The Literature of Trieste and the Perils of Peripherality

The translational, the transnational and the transcultural are established critical routes into Modernism, at least since Bradbury and McFarlane’s seminal Modernism, 1890–1930. An international phenomenon, Modernism encompasses travelling cultures, contact zones and their overlaps, together with a corollary of diasporic, exilic and migrant discourses and practices. This inflection has increasingly challenged critical frameworks, re-orienting them in recent years towards notions of centre and periphery. Where neat vectors of national and cultural allegiance are being disavowed, as is the case with global Modernism, its diasporic and migratory vocation renders it an eminently ‘traveling culture’ as James Clifford puts it. Paradoxically, this experience can be at once migratory and rooted, international and local, ‘singular’ and plural, as is elucidated in Jameson’s ‘singular modernity’. My aim here is to examine a particular case study in south-eastern Europe and the manners in which it responded to, as well as resisted, the Modernist constellation. The historical and multilingual legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave rise to a particular syntax of creativity and literary production across diverse cultures and languages. This liminal region could be branded a ‘double periphery’, or ‘the periphery of a periphery’, in view of its peripherality both vis-à-vis Italy, which acquired Trieste and large parts of the region’s multilinguistic and multiethnic hinterland in 1918, as well as with respect to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where this southern Adriatic port town had been the financial and economic hub of the Empire. The authoritarian turn taken by Italy after 1924 also facilitated a distancing of numerous avant-garde artists from active politics, leading to disengagement and, in a number of cases, exile, ostracism and expatriations, both enforced and voluntary. In this unique configuration, location was indeed ‘an itinerary rather than a bounded site – a series of encounters and translations’ within a constellation of contact zones as observed by Clifford. My essay elucidates and discusses the osmotic, organic translatability of individual local cultures at this porous Modernist interface, focusing, in particular, on the interruptions, breakdowns and ruptures, under the mounting pressure of national, ethnic and identitarian fractures, in the fabric of a social and political framework in transition from Imperial to totalitarian rule.