Karaoke Culture

THE FLY

1.

It was like a mystical revelation. I remember it. Having cleared passport control, I was sitting in a café at the airport in Budapest waiting for my flight. OK, let’s not get carried away, it wasn’t a revelation, let alone a mystical one — more like the gentle prick of an acupuncture needle, the prick of recognition. Glancing idly at the contents in the display cabinet — sandwiches trying to become “European” and cakes fortunately trying to remain “Hungarian”—I saw it: a fly languidly meandering along the inside of the smeared plastic. The imaginary acupuncture needle hit a random spot and provoked a mental twinge, which sent the untranslatable Russian word rodnoe (roughly meaning kindred, close, familiar) flashing across my internal screen. Russian words don’t usually happen upon me out of the blue. This one dropped from my internal thesaurus like a burly winter fly.

Communism had fallen; Hungarians had flocked to newly-opened shopping centers; IKEA furniture had begun its occupation of Hungarian homes; the grand houses of Budapest had ditched their dilapidated façades and slipped on crisp new ones; unsightly communist sculptures had been shunted to the distant Memento Park. But the fly, it was as if the sprays of transition hadn’t even come close. It sauntered past like a middle finger aimed at transition enthusiasm. I hate insects, the lot of them, but contemplating this Hungarian fly, a légy, I felt a wholly ambiguous feeling of conciliation. I swear it was only later that I read somewhere about the fly as protector of the balance of Mother Nature, and about the special place it occupies in American Indian mythology.

Not long afterwards I traveled to Warsaw. Once again at an airport café, my gaze wandered over the food display, and there it was: this time a Polish fly, its little legs languidly crawling along inside the plastic cabinet. Myxa, moucha, mucha, muva, muha. . Sofia, Krakow, Prague, Warsaw, Belgrade, Skopje, Moscow, Zagreb, Sarajevo. . With a practiced eye, I now searched it out in the cafés of Central and Eastern European airports, and each time I spotted it, I’d feel the same ambiguous sense of relief. Eastern Europe is not lost. The fly is here. Everything is in its place. Something like that.

2.

Literary festivals criss-cross the European continent. Today, even the smallest European towns and cities have their own literary festival, and every writer in Europe, whoever he or she may be, is deluged with invitations. Even if a writer decides not to attend, sending off polite refusal letters takes more time than grabbing a suitcase and jetting off for a couple of days in Köln, Mantua, or Ohrid. Festival organizers treat writers like penniless tourists, or at any rate, like people who are happy to flit from one place to the next in search of a little gratification. Festivals are a chance for writers to get out from behind their desks, or to spend a few days somewhere they’d never go of their own accord, or to meet readers and do a little work on their chronically tattered self-confidence — or, as is most often the case, all of the above. At literary festivals the writer is putty in the hands of the youthful organizers, who, kitted out with mobile phones and little headsets, can barely remember the writer’s name. So writers wander around with little name badges pinned to their lapels. With a well-practiced eye, your interlocutor’s gaze flicks down to your name tag, snaps your surname in a second, and then glances back up, looking at you like you’ve known each other forever.

All the activities at literary festivals are geared towards festival visitors, the potential reading public. Random people come up to you with a photo they’ve downloaded from the Internet asking for your autograph, although, incidentally, you barely recognize yourself. The photo was of course taken and uploaded by some chancer who had never entertained the idea of asking permission. You wonder why they want the autograph, and what any of this has to do with literature, so at first you refuse, but a second later you reproach yourself for your arrogance, and resignedly sign your name. And then there are the autograph cranks with their bits of paper, notepads, and programs: Yes, there, please, next to where your name is printed, yep, below’s fine too. During your appearance — either on your own or as part of group, where you have two minutes to explain who and what you are, and five minutes to read something — the mobile phone generation sit holding their phones above their heads, and snap away at random, taking pictures of who knows what and God knows why. Then, transfixed, they start fiddling with their slinky toys, caressing the display, tapping away as if they’re solving a mathematical puzzle, flashing pictures to each other for a quick peek. Then there are those who come up holding a copy of your book. You’re nicer to them, like a teacher with her star pupils, only to realize in the next breath that they’ve got you mixed up with someone else. If you correct them, an apologetic, slightly derisory smile flickers across their faces: They never thought you’d be so sensitive!

The majority, however, just come to check you out: what you look like, how you speak, how you hold yourself, whether you match the picture they’ve created of you — assuming they even have one at all. Some come to learn a little about where you’re from, others to reminisce about a distant holiday (Yes, we went there one summer, a beautiful island, Hu..ar! Hvar? Yes, yes, Hvar!). Some of them gawk at your shoes, others at your outfit. With all the staring, you feel a dizzy spell coming on and clutch at a copy of your book, as if it were a railing that could save you from a possible fall.

Most people attend literary festivals out of a childlike curiosity about creativity (How does that work, you just sit down and write a novel?! What inspired you to become a writer? Are you more creative in the morning or in the evening? How long does it take you to write a novel?) You and your writerly persona are second fiddles; it’s all about the secret of creativity, whose chance flag bearer you are — I mean, you’ve got the proof, haven’t you? For crying out loud, it’s right there in front of your nose, bound in your book.

The secret of creativity is where the fundamental misunderstanding between writer and festival visitor lies. As Joseph Brodsky wrote, “SEEN from the outside, creativity is the object of fascination or envy; seen from within, it is an unending exercise in uncertainty, and tremendous school for insecurity.” [1] And there, right there, is where the mutual disappointment lies. A writer doesn’t appear at a literary festival out of geographical curiosity, but is driven by an internal search for the ideal reader, one whose words will salve, who’ll say that the architectonics of her novels leave him or her as breathless as the Hagia Sophia; that her dialogues are more graphic than Carver’s; that the dynamics of her novelistic texture are awe-inspiring, on a par with the overwhelming awe one feels at the sight of New York’s Grand Central Station. But instead of the desired ego-stroker, the writer encounters a shrinking violet who thrusts a bit of paper under her nose in the hope of receiving a lame autograph. It turns out that he or she, our festival visitor, wasn’t on a desperate mission to meet a writer, but someone whose words would salve, who’d say that every life, however insignificant it seems to its owner, is worthy of description; that each of us has a hidden creative wellspring, we just need to let it flow; that life’s truths are more important than a writer’s bag of tricks. Instead, the festival visitor encounters a person who is evidently insecure, who clings to his or her own book like a handrail, and who obviously hasn’t seen a fashion magazine in at least fifteen years. And on that subject, it’s high time he or she got a new haircut.

3.

Romanians, both young and middle-aged, like to wear their hair tied back in a long ponytail. My translator, an anorexic thirty-something, had a silky blonde one. Rake-thin, he rolled matchstickish cigarettes, chain-smoking one after the other, his English that of a born and bred American. Parading his feathers in front of me, this young man was well-informed about everything and anything, as if he’d spent the past few months glued to the Internet. Yet for all his eloquence, there was also an old-fashioned jitteriness there, a kind of “tubercular” excitability. He dusted the general dreariness of the surroundings with words, as if his mouth were a snow machine. I spent the two days at a Bucharest literary festival surrounded by a similar crowd. But looking past their faces, eyes, shoulders, and voices, I managed to catch a glimpse of other chance details: the ramshackle streets, peeling façades, the ubiquitous and nonchalant packs of stray dogs who gave the impression that they, and not humans, were the true masters of the city.

I also felt a strong yet vague sense of absence. Of what I wasn’t exactly sure, but it felt like I was walking around a graveyard that was just pretending to be a city. Being in Bucharest was like finding myself in the not-so-distant past, in the already-vanished Eastern European intellectual everyday, a world permeated with tobacco smoke, alcohol, intellectual excitability, and the inevitable bitterness; a world where the smell of betrayal, like naphthalene, hung in the air, but also where people still dreamed dreams of art that would change the world. The faces around me were shot through with the sum total of despair, because everyone carried his or her own, a world of sudden ascents to arrogance and headlong falls into inferiority. I didn’t understand the language, but knew well what people were talking about.

On the last day of October, sitting in an airport café in Bucharest and waiting for a flight to Istanbul, I spotted it again out of the corner of my eye. A muscă, a fly, crept along my chair and jumped onto the rim of my coffee cup, anchoring itself there, frozen. It was early in the morning, and my lower back hurt from sleeping in a guesthouse bed so low and narrow you would have thought it was for a child. Even the bathroom mirror was hung lower than normal. In my nostrils I could still smell the old sewers and the sulfurous stench that had filled my room.

Why, today, more than ever, does Eastern Europe really look like Eastern Europe, as if it was trying to fit the stereotypes others have created of it? The further it moves towards the West, the more it remains in the East. Or is it perhaps the other way around? Does the East today look more like the West than the West is prepared to admit? And is my gaze an eastern or western one?

