen area, the ease of access to medical assistance with the European health insurance card, the improvement of the Erasmus programme, which has tirelessly worked for the idea of Europe (Bance, 1992), and other practical issues that allow Europeans to think that they are really citizens of the same country.

Despite this situation, Europe has the background and energy to overcome its crisis and culture can significantly contribute to the cohesion of European countries (European Union member states as well as non-member states) that is necessary to fight against fragmentation and to reinforce the idea of Europe and the consciousness of being European.

Europe as a cultural construction

The idea of Europe has been constructed across the centuries mainly upon cultural foundations. Greek culture deeply influenced Roman culture, and the Greco-Roman culture became a solid background supporting the culture of Europe with the integration of other cultures such as the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic. Movements including Romanesque and Gothic art, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Avant-garde were steps to a global European art, that alongside different developments such as the birth and spread of the art of rhetoric, the Camino de Santiago, the use of Latin as an international language, and exploration seeking previously undiscovered lands overseas, built a cultural consciousness beyond the political fragmentation of Europe and the diversity of its languages.

In spite of their differences as to birthplace, time, language, style and subject, Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Luís de Camões, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Cees Nooteboom and many other writers can no doubt be considered to be authors of what is called ‘European literature’ (in the singular). The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Divina Commedia, Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Le Curé de Tours (The Priest of Tours), Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), The Waves and De Omweg naar Santiago (The Detour to Santiago), for instance, are works of European literature, in addition to being works of Greek, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, English, German, French, Russian and Dutch literature. Common cultural roots and a pervasive background connect them within a cultural network of different languages and national literatures converging on European identity as a supranational one. John Taylor highlights the existence of these links building European literature:

If an intense concern with and knowledge of style and poetics are attributes linking European poets and writers to each other, then a second, even more important one, is constituted by the profound and extensive philosophical heritage that Europeans acquire from childhood onwards. (2008: x)

The contribution of the different national literatures of Europe as European literature to the construction of the idea of Europe is a mode of cohesion and a powerful cultural tool for the breakdown of fragmentation derived from the crisis.

Literature and change of location

However, the cultural construction of Europe does not only include authors and works belonging to and clearly defined within the national literatures which constitute European literature. Authors born in different European and non-European countries from those where they are living and writing are key to the construction of Europe as a space of welcome that is enriched by cross-cultural contributions from areas inside Europe itself as well as from non-European areas.

Travelling works and transnational networks

Greek mythology offers the story of the rape of Europa (Εὐρώπη, Európe) by Zeus, the father of the gods. According to this myth, Europa was a Phoenician princess, daughter of the King of Tyre in present-day Lebanon. When Europa was gathering flowers in a meadow, Zeus saw her and fell in love with her. The god transformed himself into a bull, and raped Europa. Zeus, carrying her on his back, reached the sea and swam as far as the island of Crete (Hesiod, 1997). This myth can be projected onto current times and interpreted allegorically from a European perspective: the Asian princess Europa is brought to Crete, one of the core sites of Western cultural space, and European culture is founded on this movement. In addition to this, according to legend, Cadmus, Europa’s brother, also an Asian, introduced the alphabet to Greece from Phoenicia. The myth of the rape of Europa by Zeus has had an extraordinary echo in European culture There are numerous artistic depictions, including, for instance, Titian’s The Rape of Europa, one of the most famous paintings of the myth.

The myth of Princess Europa and the god Zeus can currently be taken as a symbol of the hybrid nature of a European culture that was fed by Eastern cultures, which offered it techniques like writing, as well as literary forms and topics. Literature can easily travel through countries and cultures, despite geographical distance and the presence of language barriers. Literature can be considered a bridge between cultures and languages. This can be seen, for instance, in the translation of Homer’s Odyssey from Greek into Latin by Livius Andronicus in the third century BC. It is also the case of the thirty-second tale of Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (Count Lucanor), a work of the fourteenth century and one of the major works of Spanish medieval literature. This tale (Exemplo XXXII) is De lo que contesció a un rey con los burladores que fizieron el paño (The tale of the king and the swindlers who made the fabric). The topic of the tale is probably of Arabic origin (Don Juan Manuel, 1971: 178) and was brought to Al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula during Islamic rule) within Arabic culture. Don Juan Manuel introduced the tale into Spanish literature through his writing, and the story subsequently travelled to Denmark when Hans Christian Andersen wrote his work Kejserens nye klæder (The Emperor’s New Clothes). Literature is a hybrid activity, since works created and composed in one language and culture can influence other works in different cultures and languages.

