Europe in Sepia

CAN A BOOK SAVE OUR LIFE?

ON A BRIEF visit to Jerusalem I walked the streets of Mea Shearim, one of the city’s more colorful neighborhoods, home to the Haredi Jews. The ingenuous tourist could be forgiven for thinking that he or she has strayed onto a film set depicting the life of a nineteenth-century Jewish shtetl. But life in Mea Shearim is for real, preserved the way it was a hundred years ago. Those who live in the neighborhood don’t try to cash in on their exoticism; tourists are (for now) unwanted. My eye caught a trio of skinny, pallid-looking men in tall black hats, all draped in black frock coats. They stood there in a circle as if mumbling the words of a prayer in unison. One cradled a weighty leather-bound tome. As he opened the Torah (and I’m guessing here), I noticed that the book was actually a hollowed-out cavity, a box camouflaged inside a book. Inside the book wrist watches shimmered. This little detail cheered me no end, and for a moment I thought I had turned up in the Odessa of Isaak Babel’s stories.

In May 2011, the Argentine artist Marta Minujín exhibited her installation Torre de Babel de Libros on San Martín Square in Buenos Aires. Fashioned from books from all over the world, the tower was twenty-five meters high. Croatian newspapers proudly published a list of all the Croatian titles in the project, as if the whole thing was about the massive international success of Croatian literature. Yet the mytheme of the Tower of Babel points to the opposite: failure. Nimrod, a descendant of Noah, initiated the building of the tower out of a desire to create “a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” Enraged by the hubris and unbridled ambition of it all, Yahweh destroyed the tower and punished its builders by giving them different languages, short-circuiting access to Google Translate along the way. The story goes something like that, perhaps a little different.

One way or another, books have always been multifunctional: Depending on the user they have been good for kindling, bonfire fuel, brownbagging, bookshelf supports, wine coasters, secret piggy banks, status symbols, and/or window cleaning paper. Marta Minujín is far from alone — many contemporary visual artists have used, abused, and defamiliarized books in different ways. In one of Richard Wentworth’s cerebral installations, books hang by string from the ceiling, in others, broken plates, hand watches, and candy wrappings jut out like strange bookmarks. Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, Tree of Codes, is an artistic installation affordable to all. Foer has disemboweled every page of his favorite bedside reading — Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles—creating a “window” on each page that alters the meaning of the original text. Having suffered this “vandalistic” artistic treatment, Schulz’s book has ended up a new, original work, one authored by a “vandal,” just like Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa.

Video clips currently making the rounds of the Internet also make keen use of “vandalistic” narration. In Can a Book Save Your Life a professional shooter fires a revolver into a handful of recent books, testing how bulletproof they are. Another, Bill Simmons’ Book Can Save Your Life!, proves that, shot with a 9 mm revolver, Bill Simmons’s book really can. The Spanish clip Did You Know the Book? takes up the apparent end of the Gutenberg era, a likeable young sales rep presenting the book as a completely new product and explaining its advantages — no wires, no batteries, no viruses, easy to read, easy to handle. There is a Norwegian clip with a similar message. In a monastery library somewhere, an older monk is having trouble getting to grips with a book, bringing to mind the struggle early adopters endured with the computer. A younger monk patiently explains to the elder how one uses it, but then loses his cool and leaves him an instruction manual. These examples — some of which have been randomly selected from the cultural mainstream, and others equally randomly from its fringes — clearly point to both the death of the book and the death of literature itself (the latter having died the moment it turned into—“books,” i.e., merchandise). Yet authors (better known in the publishing world as content providers), book industry employees (who used to be called publishers), and consumers (until recently referred to as readers) aren’t exactly going quietly into the night — a desperate resuscitation of the corpse is underway, a final shakedown for the last penny.

The more irremediable the death of the book becomes, the more wild and flailing the resuscitation effort. The publishing industry is producing a greater number of books, and is doing so faster than ever before. The good old days when literary bestsellers appeared every few years, or maybe once a year, are irrevocably past. Today global bestsellers burn brightly on a monthly basis, and then fizzle as fast as New Year’s firecrackers. Overnight fame and hefty advances reserved for the few lucky puppies are no longer a secret, and neither are the annual earnings of the industry’s top producers.¹ All this whets the appetites of the millions of hungry rookies. The examples of jackpot debutants suggest that anyone can make it if they want to, one just needs a little bit between the ears, good looks, a little luck — and spectacular (and spectacularly speedy) canonization is guaranteed.

The production of books has increased to the point that books are rarely actually read, let alone seriously evaluated. Anonymous commentators on Amazon.com (a few brief comments, like it — don’t like it, little stars), bloggers, twitterers (even briefer comments), and even authors themselves have taken over critical duties. In the Guardian series of clips Review My Book! authors gush about why it is that their book should be reviewed, the end result being the desired (self-)review. It isn’t easy for writers to reconcile themselves with their disappearance from the literary scene, their drowning in an endless ocean of other authors and books. Many are taking matters into their own hands. Some go in for self-promoting videos, or, if you’re Umberto Eco, you revise an old book and create a digested and simplified Kindle-friendly edition (The Name of the Rose) — self-resuscitation at its most panicked. In fear of evanescence, many dream up wacky passions or hobbies, this kind of supplementary authorial trace is a way to expand the club of devotees and potential readers. Some come out swinging for the protection of panda bears, others vegetarianism, others worry about global warming — and some will do whatever it takes. In a television interview Charlotte Roche — the best-selling author of (in her own phrase) “the hemorrhoid novel” Wetlands—popped her partial denture out, showing viewers her missing front tooth, tossed the denture high in the air, caught it in her mouth, and settled it back in place with her tongue. The audience went into rapture.

This world wouldn’t be hurtling along with such speed were its own destruction not constantly at its heels—this is the sentiment of the anonymous collectively authored manifesto The Coming Insurrection. The literary world is no longer a space of contemplation, subversion, spiritually enriching escapism, or discovery, but one of spectacle. Nor is the book any longer “the temple of the soul”—it is a bare-assed commodity little different from a bottle of Coca-Cola. Writers can be ticket holders in the lottery, daydreamers, clued-up entrepreneurs, intellectual proles, exhibitionists, content providers, whatever, but like it or not, they are all participants in the society of spectacle. Measured by its yardsticks, they divide into winners and losers.

On the subject of Coca-Cola, there’s a good joke from the repertoire of Cold War humor. Ronald Reagan is woken in the middle of the night:

“Mr. Reagan, sir, the guys from the evil empire are up painting the moon red!”

“What the hell?!”

“The Russians are on the moon and they’re painting it red!”

“Get our boys up there and write ‘Coca-Cola’ on it, pronto,” Reagan replies groggily.

If we leave the political connotations of the joke to the side (these days even the gung-ho Chinese are into graffiti!), then the mytheme of the Tower of Babel appears ghostly on its semantic field. The world is divided into losers — who clamber toward the moon seduced by the poetic idea of painting it red — and winners just waiting to write Coca-Cola on a red backdrop. Losers win the right to the consolation of “symbolic capital,” the winners get the fame and money. Until recently the realization of “symbolic capital” underpinned the entire literary system, with its evaluatory codes, publishers, critics, theorists, translators, university literature departments, journals, literary prizes and so forth. Today that system is in ruins. Hope is gone; getting paid is all that remains. And as far as the book goes, yes, a book can save your life. But only if it is bulletproof.

1According to Forbes magazine, in 2010 James Patterson took top honours with $84 million in earnings, followed by Danielle Steel ($35 million), Stephen King ($28 million), Janet Evanovich ($22 million), and Stephenie Meyer ($21 million), with young adult novelists Rick Riordan, Jeff Kinney, and Suzanne Collins further down the list.

A WOMEN’S CANON?

NOT SO LONG ago I found myself in Norway at the invitation of the Norwegian association of literary critics. The Norwegian critics were all in a lather, the old-fashioned word canon buzzing in the air. My hosts were embroiled in voting to select a Norwegian canon, ten works representative of Norwegian national literature. The results were disheartening: Eight of the writers were men, only two were women. I had very short odds on the Norwegians being far more progressive on the gender question, which I guess explains my disappointment.

National literatures are — irrespective of (or perhaps as a result of?) globalization — in fighting form. National canons are organized like soccer teams. The players are men. And the referees are too. The winners of the ever-swelling number of literary prizes are inevitably men. But now they make sure prize juries have a more-or-less equal number of men and women, so when a man again lifts the trophy, no can say it was a gender fix. The European literary canon is in fine fettle. Its representatives are men, too.

They say that literature is a hobby right up until the author’s literary message reaches its recipient. But to whom do we send our artistic messages? Women writers most often cite men as their literary idols. Men almost never cite women as theirs. Research confirms that men never, or only very rarely, read books by women. Having carefully collated the data, VIDA, an American women’s literary organization that crunches the numbers on gender discrimination in literature, concluded that three-quarters of books reviewed in prestigious American newspapers and magazines were written by — men. Women’s Studies is no longer an academic eccentricity as it once was, but rather an academic necessity. Feminism and postcolonialism instigated the long process that eventually led to an increased awareness of the gendered and racially colonized nature of women’s cultural history. Today, young women writers from Africa, South America, and Asia, their print runs the envy of literature’s canonized men, raise their flags from all corners of the contemporary cultural map. And moreover, their gender, ethnic, and religious identities — serious hindrances until recently — today serve to enhance their commercial clout. A woman is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature about once every ten years.

But have women managed to establish their own “cultural canon,” or something that might be called “women’s culture”? How do women perceive themselves today? Which prominent women do they mass identify with? Who are their female cultural icons? What causes do they advance, for what are they pushing, and who are they addressing? While we’re at it, to whom am I sending my literary messages? Be they women or men, who are my potential readers? How do they see me?

In contemporary culture women still construct their cultural values on self-colonizing assumptions. Let’s run through a few female icons, who in our “in today, out tomorrow” world are, of course, easily substituted. Hugging the beloved American before and after formula, Oprah Winfrey went from being a dumpy, promiscuous, sexually-abused, and deprived young woman to a slim and sexy mistress of the small screen, one of the most influential women in America. Diana, “the Princess of Hearts,” now a somewhat faded icon, crippled by the brutal rituals of royal everyday life, ended hers in a tragic traffic accident. Hillary Clinton, today a sun that is setting, maintained her dignity throughout the scandal of her husband’s infidelity, held her family together, and emboldened, went on to win new political victories. Paris Hilton (not to mention the plethora of lookalikes!), a celeb who resembles a cheap statuette of the Virgin Mary sold at a newly-built church, she’s “a victim of the media,” a symbol of emptiness, one whose every move is followed by every tabloid in the world. Frida Kahlo (and a long line of contemporary female artists boasting the same “aura”) is a “martyr” whom the culture industry has transformed into a “saint.”

