All in all, the alliance of the Politician, Priest, and Poet is complex, historically rich, dramatic, exciting, often fatal, and inevitably — unavoidable. Even if the Poet eventually wins his freedom, no longer requiring the assistance of Priest or Politician, it’s no matter, the two of them will then go to him. Just think of the honorary doctorates bestowed on J. K. Rowling, all the politicians who have curtsied in her direction. Sure, she curtsies too, though she doesn’t have to. Accused of promoting witchcraft and magic over religion in her work, Rowling responded: “I believe in God, not magic!” The Priest breathed a contented sigh of relief — he doesn’t like competition.
Having a certain Felix Landau, an SS officer in Drohobych, as a fan of his sketches saved Bruno Schulz’s life for a time. Landau made him his “personal Jew,” hiring him to paint his son’s room. One “black Thursday,” on a day when 250 Jews were killed in Drohobych, Bruno Schulz was felled by the bullet of SS officer Karl Günther. Günther shot Schulz as revenge on Landau for having shot his own “personal Jew,” a dentist. At least that’s how legend has it. Today three states jostle to incorporate Schulz in the fabric of their national culture: Poland (because Schulz wrote in Polish), Israel (for obvious reasons), and Ukraine (because Drohobych is today in western Ukraine). About twenty years ago there was a scandal when a mural Schulz painted for his temporary protector was found. Sections of the mural were promptly whisked off to Israel and installed in Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture confirmed that it had donated the mural to Yad Vashem because in return Yad Vashem had promised to fund the construction of a Schulz museum in Drobobych. Schulz’s fate — one of the saddest and most ironic of literary fates — illustrates the extent to which the Poet is always a plaything, putty in the hands of Politician and Priest, even after his death (which they of course ably concealed). Priest and Politician never miss a chance to “warm” themselves on a book either.
As far as writers, their nationalities, and their countries of residence go, things aren’t always in accord, don’t always match expectations. Some writers change countries and languages, chance sends one to a hospitable country, another some place less hospitable, but most writers stick to the countries where they were born. Being a writer is complicated enough. Yet being an Anglo-American writer and being a Malaysian one isn’t quite the same thing, just as being an Anglo-American woman writer among Anglo-American male writers is not the same thing — nor, for that matter, is being a Malaysian woman writer within Malaysian literature and being one on the world literary map. Wanting to mark his or her territory on the literary map, a Malaysian has to display vastly greater talent and invest vastly greater energy than his or her Anglo-American colleague. There’s no mystery in the power relations. For a great writer, a small country lacking a significant literary tradition is a great misfortune. Had he been a German writer, Miroslav Krleža would today tower on the world literary map as one of its peaks. But Miroslav Krleža only exists on Croatian maps. Minor writers are in much better shape — if it weren’t for their small countries and languages, many writers wouldn’t be able to call themselves such. Small countries tend to seek out literary representatives cut to their own size; they wouldn’t know what to do with a great writer, a minor one suits all concerned. For a minor writer, the backing of his small country is his most potent weapon.
The global marketplace is particularly enamored with the idea of homelands, nations, and nationalities; there is, after all, good money to be made. At the apotheosis of modernism, Virginia Woolf declared, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” To me, it seems a declaration that was then as equally “incomprehensible” as it is today. Because literature — as an exemplar of a nation’s “spiritual wealth,” as a “bridge between peoples” (alongside the many other characteristics attributed to it) — is also a form of ethno-business. Unfortunately. And one sometimes gets the impression that many writers are awfully adroit in the role of ethno-businessmen.
THE AUTHOR: DEAD AND ALIVE
Those who say the author is dead usually have in mind to rifle his wardrobe.
— Les Murray4
In a single sentence, poet Les Murray nonchalantly casts aside the manifold efforts of his “natural” allies — critics, literary theorists, and literary historians — and their responses to one of the most complex literary questions, that of the author and authorship. And if I zip the mouth of the literary theorist in me shut, and let the writer speak, at least fleetingly I have to agree with him.