Literary works travel and authors travel, resulting in an international, but also a transnational cultural network, which takes place in nations, where the form of the ‘transnation’ as proposed by Bill Ashcroft is adopted:

So the concept of ‘the’ transnation I am proposing is composed not only of diasporas but of the rhizomic interplay of travelling subjects within and between nations. The transnation exists within, beyond and between nation states. It is a collectivity comprised of communities, who may be drawn in one way or another to the myth of a particular nation state, but who draw away perpetually into the liberating region of representational undecideability [sic]. (Ashcroft, 2010: 22)

Culture is one of the foundations of transnations and it exists in spaces that are not precisely defined as nations or states. Displacements and other changes of place are among the foundations of transnations, too. The fuzzy limits of the transnation are projected onto the relationships between travelling literature and travelling authors. The coexistence of different languages and literatures improves cohabitation in the transnation. The fuzziness of the limits of the transnation owes a lot to the relativizing and surmounting of borders because of the spatial and cultural travel of literary works as well as of authors.

The transnational reality is compatible with the idea of cosmopolitanism proposed by Timothy Brennan (2010: 30–5). A way to cosmopolitanism is the transnational, whose components strongly support interculturality: ‘the particular, the national and the ethnic can be regarded as repositories of alternative options and of cultural memories which can and must contribute to the formation of intercultural exchanges’ (Goebel and Schabio, 2010: 2).

The role of translation is a support for the constitution of open transnational spaces for literature, crossing geographical, political, cultural and linguistic borders. Translation is consequently a solid step towards cosmopolitanism. Literature grows while it is travelling beyond borders and can enrich other spaces different from its original space, while at the same time itself becoming enriched by its travelling. According to Walter Benjamin’s Der Aufgabe des Übersetzers (The Task of the Translator, 1994), literary works get a second life in translation; they are expanded to their recipients and they are re-interpreted, reaching additional possibilities of renewal because of the new positions that translation gives them. The translations of literary works of particular literary genres or subgenres into other languages can also open the way for new works in the target language and its literature(s). For example, the translations of the works of Stieg Larsson and other Swedish authors into numerous languages have inspired the writing of crime novels in other languages and literatures (Albaladejo and Chico Rico, 2018).

Context is one of the constituents of the literary event, and it can be divided into contexts of production and contexts of reception. The contexts of production and reception consist of a set of several factors, with place and time being the key factors constituting its framework. Historical, economic, ideological, political, social and cultural factors are situated in this framework. As Antonio García-Berrio (1979) has shown, literature is also part of these contexts of production and reception, and it is decisive both in writing and interpreting literary works. This is important regarding the travel of literary works from source spaces to target ones. The love sonnets of the Spanish Golden Age were written within a literary system that was part of their context of production, and it is necessary to assume this literary system as part of the context of reception for the interpretation of these sonnets by contemporary and subsequent readers in the same cultural space and other cultural spaces (García-Berrio, 1979).

