What makes the insular El Greco the Greek, the cosmopolitan Spanish? Many believe that national identity is subject to the place of major activity undergone by the particular artist. If this is correct and if we have to be consistent one must assert then that the provincial Picasso is French, the insular Maltese Melchiorre Cafá is Italian, the provincial Mattia Preti Maltese, the insular British painter Victor Pasmore Maltese, the Maltese modernist revolutionary jewellery designer Andrew Grima British. These jigsaw puzzled relationships between these artists all hailing from insular/provincial settings and their cosmopolitan realisations manifest the more theoretical debate surrounding the insular-cosmopolitan oxymoronic relationship. Such a relationship between these two categories becomes enigmatic when one introduces the complex subject of national identity.
Identity is integrally linked to what I term as the ratio between power-appropriation and power-absorption of the insular by the cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan power has the capacity to appropriate the praxis of the artist and to absorb him/her within its own identity. In fact such appropriation and absorption is an inherent ability of power. It forms part of an organic hegemonic praxis that is vital for its own sustainability of power.
The cosmopolitan centre appropriates/absorbs the identity of the insular and confers upon it the identity of its own cosmopolitanism. This is a sort of cosmopolitan social engineering.
This cosmopolitan-insular reflects the Hegelian-Nietzschean antiperistesic master-slave relationship. The more the cosmopolitan isolates the insular for its hegemonic purposes the more insularity acquires strength. Thus British interests in isolating Malta from its Italo-Continental historical links provoked a strong resistance which created a successful strategy towards independence from both. Thus cosmopolitan forces which strive to isolate the insular heighten the force of the latter, reaching an enantiodromatic state in which the cosmopolitan itself becomes insular and provincial. On the other hand the insular yearns towards its negation, cosmopolitanism. It struggles to become cosmopolitan clothing itself with the particular cosmopolitan centre it is linked with. The cosmopolitan values of art, culture and behaviour become the accepted form for the insular.
The cosmopolitan becomes the village, and it is the village and not the Balzac-Baudelarian city that becomes global. The insular becomes the cosmopolitan and the cosmopolitan insular until the distinction becomes blurred, blurred as Cervantes’ description of Sancho’s departure to the island which is not an isla.
In his stimulating analysis Daniel Nemser tackles the concept of insularity from Governor Sancho Panza’s rule on the insula Barataria, part two of Cervantes masterpiece Don Quichotte. In fact it is precisely here where insularity meets provincialism, both being considered as a state of the mind. The idea that insularity/provincialism is exclusively linked with specific vulnerable territorial units is mistaken.
Besides the literal meaning of insular as a geographical meaning of land surrounded by water, isla, one must also understand insularity as insular space, that is ‘the context, the social and spatial relations’ of the isla in question. More important for this part of our discussion is that insularity is a state of mind. In fact Sancho’s Barataria ‘is only an island in the squire’s mind’, and in actual fact it is a town on the Spanish mainland.
The principles of appropriation and absorption discussed above together with Sancho’s governance of the ‘insular’ Barataria bring us back to the discussion of the insular-cosmopolitan hegemonic relationship and its effect on the arts.
The real situation in the arts is that different criteria of various movements develop parallelly and in multi-faceted layers. One notices a living artistic tradition ‘peacefully’ co-existing with its own historical antipodes. This happens when cosmopolitan values start to permeate a strongly rooted and still thriving insular/provincial structure without succeeding in deracinating the previous dominant set-up. Thus, for example as Gavin Stamp writes when dealing with the fascinating situation in Malta where living Baroque culture lives in parallel to a modernist and post-modernist artistic presence. Gavin Stamp writes how, for example the 1971 baroque Xewkija Rotunda ‘stands outside conventional architectural history, for while the Mosta Rotunda reflected contemporary neo-classical taste, this modern continuation of the baroque has no parallel. Indeed, this church is little known outside Malta. But its very existence – a baroque church built by local labour more than three centuries after its Venetian model – emphasises how inadequate is the idea of progress, dominated by the assumed hegemony of Modernism’.
Modernism in fact was a cultural onslaught on the metropolis by the provinces, insular provinces, or at least by insular provincial states of mind. It needed the TJ Clark compromise to transform this insularity into the global power it attained and which thereafter relegated previous cosmopolitan values to Dante’s rings of hellish insularity. It needed a tremendous intellectual, spiritual and financial struggle for modernism to assert itself as the cosmopolitan form of human creativity.
Values and ideas like those of the Enlightenment and of Modernism do meet buffers which are also, though not only, made of territorial spaces and as such we have territorial-cultural spots which negate such import or rather such integration of novel ideas, thus sustaining their status as insular and provincial spots. The Enlightenment and later Modernism brought into being new meanings about religion, about tolerance, ideas which radically changed the whole political structure of government, the recognition and acceptance of Newtonian science in the Enlightenment and of Einsteinian during Modernism, alternatives to absolutism in church and state. All this constituted a new integral structure of new thought, the non-acceptance of which would lead to a certain form of absolutism based on provincialism and insularity.
