If you are ever lost in an Italian city, look for Dante Alighieri street.

Milan 2019

If you are ever lost in an Italian city, look for Dante Alighieri street. Or search for the closest Alighieri metro station. Perhaps there’s a nearby Alighieri piazza. And once you do spot that inevitable landmark for the Father of Italian, know that you’re probably somewhere near the center of town, or at least you’re heading in that direction. Of course you might have to skip past the odd Boccaccio road or Da Vinci lane to find your way, but these, too, are predictable beacons that can guide your path.

Taking the same approach in France is a bit more slippery. You might end up slinking past a collection of Victor Hugo roundabouts and Balzac Boulevards and Zola squares, somehow discovering new Voltaire statues in the most peculiar places, never quite sure whether you’re in the town center or headed for the periphery or already in the countryside. In a way that’s oddly fitting for the country’s literature, landmarks are dropped in a haphazard fashion, sculptures and markers and plaques that commemorate great writers are set in the most unexpected spots, in a manner that you might even call postmodern. This is a country—it must be remembered—that renamed an entire town after Proust.

Although that still doesn’t reach the extremes of what you find in Berlin: streets celebrate politicians and scientists and composers and artists and activists and every journey across the city has the character of strolling through the sections of a library. For the music landmarks we have Bach, Wagner, Schubert, Mahler, and obviously a few dozen spots for Beethoven; for the political there are countless memorials in the city, from Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt to Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg; and of course there’s still room for Mann, Hesse, Goethe, and Freud to have their own streets. Yet it all seems a bit too much. A bit too aggressive. On every corner and intersection and park some giant from history watches you take a stroll. I don’t need to visit a dentist on Karl Marx Avenue nor do I need to start thinking about Freud whenever I stop by the bakery.

Of course knowing a bit about American literature won’t, alas, help much if you’re lost in America. The only real skill required to avoid straying off course in most American cities is the ability to count. These are orderly grids, with 17th Street almost sure to follow 16th Street, which means that there’s simply no room whatsoever for the history of romantic poetry to get involved with city planning. A typical example of what you might find instead is the minuscule plaque for Walt Whitman near the waterfront in Brooklyn—which you can fall into and still miss, though it does commemorate a newspaper that fired him, so perhaps minuscule is just right.

Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.

To notice that a city’s geography influences its residents isn’t to make a grand claim: living along the shore creates a particular atmosphere, but you’ll get a different atmosphere amid narrow and shadowy streets, or when you’re near wide boulevards and crowded parks and expensive towers. The character that’s inherent to a city—in its architecture, the speed with which it changes, through its customs—has an obvious influence on your perceptions. Because there’s more than one reason why the coffee tastes different at an outdoor café in São Paulo than after a dinner in Dublin. So it is curious to consider what effects these landmarks have on contemporary literary culture.

Imagine, for instance, that Italian is your native language, and that you flirt with some loose thoughts of writing a novel. In school you slogged through the Divine Comedy, and you were taught that this Dante Alighieri, who died seven hundred years ago, was integral in creating the language that composes the thoughts in your head. This Father of Italian is on street names and piazzas and is certainly a shadow on the page when you first begin to write—even if that’s never expressed as a conscious thought in your mind. Hasn’t the culture already made its decision about writers? What can you create with such a figure looking over your shoulder? Doesn’t the presence of such a stupefying name at the heart of your language make you halt? Probably not if you were truly serious. You’ll still write that novel, but perhaps your expectations will shift. It just might be a little harder to look skyward with the lofty, preposterous aims that are absolutely necessary to write a literary novel.

There’s a similar shadow created by Shakespeare—with the grandeur, indispensability, and ubiquity of his work giving tears and crumbled pages to a few centuries of writers. Go on then: try writing an original sonnet. Or sell-out the theater with a new five act play. You don’t have to acknowledge the ghostly figure that’s always whispering in the background of any grand project in English to still sense his presence. That lineage redounds onto literary culture today. It influences what writers decide to value. And with the drama department not taking any more applications—it is reasonable to wonder—is that why there’s such a great tradition in Britain for the comic novel? It is difficult to miss that in contemporary Britain to act haughty or cocky or to mix your seriousness with your arrogance—in other words, to act American—is much more than a mere transgression. Not having a sense of humor is a major offense, so perhaps the modern comic novel shouldn’t be a surprise. Expertly done, succinct, a cocktail of arched eyebrow and sparkle, absolutely never self-important. Does that result from having Shakespeare peer over every writer’s shoulder? From knowing that the drama department is already overbooked? From having to learn about centuries of English literature? Obviously monocausal explanations are insufficient and a bit ridiculous. Yet you can’t dismiss how many people in Britain would consider it absurd to even attempt a climb of the literary hierarchy.

Back in Brooklyn—where all the streets have numbers, where nobody remembers a book published yesterday, where the subject is always tomorrow—you can’t step into a café without tripping over three people writing a novel that, they are certain, will result in greatness, triggering ripples throughout the literary world, bringing convulsions to the entire culture. There’s no shyness in American literature about publishing a thousand page tome. There’s no worry about having swagger and hubris and wanting to toss the past away and quite literally begin a new chapter. And it just might be true that a poor sense of history is essential for bravado, and that bravado is essential for creation.

Read More