Georg Simmel proposed the notions of ‘Brücke’ (bridge) and ‘Tür’ (door) to explain how issues of separation and union are characteristic of human beings. The bridge joins the two banks of a river and it is possible to cross the river via the bridge in two directions. However, the door separates an external space (outdoor) from an internal one (indoor), and, when it is open, it joins them in the direction of entrance (Simmel, 1957: 1–7). Literary translation as well as general translation is both a bridge and a door: it allows the text and the reader to cross the space between two opposite areas, and to enter the space behind the door. The translation of literary works functions as a bridge between languages and literatures and it also acts as a door, as it gives readers the opportunity to enter the literature of another language and, consequently, of another culture. The role of translation as a bridge and a door is mainly based on the transfer from one language to another. However, even without translation, literature has the function of a bridge as well as a door, allowing a more open relationship between cultures. Of course, these functions are reinforced if translation accompanies literature, since this adds the power of crossing linguistic borders. David Amezcua (2014, 2016) regards translation as a ‘tópos’, i.e. a place for works and authors.

The notion of ‘disinherited literature’ as proposed by Pablo Valdivia fully explains the role of literature in building transnational cultural networks. ‘Disinherited literature’ is explained as a core feature of the resistance of literature, which refuses to be a nationalist discourse:

There is a definitory pattern in all works and authors belonging to the category of ‘disinherited literature’: they are transnational, and the meaning of their works has been modified in connection to the difficulty of fitting and appropriating their cultural innovations for justifying political and power strategies. In this regard, ‘disinherited’ is not a term with a negative connotation. To the contrary, ‘disinherited’ is the condition of existence of these works that have resisted to become part of a grand nationalist narrative. (Valdivia, 2018: 177)

Literature is a human activity that crosses the borders of countries, languages and cultures. The movement of literature contributes to building a transnational literary network that supports several shapes of the relationship between cultures: multiculturalism, cross-culturalism, transculturalism and interculturalism. The source cultures and the target cultures implied in this movement become strongly related by literary works which are created within the boundaries of a certain culture and live not only in their birth place but also in other places beyond their borders. The border theory provides critical-theoretical tools for analysing the relationship between cultures on both sides of the borders, giving a key role to cultural translation (McGuirk, 2000).

Changes of location allow cultures, literatures and languages from different places to coexist and even to achieve cohabitation. By taking into account Languages in Contact, a book by Uriel Weinreich (1979 [1953]), it is possible to transfer the concepts of language contact and interference to the notion of ‘literatures in contact’. Weinreich writes:

Those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language, i.e. as a result of language contact, will be referred to as interference phenomena. (1979: 1)

Interference phenomena in literatures in contact are a strong engine in literary creation in all levels of the literary work, in both form and content. These phenomena are a key step in the transnationalization of literature.

The transnational implication of literature in connecting cultures supports cohesion in major cultural spaces, like the European arena, and it strongly contributes to breaking the fragmentation caused by crisis.

Writing in another place

The change of place in literature concerns literary works and authors. The role of the place of writing is one of the issues to be considered when dealing with literary production. Migration is a reality in all societies; it has always existed, but it has intensified in recent years. Migration is a fact in human lives, and therefore it can be present in the life of literary authors, too (Valdivia, 2014, 2018). Intercultural literature owes a lot to migration, as Carmine Chiellino (2000, 2001) has shown. Writing in another place offers a combination of cultural features and components from different places, as autobiographies and memoirs (Velde, 2016) mainly show, Edward W. Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir being a prestigious example (Said, 1999). That combination can produce an enrichment for writers and consequently for literature as a creative activity in the individual and social spheres. In accordance with the capacity and the impulse of literature to represent the reality and the problems of human beings, migration is represented in literary works (Andrés-Suárez et al., 2002; Kunz, 2003; Albaladejo, 2008).