However does it necessarily mean that insularity is sustained exclusively through the buffering of new ideas? For example Modernism was, in Malta declared by Mgr P. Pace, the archbishop of the Catholic Church in Malta as ‘the great enemy … which appears to threaten, to shake to its very foundations, the whole fabric of Christianity’[i]. The Church’s struggle to create an impenetrable buffer zone against the intrusion of any element of modernism was at the time highly successful. In spite of this provincial stand Modernism started to seep through. However, and which is radically important to understand how new ideas succeed to permeate through insularity, this initial pervasion of modernist ideas occurred without any radical philosophical or ideological roots. Modernist ideas were reluctantly accepted only as superficial ‘fashionable’ visual events, divested of their radical social-philosophical-artistic presuppositions. So long as Modernism’s embodied ideas and philosophy remained offshore, and as long as only the formal visual manifestation of these ideas succeeded in penetrating feudal insular Maltese labyrinths, so long as only the façade is imported, then Maltese artists were subtly tolerated to experiment with such a new language coming from the cosmopolitan centres.
The paradox between Insularity and Cosmopolitanism becomes sharper when one understands that Malta’s insularity is one of a cosmopolitan nature. Its insularity was always dialectically linked with cosmopolitanism. This hybrid of course creates theoretical and historical problems and debate. Its historical links with the Kingdom of Naples when Naples was a centre of artistic power, the trans-national character of the Order of St John with whom Malta is inevitably linked is obviously another example. Malta was faced with cosmopolitan ‘sample’ of micro-European states made up of the most important feudal kingdoms of the time. At the same time such feudal kingdoms had one common denominator within the Order: international maritime trade and military fleet structure needing a specific work force of commerce which brought Malta closer to a Bourgeois renaissance. It is not a mere coincidence or chance that the Order chose the port trade centre of Birgu instead of the Medieval feudal Mdina. This bourgeois character of the feudal multi-national Order has been many a time bypassed in scholarship.
A parallel situation erupted with the introduction of the British era. Malta evolved into the most important military industrialised port for the cosmopolitan global Empire of Great Britain, in the Mediterranean. This required a new progressive strata of highly specialised working class ready to deal with the most modern technology of the times. Just quick examples of this would make the picture clearer: the train, tram system, photography development in 1840s, upper Barracca lift mechanism, national water and electricity organisation, a whole structure modernised for trade and warfare, the massive Drydocks working class’ education and specialisation, introduction of public transport, a volcanic growth of the naval fleet and construction, the Grand Harbour economic boom, and other.
What the Renaissance and the Baroque ‘brought into’ Malta were Caravaggio, Mattia Preti, Melchiorre Caffa, and Favray. With Britain we faced the Nazarene Movement and the Hyzler- Overbeck relationship, later Pasmore and abstract art, and the bulk of British artists. And yet enigmatically Malta remained insular and provincial within such a rich cosmopolitan environment. Or did it? Is Malta’s recognised insularity and provincialism a myth?
It is rather difficult to explain this oxymoronic situation in which on the one hand Malta found itself passing through such a modernist industrial upheaval, which parallels the Order of St John’s presence centuries before, and at the same time such upheaval finds no parallel in the arts. Confronting the Esposizione Industriale of 1897 one finds Lazzaro Pisani’s Death of Abel (1885) and Giuseppe Cali’s Adrian Dingli.
It seems that Malta violently entered the modern age still harbouring an insular Sicilian mental world view, of which it was an integral part. An enigmatic threshold was met. ‘Sicilian’ Malta with which she was no longer anchoring its identity had not yet achieved its total transition to the new status. Malta found itself in a liminal state, at a threshold between a previous way and a new way ‘of structuring one’s identity, time and community’. The continuity of tradition became uncertain and future outcomes thrown into doubt. The Catholic Church at this point stood as a social anchorage during such liminal situations. The Church buffered against the fluidity and malleable state of affairs which enables new order, new institutions, new customs, and new ways of thinking to become established. The Church’s initial successful buffering created consequently what Gregory Bateson, the British Anthropologist calls schismogenesis, that is a situation of permanent liminality in which ‘societies can be stuck for a long time in a state where the previous unity was broken, and yet the schismatic components are forced to stay together, producing an unpleasant, violent, harrowing, truly miserable existence’. This produces schizoid personalities.
Such a situation can be seen manifested, for example, not only in Emvin Cremona’s works during the Politico-Religious conflict of the 1960s but also at the recent ‘novel’ upsurge of the St Paul debate. In today’s liminal situation some Maltese ‘modern’ historians are still ‘fossilised’ at the stage of deconstructing myths already deconstructed, a methodology still anchored in British empirical-positivistism of the mid-19 century. These scholars remain oblivious to all the radical revolutionary changes in research methodology ushered in the 20/21 century.
Annihilating myths becomes an organic component of insularity in such hands. Insularity in facts provokes this need to annihilate myths so as to create rather paradoxically an illusion of one’s identity. To sustain one’s identity the need to annihilate myths becomes of primary importance. This is an integral characteristic of insularity. Insularity thus succeeds in achieving what the cosmopolitan power did not succeed in accomplishing, that is the deletion of identity. Insularity as the self-devouring snake creates a situation in which one’s identity falls into the hegemonic contradiction of deconstructing and annihilating that very same identity. And it accomplishes this through the obliteration of myths.