I wandered, dazed and confused, around the vanished system of coordinates. East and West definitely no longer exist. In the meantime, the world has split into the rich, who enrich themselves globally, and the poor, who are impoverished locally. A well-heeled English friend of mine recently spent a summer holiday on an exclusive Thai island. The nature over there, he said, really is pristine and untouched, but the island itself is overrun with wealthy Russians. “It was great,” he said. “I got to brush up my rusty Russian.”

I proceed towards the boarding gate for Istanbul. From the lip of my coffee cup, the muscă, the fly, watched me leave. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me.

4.

Insects creep merrily through the literary, musical, and visual texts of the Eastern European cultural zone as in the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic. Kafka’s emblematic Metamorphosis doesn’t even scratch the surface of the insect-inspired artistic corpus: cockroaches, fleas, bedbugs, and flies are everywhere. For a start, there’s Mayakovsky’s drama The Bedbug and Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons, from which Captain Lebyadkin’s poem “The Cockroach” (’Tis of a cockroach I will tell. .) was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Sticking with music, there’s also Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee” and Béla Bartók’s “From the Diary of a Fly.” In the area of poetry, generations of Russian children know Korney Chukovsky’s “The Clattering Fly” (Mukha-Tsokotukha) by heart, not to mention his short story “The Giant Roach” (Tarakanishche), in which the “roachzilla” title character is actually thought to be Stalin. In Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel White Robes (Beliye Odezhdi), a character named Xavier appears as a cockroach, while his more contemporary countryman Victor Pelevin has a novel entitled The Life of Insects (Zhizn’ nasekomyh). Long before Pelevin, the Čapek brothers, Karel and Josef, wrote the allegorical Ze života hmyzu, itself often translated as The Life of Insects. Even when “Easterners” switch cultural zones, there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll shake their fascination with flies. The Serbian-American poet Charles Simic published a memoir entitled A Fly in the Soup.

Ilya Kabakov’s Life of a Fly project consisted of sketches, albums, and installations on the theme of the fly. It also included an authorial hoax, which included brief notes on the role of the fly in art, politics, economics, music, and philosophy and the fabricated comments of fictitious visitors to the exhibition. One of the installations is entitled “My Homeland” (Moya rodina): in a cavernous empty space a swarm of flies buzzes through the air towards the ceiling.

Culturally and linguistically (at least in Slavic languages) the fly carries any number of negative connotations: the fly is insignificant (I’ll squash you like a fly!); hasn’t a shred of dignity (Where can a fly go but to the shit!); is stupid and irrational (He goes around like headless fly!); is ubiquitous, annoying, and boring (Boring as a fly!); and is inevitably associated with poverty, decay, and chaos. As Boris Groys writes, although Kabakov sees Russia as “a country of rubbish and flies” (“strana musora i muh”), he leaves the symbolic nature of the fly open. For every negative connotation, a fly could equally serve as a symbol of freedom, “soul,” and spirituality (an angel in the diminutive?). It could be an “archeologist;” a guardian of memories and of continuity (because wherever there are “rubbish” and ruins, there are also flies); an emissary between worlds; a comic symbol of the relativization of all values (it sits on both the dung heap and the Czar’s crown); a standard-bearer for the re-evaluation of closed meanings, clichés, and hierarchies; a constant human companion who sees through non-human eyes.

5.

The Istanbul festival set was worlds apart from its Bucharest counterparts. Young management and translation studies students, volunteers, hovered everywhere. I was involved in two events: the first was in a restaurant with a spectacular view of the Bosphorus, where we sat jammed in a corner doing our best to ignore the encroaching restaurant noise. The festival organizer read excerpts from our books in Turkish, each writer getting about two or three minutes. Apart from the student volunteers, there were actually only two spectators in the audience, although I couldn’t help thinking they might be the organizer’s mother and aunt. The other reading was in an Istanbul literary café. The audience of volunteers, relatives, and friends was almost identical. The two Turkish writers, one on either side of me, were particularly impressive. In his black Armani suit and black T-shirt, the shaven-headed young guy looked like a male model, his young countrywomen, a new corporate literary star — Manolo Blahnik shoes and frosted-blond Hilary Clinton hair — the perfect match. Both of them had a superior stage presence, but the enviably muscular self-confidence of the young Turkess set her apart. Everything was the way it should have been: there were writers, local and foreign, the odd literary agent, the odd publisher, the odd ambitious and American-educated local editor. The event had everything — except an audience, mutual curiosity, books, and literature.

An old Russian writer and I sat in the hotel lobby kvetching about it all.

“To be honest, it’s really all the same to me,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’d just like to keep traveling while I still can, to write this or that while I’ve still got the juice in me. .” The phrase while I’ve still got the juice in me had an indecent, almost pornographic, ring. I didn’t respond. With a flirtatious kick, he got up and hobbled off towards the lift.

At an alfresco restaurant near our hotel a Bulgarian writer friend and I sat down and had a kvetch about it all too. He showed me a gorgeously illustrated picture book for which he’d written the text. It was the story of a fly that buzzed about everywhere, for the most part through European historical epochs.

“We wanted to capture a fly’s distinctive perspective,” said the friend, referring to himself and the illustrator.

“If it’s a fly’s perspective, then why is it making a school primer out of European history? It’s as if the fly is the class geek, and not a fly. .”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“That aside, do flies really land on masterpieces of European art like Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper? I mean, as a fly, surely you could’ve chosen something else, right?”

“It landed on a plate on the table. . there it is, there. .” said my friend sheepishly.

“Flies are conformists. .” I said, taking a mollifying tone. “But why then would you want a fly’s perspective!? Isn’t a fly just a means of transport for your perspective?”

It was a sunny day, Istanbul was experiencing an Indian summer, we were eating baklava, the golden wasps of Istanbul buzzed overhead.

6.

“Hey, pretty lady, stop a while! Come and take a look at my rugs. .” shouts the broad-smiling squirt of a man beckoning me into his shop. I don’t have the slightest intention of stopping; I’m on my way back to the hotel after a day spent playing tourist. I’m exhausted, and can hardly wait to get under a hot shower and into bed. Besides, I know the whole bazaar hustle: if I even think about stopping, it’ll be tough to wriggle out.

No, please God, no way — I find myself obediently stopping, as if someone had zapped me with the TV remote.

“You don’t have to buy anything, come in, take a look around, we’ll have tea. .”

The Turk was in his thirties, and I wouldn’t have remembered him had it not been for the floppy dumbo ears planted on either side of his shaven head.

“I can come in, but as I already told you, I’m not going to buy anything. .” I say, though I hadn’t actually told him anything yet.

The Turk lifted his arm protectively as if he was going to wrap it around my shoulder, leading me into a spacious and elegant rug shop. He sat me down on a cushion-laden sofa, clicked his fingers, and voila, a cute little boy sprang out from somewhere with a tray carrying small glasses of Turkish apple tea.

“You really are very gracious, but I’m not a buyer. .” I said.

Not batting an eyelid, the Turk again clicked his fingers, pointed to one of the shelves and nodded his head, yep, that one. The boy pulled out a rug, skillfully unrolling it. For a moment I thought we were all extras in an ad or an Orientalist film.

The Turk lets his rug story unfurl. He tells of rugs from the Balkans to Pakistan, the differences between Bulgarian, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Egyptian, Israeli, Jordanian, and Indian rugs, of styles, shapes, stitches, knots, and fabrics, of wool, cotton, and silk, of thickness, length, and lustre. The boy is as agile as a gymnast, unrolling and re-rolling rugs in silence.

“There’s no point going to any effort, I’m not going to buy anything. .” I repeat.

“This is a magnificent, handmade piece. .”

“I doubt it’s handmade,” I said, slightly irritated.

“How do you know it’s not?”

“You can see from the underside. .” I bluff.

“You’re wrong, madame, you’re so terribly wrong. My mother wove this with her own hands,” said the Turk in a pained voice, as if I’d insulted him.

Choosing to let it go, he continued spinning a yarn about his mother who lives in a small village (his mother being a weaver, an artist, and the cornerstone of the family), about his brothers and sisters, about his family, family values, and his family lineage whose honesty is known far and wide.

“We’re in a recession — even if I wanted to, I couldn’t buy one,” say I, in lieu of an apology.

The Turk agrees, nods his head, turns the mother and family channel off and changes tack. Of course, yes, the recession, but you know a recession is exactly the right time to invest in things of lasting value; gold, paintings, precious rugs, that sort of thing. Rembrandt, Picasso, precious silk rugs, they’re all works of art. . And if you can’t afford a Picasso, why wouldn’t you buy yourself a rug?

“I know, but I’m not buying. .”

The Turk looks at me silently. I squirm on the sofa.

“I can’t. .” I add.

“And what, madame, do you do?”

Of course I hadn’t the slightest intention of telling him. Why would I tell him? I could invent any profession I like — tell him I was a waitress, for example.