Causes of the change of location of writers are of several kinds. Exile is a cause of displacement; exiled authors are those who have left their countries because of ideological and/or political persecution, religious persecution, ethnic or social discrimination, censorship of their works, etc. Exile and the literature of exile have been an object of continuous research (Said, 2005) and their study constitutes a strongly established research trend. The exile of republican politicians, intellectuals and writers produced by the Spanish Civil War and the defeat of the Spanish Republic has gained particular attention from historians and philologists (Aznar Soler, 2009; Valdivia, 2014). Another cause is diaspora (David and Muñoz-Basols, 2011; Carpi and Stierstorfer, 2017), which is connected to exile. Diaspora is the dispersion of a human group characterized by a shared religion, similar political ideas, language, ethnicity, etc. Spanish Republican exiles might be considered a diaspora, as all the exiles who left Spain shared republican ideas despite their political differences, since, although they were mainly leftist men and women, there were communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals and conservatives among them. The term ‘diaspora’ comes from the Greek word ‘διασπορά’, meaning ‘dispersion’, and was used to refer to the worldwide dispersion of the people of Israel. ‘Diaspora’ can be used for all kinds of collective displacements of a group of people or a community, as Daniela Carpi writes: ‘Although the term diaspora often refers to a catastrophic dispersion, we must now extend the strict literal meaning of diaspora to include trade, labour, and cultural diasporas’ (2017: vii). In the target locations, diaspora produces the existence of communities speaking the same language with special socio-linguistic characteristics (Márquez Reiter and Martín Rojo, 2015). The complex memory of exile and diaspora can be incorporated in literary works by translating memory into fiction, as Amezcua (2017) has explained in his analysis of the novel Sefarad by the Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina.

Other causes of a change in location for writers are innumerable, but can include family circumstances, a search for better living conditions, or simply the desire to live somewhere different. All causes and circumstances contain a wide set of possibilities for human beings, and thence for writers, to change their places of origin for other places that might be better for them.

One of the effects of the movement of writers is the dual culture or multicultural foundation of the geno-text, proposed by Julia Kristeva as textual generation, where ideological, political, social and cultural issues are active in the production of sense and support the pheno-text, i.e. the textual manifestation or expression (Kristeva, 1974: 95ff; 1976). The presence in the writer of his or her culture of origin, together with the culture of the new space where she or he resides and writes, provides a cultural background characterized by hybridism, which is active in the geno-text and manifests itself in the pheno-text. These movements no doubt constitute a cultural enrichment of the target place and society. They also imply a widening of the possibility of the combination of fictional components and real components from the life experience of authors who have moved from one place to another, with the consequent strengthening of self-fiction and self-narrative. Authors’ changes of location form a keystone in the arch spanning national and transnational literatures.

Ectopic literature

I have proposed the concept and the term ‘ectopic literature’ to describe, analyse and explain literary production that is a consequence of the movement of writers or people who will become writers in the space that is the target of their travel. Ectopic literature can be defined as the literature written outside an author’s place of origin (source place or space) by authors who have moved to another place (their target place or space), where they are living and writing (Albaladejo, 2011; Hellín Nistal, 2015a; 2015b; Luarsabishvili, 2013). These writers can be called ectopic authors, and their works known as ectopic works. Both writers and works are a representation of the ‘ectopia’.

Several criteria must be considered in the explanation of ectopic literature. One of them is the age of the writer when she or he moved from the place of origin. Another is whether he or she was a literary writer before changing location or whether she or he began to write literature afterwards. The cause of the change of location is also one of these criteria, mainly considering whether the author has moved voluntarily, or whether they have been forcibly moved from their place of origin by political, religious or economic circumstances. The fact that the ectopic writer has moved to one or more countries is another criterion to be taken into account, since it could constitute a ‘recursive movement’ and become an instance of ‘meta-ectopia’ and even of ‘meta-meta-ectopia’ or ‘n-meta-ectopia’, since the recursiveness can be accomplished n times.

Ectopic literature is written ‘out of place’, as the title of Said’s memoir indicates. It is written out of the place of origin, in other places, in places where otherness manifests itself both by means of the difference of these places from the place of origin and by virtue of the close view and knowledge of the target places that ectopic authors develop. Ectopic literature is written in a place, but it is another place. It is a deterritorialized literature because of its change of territory (Ruiz-Sánchez, 2005), but it does not remain without territory, since new territories are found by ectopic authors, so that after deterritorialization it becomes reterritorialized.

