“Doesn’t the noise disturb the fish?” I asked.
“Not at all,” confirmed the fishermen.
Vienna suddenly shone with the glow of a metropolis. The salsa, the immigrants dancing with the Viennese, my happy countrymen — these fluorescent fishermen. The tolerant Danubian fish who weren’t disturbed by the noise. I remembered that Zagreb is the only city I know which suffers from hydrophobia. While all the other cities I know embrace the banks of their rivers, Zagreb flees from the Sava to the foothills of the nearby hill, Sljeme, which I hope is not being touted as a mountain in all the new Croatian textbooks. As soon as he came into power, Franjo Tuđman proclaimed Zagreb a metropolis. Of course he also proclaimed himself the Croatian George Washington. From his official position, from the mouth of the first Croatian president, poured the language of the provinces with a thundering inferiority complex. Our “little Paris,” our “little Vienna,” our Croatian “George Washington”—those are the tropes of the provinces. With this rhetorical figure, stuck like a burr to popular references, the provinces do what they can to leap on board the train of history and inscribe themselves on the map.
Culture As Utopia
Most of the culture of Europe came out of the vortex of these fundamental oppositions, from the dynamics of center and periphery, metropolis and the provinces, the palanka and the world. Today, at a moment when all the great Utopian systems have come tumbling down, when the political and social imagination has been exhausted, when the idea of democracy is spent, when the gray, cold mechanism of money has replaced all else, at a time when the five-hundred-year-old Gutenberg galaxy is dying while the new, young, omnipresent Digital galaxy is ascendant, at a time of the barbarization of high technology, Culture suddenly looms large as a straw to be grasped at. Culture is suddenly the language, the reason, the goal. Culture has taken the place of the mumbo-jumbo of European political lingo and substance, and, hey, the main substance of European unification has suddenly become culture. Culture is the ideological Euro, the means of communication. Culture is the diplomatic language and the language of diplomacy. Culture is a field of struggle, an exorcism of superiority. Culture is the legal nursery of chauvinism, racism, nationalism, otherness, and supremacy (Dostoyevsky vs. Balzac). Culture is a means of transportation (Only with culture can we go out into the world) and a way to export value. Culture is a brand, culture is the vehicle of national identity (If it weren’t for Ivo Pogorelić, no one would know a thing about us!), culture is the tourist industry. Culture is what countries are. Ireland is the land of James Joyce, France is the land of Marcel Proust, Austria is the land of Robert Musil, just as little Klagenfurt is where Musil was born. These are the people of Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, howled Emir Kusturica at a Belgrade gathering, condemning the proclamation of independence for Kosovo Albanians. And the Kosovars must have separated, of course, only so they could steal culture, the sacred Serbian monasteries. James Joyce, who fled from Ireland, was dragged back there after his death and placed on the throne of Irish literature — and Irish tourism. Today his name and face are trapped on souvenir coffee cups. Even little Galway profits from the little house, now a museum, where Nora, Joyce’s wife, was born.
So what is culture, then? Culture is a phenomenon that serves for all sorts of things, from money laundering to laundering the collective national conscience, and perhaps a recent event can provide the clearest illustration. Only two days after Joshua Bell, the famous violinist, had performed in Boston at a concert where people paid large sums to come and hear him, he performed the same repertoire at a subway station, except that no one stopped to listen, and he collected only a few coins in his hat.
The Kakania Project
Two decades ago the cultural construct of “Central Europe” surfaced briefly among intellectuals, and for a time academics and writers such as Milan Kundera, György Konrád, Joseph Brodsky, and others wrote about it. This construct no longer attracts interest, but one occasionally comes across mention of the “Kakania,” as a half-hearted call for a new republic of writers, or a sense of shared geographical and historical space, or a longing for a new cultural construct. If we play for a moment with the Kakanian literary utopia, we will automatically find ourselves imagining this (and every other) republic of writers as a space of freedom. Why not do the opposite and try to imagine the Kakania republic in other ways: as a space of restriction, or a space of decontamination, or of deprivation, depending, of course, on one’s perspective.
So we imagine that at the border of the Republic of Literature of Kakania the imperial officials demand of writers that they leave behind their passports and agree in writing to respect the Kakanian rules of the road. For Kakania is a literary republic, is it not? Aren’t writers banned, while dwelling there, from strutting the stuff of their nations, their states (they are not literary soccer players after all), their ethnicity, their religious and political conviction? One must be forbidden from speaking of such things. The only visa for entry to the Republic of Letters should be a literary work.
Let us now try to imagine a conversation between two Kakanians, one who is respecting the rules and another who is violating them.
“So, you, too, are a writer?”
“Yes. Aren’t we all?”
“We are, we are, we all put pen to paper, we do little else. But some of us are more successful at it than others. It is not the same if you’re English or if you’re Macedonian. And, by the way, where are you from?”
“Kakania. Isn’t that obvious?”
“Why should it be? I’m betting you’re Lithuanian. Come on, admit it.”
“No, I am Kakanian.”
“OK. Kakanian. I have nothing against it. I am a Czech, my mother is Hungarian, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. From the cultural and historical perspective, I have more right to call myself Kakanian than you do. But we aren’t splitting hairs here, now are we. What language do you write in?”
“Literary.”
“All of us are literate, we wouldn’t be here otherwise. But whether you write in the language of Shakespeare or some fellow called Costa Costolopoulus matters. Come on, confess, I won’t tell a soul.”
“Literary language.”
“You are really stuck on that. Weren’t you baptized? And by the way, do you believe in God?”
“I believe in the muse.”
“Jesus, what a stickler! And on top of it you’ve disguised yourself as a feminist. OK, so that’s politically correct. The muses were women after all, so we had to include them in our work. But, do tell, my Kakanian, where do you stand on politics?”