“I’m a writer. .”

The Turk stops for a second and, for the first time, frowns a little, as if this wasn’t the answer he was expecting. With a theatrical wave of the hand, he dismisses the assistant.

“Do you write for a newspaper?”

Yes, I think; maybe it’s better to tell him I write for a newspaper. .

“I write books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Well, you know, novels, stories, and stuff. .”

He frowns again, as if rocked by unpleasant news, but recovers in a second and jovially declares. .

“I love novels too, and stories. . books should adorn every home, like rugs.”

“My book is in every bookstore in Istanbul; it’s been translated into Turkish,” I reply in a single breath, as if someone were forcibly dragging me along by my tongue.

“Bravo! Give me your name and the title, and I’ll buy it. . but did you know that rugs are books too?”

“No. .”

“All those fairytale heroes on flying carpets are actually flying on books, because actually, books are ‘the wings of imagination,’ are they not?”

The Turk hits a button on his invisible remote again. The boy reappears, unfurling rugs as if they were papyruses, laying them at my feet.

“There we go, madame, now tell me what they say,” the Turk demands.

“How am I supposed to read them?!”

“They’re all stories written by your sisters. And women being women, your sisters have woven all sorts of things into these rugs: young girls their dreams of love and marriage, young married women their dissatisfaction with impotent husbands and evil stepmothers, old grannies memories of their youth. Rugs are women’s diaries, you just need to know how to read them. But I see you’re illiterate in this area. You say you’re a writer, but you don’t know the alphabet.”

“Well, the script is different. .” I say.

“Look, this is bird, this is a wolf’s muzzle, a scorpion, a comb, an eye, a star, a snake, a burdock, an amulet. . Fruit usually means fertility, this zig-zag line denotes water and eternity, this eight-pointed star is divine, this Z-shaped line is light, a snake is wisdom, and a rose, as you know, usually means love. Having a rug with a tarantula in the house is excellent protection against all kinds of insects. . A horse means freedom, a peacock is a holy spirit, although truth be told, I can’t stand the bloody things. A camel is just another symbol of wealth and happiness, and a dog is a protector of the home, but that one you could’ve worked for yourself.

“A hen-pigeon, this one here, is an SMS from God, a snake usually means a win of some sort, and a fish happiness. . Of course, every symbol, every line and color can also mean something completely different. There’s no firm collective agreement on coded language. Because then it wouldn’t be coded, would it?”

“Of course not. .” I say.

“I hope your need to read all the feminist books in my shop is now clear?! Starting with this little pure silk rug — look at how it shines! And I’m going to give you an exercise to help. Just think of it as obligatory reading. It’s easy to carry, and the text is short. I won’t tell you what it says of course, you’ll have to work that out for yourself, but take my word for it, pretty lady, it’s perfect for you, perfect. If you don’t figure it out, use it as a mouse pad, put it on the wall, polish your shoes with it, do whatever you like, but buy it you must!” he says, his tone putting a full-stop on our conversation.

Pressed again the wall, I take out my credit card and, what do you know, I pay without further ado. In the shop doorway, the Turk palms his business card off on me.

“Will you write about me in one of your books” he asks, smiling broadly.

“Why would I?”

“So people find out about me and my rugs! All publicity’s good publicity.”

“I definitely will,” I mumble, glancing at the business card. Adem, his name is Adem.

Drained, I set off for the hotel. All I want is a hot shower and to slip into bed. On the way it occurred to me that he’d forgotten to ask for the Turkish title of my book. Oh Adem, you sly dog, you.

7.

That evening in the hotel room I unrolled the little rug of pure silk. I looked for the symbols and tried to crack the coded language. I couldn’t see a thing. I even gave it a little shake, thinking a message might fall out. I didn’t expect fortune-cookie-type wisdom, actually; I would have been happy with the standard, We’re sorry, all of our operators are currently unavailable. The rug, however, didn’t say boo. It was like a mobile phone with an empty battery. I flipped it over a few times, seeing if it would do the shiny trick. It didn’t. Adem was the battery charger, without him it simply didn’t “work.” I folded it up (it was about four A4 pages in size) and stuffed it in my suitcase. I paid 250 euro for a Turkish apple tea and a one-on-one literature lesson from an Istanbul rug merchant.

In the morning, at Istanbul Airport, waiting for a flight to Zagreb, I tried to piece together the random details of my travels (my fly’s hop: Bucharest-Istanbul-Zagreb). The pieces didn’t fit. I tried stitching them together with the metaphorical thread of the fly, but that didn’t work either; the thread broke, and the pieces flew everywhere. I thought about the navigation of reality; about how we interpret reality, stitches, colors, threads, and symbols; about how we read people, situations, and details; about perspectives; about how the language of reality, in which we normally swim like fish in water, can in a flash become terrifyingly unintelligible, and then, in another, worryingly self-explanatory. I kept thinking of Adem, the prince of liars, the teacher of optics and holograms, the master of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tricks, the philosopher king: Yes, madame, each of sees as much as we are given to see. .

Suddenly a Turkish fly landed on the edge of my coffee cup, a sinek, and I felt a strange sense of relief. I just sat there and watched it. I thought about the fact that I hadn’t managed to capture the substance of my travels, and I conceded defeat. Then I reassured myself with the idea that, who knows, maybe the point of everything we do isn’t in the capture, but rather in the hunt. And then, as unexpectedly as an unannounced fly, I remembered the lines of a Croatian nursery rhyme:

Three butchers tried to skin a fly’s hide

But hopping here, then hopping there,

The fly left them to chide and stare.

And as I headed off towards the gate for Zagreb, from the edge of the coffee cup, the sinek, the fly (an angel in the diminutive?), watched me go. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me.

December 2010

[1]Joseph Brodsky, “A Cat’s Meow,” in On Grief and Reason.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS

Upton Sinclair, author of the novel Oil!, would have stayed a half-forgotten American literary classic had there not been a film adaptation of the novel There Will Be Blood (2007), with the entrancing Daniel Day-Lewis in the main role, which briefly blew the dust off of Sinclair’s name.

Having seen the movie, I thought back to the shelf of books in my mother’s apartment and the book cover of the first Yugoslav edition of Oil!, which was titled Petrolej. There were pencil drawings all over the inside: those, said my mother, were my first childish scribblings. It was the time of post-war poverty, and the cover of a book doubled as a drawing pad. Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, Maxim Gorky’s The Mother, and Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy were not, perhaps, my mother’s favorite books, but they sold in the bookstores of post-war, socialist Yugoslavia. These and a few others were the first titles in the home library of my young parents.

I don’t remember whether I ever actually read Oil! Probably not, but if I did, back when I was a student — earnestly dedicated to comparative literature — I wouldn’t have dared say so out loud. At that time, defense of the “autonomy of the literary text” was something nearly sacred to every student of comparative literature, and I certainly perceived myself as battling on the front lines. In my student days “literary autonomy” was closely tied to values and literary taste. In simple terms, we felt that good writers did not embark on politics — or write about life in overly real terms. Real life was left to the bad writers and those who flirted with politics. “Literary” literature was “in.” The Yugoslav writers were never seriously infected with the virus of socialist realism, which does not mean, of course, that there weren’t those who compromised. But resistance to the tendency to ideologize and politicize in literature, despite the occasional line penned to glorify Tito, lasted unusually long after the enemy, socialist realism, was dead and buried. There were many good writers, thanks to this, who wrote fine books. There were bad writers, on the other hand, who were labeled “good” because they “didn’t get caught up in politics”; just as many good writers were deemed bad because they had no bone to pick with the regime, or at least didn’t do so publicly; just as there were bad writers who were deemed good only because they had taken a public stand against the regime. The fine Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, long since dead and buried, bears a stigma even today for his friendship with Tito.

Today, of course, I know that the connection between literature and “ideology” has been around since the beginnings of literacy. The Bible, the cornerstone of the European literatures, is not just a grandiose work of literature, it is a grandiose work of ideology. The history of the bond between literature and ideology is long, complex, and dramatic. Because of the written word, writers have lost their lives and been put to death. The history of the relations between emperors and poets, between leaders and court fools, between those who order literature and those who comply with the orders is too gory, the episodes of book burning and censorship too frequent, the number of writers’ lives given for the freedom of speech, for an idea, or even just a dream is too vast to allow taking this fatal historical combination lightly. The notion of literary autonomy served too often as an alibi for it to enjoy full validity: when they thought they had something to gain by it, there were writers who stepped into politics; others took on politics even when doing so led to symbolic or real suicide. Some, when they were looking to save their skins, sought the shield of literary autonomy, while others paid for their literary autonomy with their hides.