Ectopic authors can maintain their language of origin or adopt the language of the space of welcome; they can also write in both languages and even in other languages. There is a dialectical relationship in ectopic literature between the source place, the source culture and the source language, on the one hand, and the target place, the target culture and the target language, on the other. With different or equal intensity and degree, the source culture and the target one can be present in ectopic works. It is also possible to find very complex combinations of cultures in the work of authors with roots in more than two cultures.

One of the most representative and prestigious ectopic authors in twentieth-century literature is Elias Canetti, who was born in 1905 in Ruse, Bulgaria, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He lived in many European countries: Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. His native tongue was the ancient Spanish known as Ladino or Judaeo-Spanish, spoken by the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and the language of his literary writing was German, which he was taught by his mother. Canetti’s cultural space was multilingual (Ruiz-Sánchez, 2017). A starting point for Canetti’s travel across languages and countries can be perceived in the following passage from his autobiographic work Die Gerettete Zunge: Geschichte einer Jugend (The Saved Tongue: History of a Youth):

Meine Eltern untereinender sprachen deutsch, wovon ich nichts verstehen durfte. Zu uns Kindern und zu allen Verwandten und Freunden sprachen sie spanisch. Das war die eigentliche Umganssprache, allerdings ein altertümliches Spanisch, ich hörte es auch später oft und habe es nie verlernt. (Canetti, 2004: 17)

[My parents spoke German to each other, which I was not able to understand. They spoke Spanish to us children and to all relatives and friends. That was the everyday language; although it was an ancient Spanish, I also often heard it later and have never forgotten it. (my translation)]

Canetti’s change of location was accomplished through countries as well as through languages. One of the main issues to take into account when studying ectopic literature is the language of authors and works. Considering place and language, I am offering a tentative and open typology of ectopic literature based on authors and works. It is important to stress that there are authors who can be included in more than one of the types that I am presenting:

This typology only offers some main paths with which to range over the many possibilities of ectopic literature. Combining these paths with other features, such as the age of authors when their movement took place, or whether an author was involved in more than one movement, will provide an exhaustive set of criteria for the scrutiny and subsequent explanation of each concrete case of an author and their works. Each author has her or his own situation as to the ectopia of his or her writing, so it is necessary to consider the particular circumstances and characteristics in every case in addition to the main lines offered above. So the status regarding ectopic literature of authors like George (or Jorge) Santayana, who was born in Madrid in 1863 and moved to the United States of America when he was eight years old, or Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved when he was five years old, need to be accurately analysed because of their age when they moved to the target place. The same criteria apply to the case of Najat El Hachmi. The existence of several changes of place in the case of Elias Canetti, who is an example of recursive meta-ectopia, also requires exhaustive analysis to determine the real shape and characteristics of his ectopia. Another author who would need a precise consideration of his status as ectopic author is Max Aub, who was born in Paris in 1903 and moved to Spain in 1914; he was exiled to France in 1939, a few months before the end of the Spanish Civil War, and afterwards to Mexico in 1942, maintaining his roots in Spanish culture (Hellín Nistal, 2018). Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) is a novel written in French by Jonathan Littell, an author who was born in New York, raised in France and the United States and is living in Barcelona. This novel, polemical for its topic and the use of the ‘infamous’ ‘Erzähler-Ich’ (first-person narrator) (Von Koppenfels, 2012: 32–52), is included in ectopic literature, and the concept of ‘dritte Raum’ (third space) proposed by Klaus Dirscherl as a neutral space in intercultural communication (Dirscherl, 2004) is useful to explain its ectopia. The interruption of residence in the target place can also be considered one of the particular criteria for the analysis. For example, the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún (Ruiz-Sánchez, 2018) interrupted his extended stay in France and resided in his place of origin when he was appointed Minister of Culture for Spain.

More authors with special circumstances and characteristics as to their ectopia and their literary language could be added to this sample to combine the models or paths of the typology and concrete biographies in the study of ectopic literature.