Although there is, as yet, no accord among literary historians on who or what gave birth to the author and when — whether it was the advent of written culture or the invention of publishing (i.e., legal regulation in book production) — the author, it seems, is already dead. Having established himself and become an institution in the nineteenth century, by the mid-twentieth century his relevance was already in question. The institution of the author and authorship was actually tragi-comically brief; richer and lengthier by far is the story of anonymous literary creation.5
Yet theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Terry Eagleton, or Pierre Bourdieu didn’t bury the author; one can’t even credit the scribes who periodically proffer hegemonic, universalist (male, naturally), white (we can’t worry about the whole world!), West European and North American (the Arabs are loaded, they can look after themselves!) thinking on literature, literary values, and the author and authorship. As we know, the author is a kind of social consensus, as is literature itself; the author is a mutant adapting to the demands and expectations of the purchaser, irrespective of who this might be — king, tsar, state, religious community, imagined literary public, social class, or market. There is no author without social consensus. If you don’t believe this, try explaining you’re an author to the Brazilian Awa tribe.
The institution of literature, at least as we have hitherto known it, is disintegrating by the day, and is doing so together with the foundations on which its construction rests. The Author is one of the key elements, the traditional author, that is. Because in today’s celebrity culture, authors are more worried about how they might create an authorial public persona than, for example, the narrative masks of their novels. It’s the authorial persona that sells books, or so we’re told. This explains why in terms of self-representation, on websites, in the brief biographical notes on inside covers, we see those clumsy collections of words attempting to confirm the identity of the person in question: novelist, essayist, author of such and such. Don’t novelist and essayist also automatically imply the concept of authorship? Or is the word author itself a kind of bonus medal, which we award ourselves (or is awarded to us by others) in the belief it might seal our social standing? Maybe the word author is just a symptom of a deep internal fear that we are all together going to disappear, swept away by the first strong gust of a new cultural wind?
Most people associate “visual art” with strong (“scandalous”) authorial personas, Damien Hearst being a case in point. Building his or her authorial personae — conscious that they live in the celebrity culture that is ours, a modern version of polytheism — many artists, consciously or unconsciously use self-beatification, self-divinization (one of the forms of canonization in celebrity culture), and thus exploit the religious potential of the artistic act. It’s how Marina Abramović turned MoMA into Međugorje (or Lourdes), herself into Our Lady, and thousands of visitors into believers and pilgrims for the duration of her three-month project, “The Artist Is Present.” Dressed as the Virgin Mary full of grace, Abramović lowered her healing gaze onto visitors, flickered her eyelids, and occasionally let a tear fall from her eye. Reporting that they had undergone a cathartic experience, many visitors also shed tears. It turns out that today’s celebrated authors are indeed modern saints, with devotees who follow in the footsteps of their teacher, cementing his or her canonical place on the artistic map of the world, spreading his or her artistic vision. At the same MoMA exhibition, young performers and devotees of Abramović’s artistic teachings reactivated her early performance works, in the self-same way that groups of amateur faithful perform the nativity scene at Christmas, or more masochistic Catholics tread Jesus’s path to Calvary. The repetition of Abramović’s performances by younger artists was in the service of the canonization of the authorial persona of Marina Abramović, not the affirmation of a particular form of artistic expression, in this case, performance art. Moreover, the repetition of a live artistic act, such as performance art, is in contradiction with the very essence and purpose of the form. Repeated, performance art becomes an artistic souvenir. When an anonymous young visitor to Abramović’s MoMA show did her own little Pussy Riot and undressed — an attempt to display her devotion to the great artist — the museum guards immediately led her away. Why? Because the heathen have never been allowed to act out any instinct that might disturb the religious ritual, in this case that of self-beatification. But then, Marina Abramović is a woman and an artist, aware of the powerful world of stereotypes, and her own position within it. Women artists are rarely canonized and even more rarely proclaimed saints. Conscious of this, Abramović decided to take matters into her own hands.