The tension between the two opposing poles — the political engagement of a writer and a writer’s autonomy — was particularly dramatic in the literatures of the former Eastern Europe, and even today, surprising as this may seem, it has still not lost its hold, although the context has changed in terms of the politics, ideas, and culture. The Eastern European literary environments were much more rigid than the Western European ones; in the Eastern European literary zones careers were destroyed because of the written word or, conversely, the writer was promoted to government minister. This is no different today, it seems, though it may seem to be different: state institutions continue to play the part of literary patron, albeit a bad and stingy patron, but there is barely any independent territory left. The writer in small post-communist states is still treated as the “voice of his people” or as a “traitor.” Why? For the simple reason that communism in transitional countries has been replaced by nationalism, and both systems have their eyes on writers. The literary marketplace is too small for the writer to maintain his belief that he is independent.

As I watched the movie There Will Be Blood, I thought back to the soc-realist Yugoslav design of the book cover for Petrolej. I tried to bring to memory the many Yugoslav writers who were not fortunate enough to survive the shift from socialism to nationalism, to reposition themselves nationally, thereby ensuring themselves a place on the bookshelves of the national literature. Some of them tried, and survived a year or so longer, slipping through the eye of the needle. Many of the losers, along with their collected works and mountains of scribbled pages, however, sank into the dust of oblivion. Young writers, and with them the young literary critics and theoreticians, showed no compassion; they must have figured this wasn’t their story. Today is, after all, another time, life is proceeding at a rapid clip, literature is a time-investment which for most of us does not provide anything more than aching joints and bankruptcy, but it is a lottery which brings the lucky winner the jackpot. The young rush out to buy lottery tickets and don’t ask too many questions. How is it, for instance, that the writers who were dissidents in their communist states, are so quick to accept posts in ministries, embassies, or elsewhere in the new democra-tatorships? How is it that today, in one way or another, everyone continues to live on government handouts? How is it that those who once pressed so fiercely for autonomy in literature are now demanding that their state institutions underwrite culture (hence literature), thereby implicitly agreeing that they won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

All in all, culture in small countries was never viable on the market, nor could it have been. That is why writers from small countries, whether they like it or not, are condemned to act as representatives for their country, whether the state be Croatia, Serbia, Estonia, or Latvia; either that or they are labeled “traitors” and live abroad. One often goes hand in hand with the other. Even international literary stars, who have long since left their home literatures behind, changing the language they write in as they go, are not immune to the righteous fury of the homeland. The recent incident with Milan Kundera only confirms that the Czech republic is a small country and that the model for traumatic back-and-forth between literature and ideology is unchanged. The not so distant example of Salman Rushdie confirms that religion can be an equally rigid ideology, and that writers, no matter where they live, are still vulnerable to being branded usurpers of religious taboos, with the attendant life-threatening consequences. And a very recent interview with Ismail Kadare shows the unfortunate duality and hypocrisy of the literary position: every year Albania nominates Kadare for the Nobel Prize, yet Kadare is an Albanian dissident, a writer who denies the connection between politics and literature, and still he himslef comes back to that dangerous liaison, re-warming his own trauma and reinforcing it as his own niche of literary identification.

The question arises: Is it possible to step out of the hellish circle, where the autonomy of a literary text is only another name for politicization, and politicization is only another name for autonomy? How does the relationship to a text change when the context changes?

Exile is literally a change of context. Exile implies the personal experience of every exilee, which would be difficult to subsume under terms that are stubbornly endorsed by literary critics from both worlds, the writer’s home base and the host environment. The terms—émigré, immigrant, exile, nomad, minority, ethnic, hybrid literature—discriminate, but they are also affirmative. With these terms the home base expels the writer, while the same terms are used by the host environment to relegate the writer to an ethnic niche, and at the same time affirm his or her existence. The home base makes assumptions of monoculturalism and exclusivity, while the host environment make assumptions of multiculturalism and inclusivity, but both are essentially working with dusty labels of ethnicity and the politics of otherness. Even if I were to write a text about the desolation of frozen landscapes at the North Pole, I would still be chiefly labeled as a Croatian writer, or as a Croatian writer in exile writing about the desolation of the frozen landscapes at the North Pole. Reviewers would promptly populate the frozen wasteland of my text with concepts such as exile, Croatia, ex-Yugoslavia, post-communism, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Slavic world, Balkan feminism, or perhaps Balkan eco-feminism, while journalists would ask me whether I had the opportunity while up in the frozen wasteland to run into the Yugoslav diaspora, and how I perceived the situation in Kosovo from that frozen vantage point. If an English writer writes his or her version of a visit to the North Pole, Englishness will not likely serve as the framework within which his or her text is read. This attitude of the host environment to writer-newcomers springs from a subconscious colonial attitude — just when the larger literary world is doing its best to reject this — in a market which relishes any form of the profitable exotic, what with the always vital relations between the periphery and the center. The concepts of periphery and center are, however, elastic; I am sure that Serbs feel closer to the center than do the Bulgarians, and the Bulgarians feel closer to the center than do the Turks. Feelings, however, are one thing and real relations of power are something else. The real center of power is America, or rather Anglo-American culture, whose cultural domination marked the twentieth century. We are still looking to that center with equal fascination today. Anglo-American culture is the dominant field of reference, while, at the same time, it is the most powerful, if not the most just, mediator of cultural values. In other words, if certain Chinese writers are not translated into English, it is unlikely that any Serbian or Croatian reader, with the exception of the occasional sinologist, will ever hear of them.

The relationship to a literary text changes, of course, with a change of language. There are many examples of writers who embraced the language of their host-country, yet by doing so they did not manage to protect their texts from manipulative readings, but there is an even larger number of writers who, writing in the language of the host country, seek a special ethnic-religious hybrid status for themselves, because only this status will afford them a recognizable, profitable niche. There are also writers who protected their literary text from burdensome and often incorrect readings; they enriched the literary community in which they found themselves, becoming an indivisible part of it. All in all, an opposition asserts itself here, this time the opposition between the autonomy of the literary text and its critical reception and market manipulation (having said that the market is not without its political aspirations) in the new context of the internationalization of literary texts and transnational literature. This is still the realm of literature as we know it, with its tradition, canons, apparatus, institutions, with its system of values. Here we still know, or at least we approximately know, what it is we are talking about when we speak of literature.

The first Croatian-Serbian edition of Sinclair’s Petrolej is sound asleep on the bookshelf in the apartment of my eighty-two-year-old mother. My mother’s grandchildren, of course, have no clue about who Upton Sinclair is. But Grandma knows. Then again Grandma, of course, has no clue who Daniel Day-Lewis is. The grandchildren do. Her grandchildren speak SMS and they mostly read text messages, but they do have a culture of their own. Literature holds no place at all in that culture, unless it’s a part of a mass media package. Take Harry Potter, for instance: the movie, the games, the T-shirts, the consumer planet in miniature. As it leaps from the national to the international, literature enters its third context, the powerful global zone of the mass media. In that context literature, or rather its assumptions, dissolves, vanishes, or transmutes into something else. Bookstores are full of books; the chains are reminiscent of supermarkets, there are more translations of books than ever before, more literary awards than ever before; literary festivals are suddenly key points for the popularization of books; there are writers being lauded like pop stars — all of which suggests that things have never been better for writing. However, the culture of the literary form is on the wane. The space in the papers given over to reviews is disappearing, just as the papers themselves are. Literary life is moving onto the Internet. Books circulate through movies (movie screenplays published as books sell better than the books they are based on), through audio recordings, mobile phones. An unruly form of literature is alive and well, democratic, unstructured, extra-institutional, rejecting hierarchy, functioning in the digitalized literary realm, and this powerful literary underground will push literature as we have known it, with all the attendant apparatus, even further out onto the margins. Perhaps, in the digital galaxy, a redefined novel will arise which erases authorship, national and linguistic borders, ethnic identities, hierarchies of evaluation, and literary tradition. Or maybe it won’t. Literature is merchandise which, with each passing day, is losing its appeal.

Writers, and the people who publish books, will have to face the change in status. As they postpone facing the music, writers rush off to the last remaining haven, the national Academies of Science and Art, which provide a secure institution for national values and a slightly more secure life in retirement. Such writers are about to become extinct, but they are not necessarily the ones who will lose out in the end. All of us, whoever we are, find ourselves in a new time in whicha premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading.[1]

Imagine contemporary literature as a mega-marathon in which all the gender, age, ethnic, and racial groups are welcome and, in principle, “equal.” An elderly participant runs toward the finish line bearing a porcelain vessel, certain that the vessel holds something precious. The precious cargo, of course, is literature, literature as art no less. But it is altogether possible that the race, the exhausting marathon, the symbolic vessel, and literature as art — that these are tragicomically misplaced assumptions. Because it is entirely possible that the marathon runner is running in place without even noticing it, or even going backwards. And even if she does reach the imagined finish line, and delivers the vessel with its precious cargo intact, she may find out that the vessel holds no more than water soup. The only comfort is that all the marathon runners are subject to the same risk.