The self-victimization (and here we need to bear in mind that “victimization” is a broad term, one some cultural theorists also claim includes shopping) formula women use to win green cards for entry into the orbit of cultural icons is worryingly patriarchal. A fleeting glance at many female public personalities (pop-stars, actresses, models, artists) reveals that beneath the star’s shine — in a camouflaged, perverted, or real shape — crouches the figure of the female “martyr.” Even a third-grade pop-starlet knows the drill: Slip a sextape to the media, accuse the same media of destroying her moral integrity, then kick back and watch her popularity skyrocket. Why? Because of a homemade sextape? No — because she’s done the perp walk of public humiliation and emerged from the other side, into the glow of moral redemption. Mainstream women’s culture presently revolves around traditional dialectic formulas of whore — virgin — martyr — saint, the stuff of men’s wet dreams, dreams served up to them by women.

Think of the manifold TV series, films, books, and celebrities, that owe their status as walking cultural texts to the media. Like a virus, the same formula also lies hibernating in so-called “serious” literature, from classic novels by men (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary) to romance novels, which are chiefly written by women for women. The same formula might also explain why women dominate the memoir genre, and why it is mostly women who read them. As a genre, the memoir is built on the very same religious-confessional basis.

Women “colonize” themselves, adapting themselves to the stereotype of woman-as-victim (or are they authentically such?), because it seems that communication with the world only works when packaged as such. With the likes of Frida Kahlo as their icon, time and time again women double down on their symbolic capital, the martyr Kahlo having replaced Sylvia Plath (who in the 1970s united the feminist world like a magnet) in the millennial turn. Kahlo’s “Diego on My Mind,” a self-portrait in which Kahlo bears a mini-portrait of Diego Rivera on her forehead, proffers an unsettlingly powerful message about a woman in whose life the central role has been given over to a man. But Sylvia Plath might have painted a similar picture, a portrait of Ted Hughes on her forehead. Taking home a literary prize, a Croatian woman recently told reporters: “I hope I didn’t win the prize because I’m a woman.” “I hope I didn’t win the prize because I’m a man” is a sentence uttered by — no man ever!

Female role models in the cultural field are rarely emancipatory, they just pretend to be. In truth, whether a particular model has an emancipatory effect or not is largely dependent on the media, political, and cultural context. I look back with nostalgia at Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which, at least for my generation, had an emancipatory effect. Some thirty years later, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues boasted the same emancipatory force. Yet my cultural experience read the latter (particularly the edition in which Ensler included readers’ responses, such as the ecstatic “I’m my vagina! My vagina that’s me!”) as retrograde. Fear of Flying emerged at the time of the sexual revolution, its effect liberating. The Vagina Monologues emerged when social mores had already changed — when talking publicly about one’s vagina was all the rage, and lighting a cigarette in a public place a criminal act.

In the meantime, the market has nurtured new niches such as chick lit, a mutant somewhere between Erica Jong and the traditional romance novel, one aimed at younger women. Both as readers and writers, women have shown themselves more open to new literary worlds, perhaps because they haven’t had to worry about their place in national literary canons. They’ve never had seats at that particular table, so they’re not angling for one. Many genres, which even thirty years ago were not deigned worthy of attention, have today become part of the literary and academic mainstream. It seems many of these “subliterary genres” (itself a vanished term!) have had a greater emancipatory function than middle-class culture, the consumers of which dutifully buy the annual Booker winner, stock up on something by the Nobel laureate, watch Oscar-winning movies, and try and catch whatever’s hot at MoMA or the Tate Modern. But in a Barbie culture, Lara Croft appears to offer many young women greater emancipatory pleasures.

While there may be no such thing as a women’s literary canon, there are certainly “women’s classics,” today given second lives in film and TV adaptions, and in new editions that could well serve as a solid fundament for a women’s literary canon. Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen would be joined by shooting literary stars such as Zadie Smith, who, as industry and critical darlings, have seen their work promptly affirmed as contemporary classics. In this sense, canonization of women writers is already occuring, and with greater speed and ease than ever, but what does this mean in terms of a women’s canon? In order to survive in the market, every culture is required to have a “negotiable” and “inclusive” character. If “women’s culture” appears discontinuous (the tape rewound every ten years), might this perhaps be ascribed to the non-existence of a canon? But who might nurse such a canon into existence? The nation? The academy? Men? The market? And whose canon would it be anyway? A white women’s canon? And how does one even approach the subject of a canon when the fundamental question of women’s identity remains obscured. A woman’s identity is inseparable from questions of class; for the age of patriarchy, one that is unhealthily obstinate and enduring, this is what it is constructed on — not gender.

Seismic political changes such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism, or the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, have adversely affected women, turning their lives upside down. The differences between me, who came of age in socialist Yugoslavia, and my young fellow countrywomen (be they Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, or other) are today immeasurably greater than between me and West European or North American women of my age. My culture was a culture of books, the culture of my young female compatriots is that of the screen and the Internet; I was and remain an atheist, which is the most natural thing in the world to me; today they undergo religious induction (be it Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim), as if this were the most natural thing in the world; I grew up in the conviction that the right to abortion was the most natural thing in the world, they grow up confronted by church-fuelled doubts and public debate on annulling this right; I grew up in the conviction that prostitution was unacceptable, they grow up listening to proponents of its legalization; I grew up in the conviction that the question of ethnic identity was irrelevant; they learn that it is one of prime importance; I grew up in the conviction that men and women were equal; they, I sense, grow up in the conviction that men and women have different roles, and that they need to work this to their advantage.

To whom, therefore, do I send my “messages”? Who are my potential readers, be they male or female? I live in a “nowhere” zone. It is from this nowhere zone that I send out my “messages in a bottle.” My books have been translated into a number of foreign languages, a significant bonus for the literary critic lying dormant inside me. On the basis of my own example I’m able to track a book’s fate, how it communicates with different linguistic and cultural milieux, how the same things are read in different ways in different milieux and at different times. I’m able to observe how atrophy or the absence of reception in one milieu doesn’t necessarily mean a book’s death, but rather the opposite, its right to a new life and reception in another. On the basis of my own work I’m able confirm the truth of Bulgakov’s poetic thesis that “manuscripts don’t burn”: Texts might indeed “age” in one readership community, yet be invigorated when thrown into another. Being anchored in this nowhere zone, the absence of a target readership constituted by age, gender, ethnic, or religious identity, and translation into foreign languages have enabled me to observe the ways in which cultural texts speak and negotiate with each other, how they are read by each other, how they are imprinted in a different culture, the exchange that takes place, their circulatory routes, how they are revitalized, how they cut across the soft borders of all identities, and how in the end, together with many other books, they are gradually incorporated into the foundations of a future literary house that might someday be called transnational literature.

What am I talking about? Isn’t my cultural enthusiasm somewhat exaggerated? Aren’t things actually at a standstill, and it just seems to me that they’re moving ahead? Because women — delighted anew every time by the fact that they’ve been given the cultural floor — forget to ask themselves what routine they are performing and, if the audience is applauding, why they are applauding.

The “Simplon Express Zagreb — Paris” was one of several artistic projects Croatia presented to the French public in the autumn of 2012, with Croatian artists journeying by train between the two capitals. A newspaper article on the event piqued my interest, particularly a section about the performance of a young Zagreb artist, who masturbated in the train, “completely imperceptibly, sitting with legs crossed and tensing her abdominal muscles.”

“The education system doesn’t teach us about sexuality, but we’re surrounded by pornography on every corner. Women have always been objects of observation, a fact further reinforced by the expansion of film, pornography inevitably being made exclusively by men. The problem is that no one ever considers a woman’s pleasure. I self-pleasured in the train because a train really is an exciting means of travel, and the invisibility of the act made me feel very powerful,” the young artist explained her artistic concept to reporters.

The artist is convinced that her artistic project is both feministically and artistically provocative, even though (or perhaps because) it is—“invisible.” For those with slightly longer cultural memories and experience, hers is simply a dull recycling project. Over the past fifty years female artists have staged similar performances in many places, Croatian artists among them. The artist’s project reveals not only her naivety, arrogance, and unwillingness to bone up on her predecessors, but also an absence of context and continuity, the absence of will to build continuity. The episode speaks to a humiliating artistic and intellectual apathy. And in this sense, it is indeed a very “female narrative.” Because without a women’s canon (now why wouldn’t that be a word for continuity?), ambitious and lazy little girls will go around in circles repeating the same thing over, determinedly claiming that they’re doing something new. The absence of a canon, that is, the presence of discontinuity, leaves an empty space that enables the inevitable reinscription of the female, the production of an exhausted art that resorts to the same stammering vocabulary, self-convinced that it is declaring revolution. In any case, a canon exists to be destroyed — and so that there is an awareness of what is being destroyed.

Stereotypes about women and women’s creativity, even those (ostensibly) emancipatory, are ardently encouraged by men. Almost every male writer or critic will benignantly support “literary trash” written by women, his agenda two-fold: the first, promulgation of the myth that women are best at writing literary “trash” (which concomitantly serves to secure his own manly place on the shelves of “serious literature”), the second, to demonstrate that he, personally, has nothing against mass culture, which for him is code for women’s equal participation in literature. Our literary man will cite Hannah Arendt at least once in his life, because she is the only woman he deigns worthy of citation. At least once in his life our literary man will serve on a jury, and in the process fight tooth and nail to ensure a woman doesn’t win, and if she really must, then he’ll do all in his power to ensure that the woman who does win will be she who least deserves it. Having done so, our literary man has then done his duty: Women have participated in literary life.

Stereotypes about women are most often promulgated by women themselves, because doing so is the surest path to money and attention in any field, literature included. Having attained a social standing from which they could effect change, declared feminists most often carry on like bordello owners, feeding men’s fantasies and satisfying men’s desires. Any number of women are employed in prominent positions in the Croatian media, yet this hasn’t changed its content or appearance in any significant respect. In fact, the Croatian media is more pornographic and more corrupt than ever before — it’s spent the last two decades trying to turn ninety-two-year-old Žuži Jelinek into a national women’s icon. (Every nation needs its own Dr. Ruth!) Now who is Žuži? Žuži is a seamstress who hustled her way to becoming the milliner of choice for the Yugoslav women’s communist elite, she’s the author of Secrets of a Well-Dressed Woman, the first book of its kind in post-WWII Yugoslavia, she’s a successful widow who has married four times, and she’s a columnist with a specialty line in instructive feuilletons on women’s life. Žuži’s retrograde, semi-pornographic and semiliterate columns have made her a darling of the new Croatian media establishment. Often called upon as a public speaker, a year or so ago, at the invitation of a female law professor at the University of Zagreb, Žuži gave a lecture to female students — future lawyers — on her favorite topic: how the ideal woman should behave in marriage (unmarried women, naturally, don’t fit into the “ideal” category). Above all, ideal women must satisfy their husbands’ desires, meaning they have to be — dolls. On the subject of dolls, fifteen-year-old Venus Palermo, a little Lolita and embodiment of the teenage “living doll” craze, uploaded her own doll make-up instructional video to YouTube. Some thirty million visitors have now watched how they might turn themselves into dolls. “It makes me happy that I can inspire so many people,” said Venus. This kind of woman, irrespective of whether a little girl or little old lady, is usually given media time in order that they might inspire other women. This time is frequently given to them by other women, “female pimps.”

