Today, of course, I know that the connection between literature and “ideology” has been around since the beginnings of literacy. The Bible, the cornerstone of the European literatures, is not just a grandiose work of literature, it is a grandiose work of ideology. The history of the bond between literature and ideology is long, complex, and dramatic. Because of the written word, writers have lost their lives and been put to death. The history of the relations between emperors and poets, between leaders and court fools, between those who order literature and those who comply with the orders is too gory, the episodes of book burning and censorship too frequent, the number of writers’ lives given for the freedom of speech, for an idea, or even just a dream is too vast to allow taking this fatal historical combination lightly. The notion of literary autonomy served too often as an alibi for it to enjoy full validity: when they thought they had something to gain by it, there were writers who stepped into politics; others took on politics even when doing so led to symbolic or real suicide. Some, when they were looking to save their skins, sought the shield of literary autonomy, while others paid for their literary autonomy with their hides.
The tension between the two opposing poles — the political engagement of a writer and a writer’s autonomy — was particularly dramatic in the literatures of the former Eastern Europe, and even today, surprising as this may seem, it has still not lost its hold, although the context has changed in terms of the politics, ideas, and culture. The Eastern European literary environments were much more rigid than the Western European ones; in the Eastern European literary zones careers were destroyed because of the written word or, conversely, the writer was promoted to government minister. This is no different today, it seems, though it may seem to be different: state institutions continue to play the part of literary patron, albeit a bad and stingy patron, but there is barely any independent territory left. The writer in small post-communist states is still treated as the “voice of his people” or as a “traitor.” Why? For the simple reason that communism in transitional countries has been replaced by nationalism, and both systems have their eyes on writers. The literary marketplace is too small for the writer to maintain his belief that he is independent.
As I watched the movie There Will Be Blood, I thought back to the soc-realist Yugoslav design of the book cover for Petrolej. I tried to bring to memory the many Yugoslav writers who were not fortunate enough to survive the shift from socialism to nationalism, to reposition themselves nationally, thereby ensuring themselves a place on the bookshelves of the national literature. Some of them tried, and survived a year or so longer, slipping through the eye of the needle. Many of the losers, along with their collected works and mountains of scribbled pages, however, sank into the dust of oblivion. Young writers, and with them the young literary critics and theoreticians, showed no compassion; they must have figured this wasn’t their story. Today is, after all, another time, life is proceeding at a rapid clip, literature is a time-investment which for most of us does not provide anything more than aching joints and bankruptcy, but it is a lottery which brings the lucky winner the jackpot. The young rush out to buy lottery tickets and don’t ask too many questions. How is it, for instance, that the writers who were dissidents in their communist states, are so quick to accept posts in ministries, embassies, or elsewhere in the new democra-tatorships? How is it that today, in one way or another, everyone continues to live on government handouts? How is it that those who once pressed so fiercely for autonomy in literature are now demanding that their state institutions underwrite culture (hence literature), thereby implicitly agreeing that they won’t bite the hand that feeds them.
All in all, culture in small countries was never viable on the market, nor could it have been. That is why writers from small countries, whether they like it or not, are condemned to act as representatives for their country, whether the state be Croatia, Serbia, Estonia, or Latvia; either that or they are labeled “traitors” and live abroad. One often goes hand in hand with the other. Even international literary stars, who have long since left their home literatures behind, changing the language they write in as they go, are not immune to the righteous fury of the homeland. The recent incident with Milan Kundera only confirms that the Czech republic is a small country and that the model for traumatic back-and-forth between literature and ideology is unchanged. The not so distant example of Salman Rushdie confirms that religion can be an equally rigid ideology, and that writers, no matter where they live, are still vulnerable to being branded usurpers of religious taboos, with the attendant life-threatening consequences. And a very recent interview with Ismail Kadare shows the unfortunate duality and hypocrisy of the literary position: every year Albania nominates Kadare for the Nobel Prize, yet Kadare is an Albanian dissident, a writer who denies the connection between politics and literature, and still he himslef comes back to that dangerous liaison, re-warming his own trauma and reinforcing it as his own niche of literary identification.
The question arises: Is it possible to step out of the hellish circle, where the autonomy of a literary text is only another name for politicization, and politicization is only another name for autonomy? How does the relationship to a text change when the context changes?
Exile is literally a change of context. Exile implies the personal experience of every exilee, which would be difficult to subsume under terms that are stubbornly endorsed by literary critics from both worlds, the writer’s home base and the host environment. The terms—émigré, immigrant, exile, nomad, minority, ethnic, hybrid literature—discriminate, but they are also affirmative. With these terms the home base expels the writer, while the same terms are used by the host environment to relegate the writer to an ethnic niche, and at the same time affirm his or her existence. The home base makes assumptions of monoculturalism and exclusivity, while the host environment make assumptions of multiculturalism and inclusivity, but both are essentially working with dusty labels of ethnicity and the politics of otherness. Even if I were to write a text about the desolation of frozen landscapes at the North Pole, I would still be chiefly labeled as a Croatian writer, or as a Croatian writer in exile writing about the desolation of the frozen landscapes at the North Pole. Reviewers would promptly populate the frozen wasteland of my text with concepts such as exile, Croatia, ex-Yugoslavia, post-communism, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Slavic world, Balkan feminism, or perhaps Balkan eco-feminism, while journalists would ask me whether I had the opportunity while up in the frozen wasteland to run into the Yugoslav diaspora, and how I perceived the situation in Kosovo from that frozen vantage point. If an English writer writes his or her version of a visit to the North Pole, Englishness will not likely serve as the framework within which his or her text is read. This attitude of the host environment to writer-newcomers springs from a subconscious colonial attitude — just when the larger literary world is doing its best to reject this — in a market which relishes any form of the profitable exotic, what with the always vital relations between the periphery and the center. The concepts of periphery and center are, however, elastic; I am sure that Serbs feel closer to the center than do the Bulgarians, and the Bulgarians feel closer to the center than do the Turks. Feelings, however, are one thing and real relations of power are something else. The real center of power is America, or rather Anglo-American culture, whose cultural domination marked the twentieth century. We are still looking to that center with equal fascination today. Anglo-American culture is the dominant field of reference, while, at the same time, it is the most powerful, if not the most just, mediator of cultural values. In other words, if certain Chinese writers are not translated into English, it is unlikely that any Serbian or Croatian reader, with the exception of the occasional sinologist, will ever hear of them.