The relationship to a literary text changes, of course, with a change of language. There are many examples of writers who embraced the language of their host-country, yet by doing so they did not manage to protect their texts from manipulative readings, but there is an even larger number of writers who, writing in the language of the host country, seek a special ethnic-religious hybrid status for themselves, because only this status will afford them a recognizable, profitable niche. There are also writers who protected their literary text from burdensome and often incorrect readings; they enriched the literary community in which they found themselves, becoming an indivisible part of it. All in all, an opposition asserts itself here, this time the opposition between the autonomy of the literary text and its critical reception and market manipulation (having said that the market is not without its political aspirations) in the new context of the internationalization of literary texts and transnational literature. This is still the realm of literature as we know it, with its tradition, canons, apparatus, institutions, with its system of values. Here we still know, or at least we approximately know, what it is we are talking about when we speak of literature.
The first Croatian-Serbian edition of Sinclair’s Petrolej is sound asleep on the bookshelf in the apartment of my eighty-two-year-old mother. My mother’s grandchildren, of course, have no clue about who Upton Sinclair is. But Grandma knows. Then again Grandma, of course, has no clue who Daniel Day-Lewis is. The grandchildren do. Her grandchildren speak SMS and they mostly read text messages, but they do have a culture of their own. Literature holds no place at all in that culture, unless it’s a part of a mass media package. Take Harry Potter, for instance: the movie, the games, the T-shirts, the consumer planet in miniature. As it leaps from the national to the international, literature enters its third context, the powerful global zone of the mass media. In that context literature, or rather its assumptions, dissolves, vanishes, or transmutes into something else. Bookstores are full of books; the chains are reminiscent of supermarkets, there are more translations of books than ever before, more literary awards than ever before; literary festivals are suddenly key points for the popularization of books; there are writers being lauded like pop stars — all of which suggests that things have never been better for writing. However, the culture of the literary form is on the wane. The space in the papers given over to reviews is disappearing, just as the papers themselves are. Literary life is moving onto the Internet. Books circulate through movies (movie screenplays published as books sell better than the books they are based on), through audio recordings, mobile phones. An unruly form of literature is alive and well, democratic, unstructured, extra-institutional, rejecting hierarchy, functioning in the digitalized literary realm, and this powerful literary underground will push literature as we have known it, with all the attendant apparatus, even further out onto the margins. Perhaps, in the digital galaxy, a redefined novel will arise which erases authorship, national and linguistic borders, ethnic identities, hierarchies of evaluation, and literary tradition. Or maybe it won’t. Literature is merchandise which, with each passing day, is losing its appeal.
Writers, and the people who publish books, will have to face the change in status. As they postpone facing the music, writers rush off to the last remaining haven, the national Academies of Science and Art, which provide a secure institution for national values and a slightly more secure life in retirement. Such writers are about to become extinct, but they are not necessarily the ones who will lose out in the end. All of us, whoever we are, find ourselves in a new time in whicha premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading.[1]
Imagine contemporary literature as a mega-marathon in which all the gender, age, ethnic, and racial groups are welcome and, in principle, “equal.” An elderly participant runs toward the finish line bearing a porcelain vessel, certain that the vessel holds something precious. The precious cargo, of course, is literature, literature as art no less. But it is altogether possible that the race, the exhausting marathon, the symbolic vessel, and literature as art — that these are tragicomically misplaced assumptions. Because it is entirely possible that the marathon runner is running in place without even noticing it, or even going backwards. And even if she does reach the imagined finish line, and delivers the vessel with its precious cargo intact, she may find out that the vessel holds no more than water soup. The only comfort is that all the marathon runners are subject to the same risk.
March 2009
[1]Colin Robinson, “Diary,” London Review of Books, February 26, 2009.
THE SPIRIT OF THE KAKANIAN PROVINCE
An Inner Map
Provincial train stations with their apricot-hued façades and window boxes of pelargonia (take a train from Zagreb to Budapest!), architecture (hospitals, bureaucratic buildings, schools, theaters), cuisine (sacher torte, cabbage and noodles, Kaiserschmarrn, Tafelspitz, dumplings, and poppy-seed noodles), city parks, and the Czech last names sprinkled through the Viennese telephone directory (like poppy seeds on a kaiser roll) — these are not the only ways to recognize a Kakanian landscape.
I am no expert on the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, I hardly even rank as an amateur, but I have a sense that the monarchy stamped a watermark on the souls of its subjects, an internal landscape, the coordinates of periphery and center. The center became aware of itself thanks to the periphery, the periphery grew to know itself thanks to the center. One went from the provinces to Vienna for the opera, to Budapest to buy the latest hats. After all wasn’t it a child of the periphery, a postman’s son from Sarajevo, who shot Kakania in the head, and afterwards things in Europe were never the same?
The Croatian Kakanian Novel
Croatia lay on the outskirts of Austro-Hungary. I don’t know much about the times, but I do recall a few odds and ends from the history of Croatian letters. I remember, for instance, that the protagonists of Croatian novels at the turn of the last century studied in Vienna, Prague, or Budapest, and that aside from Croatian, they used German, Hungarian, or Czech. The detail that a person went off to Vienna to study caught my youthful fancy; it seemed so noble, though it is also true that the characters in these novels could barely make ends meet. And if these protagonists were writers, as some were, their poems were occasionally published in Prague, Budapest, or Viennese publications, to the envy of their milieu. That, too, had a noble ring. The Kakanian metropoli have long since lost their attraction and pizzazz. The center moved elsewhere. I’m guessing that today’s writers in Prague, Budapest and Vienna envy the rare compatriot whose name appears as a contributor in the New Yorker.