By now it should be obvious, the little pothole I overlooked when I abandoned my “national” literature is the sinkhole of the market. Times have certainly changed since I exited the “national” zone and entered my ON-zone. What was then a gesture of resistance is today barely understood by anyone. (Today, at least in Europe, recividist nationalisms and neo-fascisms are dismissed as temporary, isolated phenomena.) Of course, not all changes are immediately apparent: The cultural landscape remains the same, we’re still surrounded by the things that were once and are still evidence of our raison d’être. We’re still surrounded by bookshops, although in recent years we’ve noticed that the selection of books has petrified, that the same books by the same authors stand displayed in the same spots for years on end, as if bookshops are but a front, a camouflage for a parallel purpose. The officer in charge has done everything he should have, just forgetting to periodically swap the selection of books, make things look convincing. Libraries are still around too, although there are fewer of them: some shut with tears and a wail, others with a slam, and then there are those that refuse to go down without a fight, and so people organize petitions. Literary theorists, critics, the professoriate, readers, they’re all still here, sure there aren’t many of them, but still enough to make being a writer somewhat sensible. Publishers, editors, agents, they’re all still in the room, though more and more often it occurs to us that they’re not the same people anymore. It’s as if no one really knows whether they’re dead, or if it’s we who are dead, just no one’s gotten around to telling us. We’ve missed the boat on heaps of stuff. It’s like we’ve turned up at a party, invitation safely in hand, but for some reason we have the dress code all wrong. .
Literary life in the ON-zone seems to have lost any real sense. The ethical imperatives that once drove writers, intellectuals, and artists to “dispatriation” have in the meantime lost their value in the marketplace of ideas. The most frequent reasons for artistic and intellectual protest — fascism, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, political dictatorship, human rights violations, and the like — have been perverted by the voraciousness of the market, stripped of any ideological impetus and imbued with marketing clout, pathologizing even the most untainted “struggle for freedom,” and transforming it into a struggle for commercial prestige.4
For this reason it’s completely irrelevant whether tomorrow I leave my ON-zone and return “home,” whether I set up shop somewhere else, or whether I stay where I am. For the first time I can see that my zone is just a ragged tent erected between the giant tower blocks of a new corporate culture. Although my books and the recognition they have received serve to confirm my professional status, they offer me no protection from the feeling that I’ve lost my “profession,” not to mention my right to a “profession.” I’m not alone, there are many like me. Many of us, without having noticed, have become homeless: for a quick buck, others, more powerful, have set the wrecking ball on our house.
Let’s horse around for a moment — let’s take the global success of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey seriously (you can’t not take those millions of copies sold seriously!), and baldly assert that the novel is the symbolic crown of today’s corporate culture. And if we read the novel as exemplary of corporate culture — financial power as the only currency; the commutibility of the surrounding class of “oppressed” chauffeurs, secretaries and cooks who serve Christian and Anastasia; sadomasochism as the organizing principle of interpersonal relations in all domains, including sex; brutality, vulgarity, violence, materialism; people being either masters or slaves — there’s no chance of us missing a particular detail. At one point Christian gives Anastasia an “independent” (naturally!) publishing house as a little present. And thus, in this symbolic setting, my literary fate (and the fates of many of my brothers and sisters of the pen) depends entirely on the symbolic pairing of Anastasia and Christian. In this kind of setting, indentured by the principle of publish or perish, I belong to the servant class and can only count on employment as Anatasia and Christian’s shoe-shine girl. And so it is my spit that softens their shoes, my tongue that licks them clean, my hair that makes them gleam.
Lamenting the death of the golden era of critical theory, Terry Eagleton memorably observes: “It seemed that God was not a structuralist.” But it seems that God was not a writer either, certainly not a serious one. He slapped his bestseller together in seven days. And this all gets me thinking — if I’ve already bet my lot in life on literary values and lost — maybe I should bet my few remaining chips on their future. Because who knows, perhaps tomorrow, to my every flight of fancy, a translucent book, letters shimmering like plankton, will appear in the air before me; a liquid book into which I’ll dive as if into a welcoming sea, surfacing with texts translucent and alive like a shoal of sardines. Perhaps tomorrow books will appear whose letters will converge in the air like swarms of gnats, with every stroke of my finger a coherent cluster of words forming. . It’s not so bad, I think, and imagine how in the very heart of defeat a new text is being born. .
1“By dispatriation I mean the process of distancing oneself more from one’s own native or primary culture than from one’s own national identity, even if, as we have seen, in a many cases the two tend to coincide.” Arianna Dagnino, “Transnational Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of Global Modernity,” Transnational Literature, 4.2 (May 2012).
2Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
3In addition to Seyhan’s book, worth recommending are the edited collection Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing, edited by Adele Parker and Stephenie Young (Rodopi, 2013), and the collections, The Creolization of Theory (Duke UP, 2011), and Minor Transnationalism (Duke UP, 2005), edited by Françoise Lionnet, and Shu-mei Shih respectively.
4In May 2013, the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) launched its election campaign wearing a new “party” dress. In place of the usual checkerboard coat of arms, gingerbread hearts, circle dances, and similar down-home kitsch, these Croatian rednecks came out with minimalist posters bearing Jean Paul Sartre’s “It is right to rebel!” slogan — poor old Sartre the ideological plume of Croatian conservatives!