March 2009

[1]Colin Robinson, “Diary,” London Review of Books, February 26, 2009.

THE SPIRIT OF THE KAKANIAN PROVINCE

An Inner Map

Provincial train stations with their apricot-hued façades and window boxes of pelargonia (take a train from Zagreb to Budapest!), architecture (hospitals, bureaucratic buildings, schools, theaters), cuisine (sacher torte, cabbage and noodles, Kaiserschmarrn, Tafelspitz, dumplings, and poppy-seed noodles), city parks, and the Czech last names sprinkled through the Viennese telephone directory (like poppy seeds on a kaiser roll) — these are not the only ways to recognize a Kakanian landscape.

I am no expert on the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, I hardly even rank as an amateur, but I have a sense that the monarchy stamped a watermark on the souls of its subjects, an internal landscape, the coordinates of periphery and center. The center became aware of itself thanks to the periphery, the periphery grew to know itself thanks to the center. One went from the provinces to Vienna for the opera, to Budapest to buy the latest hats. After all wasn’t it a child of the periphery, a postman’s son from Sarajevo, who shot Kakania in the head, and afterwards things in Europe were never the same?

The Croatian Kakanian Novel

Croatia lay on the outskirts of Austro-Hungary. I don’t know much about the times, but I do recall a few odds and ends from the history of Croatian letters. I remember, for instance, that the protagonists of Croatian novels at the turn of the last century studied in Vienna, Prague, or Budapest, and that aside from Croatian, they used German, Hungarian, or Czech. The detail that a person went off to Vienna to study caught my youthful fancy; it seemed so noble, though it is also true that the characters in these novels could barely make ends meet. And if these protagonists were writers, as some were, their poems were occasionally published in Prague, Budapest, or Viennese publications, to the envy of their milieu. That, too, had a noble ring. The Kakanian metropoli have long since lost their attraction and pizzazz. The center moved elsewhere. I’m guessing that today’s writers in Prague, Budapest and Vienna envy the rare compatriot whose name appears as a contributor in the New Yorker.

While I was leafing through a few Croatian Kakanian novels (which I’d last cracked in high school), I felt I was working not with literary texts but genes. It was like discovering something we have always known but failed to attend to, like discovering a birthmark exactly where it was on our parents, children, grandchildren. At the same time, the literary critic in me grumbled while reading the ongoing episodes of these provincial literary soap operas, which have been going on for a century. Ah, picking up old books again is so often a disappointment.

I will say something about these novels in thumbnail sketches, as befits them, like the episodes of TV soap operas, or teletext. All the examples come from the Croatian literary canon and are required reading in high school. At their center there is invariably a male protagonist, and his life’s destiny is told in first or third person. The structure of the novel follows a type, like the window-box pelargonia of Austro-Hungarian railway stations. These literary heroes are distant relatives of Werther and Childe Harold, cousins to the Russian literary heroes, those who would be dubbed “superfluous” by literary critics after Turgenev’s The Diary of a Superfluous Man. The type — the high-strung, over-sensitive, educated misfit or outcast — such as Griboyedov’s Chatsky, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Turgenev’s heroes (Rudin, Lavrecki, the Kirsanovs, and Bazarov), Goncharov’s Oblomov and others — proliferated throughout the Slavic literatures and is exclusively the characteristic of the male literary lineage. The women in these novels belong to one of three varieties: a) the young, beautiful, noble, and patriotic girl, who is abandoned, as a rule, by the hero; b) the femme fatale (often foreign), who toys with the hero; c) the unloved, quiet “sufferer,” who follows the hero faithfully to the end of her days.

The First Suicide

The novel Janko Borislavić by Ksaver andor Gjalski was published in 1887 (we are already twenty years into Austro-Hungary at this point). The novel is a belated romantic work on “Faustian problems of the spirit,” as Croatian literary criticism of the day deemed it. Janko Borislavić is a Croatian landowner who, while studying abroad, is torn by doubts as to his course of study, theology, and returns to his estate in the Croatian Zagorje region. Here he falls in love with charming Dorica, though love, thinks Borislavić, is “fickle,” turning a “chaste, holy virgin” into nothing more than a “simple organ for prolonging the species.” Possessed by the “intellectualistic” restlessness of the period, steeped in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and, of course, a fear of women, Borislavić in his long internal monologues polemicizes passionately with the books he has read. He leaves Dorica and ventures into the world, where he spends six years, sinking into greater and greater disappointment. Human “stupidity” is “eternal and absolute” and everywhere.

“Ha, ha, for that you, my Diderot, Rousseau and you other unfortunates who were so gifted with human spirit, for this you wrote those volumes of wisdom! In vain your efforts, futile all that work. Ah, so stupid, stupid is the world.”

“Compelled by his Faustian nature, his inner fire, to track down the thousands of threads that compose the mysterious source of life,” Borislavić travels. He leaves Paris, disappointed (“Eighty years ago you shed so much blood, alas, my Frenchmen!”); he stops briefly in England, where he cannot bear the “stuffiness of human society which lies in wait implacably to thwart all progress and then it serves up peace for the human spirit.” From England he goes to America, but there he is put off by the “amalgam of inherited prejudices, the frenzy and struggle of individual wills and desires.” Upon his return from America he disembarks in Germany, like “vast barracks of philistine phalanges.” Borislavić returns to his native Zagorje, but here, as well, “human malice and stupidity revel in orgy.” Again he sets out on his journey, again he returns, he has a “nervous breakdown,” slits his wrists, and dies.

A Second Death

A somewhat later novel by Ksaver andor Gjalski, Radmilović (1894), has a similar plot. Here the hero, Marko Radmilović, is not destroyed by “world anguish” but by the environment of Zagreb, the place Radmilović comes to from the Croatian provinces. Radmilović publishes his poems and short stories in Czech, Polish, Russian, and other Slavic languages, they have even heard of him in Paris, but in Zagreb he is unknown and unrecognized.

“It is sad, so sad that such a writer is unknown!. . Had he been born in France, Russia or Germany, believe me, the whole world would have known of him. But he is only a Croatian writer, he works on the threshold to the Orient, at the fringes of Europe. . This could easily happen here with someone like Bourget, or another more vaunted celebrity. There is no such European or world fame which could so easily surmount our high wall, the wall of pervasive non-reading.”

Radmilović is insulted by the “cannabilistic persecutions” of his colleagues, an environment which holds that the literary calling is not worthy of respect and where there is no educated readership.

“—So, I tell you, were all our literary institutions to collapse, were all our writers to breathe their last, the gentlemen here would not fall silent for so much as a instant, or even notice that something was amiss! But were the German Leipzig Press to stop coming out, heaven forbid, with its Familienblatters, its Buch fur Alle, or its pound-a-novel publications such as Sibiriens Holle, these men would be despondent. . How many lovely Croatian women know the names of a Gundulić, a Mažuranić, a Preradović, how many of them would blush if you were to catch them unaware of Osman or Čengić?. . Ah — yet heaven forbid that you come across a single one who knows nothing of the German Elise Polko or Marlitt! — for this we struggle, day and night, for this we sacrifice peace of mind and a sure existence, health, everything! Oh, Lord, where do we find the will to keep working? — This work brings us no sustenance, gives us no moral or ethical reward, no fame, no benefit to the people. Why keep working at all?”

Radmilović rents a small room in a modest dwelling where a girl named Stanka lives with her ailing mother. Radmilović finds a sympathetic soul in Stanka, but falls in love instead with wealthy, frivolous, beautiful Olga. When Olga becomes engaged to a more profitable life partner, Radmilović plunges into despair. With Stanka’s help he completes his novel, The Sufferers. Radmilović and Stanka marry, leave Zagreb, and move to a provincial town. Though an attorney by profession, Radmilović finds work at a local attorney’s office as an ordinary legal clerk. When a publishing house decides not to bring out his new novel, Radmilović publishes it at his own expense, but the literary critics dismiss the novel with scorn. Radmilović burns his own book in a fit of pique, suffers a nervous breakdown, and soon dies in a madhouse.

The same writer, two of the same endings — a person undone, descending into madness and death. Let us continue on our way and see whether the Kakanian Croatian writers offer us a more cheerful novelistic resolution after the protagonist returns from the metropolis to his native provinces.

Two Worlds

The hero of Vjenceslav Novak’s Two Worlds (Dva svijeta, 1901), Amadej Zlatanić (the Croatian Mozart!), having been left early without parents, finds parental care and support in the local chaplain, Jan Jahoda (a Czech, of course). Jahoda discovers the boy’s remarkable musical talent and seeks a scholarship for him through the local authorities, so that Zlatanić can attend the Prague conservatory.

“Among the smaller peoples — and that means you, Croats — such natural talents are often lost both out of poverty and the lack of understanding by those who should be seeing to their education.” The local authorities turn down Jahoda’s request (“Pane Jahoda, our children are not made for such things. We leave this to you Czechs.”)