Nonetheless, every now and then women wake from their slumber, take a look around, and ask themselves what kind of world they’re living in. In a recent article American writer Meg Wolitzer pointedly raised the culture’s neglect of women writers relative to their male colleagues.¹ Although we can readily agree with her every observation, we remain struck by the fact that, in terms of her literary references, Wolitzer thinks of literature as an exclusively Anglo-American domain. It’s as if she’s forgotten the power relations involved; that the names of “neglected” American women writers appear in the window displays of every bookstore on earth; that it’s probably all the same to a Korean woman writer whether she is discriminated against by her male colleagues at home, their Anglo-American buddies, or Anglo-American women writers.

Whatever the case may be, having first “satisfied men’s desires,” women eventually start asking the questions their predecessors asked long ago, to which — who would have thought — they never got any answers. And while women are preoccupied asking questions, men amuse themselves with the toys they have usurped, claiming that they’re playing for all of us, that their game has universal significance. Like soccer, literature is their game. Why? Because they give themselves the right, because the right is given to them. By whom? By women, naturally.

1Meg Wolitzer, “The Second Shelf,” The New York Times, March 30 2012.

ZAGREB ZOO

LATELY ALL THE talk has been about the decline of independent bookshops, the fall of the once powerful chains, publishers going to the wall, editors losing their jobs, the closing of libraries and university literature departments, literature PhDs on food stamps — but most of all, talk has been about the physical disappearance of books. Spokespeople for the two main views are plentiful: On the one hand, “the pessimists” furiously attack the aggressive “trash” polluting our cultural habitat and depriving it of oxygen, and on the other, “the optimists” furiously defend the laws of the literary marketplace (the lowest category of optimist having recently tried to put The Muppets film in the dock for indoctrinating American children with anti-capitalist propaganda). People are all abuzz about tablets of all kinds, about self-publishing, the hordes of “non-professional” writers on the literary scene, among them the writers of fan fiction, which, as a Guardian headline beams, promises to be a “rich vein for publishers,” one that suggests publishers are vampires ever on the lookout for fresh blood.

Amid the general clamor no one, really no one, is talking about writers, which means that the “workers” (the literary proletariat) have become a totally marginal factor in the chain of production. The proletariat has in any case disappeared from general view, both actual and mental, and can today only be seen in industrial museums; a wax figure clasping a symbolic hammer, a placard saying he’s a worker, a man in a yellow helmet, wheeled out from the murk of forgetting for Labor Day celebrations. As far as the literary proletariat goes, let’s recall the old Robert Altman film, The Player, in which an unscrupulous Hollywood mogul murders a screenwriter with impunity, marries his girlfriend, and then cynically claims that, in the film business, writers just get in the way. What was once a satire on a possible reality has today become reality. I cried watching my murdered colleague David Kahane draw his last breath in a parking lot.

Lately I’ve been meeting my fellow writers in unexpected places of work. On a recent trip to New York, three writers told me how they keep a roof over their heads with parallel careers as physiotherapists and masseurs. In Europe, there are a bunch of writers driving taxis. For example, a while ago an Irish taxi driver picked me up from Galway Airport and recited a long poem in praise of Irish-American relations. Fine, that’s the Irish for you, I thought to myself, they’re all born poets. However, in London, a taxi driver recently gave me a detailed rundown on half his novel. Hurrying to a literary evening in Brussels, I took a taxi only to find a professional writer sitting at the wheel, a Portuguese, driving to somehow make ends meet. And these guys weren’t just wannabe writers like, for example, the Pakistani in Edinburgh who told me about how his girlfriend had left him, and then presented me with three possible synopses of the event. “I hate memoirs, I’d rather turn my memories into a script for a Bollywood film,” he said, while driving me to the airport.

Historically speaking, writers have always fallen into the category of “sensitive” human material, but somehow they’ve hung on, surviving hostile epochs, the reigns of kings, czars, and dictators, seasons of book burnings and censorship. Today, lo and behold, some earn fabulous money and turn up on the Forbes’ list of richest “content providers,” tour the world like royalty, surrounded by clubs of devoted subjects. Ever since a few writers made it into star-like orbit, the writerly profession has become somewhat chic. Once upon a time only the shady took up the pen; the mad, potential suicides, masochists, and unemployed aristocrats in need of something to fill the day. Today money and fame have made writing an attractive occupation. To be like J. K. Rowling is equally if not more attractive than being like Angelina Jolie. You know, literature still has a few shares in our collective spiritual capital. Some great writers have posthumously become an integral part of the tourist package, Joyce in Dublin, Proust in Paris, for example. As a consequence of this apparent promise, many writers patiently endure semi-anonymity and poverty, their hopes firmly planted on life after death — their very own statue for local pigeons to crap on.

All in all, the fact is that today roses only bloom for the few. As a specific human species, the majority of writers are facing extinction. Whether writers fall into the critically endangered group like Sumatran orangutans; the endangered group like Malaysian tigers; the vulnerable group like African elephants; the near threatened group together with the jaguar; or in the least concern group with the giraffe — let’s leave that to the experts. They say that the endangeredness of a species is determined by three factors: habitat, over-exploitation, and other risk factors such as threat of viruses. Every former literary theorist, critic, or historian (the active are as endangered as writers) will easily identify the same three threat factors at work in the literary world.

I see my writerly colleagues struggling more and more: some to hold on to their critical and popular status, others to win such status. Isabel Losada spent a few days in the window of a Paris bookstore promoting her latest book. She called the stunt writer-in-residence. Many writers take writer-in-residence jobs on tourist cruises, in hospitals, at universities and on safaris. I know of one author who has recently passed her safari guide test, and is now successfully combining two jobs, the literary and the touristic. A recent ad for a writer-in-residence program in prisons drew well over a thousand applicants. You get a two-year contract, and have to give creative writing workshops to prisoners two-and-a-half days a week. I personally know a writer who spent a year in a village famous only for its prison. The local authorities set her up with a pretty cottage and modest monthly stipend. In return, she was expected to write a book about her experience in the village.

Only some thirty years ago West European writers routinely mocked socialist realism as a genre and the Stalinist practice of placing Soviet writers in a factory, on a kolkhoz, or at a site where a motorway or dam was being built. Today these same West European writers dream of commissions from the likes of Shell or Heathrow. The most lucrative commissions circulating among a select group of Dutch writers come from the directors of big companies and banks (who might want to flavor an important meeting with a few words of wisdom, a poem or the like, and thus seek out “professional” help). Dutch writers dream of jobs as editors-in-chief at Shell or Heineken’s in-house newsletter. Of course, today they don’t call it a Stalinist socialist realist practice, but a successful business arrangement. No one has a moral crack at the lucky colleague; they envy him. What’s more, in Amsterdam there’s a literary agency that specializes in these kinds of literary gigs. Russian writers had the metal to mock Stalinist cultural practice, and did so masterfully (Ilf and Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others). It’s interesting that today few writers raise their voices against anything.

I’ve been carefully following the phenomenon of transition for the past twenty years or so, the transformation of a former communist country into a capitalist statelet. That statelet is called Croatia. Aside from the unemployed and those on a pension, the rest of the population consists of children, an extensive bureaucracy, a plethora of politicians, and a handful of local tycoons. The short story is that for the majority of the population things have gone downhill over the past twenty years, and only improved for a statistically negligible minority. On the other hand though, in the same period, the status of animals at Zagreb Zoo has improved markedly. While public services have been asset-stripped and closed down (a handful of Croats enriching themselves in the process), only the fortunes of animals at the Zagreb Zoo have been on the up. How is that? Simple: Wealthy Croats have taken protection of individual animals upon themselves. The owner of a well-reputed Zagreb restaurant has been feeding the tiger; the President the ostrich; a famous pop-starlet the flamingo; the tapir is under the protection of a well-known war criminal, while the crocodile is under the wing of a Croatian tycoon. Wealthy Croats amuse themselves to no end with conversations such as: How’s your ostrich? Good thanks, last month we nursed his sore throat back to health. And how’s your tapir? I gave him up, now I’m looking after a hippopotamus. That basketball player took the tapir on. . somehow suits him better.

In citing the example of Zagreb Zoo, I naturally don’t want to suggest that endangered writers should be put in zoos. But I don’t see the problem with luxury resorts, theme parks, and writers’ villages. I mean, in Soviet times there was such a village, romantic wooden cottages and the like. It was called Peredelkino. There, thirty years ago, in Boris Pasternak’s former dacha I met the woman who served as the inspiration for the character of Lara in Doctor Zhivago.

While we’re on the subject of Russians, let’s put it out there that the Russians have always had more respect for literature than other nations. When you tally things up, no one, out of fear of the literary word — that is, respect for the literary word — has killed more writers than the Russians. That’s why it’s somehow understandable that a Russian oligarch has bought Waterstones, another the Independent, and a third set up a foundation for the translation of Russian writers into foreign languages (the same guy who one night paid Amy Winehouse a million pounds to sing just for him). Inspired by these examples, perhaps Madonna might swoop down to offer lifelong protection to a potential African Nobel laureate, or Bill Gates spend the rest of his days dedicated to the promotion of Malaysian literature.

So it’s not all glum, you just need a little imagination. I really don’t know why I’m so worried about writers. Being a writer is still predominantly a job for the boys. The assumption that things will be better for me if I’m my male colleagues’ keeper is wrong: For them, my male colleagues, things will always be better. So why am I worrying, then? In an ocean of general despair, it’s like worrying about the last European leper colony on the Romanian side of the Danube. I don’t know, it must because I’m doing okay. I just passed my taxi driver training.

WHAT IS AN AUTHOR MADE OF?

WRITER AND/OR AUTHOR?

Look at the years I’ve clocked in — and I’m still not sure about the name of my profession, or even what it’s for! If earnings qualify a particular human activity as a profession, then only a small number of writers can claim writing as theirs. Yet even so, the true purpose of the profession remains painfully unclear. Perhaps this uncertainty of purpose can be traced to the literary creator’s schizophrenic split into author and writer. In the 1970s, Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” upended literary scholarship and even today the text remains one of the briefest and most-cited in the history of literary theory. As Barthes maintains, the author is a scriptor, his or her function is the production, not explanation, of a text. Explaining would be to restrict a text’s meaning, and a text’s meaning resides in language, the way language works on a reader — it has nothing to do with the author or authorial intention, his or her identity, nationality, ethnicity, the historical context, and so forth. In his essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault asserts that not all writers are authors, but that all authors are writers. The author’s performance of the authorial function is part of the text, but irrelevant to the interpretative process. Both Barthes and Foucault adhere to the thesis that the author is language, that is, that language is the author.

