Michel Biron carried out such an attempt in a manner of his choosing in 1994, by selecting a concept that was capable of including all the examples of Belgian literature since the 1870s. Basing himself on a proper socio-critical methodology, it is the concept of modernity that he emphasizes and interprets, remaining “sensitive to the many senses that are given to (modernity)” and showing that “the diffuse and polymorphic circulation of such an aesthetic emblem often is a response to strategic imperatives existing within the literary hierarchy in Belgium.” In 2004, in works by Dirk De Geest and Reine Meylaerts, the question concerns “Belgique” and “België”. What heuristic value is to be given to these two proper names, each designating a country that is notable for its bilingualism – not taking the German-speaking community into account – or to the adjectives that are related to them in their respective languages (French and Dutch)? One takes one’s best shot, as it were, for nothing other than “the concept “Belgian” stirs up such a range of acceptations, some opposed to others, some complementary, never obvious or univocal, and it runs like a golden thread through Belgian literary practices. This contest over identity, not always fought fairly, might be moderated thanks to the contribution of a comparativist approach in the matter of culture, accompanied by consciousness of the “lack of evidence attached to even the idea of a national literature.” With Paul Aron and Benoît Denis, the concept of a “literary network” assumes importance, not in order to be substituted for Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields, but in order to make possible a “more precise description of certain processes at work in a sub-field that is under some sort of domination, or else only weakly autonomous.” Such is the case of the field of “Belgian letters” – the reference is only to literary production in French – in which the relational capital of a given agent may compensate in a non-negligible way for the weakness of the symbolic capital that only Paris can really provide.

A polymorphous rhetoric

Three texts of a certain length illustrate each of the four phases mentioned above, and the transitions also offer some insight. We pass from a single Belgium (Potvin, Nautet, Hamelius) that is steeped in a “Nordic myth” to the standard-setting status of France and the emergence of “francophone literatures” (Charlier, Hanse, Piron), and thence to a sociological exploration of “belgitude” and the “literatures of the periphery” (Quaghebeur, Klinkenberg, Lambert), before winding things up with other university specialists who focus on new concepts and new explicative possibilities (Biron, De Geest and Meylaerts, Aron and Denis).    

It may be assumed that these historiographical protocols have each their own rhetoric. In this respect, in the very dense introduction to their anthology, Björn-Olav Dozo and François Provenzano offer a table that displays the development of various strands of argument followed by several selected texts. They reckon that “the discourse on literary history in Belgium [...] often articulates a proposition about the intrinsic identity of that history in terms of a proposition about the relationship between that history and the literary history of neighbouring countries.” For example, the “bastardy” of the Belgian writer (this is considered something positive) forces him or her into “exile”, considered a negative value; the negative “institutional misery” of the same may turn into a positive “intersection of influences”; finally, an “absence” of legitimacy, translating the lack, opens up upon a promising “space of possibilities”. In other words, today as yesterday, speaking about literary practice in Belgium is never done univocally. Perhaps it is just the way things are in a country of meeting places like ours, which bounces back and forth between unity and multiculturalism, affected more often than many believe by ideological developments. No, truly, no more than literature, this historiography cannot claim to be the bearer of an essentialism...