When Jahoda dies, Amadej sells his parental home for a pittance and goes to Prague, where he passes the entrance exam and enrolls at the conservatory. Amadej graduates from the conservatory with success, and his composition, entitled “Adelka” (the name of the girl waiting for him at home), is performed at the final student recital. With glowing reviews in the Prague papers and his diploma in his pocket, Amadej returns home full of hope and plans. He is given a modest salary as the local chaplain and marries Adelka. He sends his composition “Adelka” to Zagreb, but its performance receives bad reviews (“A homework assignment, in which the mostly familiar motifs have been reworked”). Amadej plunges into despair, his only solace being the appearance of Irma Leschetizky, the wife of a man involved in a future railway line (see, here are Austro-Hungarian railway lines and foreign women full of understanding!). Amadej spends more and more time with Irma. When Irma leaves, Adelka falls seriously ill. Amadej realizes he has been unfair to Adelka, the one person who is truly dedicated to him.

With the intention of relegating to “the shadows all arrogant talents” in town, the authorities introduce Rakovčić, a tambura player. Rakovčić’s tamburitza ensemble is far more draw for everyone than Amadej’s classical music.

“Mr. Z. played a Chopin piece on the piano which did not warm up the audience. Perhaps this does for the cold north, but in the warm south everything is more lush and heartfelt, even the music.”

Amadej loses his job, and it is given to Rakovčić the tambura player. Faced with poverty, Amadej gives private lessons. Irma Leschetizky speaks for Amadej in Berlin musical circles. Amadej is made an offer to sell his compositions to a Berlin publisher, but he must relinquish the copyright. Amadej refuses, but when Adelka’s health worsens, he sells his compositions to the Berlin publisher after all (“I go around the world, nameless, hence no one can see me.”) Adelka dies, Amadej loses his bearings, the local authorities lock him up in an asylum, and he soon dies.

Vjenceslav Novak develops a similar theme once more, but this time from the perspective of a theory, popular at the time, of heredity. In the novel Tito Dorčić (1906) he describes the sad fate of a fisherman’s son. Though all the people in Tito Dorčić’s family are fishermen, his father compels the boy to pursue a different path in life. He dispatches him to school in Vienna (again Vienna!), where Tito fritters away his days, utterly disinterested in his surroundings and the study of law. His father’s bribes propel him, somehow, through his studies, and he comes home and finds work as a local judge. The job does not interest him. His father’s efforts are finally undone when Tito, out of lack of ability and carelessness, condemns an innocent man to die. Dorčić goes mad and drowns in the sea, returning to where he belongs.

We can add here that the time of mass suicides in Europe came a decade or so later, inspired by the Great Depression and Rezső Seress’s hit “Szomoru Vasarnap.” As the story goes, Seress managed to infect not only Central Europeans but Americans with a Central European melancholy. Supposedly people threw themselves off of the Brooklyn Bridge after listening to Seress’s doleful hit in New York.

Another Suicide

Milutin Cihlar Nehajev’s novel Escape (Bijeg, 1909) is thought by Croatian critics to be the finest novel of Croatian Modernism. Đuro Andrijašević, the protagonist, throws away two years spent studying law in Vienna (Vienna again!); he returns to Zagreb, where he enrolls at the faculty and passes all the exams. All he has left to do is his doctoral dissertation. His uncle, who has been sending him monthly financial support, dies without leaving Đuro the anticipated inheritance. Andrijašević is engaged to Vera Hrabarova, but he fears he will lose her because of his unexpected financial woes. The history of Andrijašević’s fall begins the moment he finds a job as a teacher in a secondary school in Senj. Andrijašević finds everything in the small costal town boring and strange.

“It’s not that the people are bad, they are not repulsive. But they are empty, so horribly empty. And the same — one is like the next. They have nearly identical habits, they even drink the same number of glasses of beer.”

Andrijašević is not interested in the school and finds it difficult to write his dissertation. After waiting patiently for several years, Vera leaves him and becomes engaged to someone else. Andrijašević falls further and further into debt, spends all his time drinking and quarreling with a growing number of people, and is ultimately fired. In his last letter, which he sends to his one remaining friend, he hints at suicide.

“The only thing I feel is: I must put an end to this. I should escape altogether — flee from this life, so sickening, so disgraceful. . Surely you can see that I have always fled from life and people. I’ve never resisted — I have stepped aside. And when I came in contact with the life of our people, a life in poverty and straightened circumstances, I fled. I fled from myself, not wanting to see how I was plummeting; drinking, awaiting the end.”

Andrijašević, who “carries the tragedy of himself and others,” ends his life just as his literary predecessor Tito Dorčić did, drowning one night in the sea.

Upon hearing these brief statistics, a naïve reader might conclude that Croats in the late 19th and early twentieth century used the sea for nothing but drowning. Fortunately, tourism developed in the meanwhile, which has truly vindicated the deaths of these fictional victims and reversed the destructive opposition of metropolis — province, at least during the summer months, to the benefit of the provinces. This, of course, happened in reality, not in literature.

The novels The Return of Philip Latinowicz (Povratak Filipa Latinovicza, 1932) and On the Edge of Reason (Na rubu pameti, 1937) by Miroslav Krleža are the literary crown of the Croatian Kakanian literary dynasty. The central figure of Philip Latinowicz repeats the trajectory of his predecessors: he is a painter, forty years old, who returns to his native region, Pannonia, from Paris after having spent twenty-three years abroad. The hero of On the Edge of Reason describes how he is gradually being destroyed by Zagreb’s bourgeois environment, just as his literary predecessors were. Krleža’s novels can be read in all the Kakanian, and many other, languages, and this availability is the only reason why these lines about him amount to little more than a footnote. Miroslav Krleža de-provincialized Croatian literature, imposing exacting literary standards. These standards were rarely later attained by Krleža’s literary progeny, which is one of the answers to the question of why the canonical Krleža is still a despised writer in Croatia today. In an ideal literary republic, all other Croatian writers, including those mentioned above, would be nothing but a footnote — to Miroslav Krleža.

The Provinces — The Metropoli

Why am I dusting off old books that mean nothing to anyone except high-school Croatian-literature teachers? Literature is not a reliable aide in detecting the everyday life of an historical era, nor is that its job. Literature plays within its coordinates, its themes, its genres, its language, and even if readers recognize truth in it, this still does not elevate literature to the role of arbiter in questions of what is truth and what is a lie. All the prose examples given so far nevertheless ring with a strikingly similar tone, the same web of motives about the dislocation of the intelligent individual from the environment and his state of forever being torn between provinces and metropoli. The hero’s choice always favors a return to the homeland, the periphery, the provinces.

The stubborn permutation of the theme of a periphery that devours its young is made even more complex if we consider the real historical context, the way Croatia was torn between Austro-Hungary, their dream of independence, and a possible alliance of southern Slavs. Ksaver andor Gjalski’s now forgotten novel In the Night (U noći, 1886) is surprisingly close to the contemporary Croatian political life of these last twenty years. The reader wonders: in 1991, just as Croatia was becoming an independent state, did Croatian political life truly regress to Gjalski’s nineteenth century, or did it simply fail to move forward?

The self-pitying tone of the provinces resonates to this day. Perhaps the South Slavic states regressed by a century with the collapse of Yugoslavia, as if they were in a session of regressive psychotherapy. Or maybe they simply failed to move. They, too, are torn between options — pro-European versus anti-European positions, the Royalist versus the Democratic, a willingness to consider stronger alliances versus a more than glaring affiliation with religion, be it Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Islam.

The colonized mentality has clearly carried on beyond colonial times. Sometimes it seems as if a colonizer-boogeyman is constantly crouching among the inhabitants of the former Kakanian provinces, whether in the form of a Turk with fez and saber, or a Hungarian, an Austrian, an Italian, a German, a Bulgarian, fascists and communists, Russians, Serbs, Croats, foreign banks, foreign capital, domestic capital, the Chinese, corrupt politicians, the geographic position, loss in the geo-political lottery, fate, or celestial constellations. The imaginary acupuncture points on the imaginary national body always seem to respond in the same way. An unending delusion — about independence and freedom, flight from one trap to another, infantilism, immaturity, aggression, passivity, and submissiveness (when choosing between confrontation and comformism, they choose conformism) — all this situates the periphery as the historical victim. Seldom can one remain normal with such a psychogram, the best one can do is to sustain a semblance of normalcy.