Whatever the case may be, perhaps more than ever before, contemporary writers cling to their symbolic authorial thrones with all their might, desperately self-identifying as authors. It could be that their anxiety is provoked by the plethora of new terms such as creative writer and creative writing, which presuppose the existence of uncreative writers, uncreative writing — and, God forbid — an uncreative imagination. The implied existence of both “creative” and “uncreative” writing, each being equally valid, is particularly hard for “creative writers” to accept. The dawn of the digital future has only increased the author/writer confusion — just think of the fan fiction phenomenon and collaborative writing projects; the attempts to establish collective authors and authorships; the popularity of self-publishing, internet novels, cell-phone novels, twitterature; the new flabbiness of the very concept of literature; the attendant de-canonization and re-canonization; the re-semantification of plagiarism and intellectual property; the culture of remix, and copy and paste; the changes wrought as the publishing industry tries to adapt to new technology; the surge of “amateurism,” and the concurrent flood of “professional” education, i.e., creative writing programs.

Ideas about “the death of the author” might still sound alluring in the texts of Barthes and Foucault, yet the literary context in which they were born has long been aborted. Our time is completely different, and brutally so. When someone steals the title of one of your books and uses it as her own, even gets in touch to let you know what she’s done — expectant of your blessing — and when you refuse, she accuses you of being overly sensitive about matters of intellectual property, as an author, it’s there, right there, your enthusiasm for any theoretical burial of the author and authorship wanes.

Do two people inhabit the body of he or she who works with the pen? The first, a diligent, self-deprecating hand worker, or “crafter of texts,” the second, his or her media persona, the “author”? Are readers co-authors? And if so, does only an “author” need readers, or does a “crafter of texts” need them too? In this rather promiscuous relationship, how do we assign authorship roles? If the author died forty years ago (as theorists claim), but is not yet buried, and has in fact been resurrected (as literary practitioners suggest), perhaps he or she should be issued a temporary ID card? But in which register should the author be entered — that of the living, the dead, or the resurrected?

The title of this essay was inspired by a question my young niece posed to me. She didn’t know what the word “author” meant, so as a diversion inquired, “What’s an author made of then?” And indeed, let’s start with that one — what is an author made of?

NAME

Starbucks is a kind of instant psychotherapy, boosting our self-confidence together with our caffeine levels. At Starbucks we buy a personalized little treat, a coffee that is ours and ours alone, because they even write our name on it.

When a bouncy young Starbucks barista asked me my name for the first time, I articulated it with conviction and clarity.

“Say what?!”

“Du-brav-ka,” I repeated.

“Say whaaaat?!”

I said it again, and then again, just louder. The people in line behind me were already bitching. A short while later, a plastic cup with “Dwbra” scribbled on it arrived. I relayed the episode to a countryman who lives in Los Angeles, where my Starbucks initiation had occurred. That was twenty years ago.

“Jesus, what a dumbass! Who told you you’ve got to give your own name?!”

To be honest, it hadn’t occurred to me not to.

“I always say Tito!” he fired.

“And?”

“And nothing. I just love hearing: Titoooo, your coffee’s reaaaadyyyy!”

I took his advice and tried using Marx and Engels, but the Starbucks crew didn’t quite get the message I was sending. In the end I chose a regular name. At Starbucks, I’m Jenny.

I learned my lesson: if I want coffee, I have to adapt, my personality has to conform. The barista’s ear only hears what it’s given to hear, and that’s Jenny. This is a story about authors and authorship. If an author wants visibility — and we all do — he or she has to adjust his or her general tone, it has to be a tone discernable to the imaginary ear of the populace at large. Jenny is a collection of vowels and consonants everyone hears. “Dwbra” is not. I know this. I’ve tested it out in many parts of the world.

Hmmm, “general tone,” what I do mean by that? The general tone is the context, and the context is dictated by the dominant literature, inevitably that of the predominant language, which is, at least currently, English. Our context is thus an Anglo-American one. What about other great literatures? Statistics confirm the jawdrop-ping fact that European countries translate significant numbers of American and British authors, yet translations make up barely three percent of Anglo-American publishing. Viewed in this light, the tastes of the German, Croatian, French, Swedish, Dutch, and other reading publics, are in many ways pre-formed, their ears attuned to “Jenny,” not “Dwbra.” Yet as we know, “Jenny” and “Dwbra” might be the same person, the same literary text, just with two different names. If the substance is the same, why is one text readable, the other unreadable; one heard, the other not; one visible, the other invisible? Why do the Dutch scuttle to the bookstore the minute the Booker Prize winner is announced, yet local literary prizes leave them cold? Why did Croatian journalists scribble long obituaries to Christopher Hitchens, when Hitchens’s books have never been translated into Croatian (and few have even heard of him), yet a rare Croatian literary success abroad is glossed in a few reluctant lines?

Even when passing myself off as “Jenny,” communication at Starbucks still has its limits. In a Dublin Starbucks I recently had the following exchange:

“Name?”

“Jenny. .”

“How are we today, Jenny?”

“Good, thanks.”

“It’s grand to be good, is it not, Jenny. . ”

The kid had clearly passed Starbucks’s customer service training, and it was obviously centered on the mind-numbing repetition of my name.

“Here’s your coffee, Jenny. .”

“Thanks,” I said, taking a seat at one of the high chairs at the bar.

“What are your plans for the day, Jenny?” the kid asked.

“To hang myself. .”

“Good choice, Jenny. .” he replied, his tone of voice unchanged, and served the next customer.

This wee episode illustrates that even as Jenny I still have to accept a standardized form of communication if I want potential readers (and Starbucks’s employees!) to actually hear me, and continue engagement. Because if the global marketplace has undergone McDonaldsification and Starbucksification, if Apple stores, the modern temples of our times, are erected in the most prominent places in our cities, tens of thousands of people circulating through them on a daily basis, then why wouldn’t all other human activities — religion, politics, cinema, television, literature — behave in line with the same market principles, as mega-nodes of standardization? Participants in the market — authors, producers, consumers — all have to master the language of McDonalds, Starbucks, Apple, whomever. Like it or not, it means that I have to be “Jenny.” If by some rare stroke of luck I manage to penetrate the sound barrier as “Dwbra,” I might even enjoy a slight advantage over “Jenny,” because people might then show greater tolerance for my disrespect of the codes of standard communication. She’s “Dwbra,” they’ll say, she’s culturally incomprehensible. That’s the sort of comment Amazon’s online “executors” make, ventriloquists for the genes of the thousands of executors who throughout history got off on their secret duty. Even today it’s a secret one, the difference being that thanks to the Internet, anyone can execute in secrecy. I mean, how the hell would I know who the jerk-off hiding behind the “Batman” avatar is? His comment on one of my books: “something Slavic, completely incomprehensible.”

Those with whom I live in “promiscuity”—my “co-authors,” publishers, editors, booksellers, readers, critics, even “Batman”—beckon me not toward compromise (which would be a violation of my authorial autonomy), but the standardization of my message; its form, volume, language, meaning, tone, the puissance of its tone. . Whether I want to stay “Dwbra” or become “Jenny,” to attempt total or superficial transformation, to submit to standardized communication or remain “coffee-less”—it’s entirely up to me. That I bear the consequences of my decisions is self-evident, and the results are plain to see.

GENDER

I was once a literary guest of a gregarious West European mayor. There was a group of us, writers, invited to dinner at a majestic table in the banquet room of a grand city hall. Stooped under the weight of his chains, the mayor entertained us with a potted history of the city and its most famous denizens. Their oil portraits peered down on us from the banquet room walls, visually underscoring the historical tour. As my gaze slid across the portraits — the shoes with raised heels, the ribbons and bows on manly feet, the tight satin trousers and puffy turkey-like jowls, mini and massive moustaches, wigs and frilly collars, walking sticks and gloves, hats, feathers, and rings — the thought occurred to me as clear as the figures on a cash register: Look at them, they’re all men!

It was an epiphany that worked like a jammed trigger, my brain automatically becoming a montage table on which I assembled shots of similar portraits, similar sculptures of commanders-in-chief and generals, similar images of poets and thinkers, folk leaders and politicians, kings and tsars, fire-fighters and hunters, policemen and soldiers. At breakneck speed my brain pumped out book covers, newspaper headlines, encyclopedia entries, television clips, cinematic fragments. . unbelievable, all full of men! Suddenly — just like the indelible Mr. “Everything comes from India” from the BBC series Goodness Gracious Me! who claims that everything in the world is Indian — it really was raining men, though none were Indian. Looking at Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the intransigent Mr. “Everything. .” persists in claiming the painter is Indian, the picture “Indian,” and when asked why, he replies: “No women!” Hasn’t gender discrimination become invisible precisely because it is so obvious and so incredibly pervasive? Why are West European and North American women scandalized (if indeed they really are) by the discrimination endured by their “sisters” in Asia or Africa, yet simultaneously fail to see that they themselves live in a gender-discriminating world? Do none of them see it, or have they all simply capitulated and beat their retreat?

The city hall episode isn’t the most judicious of examples, I can admit that. It’s hard to believe powerful moments of cognition occur smack bang in the middle of city halls, and it’s harder still to believe that the realization is hitting me again at this very moment (Hey, sister, where you been all your life?!). Yet it is equally unbelievable to think that men and women are, at any given moment, conscious of the dictates of gender in both their professional lives, and in life in general; that every move they make is not guided by this consciousness. In literary life, this consciousness usually strikes by stealth, like a betrayal, a knife in the back, inevitably so torturous we immediately erase it or fob it off for another day (Ah, I’ll think about it tomorrow!). But tomorrow we delete it all again, fatalistically reconciling ourselves with the order of things, each of us alone, as lonely as a samurai. “Things are the way they are,” we say, playing blind man’s bluff, ready to swallow the insult, marching on, tormented by the same anxiety — the anxiety of authorship — that forever begs mastery anew. Saddest of all, and psychologically the most interesting, the exclusion of women is inevitably accompanied by the silence of other women, who lack the will to intervene.

In contrast to most women, the vast majority of men feel very comfortable in the literary world. Literature is their territory, they’re well “at home”; literature is their armchair, their pair of slippers, their pipe to smoke. The history of literature is the history of men — poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists, thinkers, philosophers; it’s friends and buddies, talking heads and fellow players, idols and inspirations. Literature is an extended male family. Although female authors have participated in professional literary life for some two centuries,¹ they’re still classed as arrivistes, immigrants, and stowaways. Most men mentally address their work to other men, and most women address theirs to men too. Literature is a man’s playing field, men jockey for the ball; women can only sit on the sidelines and cheer. Of course, male “players” don’t have anything against women, they’re just not that interested in them; most often, women simply aren’t in their field of vision. Men can’t conceive of sharing the turf with women, but sure, they’re welcome as cheerleaders. On the literary playing field, the “cheerleaders” include translators, librarians, editors, agents, studious critics (of the male oeuvre), archivists. Isn’t it best we all work where we’re most at home? Men feel at ease in literature, they’re masters of polemicizing among themselves, backscratching and backbiting, appearing in public together, critiquing each other, devising little strategies, swimming in formations like dolphins, forming literary clans, backslapping each other, savaging each other — and all the while they mentally hold each other’s hands, as men in some regions do in real life. This collegial intimacy is sometimes so overpowering that they refer to their literary buddies by first or nick names, smug in the assumption that their readers and audiences will know who they’re on about.

