“I believe in humanism.”
“Humanism?! Blah, blah, blah. . I haven’t met anyone more boring than you in ages!”
I am afraid such a Utopian Kakania would soon lose its citizens. European writers are too used to lugging the baggage of their states with them, acting as its representatives, espousing its history, its political, national, religious beliefs, its communities and homeland. They are too used to not treating Others, no matter who those others are, as their own. If the Republic of Literature as described above, with all its rules, were to actually exist, it would be a dangerous test for Europe, for its foundations, and its future.
Most writers flourish within their state, religious, political, ethnic, and national communities, within their clans, institutions, publishing houses, readers, academies, their honors, and seldom do they toss out all the medals they have received and go out into the world as beggars, relying only on their naked talent. What happens to art when it is stripped of its context is best shown by the example of Joshua Bell. Everyone will spit at you, or even worse, they won’t even see you. In any case your hat will be empty.
All in all, writers are only people, and literature is a complex, multi-faceted thing, just as the relations of influence and power, interrelations between the periphery and the center, between the metropolis and the provinces, between the palanka and the outside world are complex. The well-intentioned creators of European cultural policy and those who are putting it into practice imagine that relationship as if it were part of a fairy tale.
The prince meets a frog. “Kiss me,” says the frog, “and I’ll turn into a princess.” The prince kisses the frog and, bingo! it turns into a princess.
But the fairy tale could also go like this. .
“Kiss me,” says the frog, “and I’ll turn into a princess.”
“No, for the time being you suit me better as a frog,” answers the prince.
Or, like this. .
“I’ll kiss you, and you’ll turn into a princess!” says the prince to the frog.
“No thanks,” says the frog, “for the time being I would rather stay a frog.”
April 2010
THE ELUSIVE SUBSTANCE OF THE ARCHIVE
A File-Storm
There’s something I need to confess: I’ve never peered into a real archive, and I don’t know how such an archive works. I’m a writer, an archive amateur. My private archive is a hazy, subconscious space in which the camera of my eye has randomly stored dozens of faces, dozens of chance gestures, sounds, and sentences. It’s a house that does not exist, but of which I regularly dream, full of staircases, balconies, cubbyholes, cobwebs, and holes in the wall through which a harsh wind blows. This archive is home to the real and imagined conversations I’ve had, objects and memories of objects, images, scents, and books whose contents resemble the house from my recurring dream. But the thing is, I’m not the one who walks this subconscious archival space picking out files: files rush out at me. They leap from the archive, jostling for my attention, pushing and shoving, hustling, all so embarrassingly “promiscuous”: so many things slip into bed with so many other things, and I’m really not sure why.
I recently visited the island of Bali. Night falls early on Bali, and the morning rises late. In the silence of the evening I would listen out for the sound of heavy leaves falling from the trees. Always one leaf after the other, never two at once. The giant ants that would come crawling down the computer screen from out of nowhere, and the books grey with damp, left behind by tourists and stacked on an open shelf for anyone to read, were the triggers for the “file-storm” to come. (I mean, I think they were?) The hotel staff spent the day with brooms and rubbish bags in hand, diligently sweeping up every fallen leaf. They’d even do so when it was windy — actually, especially then — as if they were having a competition with the wind. Other staff changed the bed linen daily, and the hand towels several times a day. I’d wake up at night, sit out on the veranda in a wicker armchair, and stare out into the muggy tropical darkness. Invisible files from my archive would fall on me like leaves, and at times I thought I was going to faint, lose control, and be forever submerged beneath that lush and invisible pile.
My recently-deceased mother was with me on Bali, as was my long-deceased father. The town of Bol on the Adriatic island of Brač also appeared, the place my mother and I spent our last summer holiday together. (Look, there, out of nowhere an image of my mother’s clothing pops up: a petite silk blouse and a little straw hat! Had Bali become Bol or Bol Bali?) A few people who really had no business being there also turned up, people who I hadn’t seen for more than thirty years, and with whom I’ve long since had any contact. What do they want from me here on Bali? I asked myself. And what would happen if the hotel staff found out about all the people staying in my room on the sly. How much would that cost? I wondered.
On Bali the locals use palm leaves as miniature trays and every morning place offerings (a flower, some rice, and a joss stick) in front of their houses, food for both good and evil spirits. As I understand it, with this daily religious ritual they pacify the Archive in which the living and the dead, the visible and invisible worlds reside. “You need to feed them, because when they’re hungry, man they can have a mean streak,” a local taxi driver confirmed.
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
It is said that Danilo Kiš’s short story “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” was inspired by a newspaper clipping about a secret Mormon archive in Utah, the Granite Mountain Records Vault. Today, thanks to the Internet, photographs of the archive, its impressive location, and equally impressive information about the archive, are widely available. Thirty years ago, when the short story was written, a small newspaper article about Mormon biographies stored on microfilm in hidden caves in Utah appears to have fired Kiš’s historically sensitive imagination. The narrator of “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” is a theatre scholar by profession (“Last year, as you know, I went to Sweden at the invitation of the Institute for Theatre Research”[1]) and narrates her story to an unnamed listener. In Stockholm she is shown a mysterious archive containing the biographies of people whose names are not recorded “in any other encyclopedia.”[2] The narrator’s experience of the archive is so incredibly romanticized that fragments from a gothic novel come to mind. The narrator is ushered into the archive by a guard “holding a large ring of keys.”[3] The guard — whom the narrator refers to as “Mr. Cerberus”—locks the door behind her, leaving her alone in the library as if in a casemate. In this sense, entry into the library is entry into Hades, into the world of the dead.
A draft blew in from somewhere, rippling the cobwebs, which, like dirty scraps of gauze, hung from the bookshelves as over select bottles of old wine in a cellar. All the rooms were alike, connected by a narrow passageway, and the draft, whose source I could not identify, penetrated everywhere.
[4]
I therefore started skimming through the paragraphs, turning the open book, insofar as the chain would allow, in the direction of the pale light shed by the lamp. The thick layer of dust that had gathered along their edges and the dangling scraps of cobwebs bore clear witness to the fact that no one had handled the volumes in a long time. They were fettered to one another like galley slaves, but their chains had no locks.