The question remains whether socialist Yugoslavia managed to emancipate and de-provincialize the mindset of its citizens. Apparently it did. World War II had ended. Yugoslavia had come out of the war on the winning side, a victor, which was already in and of itself enough to help most citizens repair their self-image. Tito said his historic “NO” to Stalin. Unlike their communist neighbors, the Yugoslavs had passports in the 1960s, a better standard of living, and open borders. Free schooling, a university education, and self-betterment as fundamental values, a communist faith that knowledge is power, self-management, the non-aligned-nations movement, tourism, festivals of international theater and film, a lively publishing industry, a number of cultural centers (Belgrade — Zagreb — Sarajevo — Ljubljana), and the general impression that life was getting better from one year to the next — all this was the praxis of de-provincialization. And yet texts that broach the themes of better and worse worlds, the periphery and the center, kept right on appearing in the Yugoslav literatures. And why not add the detail: the passport. In order to contemplate the theme of periphery and center, the author needs a passport that would allow him to cross borders without obstruction. The Yugoslavs had such a passport.

People Who’d Rather Be Sleeping

The novel-essay My Dear Petrović (Dragi moj, Petroviću, 1986) by Milovan Danojlić consists of ten letters, arranged in chronological order, sent by Mihailo Putnik, a retired returnee from America, to his friend Steve Petrovich in Cleveland. Putnik writes the letters to help Petrovich, who is wondering whether or not he should return to the old country. The letter-writer sits every day in Domovina (meaning Homeland) Café, and the name of the town is Kopanja. Kopanja is a wooden trough for feeding swine.

“Dizzy from the fact that you aren’t needed,” in a place where “wasteland enters at one door, and boredom sneaks out another,” Mihajlo Putnik contemplates civilizations (“You and I no longer live in the same century,” writes Putnik to his friend), the backwardness, paralysis, gloom, and lackluster life of the Serbian provinces, claiming that the Earth orbits more slowly where he is from, and that there is a special “delight taken in deadening,” a “disease of sleeping,” “relish of neglect and deafness,” moments when you “forget where you were headed, what you were after, and you don’t want anyone reminding you of it.”

Putnik dissuades his friend from returning, claiming that what is drawing him back “is best cherished and held as memory.”

“There is no real life anywhere for you and me. It is tough there, it is tough here, it is toughest of all with yourself. The trick is choosing the toughness that suits you best right now. As far as I am concerned it would be best if you could stand at the same time in several places, here and there, on your native soil and abroad, in abundance and poverty, in freedom and constraint, and to pass through all that, experiencing the one, while gauging its opposite; to be with your people (because you love them) and yet far away (because you find them disturbing), to serve and be served, to have and have not, never to be in one place with a single, final choice.”

Putnik is merciless on the question of emigré illusions of home. He describes his “countrymen” who “seem to enjoy exacerbating their predicament: they aggravate it through laziness and fear, they worsen it by how unaccustomed they are to serious thinking”; their countrymen “would rather have been sleeping, walking in a dream, multiplying and feeding dream-like for fifty or a hundred years.” Putnik is horrified by their stupidity, indifference, stubbornness (“Shout, they don’t hear, write, they won’t read. They have more pressing things to do. They are working to accomplish what they transcended in the beginning”), by their humility and their attachment to authority (“And the ordinary man is always standing with a man who is holding a cudgel”), their coarseness and malevolence.

Putnik furthermore dissects the delusions “our people” cultivate about themselves, tartly describing their traits, their arrogance, which comes from a suppressed “feeling of unimportance.” He describes their obsession with death (funerals that, like weddings, last for three days); their penury, and how an entire philosophy of impoverishment has grown out of their poverty, troubles, and ignorance; and “the skills of the poor.” The skills of the poor are the “acrobatics of spitting into the wind”; the skill of stealing salt shakers, toothpicks, and napkins from cafés and toilet paper from public bathrooms; the skill of cursing. Fellow countrymen are suspicious of everything and everybody (“He would rather starve than taste something he has never eaten before”); fearful of the cold (“The poor fear chills”); they have an aversion to “fresh air” (“Drafts are, for them, demonic”); they fear exploitation (“Now that’s an idea particular to the poor: to think that it is possible to live without spending life”); they are wasteful and rapacious.

“For the holidays, they burst with pork and lamb roasts, stuffed cabbage, and boiled pig’s feet. The television and radio programs for those days are like broadcasts from provincial taverns. Truck drivers’ songs ring out, hiccuping and burping reverberate, and comedians offer advice for how to cure hangovers. Instead of antacids they recommend brine. Once they’ve had their fill of food and drink, they strike up a circle dance. The radio and television sets wobble, the kitchen credenza trembles with glasses that are never set out on the table! When Ćira married, he used up a whole tub of lard. For centuries they have been dreaming of a tub of lard, the lard drips down their whiskers, dribbles into their dream.”

Putnik holds forth on the servile nature of their “countrymen” and their “terrifying” capacity to adapt to things (“There is nothing they won’t learn to live with”). He senses the virulence of hatred (“Their malice has drawn into a clench around their lips, it has settled in their pupils, nestled into their speech”); he is appalled at its force (“Nothing will save you. Not a single public success, no honor, no riches or glory, nothing will give you safe haven”); its longevity (“They have long memories, they are waiting to pay back in kind, they will wait a hundred years for the opportunity. They exact their revenge even from the innocent, only so that they can knock the evil out of themselves”); and the fact that it cannot be rooted out. “The word for hate, mrzeti, is too strong. Our people have come up with a word that is more endearing, more heartfelt: mrzančiti. I assume you haven’t heard it, and I doubt you’ll find a true parallel in English. Mrzančiti means to exude hatred, to hate in quiet, long, and with determination, in keeping with tradition, for no reason in particular.”

The Metaphysical Palanka

Danojlić’s novel is close kin to another book, published earlier, the 400-page long philosophical essay The Philosophy of the Palanka (Filozofija palanke, 1969) by the Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinović. While Danojlić’s novel is more or less forgotten today, the Philosophy of the Palanka was and remains a cult book. Konstantinović promoted a new concept, he gave a new, more complex meaning to the old word palanka. The palanka is not a village or a city, it is somewhere between the two. The palanka is a de-territorialized and de-contextualized place, everywhere and nowhere, a state of mind, afloat between “tribal spirit, as ideal-unique, and world spirit, as ideal-open.” The palanka experiences itself as cast-off, forgotten, time left out of historical time, and then it bemoans its bitter fate, while at the same time turning this accursed destiny into its privilege. Being closed and forgotten meant being safe, while beyond, outside the circle of the palanka, rules the dangerous chaos of the wide world. Rigidity, petrification, a constant readiness for defense, a strong tribal awareness, infantilism, formulaic patterns of thought, fear of the unknown, fear of change, an apology for purity, innocence, and simplicity, the hermetic, a cult of the dead, security, normativity, conservatism, the static, anti-historicism — are only a few of the features typical of the world of the palanka. Konstantinović does not see the root of Serbian fascism in imitation of the German fascist model, or of any other for that matter, but instead he sees it in the palanka. The palanka is the model for Ur-fascism.

The Feast of the Periphery

One of the outcomes of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the wars, and new nationalistic state projects is the destruction of what had been the shared Yugolsav cultural space, the material destruction of culture (schools, cultural monuments, libraries, book burning, etc.), vandalism (the demolition of statues), and effacement of cultural segments (for instance, the era of Yugoslav culture). Every state that disappeared from the former Yugoslavia has reconfigured its own national culture. In the tumultuous process of reconfiguration, there are creative figures, works, opuses that have been dropped, some forgotten, some abruptly jettisoned, others degraded, de-throned, yet others over-valued in terms of the current national ideology and interests. There have been bad writers and artists in this time of over-inflating national culture who have been elevated to aesthetic heights merely because they were Croatian, Serbian, or Bosnian patriots. In the less than twenty years that the new states have existed on what was the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the cultural landscape has grown grayer, it has narrowed, and become provincial.

The dependent domestic media work to regurgitate political clichés which they have retrieved from nineteenth century political dustbins, and the crazed crowd soaks these up as if they are God’s own truth. The domestic media and local politicians prattle on in a delirium about the national state, the ethnically pure and impure peoples, patriotism, heroism, defense of the homeland and patriotic honor, the enemy, his crimes against us, the national identity which had always been suppressed. Meanwhile, the foreign media exercise their almost knee-jerk colonialism, cranking out colonial clichés which ring true and convincing to their readers. They write of the terrible, wild, abandoned, uncivilized Balkans, communist repression, the consequence of which is a struggle of the little peoples for national identity and independence, while at the same time reinforcing the old mental divisions of Europe into its civilized western part and its wild, uncivilized eastern part. Here, of course, is the primitive, exotic, and bloodthirsty child — the Balkans.

Hence cultural texts are formed. The cultural text is a construct which assumes not only material factual culture but many written pages and miles of celluloid. The cultural text is a sort of meta-text. Metropoli create large and productive cultural texts. Vienna is one such cultural text. The Balkans are a cultural text. Kakania is a cultural text. The provinces are a cultural text.