Female writers remain invisible until they speak the language of pornography, or the language of money, the “male tongue.” Then they dominate the bestseller lists. Asked who inspires her, current dominatrix E. L. James rattled off names of women writers who plough similar territory, sending out a clear message in the process: In the literary world of financial profit, women hold pole position — their idols and inspiration “sisterly” writers, the millions who deliriously consume their products, also women.

The question of whether what E. L. James writes is literature, and if it’s not, then what is literature, is today completely irrelevant. “If literature has died, literary activity continues with unabated, if not increased vigor,” wrote Alvin Kernan in his long-forgotten The Death of Literature. The word literature is bidding its farewell to everyday language use, and trundling along with it are critical frames of reference and the very language of criticism. New terms are now in circulation: the publishing industry, the writing industry. What the writing industry intends to call the worker or “direct producer” remains to be seen. Maybe the current appellation of “content provider” will prevail.

If women rule the bestseller lists, men remain firmly seated in the first rows of so-called “serious” literature. At least that’s how it is in the Yugozone, in the literatures of the former Yugoslavia. Once friends, for a time political enemies, Yugozone writers are now buddies again. Not only do the “brothers” stick tight when among their own, they also click together like magnets in “fraternal” multiethnic and multi-national formations (a Serb and a Croat, a Croat and a Montenegrin, a Montenegrin and a Serb, all together with a Bosnian or an Albanian, you get the picture). Why is male bonding so attractive in the literary world? For two reasons: The first is ineluctably socio-biological (even male dolphins swim in formations!), the second purely financial. In any case, these are the very tendencies supported by the cultural structures of the European Union, which understands culture as a sedative for calming interethnic tensions, as a kind of yoga, a means of transport (cultural exchange, etc.), a bridge (that links nations), as a diplomatic strategy (culture knows no borders), as a potential tourism windfall, as everything and anything. Writers themselves have done the math and the figures don’t lie: The new national markets (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin) are simply too small. And who would have thought — the language of those literatures is the same after all!

With the advent of new media, public displays of male literary affection have blossomed into a genre. Affectionate email exchanges between two writers, TV appearances (a writerly coupling or three-some with a friendly brother in the middle, a hostess taking on the fraternal foursome); live appearances (a team of buddies performing); essays on autobiographical “bromances,” they’re all irreducibly male genres. And what of the female role in these fraternal literary relationships? As the brothers conclude tapping the veins of each other’s wisdom, a woman’s name will suddenly bleed out. “Say hi to Cica!” “And you say hi to Mica!” Cica and Mica are the brothers’ partners.

Stumbling across this kind of literary “material,” foreigners might think it the spawn of Balkan blood brotherhoods, or else a special kind of homoerotic Balkan soft-porn. Thank God this “material” almost never makes it beyond the borders of the Yugozone, so no one thinks about it at all. But if the material did indeed find legs, it could be that people in other parts of the world would think it completely natural, little different to what they’ve already seen among their own. Let’s not forget, men mentally hold each other’s hand everywhere, it’s just here and there they hold hands for real. I mean, who was it that hustled their way into Rembrandt’s famous picture? Those who had the money to buy a ticket to eternity: the boys, the buddies, the “night-watchmen,” the “Indians.”

It’s enough to do a little google of the most important European literary prizes, to click on the rubric “previous winners,” and the humiliating evidence speaks for itself. One of the most significant annual European prizes for contribution to European culture, society, and social science (a prize awarded by one of the most declaratively tolerant and democratic European states) is this year celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. In the sixty years of its existence, a woman has won the prize once. The fact that one year the prize was shared by three men and a woman (her name was Marguerite Yourcenar), and another year went to a married couple, is hardly a corrective. The result (59-to-1) reveals one of two possible things: Either women are mentally backward, which would explain men’s absolute intellectual supremacy, or women are systematically exposed to chronic professional discrimination. Maybe professional discrimination is but a form of that “ontological lack” that men — in possession of that infamous appendage — have foisted upon women as an enduring physical failing and inadequacy.

I admit that of late I’ve developed an unpleasant involuntary neurosis: Everything I set eyes on, everything I touch, I immediately put through my internal calculator, working out the ratio of men to women. I take everything in via a gender-based numerical screen: literary magazines, newspapers, feuilletons, literary production, scholarly articles, reviews, literary prizes, the lot. Courtesy of this involuntary neurosis I can say with an enormous degree of confidence that even a completely marginal human endeavor such as literature destroys every illusion about gender equality. Literature is Indian too!

As far as my neurosis goes, I’m not alone; other women are also prone to numerical mania. Bidisha, an English writer, novelist, and feminist has observed the keen paradox: the more women in literature, the more they’re invisible. Bidisha defines the professional discrimination of women in literature as “the erasure of women from public life,” which she abbreviates as “femicide.” “Discrimination is obvious,” says Bidisha, “all you have to do is count.”²

If the issue really is femicide, why is it that women have such a hard time raising their voices, are too reluctant to unite, to seek the support of other women in their profession? I once met an international feminist icon at a conference. She christened me a “Croatian aboriginal,” telling me how she’d just returned from a summer holiday in Croatia and how she’d watched “Croatian aboriginal women” feed rucola to pigs, which in her view was unbearably barbaric. On another occasion, an intellectual goddess lost her cool when I failed to display the requisite level of humility and gratitude at one of my books being published in a major world language. In fact, I’d shown ingratitude and insolence by daring remark that the honorarium I’d received for the book was humiliatingly modest (which, naturally, it was). Both women conversed with me the way a former servant converses with a present slave. I haven’t the least intention of drawing any groundbreaking conclusion from the two incidents, yet the truth remains that the gender question and the professional discrimination of women provokes unhealthy reactions among both genders of the writer’s guild. My male colleagues tend not to understand the problem; my female colleagues tend to refuse to understand it.

If literature is dead, if the author is dead, if literary theory and criticism are dead — all of which the literary Jedi Masters assure us — why do literary little boys refuse to surrender half the literary galaxy to their legally entitled sisters?

NATIONALITY

At a social gathering in Berlin I once met a Roma community representative, a fellow countryman. I say representative because the guy held a position of importance in a European Roma association. Our common homeland had fallen apart, the savagery in Bosnia continued apace, and I had made my way abroad, but still didn’t have anywhere I might call home. At a given moment I think every immigrant feels like an orphan, although most never admit it. In any case, even if I meant it more in jest than in seriousness — or, who knows, maybe it was a serious thing said in jest — in a moment of weakness I blubbered out. .

“Couldn’t you Berlin Roma take me under your wing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You could ‘adopt’ me, declare me a Roma writer. .”

“Eh, sister, that’s a no-go. .” said the Roma representative.

“Why not then?”

“Well, for a start, you’re not Roma!”

I don’t know why I thought the Roma — easily the most discriminated against ethnic minority in Europe — might be receptive to the idea. But on the subject of rejection, I’ve had a few of those in my life, and they keep coming. It’s a no-go, sister, you’re not a Croat. No way, sister, you’re not a Serb. Forget it, sister, you’re not Bosnian, you’re not even American. Oh c’mon, sister, you’re not Dutch. It’s not that I’m especially pushy; people just like putting the boot in.

Hey, Slavs was the national anthem of the country where I was born.³ Having repeated the words so many times, I should know them by heart, but I don’t. I was never able to remember them. There were so many occasions, from primary school on into adulthood, when we’d rise from our seats and open our mouths like fish, half-speaking along. The words remain a mystery to me to this day, but they start with something about grandfathers and sons (Hey, Slavs, our grandfathers’ spirits burn bright / so long as sons’ hearts beat for the nation). Then a collective voice tells an invisible listener that the Slavic spirit will endure for the ages (the Slavic spirit will live on / endure for the ages), irrespective of the fact that it’s threatened by catastrophes such as the abyss of hell and the roar of thunder. The collective Slavic spirit calls forth the storm to swallow all in its wake, for an earthquake to crack stone and shatter wood (May the storm rip the sky / may the stone crack, the trees split asunder / may the earth quake). In this climatic drama the Slavs stand as resolutely as cliff faces, like extras in a cinematic biblical spectacle. But filming was wrapped up long ago and everyone’s gone home, apart from the Slavs who are still standing there, probably waiting for someone to tell them they’re also free to go. And then, like a thunderbolt in a clear sky, the line damned be the traitor to his homeland! rings out. The damned traitor’s identity remains a mystery — it’s only natural catastrophes giving the Slavs hell. My guess is that the traitor is anyone with a ticket in his or her pocket, the coward who refuses to live in a country threatened by the abyss of hell and the roar of thunder, anyone who doesn’t find life as a cliff face particularly exciting. The traitor could be the extra who first remembers to go home, on whose head the terrifying curse damned be the traitor to his homeland! rains down.

It’s easy to be wise in retrospect, but when you repeat lines like these for a good part of your schooling, they’re definitely what we might call formative. The melody — the medium carrying the message — gives you goosebumps to this day, yet the content remains as hazy as ever. The Croatian anthem, Our Beautiful Homeland, is no better, and though it only cherry-picks a few verses from the full version of the song, it’s still longer than the Yugoslav anthem. Regardless of the fact it was written almost two hundred years ago (in 1835), its verses are eerily reminiscent of a tourism promo clip, the kind countries make for the Eurovision Song Contest — jump shots of mountains, waterways, wheat fields, and similar telegenic material. The anthem’s buzzwords are “glory,” “unique,” and “fearless,” and there’s even a little gothic detail about ancestors who bypass their graves and go straight to heaven, the family tomb apparently a favourite Croatian picnic spot. As the anthem dates from a time before telecommunication networks, the maritime Croat implores the sea to send a message out to the world that a Croat loves his homeland.

To me, the words of every anthem and every prayer border on the incomprehensible, which is how they were intended. The tribal shamans, the religious fathers of the people, they all know that the communal chanting and vacuous repetition of an incomprehensible text only increases its magical power. As systems of authority, the institutions of homeland and church harness fuzzy language and the melodic release of vocal cords to dazzle their subjects; citizens, worshippers, whomever.

Although it’s dependent on the situation, the trouble and merriment really begin when the three “Ps” get together, when the Politician and the Priest get their other buddy, the Poet, to sing along. Let’s be frank here, the Poet is the weakest link, and can be drummed from the holy trinity at the Priest or Politician’s whim. Many writers have described the intoxication of belonging (to a home, a homeland, a country, a faith) and the trauma of unbelonging. Thomas Mann treats the latter in Tonio Kröger, particularly in the masterly episode where Kröger, having returned to his birthplace after a thirty-year absence, is given the third degree by a local cop who thinks him a suspicious individual. The proofs of a forthcoming book are insufficient evidence that this individual, who claims to be a writer, might belong to the race of blue-eyed and blond-haired victors, those who no one ever looks up or down.

