The Novel and the Borders of Europe: Ben Jelloun's Leaving Tangier and Oksanen's Purge

With the collapse of Communism and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 a new and more fluid atlas of Europe emerged. On the one hand, the continuous expansion of the European Union and "Schengen" has enabled a growing number of Europeans to cross national borders internally in Europe without the need of a passport. On the other hand, Europe's magnetism on non-Europeans seems to have increased as the pressure on its external borders intensifies, and the smoothness of movement within Europe has been countered by increased friction around Europe's external borders. In general, the borders of Europe have become increasingly unstable, partly because their raison d'être is fundamentally questioned, partly because their function, position, and layout have changed dramatically.

During the same period, many novelists have become interested in, and concerned about, the role of Europe and its borders. In his Mediterranean novel Leaving Tangier (2006), Tahar Ben Jelloun chronicles the lives of several Moroccan and African persons obsessed with obtaining "that pretty burgundy passport" (47) that would grant them access to a more privileged life. But those characters daydreaming of Europe face two major obstacles: the natural barrier of the Mediterranean where many drown in the attempt to reach Europe and the strict immigration laws of Spain and Europe that materialize in various reactive and proactive ways as borders or border zones. One way is the old-fashioned way of fences, wires, and border guards at the external borders of Europe. Another is in the form of police raids within the European cities: "At the small station in Sabadell, the police were checking identity papers, systematically stopping gypsies, black Africans, and North African Arabs" (Ben Jelloun 2009, 168). Here, the national border has moved from the visible, territorial border line at the edges of Spain into the city of Sabadell, north of Barcelona, and people are required to carry passports or other documents that can verify their identity. Finally, the laws also emerge as "an electronic surveillance system…with infrared and ultrasound equipment, ultra everything, along with automatic weapons" (2009, 34) that reaches beyond Søren Frank The Novel and the Borders of Europe

Europe's external frontier in a preemptive attempt to dissuade Africans from even dreaming of Europe:

With that paraphernalia, the Spanish cops were now able to foresee everything as soon as a Moroccan showed the slightest inclination to cross the Straits of Gibraltar: the mere thought would provide the Spanish with detailed information on the guy in question.

(Ben Jelloun 2009, 34-35)

Here, the actual frontier of the nation and the continent has morphed into an invisible border reaching all the way into the Moroccans' houses and, ultimately, minds. Ben Jelloun may be exaggerating the physical range of the surveillance equipment, but in terms of the mental effects of such hightech systems—deterrence through the internalization of being watched—the reflections do not seem overstated.

As Leaving Tangier shows, the characters not only face the hardening borders of Europe in the form of wires, fences, and guards, they also have to adapt to the shape-shifting character of these borders as they oscillate between being beyond, at, and within the traditional border; the border is no longer just there, but everywhere (see also Carr 2012, 23). This increased presence of the politico-military border is complemented by a growing precarity of this same border as more and more people attempt to cross it. People's crossing of a national-geographical border has wide-ranging consequences for nation, continent, and individual in that it leads to the questioning and disruption of other and more anthropological borders, that is, the borders of language, history, religion, politics, culture, and sexuality.

In this article I claim that a new subgenre of European border novels has emerged. My aim is threefold. First, I will describe the sociological scenario that has helped generate this literary border zone condition from the outside. I will do so by dividing the European post-World War II era into three, possibly four, distinctive phases...