Ectopic literature as a support for European cohesion

Ectopic literature can be considered in connection with Europe from two complementary and interrelated points of view: the ectopic literature produced by authors who have moved to Europe from non-European countries and the ectopic literature written by authors who have moved to European countries from other European countries. In both cases the movements of these authors to or inside Europe and their writing in Europe contribute to the creation of an intercultural network that functions as a closely woven fabric where the idea of being part of a common European cultural space is shared by authors and readers, and projects onto society as one of the foundations of Europeanness. All these authors become part of European culture and their works are understood as belonging to European literature. Their original roots join their new roots in their host countries and cultures. This contributes to a fruitful situation based on difference and similarity and to the cohesion of European literature and culture, and consequently of Europe itself.

If ectopic literature has formerly helped to create the idea of Europe, it is important that movements and even displacements and the subsequent writing that results should be considered, currently, as one of the tools to surmount fragmentation and to support cohesion by strengthening the consciousness of European culture and citizenship. The works of François Cheng are part of the ectopic literature linking cultural spaces outside Europe with the European cultural space. The works of Irena Brežná (García Hernández, 2007), displaced from Slovakia to German-speaking Switzerland, as well as the works of Agota Kristof (Alfaro Amieiro, 2007), who was born in Hungary and displaced to French-speaking Switzerland, are examples of ectopic literature linking European spaces. The works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar are an example of ectopic literature linking the Asian–European space that Turkey represents to European space. All the changes of location and ectopic writings of these authors constitute transverse cultural paths that reinforce the idea of European literature, not only by connecting different European cultural spaces, but also by connecting non-European cultures with the European one. If the idea of European literature and culture is fed by the movements inside Europe, the movements from non-European spaces to Europe are key for that idea –remember the myth of Zeus and Princess Europa.

The relations and contacts between national literatures in Europe are one of the major cultural foundations that enables European literature (in the singular) to surmount European literatures (in the plural). European literature has been intercultural since its beginning, as is demonstrated, among other examples, by the connection between Greek and Roman literature, by the connections in the Middle Ages between Provençal, Galician-Portuguese and Italian love poetry, or between the French and Castilian epic poems, by Renaissance and Baroque literature, by the Enlightenment, by Romantic literature, by Realism and Naturalism, by Avant-garde literature, etc. European literatures constitute European literature as a mosaic characterized by interculturality (Albaladejo, 2012). Nowadays, this interculturality, with its long tradition and its current reality and vibrancy, is a cultural heritage which has been intensively updated, and which constitutes an asset for the idea of Europe as a common cultural home. The cultural and literary contributions provided by migrations within Europe improve interculturality and those offered by migrations from outside Europe intensify the idea of Europe as a puzzle whose pieces come together following a solid cultural dynamics of mutual enrichment, and that converge to a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. This holistic reality can surmount fragmentation and achieve cohesion. Thus, the self-image of Europe can be represented on a rich canvas that supports and explains the transverse nature of Europe, the self-consciousness of its cultural space and of Europeanness.

Conclusion

Of course, literature and culture are not the only assets to overcome the European crisis and to reactivate all the positive links and impulses existing within Europe. Surmounting the crisis no doubt requires action on a complex set of issues in the economic, political and social fields. A social reactivation of Europe is key for the success of all factors working for self-confidence and cohesion in Europe. In this sense it is important to stress that literature and culture are social issues and they can successfully collaborate with the other social issues against the crisis. Social welfare, the achievement of better conditions of life and work, the disappearance of poverty, the creation of jobs, the achievement of decent wages, the improvement of educational policies, the increase of gender equality, the solutions to housing problems, the disappearance of xenophobia, racism and racial supremacy, the increase of solidarity inside and outside Europe, the end of terrorism, the reinforcement of Human Rights, and a range of other factors bring about cohesion in Europe. Literature and culture are part of this social set and contribute to making cohesion possible. Ectopic literature, as a part of European literature based on the movement of people, strives to reach this goal.

Economic, political and social factors work alongside literature and culture as an active team of issues that both constructs our understandings of Europeanness and works towards a better and fairer Europe that can substantially contribute to improving the world.