Why is the Poet set on ingratiating himself with the Politician and Priest? It’s because they’re all honey-tongued buddies, a trio well-versed in promising the people a brighter tomorrow. The poet may well be a “linguistic magician,” a “nightingale,” an “engineer of human souls,” but aren’t the Priest and the Politician too? They too sell illusions, and like the Poet, their power resides in the ability to win over a crowd. The Poet is the nation’s old school PR man, which goes some way toward explaining why small nations so rabidly appoint poets their ambassadors, and, not infrequently, their presidents. If the Poet discharges his duties with distinction, he’ll be generously rewarded; if by some slip of the tongue he profanes his country and her honor (and thus that of the Priest and the Politician) he might end up in prison, in exile, in anonymity. . Bad options no doubt, but options nonetheless.

All in all, the alliance of the Politician, Priest, and Poet is complex, historically rich, dramatic, exciting, often fatal, and inevitably — unavoidable. Even if the Poet eventually wins his freedom, no longer requiring the assistance of Priest or Politician, it’s no matter, the two of them will then go to him. Just think of the honorary doctorates bestowed on J. K. Rowling, all the politicians who have curtsied in her direction. Sure, she curtsies too, though she doesn’t have to. Accused of promoting witchcraft and magic over religion in her work, Rowling responded: “I believe in God, not magic!” The Priest breathed a contented sigh of relief — he doesn’t like competition.

Having a certain Felix Landau, an SS officer in Drohobych, as a fan of his sketches saved Bruno Schulz’s life for a time. Landau made him his “personal Jew,” hiring him to paint his son’s room. One “black Thursday,” on a day when 250 Jews were killed in Drohobych, Bruno Schulz was felled by the bullet of SS officer Karl Günther. Günther shot Schulz as revenge on Landau for having shot his own “personal Jew,” a dentist. At least that’s how legend has it. Today three states jostle to incorporate Schulz in the fabric of their national culture: Poland (because Schulz wrote in Polish), Israel (for obvious reasons), and Ukraine (because Drohobych is today in western Ukraine). About twenty years ago there was a scandal when a mural Schulz painted for his temporary protector was found. Sections of the mural were promptly whisked off to Israel and installed in Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture confirmed that it had donated the mural to Yad Vashem because in return Yad Vashem had promised to fund the construction of a Schulz museum in Drobobych. Schulz’s fate — one of the saddest and most ironic of literary fates — illustrates the extent to which the Poet is always a plaything, putty in the hands of Politician and Priest, even after his death (which they of course ably concealed). Priest and Politician never miss a chance to “warm” themselves on a book either.

As far as writers, their nationalities, and their countries of residence go, things aren’t always in accord, don’t always match expectations. Some writers change countries and languages, chance sends one to a hospitable country, another some place less hospitable, but most writers stick to the countries where they were born. Being a writer is complicated enough. Yet being an Anglo-American writer and being a Malaysian one isn’t quite the same thing, just as being an Anglo-American woman writer among Anglo-American male writers is not the same thing — nor, for that matter, is being a Malaysian woman writer within Malaysian literature and being one on the world literary map. Wanting to mark his or her territory on the literary map, a Malaysian has to display vastly greater talent and invest vastly greater energy than his or her Anglo-American colleague. There’s no mystery in the power relations. For a great writer, a small country lacking a significant literary tradition is a great misfortune. Had he been a German writer, Miroslav Krleža would today tower on the world literary map as one of its peaks. But Miroslav Krleža only exists on Croatian maps. Minor writers are in much better shape — if it weren’t for their small countries and languages, many writers wouldn’t be able to call themselves such. Small countries tend to seek out literary representatives cut to their own size; they wouldn’t know what to do with a great writer, a minor one suits all concerned. For a minor writer, the backing of his small country is his most potent weapon.

The global marketplace is particularly enamored with the idea of homelands, nations, and nationalities; there is, after all, good money to be made. At the apotheosis of modernism, Virginia Woolf declared, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” To me, it seems a declaration that was then as equally “incomprehensible” as it is today. Because literature — as an exemplar of a nation’s “spiritual wealth,” as a “bridge between peoples” (alongside the many other characteristics attributed to it) — is also a form of ethno-business. Unfortunately. And one sometimes gets the impression that many writers are awfully adroit in the role of ethno-businessmen.

THE AUTHOR: DEAD AND ALIVE

Those who say the author is dead usually have in mind to rifle his wardrobe.

— Les Murray⁴

In a single sentence, poet Les Murray nonchalantly casts aside the manifold efforts of his “natural” allies — critics, literary theorists, and literary historians — and their responses to one of the most complex literary questions, that of the author and authorship. And if I zip the mouth of the literary theorist in me shut, and let the writer speak, at least fleetingly I have to agree with him.

Although there is, as yet, no accord among literary historians on who or what gave birth to the author and when — whether it was the advent of written culture or the invention of publishing (i.e., legal regulation in book production) — the author, it seems, is already dead. Having established himself and become an institution in the nineteenth century, by the mid-twentieth century his relevance was already in question. The institution of the author and authorship was actually tragi-comically brief; richer and lengthier by far is the story of anonymous literary creation.⁵

Yet theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Terry Eagleton, or Pierre Bourdieu didn’t bury the author; one can’t even credit the scribes who periodically proffer hegemonic, universalist (male, naturally), white (we can’t worry about the whole world!), West European and North American (the Arabs are loaded, they can look after themselves!) thinking on literature, literary values, and the author and authorship. As we know, the author is a kind of social consensus, as is literature itself; the author is a mutant adapting to the demands and expectations of the purchaser, irrespective of who this might be — king, tsar, state, religious community, imagined literary public, social class, or market. There is no author without social consensus. If you don’t believe this, try explaining you’re an author to the Brazilian Awa tribe.

The institution of literature, at least as we have hitherto known it, is disintegrating by the day, and is doing so together with the foundations on which its construction rests. The Author is one of the key elements, the traditional author, that is. Because in today’s celebrity culture, authors are more worried about how they might create an authorial public persona than, for example, the narrative masks of their novels. It’s the authorial persona that sells books, or so we’re told. This explains why in terms of self-representation, on websites, in the brief biographical notes on inside covers, we see those clumsy collections of words attempting to confirm the identity of the person in question: novelist, essayist, author of such and such. Don’t novelist and essayist also automatically imply the concept of authorship? Or is the word author itself a kind of bonus medal, which we award ourselves (or is awarded to us by others) in the belief it might seal our social standing? Maybe the word author is just a symptom of a deep internal fear that we are all together going to disappear, swept away by the first strong gust of a new cultural wind?

Most people associate “visual art” with strong (“scandalous”) authorial personas, Damien Hearst being a case in point. Building his or her authorial personae — conscious that they live in the celebrity culture that is ours, a modern version of polytheism — many artists, consciously or unconsciously use self-beatification, self-divinization (one of the forms of canonization in celebrity culture), and thus exploit the religious potential of the artistic act. It’s how Marina Abramović turned MoMA into Međugorje (or Lourdes), herself into Our Lady, and thousands of visitors into believers and pilgrims for the duration of her three-month project, “The Artist Is Present.” Dressed as the Virgin Mary full of grace, Abramović lowered her healing gaze onto visitors, flickered her eyelids, and occasionally let a tear fall from her eye. Reporting that they had undergone a cathartic experience, many visitors also shed tears. It turns out that today’s celebrated authors are indeed modern saints, with devotees who follow in the footsteps of their teacher, cementing his or her canonical place on the artistic map of the world, spreading his or her artistic vision. At the same MoMA exhibition, young performers and devotees of Abramović’s artistic teachings reactivated her early performance works, in the self-same way that groups of amateur faithful perform the nativity scene at Christmas, or more masochistic Catholics tread Jesus’s path to Calvary. The repetition of Abramović’s performances by younger artists was in the service of the canonization of the authorial persona of Marina Abramović, not the affirmation of a particular form of artistic expression, in this case, performance art. Moreover, the repetition of a live artistic act, such as performance art, is in contradiction with the very essence and purpose of the form. Repeated, performance art becomes an artistic souvenir. When an anonymous young visitor to Abramović’s MoMA show did her own little Pussy Riot and undressed — an attempt to display her devotion to the great artist — the museum guards immediately led her away. Why? Because the heathen have never been allowed to act out any instinct that might disturb the religious ritual, in this case that of self-beatification. But then, Marina Abramović is a woman and an artist, aware of the powerful world of stereotypes, and her own position within it. Women artists are rarely canonized and even more rarely proclaimed saints. Conscious of this, Abramović decided to take matters into her own hands.

Buying a book by Haruki Murakami, many readers throughout the world first and foremostly buy entry to the heaving mass of fans of this “literary saint,” then they buy a story about global literary success, and then also into one about community. In the symbolic act of buying a book they create community with other readers throughout the world, a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. There, perhaps, lies the mystery of cultural conformism, the answer to the question of why most people buy the things most people buy.

The purchase of a symbolic, “spiritual” product (a book, film, album, video game, etc.) is actually contact with another consumer, the creation of belonging, the overcoming of loneliness. It is the principle, it seems, on which culture markets flourish, whether those of children, teenagers, adolescents, or adults. .

The market, it seems, has no need for an original, romantic-style genius, but for an appropriately “off-the-rack” author, someone who in the celebrity culture in which we live will substitute excellence and genius with an authorial persona, an essence coupled with good design. Because it appears the author expired the moment the idea of the “mad genius” and the “singularity of the artistic act” were expunged from the social consensus, the populist idea of “stand in line and have your shot” taking their place. Beda Foltin, the hero of Karel Čapek’s final, unfinished novel The Composer Foltin, would today not incite the moral opprobrium he did in the time the novel was set. Foltin, who fancies himself a talented composer and goes about stealing others’ motifs to create an opera he calls Judith (a musical Frankenstein), would simply be dissed as a crap DJ. In a culture of remix, cut and paste, computer programs, fan fiction and the people who write it, twitter, cell-phone novels, self-publishing, and anonymous authors and editors, a culture in which the absolute absence of responsibility prevails, Čapek’s moral message would be met by general incomprehension.

One mystery, however, remains: Whence the urge in each of us to try our creative hand, to find our listeners, viewers, and readers? Whence the hatred and envy of those who achieve greater success than we do? The millions of frustrated individuals — writers, editors, painters, musicians, directors, the malicious creeps and sarcastic douche bags, the self-appointed censors and critics, the envious, the wannabe artists hungry for fame? And whence the righteous, convinced fame has unfairly passed them by, the copiers, imitators, plagiarists, self-appointed assessors of others’ talent, the sickos fantasizing about their future masterpieces, the art lovers hiding penknives in their pockets, just waiting to slash an artist’s canvas? Whence the millions of amateurs who plaster themselves all over the Internet, with their films, songs, sketches, their monologues on painting, literature, and philosophy, seeking attention and respect for the simple fact that they’re there on our computer screens, in front of our noses, for the mere fact that they, well, exist? The terrifying armies of devotees and haters? The vicious jealousy of the creative act? Could it be because the creative work — at least as it stands in the current social contract — is a potential ticket to eternity; to a street bearing our name, a poem in a future anthology?!

