From “Brilliant Little Capital” to “Open City”: Brussel as Source of Inspiration for Intercultural Sociocriticism in Anglophone Fiction

Brussels may not feature as prominently in literature in English as do London and New York, but it, too, has been a source of inspiration for anglophone authors from across the world since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this article I consider the canonical texts of British authors William Thackeray (Vanity Fair, 1848), Charlotte Brontë (Villette, 1853) 1848), and Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1899/1902) as well as the more recent texts by the South African novelist Niq Mhlongo (‘Chocolate City,’ 2009) and the Nigerian American novelist Teju Cole (Open City, 2011). These works all present ‘hetero-images’ (Leerssen 2007) of Brussels, whereby the city is viewed from the perspective of the ‘Other,’ whether a foreign visitor passing through or a long-term expatriate. I demonstrate how their intercultural perceptions of Brussels reflect the social-cultural and political changes as well as the literary developments of the past two centuries. Initially a “brilliant little capital” at the time of the Battle of Waterloo, Brussels turns into a colonial “sepulchral city” at the end of the 19th century, to reappear as a multicultural, hybridized “open city” at the dawn of the new millennium. From realist to modernist, postmodernist and postcolonial, the anglophone authors’ images of Brussels, however, are less designed to capture the spirit of Brussels, than to critically examine the Self, their own society, or even humanity in general. The style figures and genre features used to construct Brussels in literature in English, I show, ultimately serve the authors’ self-reflexive socio-criticism.