Female writers remain invisible until they speak the language of pornography, or the language of money, the “male tongue.” Then they dominate the bestseller lists. Asked who inspires her, current dominatrix E. L. James rattled off names of women writers who plough similar territory, sending out a clear message in the process: In the literary world of financial profit, women hold pole position — their idols and inspiration “sisterly” writers, the millions who deliriously consume their products, also women.
The question of whether what E. L. James writes is literature, and if it’s not, then what is literature, is today completely irrelevant. “If literature has died, literary activity continues with unabated, if not increased vigor,” wrote Alvin Kernan in his long-forgotten The Death of Literature. The word literature is bidding its farewell to everyday language use, and trundling along with it are critical frames of reference and the very language of criticism. New terms are now in circulation: the publishing industry, the writing industry. What the writing industry intends to call the worker or “direct producer” remains to be seen. Maybe the current appellation of “content provider” will prevail.
If women rule the bestseller lists, men remain firmly seated in the first rows of so-called “serious” literature. At least that’s how it is in the Yugozone, in the literatures of the former Yugoslavia. Once friends, for a time political enemies, Yugozone writers are now buddies again. Not only do the “brothers” stick tight when among their own, they also click together like magnets in “fraternal” multiethnic and multi-national formations (a Serb and a Croat, a Croat and a Montenegrin, a Montenegrin and a Serb, all together with a Bosnian or an Albanian, you get the picture). Why is male bonding so attractive in the literary world? For two reasons: The first is ineluctably socio-biological (even male dolphins swim in formations!), the second purely financial. In any case, these are the very tendencies supported by the cultural structures of the European Union, which understands culture as a sedative for calming interethnic tensions, as a kind of yoga, a means of transport (cultural exchange, etc.), a bridge (that links nations), as a diplomatic strategy (culture knows no borders), as a potential tourism windfall, as everything and anything. Writers themselves have done the math and the figures don’t lie: The new national markets (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin) are simply too small. And who would have thought — the language of those literatures is the same after all!
With the advent of new media, public displays of male literary affection have blossomed into a genre. Affectionate email exchanges between two writers, TV appearances (a writerly coupling or three-some with a friendly brother in the middle, a hostess taking on the fraternal foursome); live appearances (a team of buddies performing); essays on autobiographical “bromances,” they’re all irreducibly male genres. And what of the female role in these fraternal literary relationships? As the brothers conclude tapping the veins of each other’s wisdom, a woman’s name will suddenly bleed out. “Say hi to Cica!” “And you say hi to Mica!” Cica and Mica are the brothers’ partners.
Stumbling across this kind of literary “material,” foreigners might think it the spawn of Balkan blood brotherhoods, or else a special kind of homoerotic Balkan soft-porn. Thank God this “material” almost never makes it beyond the borders of the Yugozone, so no one thinks about it at all. But if the material did indeed find legs, it could be that people in other parts of the world would think it completely natural, little different to what they’ve already seen among their own. Let’s not forget, men mentally hold each other’s hand everywhere, it’s just here and there they hold hands for real. I mean, who was it that hustled their way into Rembrandt’s famous picture? Those who had the money to buy a ticket to eternity: the boys, the buddies, the “night-watchmen,” the “Indians.”
It’s enough to do a little google of the most important European literary prizes, to click on the rubric “previous winners,” and the humiliating evidence speaks for itself. One of the most significant annual European prizes for contribution to European culture, society, and social science (a prize awarded by one of the most declaratively tolerant and democratic European states) is this year celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. In the sixty years of its existence, a woman has won the prize once. The fact that one year the prize was shared by three men and a woman (her name was Marguerite Yourcenar), and another year went to a married couple, is hardly a corrective. The result (59-to-1) reveals one of two possible things: Either women are mentally backward, which would explain men’s absolute intellectual supremacy, or women are systematically exposed to chronic professional discrimination. Maybe professional discrimination is but a form of that “ontological lack” that men — in possession of that infamous appendage — have foisted upon women as an enduring physical failing and inadequacy.
I admit that of late I’ve developed an unpleasant involuntary neurosis: Everything I set eyes on, everything I touch, I immediately put through my internal calculator, working out the ratio of men to women. I take everything in via a gender-based numerical screen: literary magazines, newspapers, feuilletons, literary production, scholarly articles, reviews, literary prizes, the lot. Courtesy of this involuntary neurosis I can say with an enormous degree of confidence that even a completely marginal human endeavor such as literature destroys every illusion about gender equality. Literature is Indian too!
As far as my neurosis goes, I’m not alone; other women are also prone to numerical mania. Bidisha, an English writer, novelist, and feminist has observed the keen paradox: the more women in literature, the more they’re invisible. Bidisha defines the professional discrimination of women in literature as “the erasure of women from public life,” which she abbreviates as “femicide.” “Discrimination is obvious,” says Bidisha, “all you have to do is count.”2
If the issue really is femicide, why is it that women have such a hard time raising their voices, are too reluctant to unite, to seek the support of other women in their profession? I once met an international feminist icon at a conference. She christened me a “Croatian aboriginal,” telling me how she’d just returned from a summer holiday in Croatia and how she’d watched “Croatian aboriginal women” feed rucola to pigs, which in her view was unbearably barbaric. On another occasion, an intellectual goddess lost her cool when I failed to display the requisite level of humility and gratitude at one of my books being published in a major world language. In fact, I’d shown ingratitude and insolence by daring remark that the honorarium I’d received for the book was humiliatingly modest (which, naturally, it was). Both women conversed with me the way a former servant converses with a present slave. I haven’t the least intention of drawing any groundbreaking conclusion from the two incidents, yet the truth remains that the gender question and the professional discrimination of women provokes unhealthy reactions among both genders of the writer’s guild. My male colleagues tend not to understand the problem; my female colleagues tend to refuse to understand it.