“One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.” This was Brazilian global superstar Paulo Coelho’s recent take. “I’m modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world,” he claimed.

The Peter Shaffer drama Amadeus (1979) and the Miloš Forman film of the same name (1984) rank among the most significant modern texts on the unbearable lightness of genius and the murderous weight of envy. Amadeus is the story of Salieri and Mozart’s putative rivalry, or more to the point, Salieri’s maniacal obsession with Mozart’s genius, one that will drive Mozart to the grave, and Salieri to madness. Six years older than Mozart, Salieri outlived him by a full forty years. Antonio Salieri was the director of the Italian opera at the Habsburg court, an esteemed European opera “manager” (Vienna, Rome, Paris), a popular composer of his time, the Austrian emperor’s Kapellmeister, a music teacher and “coach” to many greats, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Liszt among them. His music disappeared with his death. Thanks to Shaffer’s drama, and more so, Forman’s film, Antonio Salieri has undergone a modest artistic rehabilitation. Every year his hometown of Legnago organizes the Salieri Opera Festival, the local theater even bearing his name. Academic interest in his work has generated demand for its performance: Here and there his operas are returning to repertoires. So yeah, Salieri was an author, and Mozart was an author. Who knows, maybe future generations won’t be able to tell the difference between the two. Or maybe they will, but simply won’t care.

History, cultural history too, heaves with ironic turns. Is the platitude about the inevitable triumph of artistic justice to be believed? Questions of justice are usually settled by the victor’s hand. In this light, it’s entirely possible that James Joyce will one day figure in a Paulo Coelho biography as a footnote, with Joyce glossed as a minor Irish writer who once wrote a book Paulo Coelho determined had done great harm to literature. We don’t really believe that something of the sort might happen, but not because James Joyce is an Irish cultural icon, but rather because he’s a golden goose for Irish tourism. Whatever the case, that fact remains that the untalented are feistier than the talented, the stupid feistier than the smart, the evil feistier than the good, that parasites outlive the body on which they feed, blood donors often bleed to death — and only vampires live forever.

1Irrespective of my own early participation in professional literary life, the historical record shows that women have been consistently erased from the public domain, from professional organizations and institutions of canonization (national academies, school reading lists, histories of literature, and so forth). In mid-nineteenth century America, books by women made up half the bestseller lists. Critical opinion soon formed evaluatory codes for “women’s writing.” Women were tasked with domestic subjects such as children and the family, with matters of religion and morality, their texts aesthetically crowned or dismissed in accordance with how well they satisfied the burdens of gender expectations — in other words, the extent to which they conformed. Women didn’t create this division of labor, men did. How might we otherwise explain terms such “lady author,” “authoress,” “poetess,” or “criticess,” all ironically coined to describe women in literature?

2Bidisha, “I’m tired of being the token woman,” The Guardian, April 22 2010.

3The hymn, Hey, Slovaks, was written by Samuel-Samo Tomašik, a Slovak. In the spirit of the pan-Slavic movement of the time, he ended up dedicating the song to all Slavs, and in 1848 it was sung at the pan-Slavic congress in Prague. A hundred years later, Yugoslavs “adopted” Tomašik’s song as the official Yugoslav national anthem.

4The citation is from Andrew Bennett’s The Author (Routledge, 2005), one of the most instructive studies on the subject of the author and authorship.

5See John Mullan’s most interesting study, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2008).

ON-ZONE

Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian better known as Sir Alfred, lived at Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1998 until 2006, and for much of this time was a kind of tourist attraction. Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal was in part inspired by Nasseri’s life story. In contrast to Tom Hanks’s character in the film, Alfred spent most of his time reading. “It’s like a day at the library,” he said.

1.

A few years ago at Bucharest Airport I spotted a sign saying Zona fumatore, which simply means a smoking area — it just sounds way better in Romanian. You see all kinds of zones on your travels: free zones (zona franca), no-go zones, duty-free zones, you name it. West Germans used to call East Germany die Zone, by which they meant the Soviet Zone. There are time zones, erogenous zones, even Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is set in a zone. There’s a weight-loss diet called The Zone, and then you’ve also got zoning, in the sense of urban planning. In sci-fi, a zone is usually some sort of dystopia. Hearing the word “zone,” our first association is a clearly defined space, our second, its evanescence. Zones can be erected and dissembled like tents, ephemeral. Last but not least, there’s a form of literary life we might call the “out-of-nation zone,” best abbreviated as the ON-zone. I know a person who lives in that zone. That person is me.

I write in the language of a small country. I left that small country twenty years ago in an effort to preserve my right to a literary voice, to defend my writings from the constraints of political, national, ethnic, gender, and other ideological projections. Although true, the explanation rings a little phony, like a line from an intellectual soap opera. Parenthetically, male literary history is full of such lines, but with men being “geniuses,” “rebels,” “renegades,” “visionaries,” intellectual and moral bastions, etc. — when it comes to intellectual autobiographical kitsch, they get free passes. People only turn up their noses when it escapes a woman’s lips. Even hip memes like “words without borders” and “literature without borders” ring pretty phony, too. The important point here is that having crossed the border, I found myself in a literary out-of-nation zone, the implications of which I only figured out much later.

It could be said that I didn’t actually leave my country, but rather, that splitting into six smaller ones, my country left me. My mother tongue was the only baggage I took with me, the only souvenir my country bequeathed me. My spoken language in everyday situations was easy to switch, but changing my literary language, I was too old for that. In a second language I could have written books with a vocabulary of about five hundred words, which is about how many words million-shipping bestsellers have. Unfortunately, my ambitions lay elsewhere. I don’t have any romantic illusions about the irreplaceability of one’s mother tongue, nor have I ever understood the coinage’s etymology. Perhaps this is because my mother was Bulgarian, and Bulgarian her mother tongue. She spoke flawless Croatian though, better than many Croats. On the off chance I did ever have any romantic yearnings, they were destroyed irrevocably almost two decades ago, when Croatian libraries were euphorically purged of “non-Croatian books,” meaning books by Serbian writers, Croatian “traitors,” books by “commies” and “Yugoslavs,” books printed in Cyrillic. Mouths buttoned tight, my fellow writers bore witness to a practice that may have been short-lived, but was no less terrifying for it. The orders for the library cleansings came from the Croatian Ministry of Culture. Indeed, if I ever harbored any linguistic romanticism, it was destroyed forever the day Bosnian Serbs set their mortars on the National Library in Sarajevo. Radovan Karadžić, a Sarajevo psychiatrist and poet — a “colleague”—led the mission of destruction. Writers ought not forget these things. I haven’t. Which is why I repeat them obsessively. For the majority of writers, a mother tongue and national literature are natural homes, for an “unadjusted” minority, they’re zones of trauma. For such writers, the translation of their work into foreign languages is a kind of refugee shelter. And so translation is for me. In the euphoria of the Croatian bibliocide, my books also ended up on the scrap heap.

After several years of academic and literary wandering, I set up camp in a small and convivial European country. Both my former and my present literary milieu consider me a “foreigner,” each for their own reasons of course. And they’re not far wrong: I am a foreigner, and I have my reasons. The ON-zone is an unusual place to voluntarily live one’s literary life. Life in the zone is pretty lonely, yet with the suspect joy of a failed suicide, I live with the consequences of a choice that was my own. I write in a language that has split into three — Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian — but in spite of concerted efforts to will it apart, remains the same language. It’s the language in which war criminals have pled their innocence at the Hague Tribunal for the past twenty years. At some point, the tribunals’ tortured translators came up with an appropriate acronym: BCS (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian). Understandably, the peoples reduced and retarded by their bloody divorce can’t stand the fact that their language is now just an acronym. So the Croats call it Croatian, the Bosnians Bosnian, the Serbs Serbian, even the Montenegrins have come up with an original name: They call it Montenegrin.

What sane person would want a literary marriage with an evidently traumatized literary personality like me? No one. Maybe the odd translator. Translators keep me alive in literary life. Our marriage is a match between two paupers, our symbolic capital on the stock market of world literature entirely negligible. My admiration for translators is immense, even when they translate the names Ilf and Petrov as the names of Siberian cities. Translators are mostly humble folk. Almost invisible on the literary map, they live quiet lives in the author’s shadow. My empathy with translators stems, at least in part, from my own position on the literary map; I often feel like I’m invisible too. However things really are, translating, even from a small language, is still considered a profession. But writing in a small language, from a literary out-of-nation zone, now that is not a profession—that is a diagnosis.

The platitude about literature knowing no borders isn’t one to be believed. Only literatures written in major languages enjoy passport-free travel. Writerly representatives of major literatures travel without papers, a major literature their invisible lettre de noblesse. Writers estranged or self-estranged, exiled or self-exiled from their maternal literatures, they tend to travel on dubious passports. A literary customs officer can, at any time, escort them from the literary train under absolutely any pretext. The estranged or self-estranged female writer is such a rare species she’s barely worth mentioning.

All these reasons help explain my internal neurosis: As an ON-writer I always feel obliged to explain my complicated literary passport to an imagined customs officer. And as is always the case when you get into a conversation with a customs officer on unequal footing, ironic multiplications of misunderstandings soon follow. What does it matter, you might say, whether someone is a Croatian, Belgian, or American writer? “Literature knows no borders,” you retort. But it does matter: The difference lies in the reception of the author’s position; it’s in the way an imagined customs officer flicks through one’s passport. And although it would never cross our minds to self-designate so, we readers—we are those customs officers!

Every text is inseparable from its author, and vice versa; it’s just that different authors get different treatment. The difference is whether a text travels together with a male or female author, whether the author belongs to a major or minor literature, writes in a major or minor language; whether a text accompanies a famous or anonymous author, whether the author is young or old, Mongolian or English, Surinamese or Italian, an Arab woman or an American man, a homosexual or a heterosexual. . All of these things alter the meaning of a text, help or hinder its circulation.

Let’s imagine for a moment that someone sends me and a fellow writer — let’s call him Dexter — to the North Pole to each write an essay about our trip. Let’s also imagine a coincidence: Dexter and I return from our trip with exactly the same text. Dexter’s position doesn’t require translation, it’s a universal one — Dexter is a representative of Anglo-American letters, the dominant literature of our time. My position will be translated as Balkan, post-Yugoslav, Croatian, and, of course, female. All told, a particular and specific one. My description of the white expanse will be quickly imbued with projected, i.e., invented, content. Customs officers will ask Dexter whether in the white expanse he encountered the metaphysical; astounded that I don’t live at “home,” they’ll ask me why I live in Amsterdam, how it is that I, of all people, got sent to the North Pole, and while they’re at it, they’ll inquire how I feel about the development of Croatian eco-feminism. Not bothering to read his work first, they’ll maintain that Dexter is a great writer, and me, not bothering to read my work first either, they’ll declare a kind of literary tourist guide — to the Balkan region, of course; where else?

