The artist is convinced that her artistic project is both feministically and artistically provocative, even though (or perhaps because) it is—“invisible.” For those with slightly longer cultural memories and experience, hers is simply a dull recycling project. Over the past fifty years female artists have staged similar performances in many places, Croatian artists among them. The artist’s project reveals not only her naivety, arrogance, and unwillingness to bone up on her predecessors, but also an absence of context and continuity, the absence of will to build continuity. The episode speaks to a humiliating artistic and intellectual apathy. And in this sense, it is indeed a very “female narrative.” Because without a women’s canon (now why wouldn’t that be a word for continuity?), ambitious and lazy little girls will go around in circles repeating the same thing over, determinedly claiming that they’re doing something new. The absence of a canon, that is, the presence of discontinuity, leaves an empty space that enables the inevitable reinscription of the female, the production of an exhausted art that resorts to the same stammering vocabulary, self-convinced that it is declaring revolution. In any case, a canon exists to be destroyed — and so that there is an awareness of what is being destroyed.
Stereotypes about women and women’s creativity, even those (ostensibly) emancipatory, are ardently encouraged by men. Almost every male writer or critic will benignantly support “literary trash” written by women, his agenda two-fold: the first, promulgation of the myth that women are best at writing literary “trash” (which concomitantly serves to secure his own manly place on the shelves of “serious literature”), the second, to demonstrate that he, personally, has nothing against mass culture, which for him is code for women’s equal participation in literature. Our literary man will cite Hannah Arendt at least once in his life, because she is the only woman he deigns worthy of citation. At least once in his life our literary man will serve on a jury, and in the process fight tooth and nail to ensure a woman doesn’t win, and if she really must, then he’ll do all in his power to ensure that the woman who does win will be she who least deserves it. Having done so, our literary man has then done his duty: Women have participated in literary life.
Stereotypes about women are most often promulgated by women themselves, because doing so is the surest path to money and attention in any field, literature included. Having attained a social standing from which they could effect change, declared feminists most often carry on like bordello owners, feeding men’s fantasies and satisfying men’s desires. Any number of women are employed in prominent positions in the Croatian media, yet this hasn’t changed its content or appearance in any significant respect. In fact, the Croatian media is more pornographic and more corrupt than ever before — it’s spent the last two decades trying to turn ninety-two-year-old Žuži Jelinek into a national women’s icon. (Every nation needs its own Dr. Ruth!) Now who is Žuži? Žuži is a seamstress who hustled her way to becoming the milliner of choice for the Yugoslav women’s communist elite, she’s the author of Secrets of a Well-Dressed Woman, the first book of its kind in post-WWII Yugoslavia, she’s a successful widow who has married four times, and she’s a columnist with a specialty line in instructive feuilletons on women’s life. Žuži’s retrograde, semi-pornographic and semiliterate columns have made her a darling of the new Croatian media establishment. Often called upon as a public speaker, a year or so ago, at the invitation of a female law professor at the University of Zagreb, Žuži gave a lecture to female students — future lawyers — on her favorite topic: how the ideal woman should behave in marriage (unmarried women, naturally, don’t fit into the “ideal” category). Above all, ideal women must satisfy their husbands’ desires, meaning they have to be — dolls. On the subject of dolls, fifteen-year-old Venus Palermo, a little Lolita and embodiment of the teenage “living doll” craze, uploaded her own doll make-up instructional video to YouTube. Some thirty million visitors have now watched how they might turn themselves into dolls. “It makes me happy that I can inspire so many people,” said Venus. This kind of woman, irrespective of whether a little girl or little old lady, is usually given media time in order that they might inspire other women. This time is frequently given to them by other women, “female pimps.”
Nonetheless, every now and then women wake from their slumber, take a look around, and ask themselves what kind of world they’re living in. In a recent article American writer Meg Wolitzer pointedly raised the culture’s neglect of women writers relative to their male colleagues.1 Although we can readily agree with her every observation, we remain struck by the fact that, in terms of her literary references, Wolitzer thinks of literature as an exclusively Anglo-American domain. It’s as if she’s forgotten the power relations involved; that the names of “neglected” American women writers appear in the window displays of every bookstore on earth; that it’s probably all the same to a Korean woman writer whether she is discriminated against by her male colleagues at home, their Anglo-American buddies, or Anglo-American women writers.
Whatever the case may be, having first “satisfied men’s desires,” women eventually start asking the questions their predecessors asked long ago, to which — who would have thought — they never got any answers. And while women are preoccupied asking questions, men amuse themselves with the toys they have usurped, claiming that they’re playing for all of us, that their game has universal significance. Like soccer, literature is their game. Why? Because they give themselves the right, because the right is given to them. By whom? By women, naturally.
1Meg Wolitzer, “The Second Shelf,” The New York Times, March 30 2012.
ZAGREB ZOO
LATELY ALL THE talk has been about the decline of independent bookshops, the fall of the once powerful chains, publishers going to the wall, editors losing their jobs, the closing of libraries and university literature departments, literature PhDs on food stamps — but most of all, talk has been about the physical disappearance of books. Spokespeople for the two main views are plentifuclass="underline" On the one hand, “the pessimists” furiously attack the aggressive “trash” polluting our cultural habitat and depriving it of oxygen, and on the other, “the optimists” furiously defend the laws of the literary marketplace (the lowest category of optimist having recently tried to put The Muppets film in the dock for indoctrinating American children with anti-capitalist propaganda). People are all abuzz about tablets of all kinds, about self-publishing, the hordes of “non-professional” writers on the literary scene, among them the writers of fan fiction, which, as a Guardian headline beams, promises to be a “rich vein for publishers,” one that suggests publishers are vampires ever on the lookout for fresh blood.
Amid the general clamor no one, really no one, is talking about writers, which means that the “workers” (the literary proletariat) have become a totally marginal factor in the chain of production. The proletariat has in any case disappeared from general view, both actual and mental, and can today only be seen in industrial museums; a wax figure clasping a symbolic hammer, a placard saying he’s a worker, a man in a yellow helmet, wheeled out from the murk of forgetting for Labor Day celebrations. As far as the literary proletariat goes, let’s recall the old Robert Altman film, The Player, in which an unscrupulous Hollywood mogul murders a screenwriter with impunity, marries his girlfriend, and then cynically claims that, in the film business, writers just get in the way. What was once a satire on a possible reality has today become reality. I cried watching my murdered colleague David Kahane draw his last breath in a parking lot.