To be fair, how my text about the North Pole will be received in my former literary community is also a question worth asking. As my encounter with the metaphysical? God no. Croats will ask me how the Croatian diaspora is getting on up there, how I — a Croatian woman — managed to cope in the frozen north, and whether I plunged a Croatian flag into the ice. Actually, in all likelihood my text won’t even be published. With appropriate fanfare they’ll publish Dexter’s. It’ll be called “How a great American writer warmed us to the North Pole.”

That literature knows no borders is just a platitude. But it’s one we need to believe in. Both originals and their translations exist in literature. The life of a translation is inseparable from the relatively stable life of its original, yet the life of a translation is often much more interesting and dramatic. Translations — poor, good, mangled, congenial — have rich lives. A reader’s energy is interwoven in this life; in it are the mass of books that expand, enlighten, and entertain us, that “save our lives”; the books whose pages are imbued with our own experiences, our lives, convictions, the times in which we live, all kinds of things.

Many things can be deduced from a translation; and let us not forget, readers are also translators. The Wizard of Oz, for example, was my favorite children’s book. Much later I found out that the book had traveled from the Russian to Yugoslavia and the rest of the East European world, and that it wasn’t written by a certain A. Volkov (who had “adapted” it), but by the American writer Frank L. Baum. The first time I went to Moscow (way back in 1975) I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had turned up in a monochrome Oz, and that I, like Toto, just needed pull back the curtain to reveal a deceit masked by the special effects of totalitarianism. Baum’s innocent arrow pierced the heart of a totalitarian regime in a way the arrows of Soviet dissident literature never could.

Every translation is a miracle of communication, a game of Chinese Whispers, where the word at the start of the chain is inseparable from that exiting the mouth of whomever is at the end. Every translation is not only a multiplication of misunderstandings, but also a multiplication of meanings. Our lungs full, we need to give wind to the journey of texts, to keep watch for the eccentrics who send messages in bottles, and the equally eccentric who search for bottles carrying messages; we need to participate in the orgy of communication, even when it seems to those of us sending messages that communication is buried by the din, and thus senseless. Because somewhere on a distant shore a recipient awaits our message. To paraphrase Borges, he or she exists to misunderstand it and transform it into something else.

2.

According to data from the International Organization for Migration, the number of migrants has increased from 150 million in 2000 to an estimated 214 million today, meaning that migrants make up 3.1 percent of the world’s population. Migrant numbers vary drastically from country to country: In Qatar, 87 percent of the population are migrants; in the UAE, 70 percent; Jordan, 46 percent; in Singapore, 41 percent. As a percentage, Nigeria, Romania, India, and Indonesia have the lowest numbers of migrants. Women make up 49 percent of the migrant population. Among the migrant population, 27.5 million are categorized as displaced persons, and 15.4 million as refugees. If all migrants were settled in a single state, it would be the fifth most populous in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia, but ahead of Brazil. It’s a fair assumption that in this imagined migrant state, there would be at least a negligible percentage of writers, half of whom would be women.

Writers who have either chosen to live in the ON-zone, or been forced to seek its shelter, need more oxygen than that provided by translations into foreign languages alone. For a full-blooded literary life, such writers need, inter alia, an imaginary library — a context in which their work might be located. Because more often than not, such work floats free in a kind of limbo. The construction of a context — of a literary and theoretical platform, a theoretical raft that might accommodate the dislocated and de-territorialized; the transnational and a-national; cross-cultural and transcultural writers; cosmopolitans, neo-nomads, and literary vagabonds; those who write in “adopted” languages, in newly-acquired languages, in multiple languages, in mother tongues in non-maternal habitats; all those who have voluntarily undergone the process of dispatriation¹—much work on the construction of such a context remains.

In Writing Outside the Nation,² some ten years ago Azade Seyhan attempted to construct a theoretical framework for interpreting literary works written in exile (those of the Turkish diaspora in Germany, for example), works condemned to invisibility within both the cultural context of a writer’s host country (although written in German) and that of his or her abandoned homeland. This theoretical framework was transnational literature. In the intervening years, several new books have appeared,³ and the literary practice of transnational literature has become increasingly rich and diverse. There are ever more young authors writing in the languages of their host countries: Some emigrated with their parents, and speak their mother tongue barely or not at all; others (for cultural and pragmatic, or literary and aesthetic reasons) have consciously exchanged their mother tongues for the language of their hosts. Some write in the language of their host countries while retaining the mental blueprint of their mother tongue, giving rise to surprising linguistic mélanges; others create defamiliarizing effects by mixing the vocabulary of two or sometimes multiple languages. Changes are afoot not only within individual texts, but also in their reception. The phenomenon of literary distancing is one I myself have experienced. Although I still write in the same language, I can’t seem to follow contemporary Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian literature with the ease I once did. I get hung up on things local readers wouldn’t bat an eyelid at. I sense the undertones and nuances differently than they do, and it makes me wonder about the “chemical reaction” that takes place inside the recipient of a text (in this case, me) when cultural habitat, language, and addressee have all changed. My relationship toward the canonic literary values of the “region” has also changed. Texts I once embraced wholeheartedly now seem laughably weak. My own literary modus changed in the very moment I was invited to write a column for a Dutch newspaper. That was in 1992. I was temporarily in America, war raged in my “homeland,” and the addressee of my columns was — a Dutch reader.

I don’t know whether it’s harder to articulate the ON-zone or to live it. Cultural mediators rarely take into account contemporary cultural practice, in which, at least in Europe, “direct producers” co-locate with a sizable cultural bureaucracy — from national institutions and ministries of culture, to European cultural institutions and cultural managers, to the manifold NGOs active in the sector. The cultural bureaucracy is primarily engaged in the protection and promotion of national cultures, in enabling cultural exchange. The bureaucracy writes and adheres to policy that suits its own ends, creating its own cultural platforms, and rarely seeking the opinion of “direct producers.” Let’s be frank with each other, in the cultural food chain, “direct producers” have become completely irrelevant. What’s important is that cultural stuff happens, and that it is managed: Publishers are important, not writers; galleries and curators are important, not artists; literary festivals are important (events that prove something is happening), not the writers who participate.

Almost every European host country treats its transnational writers the same way it treats its immigrants. The civilized European milieu builds its immigrants residential neighborhoods, here and there making an effort to adapt the urban architecture to the hypothetical tastes of future residents, discreet “orientalization” being a favorite. Many stand in line to offer a warm welcome. Designers such as the Dutch Cindy van den Bremen, for example, design their new Muslim countrywomen modern hijabs — so they’ve got something to wear when they play soccer, tennis, or take a dip at the pool. The hosts do all kinds of things that they’re ever so proud of, while it never occurs to them that maybe they do so not to pull immigrants out of the ghetto, but rather to subtly keep them there, in the ghetto of their identities and cultures, whatever either might mean to them; to draw an invisible line between us and them, and thus render many social spheres inaccessible. It is for this very same reason that the publishing industry loves “exotic” authors, so long as supply and demand are balanced. Many such authors fall over themselves to ingratiate themselves with publishers — what else can they do? And anyway, why wouldn’t they?

Does transnational literature have its readers? And if it does, who are they? Publishers have long since pandered to the hypothetical tastes of the majority of consumers, and the majority’s tastes will inevitably reject many books as being culturally incomprehensible. If the trend of “cultural comprehensibility”—the standardization of literary taste — continues (and there’s no reason why it won’t), then every conversation about transnational literature is but idle chatter about a literary utopia. And anyway, how do we establish what is authentic, and what is a product of market compromise? Our literary tastes, the tastes of literary consumers, have in time also become standardized, self-adjusting to the products offered by the culture industry. Let’s not forget: The mass culture industry takes great care in rearing its consumers. In this respect, transculturality has also been transformed into a commercial trump card. In and of itself, the term bears a positive inflection, but its incorporation in a literary work needn’t be any guarantee of literary quality, which is how it is increasingly deployed in the literary marketplace. Today that marketplace offers a rich vein of such books, almost all well-regarded, and their authors, protected by voguish theoretical terms — hybridity, transnationality, transculturality, postcolonialism, ethnic and gender identities — take out the moral and aesthetic sweepstakes. Here, literary kitsch is shaded by a smoke screen of ostensible political correctness, heady cocktails mixing East and West, Amsterdam Sufis and American housewives, Saharan Bedouins and Austrian feminists, the burqa and Prada, the turban and Armani.

And where are my readers? Who’s going to support me and my little homespun enterprise? In the neoliberal system, of which literature is certainly part and parcel, my shop is doomed to close. And what happens then (as I noted at the beginning) with my right to defend my texts from the constraints of political, national, ethnic, and other ideological projections? My freedom has been eaten by democracy — that’s not actually a bad way to put it. There are, in any case, any number of parks in which I can offer speeches to the birds. What is the quality of a freedom where newspapers are slowly disappearing because they’re not able, so the claim goes, to make a profit; when departments for many literatures are closing, because there aren’t any students (i.e., no profit!); when publishers unceremoniously dump their unprofitable writers, regardless of whether those writers have won major international awards; when the Greeks have to sell the family silver (one of Apollo’s temples in Athens is rumoured to be going under the hammer); when the Dutch are fine with closing one of the oldest departments for astrophysics in the world (in Utrecht), because it turns out that studying the sun is unprofitable.

“Things are just a whisker better for you, because like it or not, at least you’ve got a kind of marketing angle. But me, I’m completely invisible, even within my own national literature,” a Dutch writer friend of mine kvetches. And I mumble to myself, Christ, my brand really is a goodie — being “a Croatian writer who lives in Amsterdam” is just the sexiest thing ever. But I understand what my Amsterdam acquaintance is going on about. And really, how does one decide between two professional humiliations — between humiliating invisibility in one’s “own” literary milieu, and humiliating visibility in a “foreign” one? The latter visibility inevitably based on details such as the incongruence between one’s place of birth and one’s place of residence, the color of one’s skin, or an abandoned homeland that has just suffered a coup d’état. My Dutch acquaintance isn’t far from the truth. Within the context of contemporary Dutch literature, or any other literature, where there is no longer any context; where there is no longer literature; where it is no longer of any importance whatsoever whether anyone reads books so long as they’re buying them; where it is no longer of any importance whatsoever what people read, as long as they’re reading; where the author is forced into the role of salesperson, promoter, and interpreter of his or her own work; only in such a deeply anti-literary and anti-intellectual context I am forced to feel lucky to be noticed as a “Croatian writer who lives in Amsterdam,” and what’s more, to be envied for it.

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!