The center is inclusive, the periphery exclusive; the center communicates, the periphery excommunicates; the center is multi-national, the periphery mono-national; the center is like a sponge, the periphery like stone. Whatever the case, the provinces are an inseparable part of the story of the metropolis, just as the center is an inseparable part of the story of the periphery. Only together do they make sense.

Fluorescent Fishermen

Some ten years ago, I cannot recall precisely when, I was out strolling along the Donauinsel during a visit to Vienna. The weather was warm, the shore studded with dozens of little restaurants, and the Viennese were out dancing the salsa. The warm summer evening, the swaying bodies, and the sound of Latin American salsa were nicely incongruous with the image of Vienna on the “beautiful, blue Danube.” I saw something unusual on the shore: three figures wearing helmets, with beaming flashlights affixed, holding fishing rods and casting fluorescent lines into the water. The image of the glowing figures with their glowing fishing rods struck me, especially because I soon learned that these were my countrymen, just as in the old jokes — a Croat, a Serb, and a Bosnian. It turned out that they lived in Vienna and spent every weekend fishing on the Danube. I nibbled some cheese pastry with them, sipped brandy straight from the bottle (the real homemade stuff, plum brandy). Around us swirled the sensual strains of the salsa.

“Doesn’t the noise disturb the fish?” I asked.

“Not at all,” confirmed the fishermen.

Vienna suddenly shone with the glow of a metropolis. The salsa, the immigrants dancing with the Viennese, my happy countrymen — these fluorescent fishermen. The tolerant Danubian fish who weren’t disturbed by the noise. I remembered that Zagreb is the only city I know which suffers from hydrophobia. While all the other cities I know embrace the banks of their rivers, Zagreb flees from the Sava to the foothills of the nearby hill, Sljeme, which I hope is not being touted as a mountain in all the new Croatian textbooks. As soon as he came into power, Franjo Tuđman proclaimed Zagreb a metropolis. Of course he also proclaimed himself the Croatian George Washington. From his official position, from the mouth of the first Croatian president, poured the language of the provinces with a thundering inferiority complex. Our “little Paris,” our “little Vienna,” our Croatian “George Washington”—those are the tropes of the provinces. With this rhetorical figure, stuck like a burr to popular references, the provinces do what they can to leap on board the train of history and inscribe themselves on the map.

Culture As Utopia

Most of the culture of Europe came out of the vortex of these fundamental oppositions, from the dynamics of center and periphery, metropolis and the provinces, the palanka and the world. Today, at a moment when all the great Utopian systems have come tumbling down, when the political and social imagination has been exhausted, when the idea of democracy is spent, when the gray, cold mechanism of money has replaced all else, at a time when the five-hundred-year-old Gutenberg galaxy is dying while the new, young, omnipresent Digital galaxy is ascendant, at a time of the barbarization of high technology, Culture suddenly looms large as a straw to be grasped at. Culture is suddenly the language, the reason, the goal. Culture has taken the place of the mumbo-jumbo of European political lingo and substance, and, hey, the main substance of European unification has suddenly become culture. Culture is the ideological Euro, the means of communication. Culture is the diplomatic language and the language of diplomacy. Culture is a field of struggle, an exorcism of superiority. Culture is the legal nursery of chauvinism, racism, nationalism, otherness, and supremacy (Dostoyevsky vs. Balzac). Culture is a means of transportation (Only with culture can we go out into the world) and a way to export value. Culture is a brand, culture is the vehicle of national identity (If it weren’t for Ivo Pogorelić, no one would know a thing about us!), culture is the tourist industry. Culture is what countries are. Ireland is the land of James Joyce, France is the land of Marcel Proust, Austria is the land of Robert Musil, just as little Klagenfurt is where Musil was born. These are the people of Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, howled Emir Kusturica at a Belgrade gathering, condemning the proclamation of independence for Kosovo Albanians. And the Kosovars must have separated, of course, only so they could steal culture, the sacred Serbian monasteries. James Joyce, who fled from Ireland, was dragged back there after his death and placed on the throne of Irish literature — and Irish tourism. Today his name and face are trapped on souvenir coffee cups. Even little Galway profits from the little house, now a museum, where Nora, Joyce’s wife, was born.

So what is culture, then? Culture is a phenomenon that serves for all sorts of things, from money laundering to laundering the collective national conscience, and perhaps a recent event can provide the clearest illustration. Only two days after Joshua Bell, the famous violinist, had performed in Boston at a concert where people paid large sums to come and hear him, he performed the same repertoire at a subway station, except that no one stopped to listen, and he collected only a few coins in his hat.

The Kakania Project

Two decades ago the cultural construct of “Central Europe” surfaced briefly among intellectuals, and for a time academics and writers such as Milan Kundera, György Konrád, Joseph Brodsky, and others wrote about it. This construct no longer attracts interest, but one occasionally comes across mention of the “Kakania,” as a half-hearted call for a new republic of writers, or a sense of shared geographical and historical space, or a longing for a new cultural construct. If we play for a moment with the Kakanian literary utopia, we will automatically find ourselves imagining this (and every other) republic of writers as a space of freedom. Why not do the opposite and try to imagine the Kakania republic in other ways: as a space of restriction, or a space of decontamination, or of deprivation, depending, of course, on one’s perspective.

So we imagine that at the border of the Republic of Literature of Kakania the imperial officials demand of writers that they leave behind their passports and agree in writing to respect the Kakanian rules of the road. For Kakania is a literary republic, is it not? Aren’t writers banned, while dwelling there, from strutting the stuff of their nations, their states (they are not literary soccer players after all), their ethnicity, their religious and political conviction? One must be forbidden from speaking of such things. The only visa for entry to the Republic of Letters should be a literary work.

Let us now try to imagine a conversation between two Kakanians, one who is respecting the rules and another who is violating them.

“So, you, too, are a writer?”

“Yes. Aren’t we all?”

“We are, we are, we all put pen to paper, we do little else. But some of us are more successful at it than others. It is not the same if you’re English or if you’re Macedonian. And, by the way, where are you from?”

“Kakania. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Why should it be? I’m betting you’re Lithuanian. Come on, admit it.”

“No, I am Kakanian.”

“OK. Kakanian. I have nothing against it. I am a Czech, my mother is Hungarian, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. From the cultural and historical perspective, I have more right to call myself Kakanian than you do. But we aren’t splitting hairs here, now are we. What language do you write in?”

“Literary.”

“All of us are literate, we wouldn’t be here otherwise. But whether you write in the language of Shakespeare or some fellow called Costa Costolopoulus matters. Come on, confess, I won’t tell a soul.”

“Literary language.”

“You are really stuck on that. Weren’t you baptized? And by the way, do you believe in God?”

“I believe in the muse.”

“Jesus, what a stickler! And on top of it you’ve disguised yourself as a feminist. OK, so that’s politically correct. The muses were women after all, so we had to include them in our work. But, do tell, my Kakanian, where do you stand on politics?”

“I believe in humanism.”

“Humanism?! Blah, blah, blah. . I haven’t met anyone more boring than you in ages!”

I am afraid such a Utopian Kakania would soon lose its citizens. European writers are too used to lugging the baggage of their states with them, acting as its representatives, espousing its history, its political, national, religious beliefs, its communities and homeland. They are too used to not treating Others, no matter who those others are, as their own. If the Republic of Literature as described above, with all its rules, were to actually exist, it would be a dangerous test for Europe, for its foundations, and its future.

Most writers flourish within their state, religious, political, ethnic, and national communities, within their clans, institutions, publishing houses, readers, academies, their honors, and seldom do they toss out all the medals they have received and go out into the world as beggars, relying only on their naked talent. What happens to art when it is stripped of its context is best shown by the example of Joshua Bell. Everyone will spit at you, or even worse, they won’t even see you. In any case your hat will be empty.

All in all, writers are only people, and literature is a complex, multi-faceted thing, just as the relations of influence and power, interrelations between the periphery and the center, between the metropolis and the provinces, between the palanka and the outside world are complex. The well-intentioned creators of European cultural policy and those who are putting it into practice imagine that relationship as if it were part of a fairy tale.

The prince meets a frog. “Kiss me,” says the frog, “and I’ll turn into a princess.” The prince kisses the frog and, bingo! it turns into a princess.

But the fairy tale could also go like this. .

“Kiss me,” says the frog, “and I’ll turn into a princess.”

“No, for the time being you suit me better as a frog,” answers the prince.

Or, like this. .

“I’ll kiss you, and you’ll turn into a princess!” says the prince to the frog.

“No thanks,” says the frog, “for the time being I would rather stay a frog.”

April 2010

THE ELUSIVE SUBSTANCE OF THE ARCHIVE

A File-Storm

There’s something I need to confess: I’ve never peered into a real archive, and I don’t know how such an archive works. I’m a writer, an archive amateur. My private archive is a hazy, subconscious space in which the camera of my eye has randomly stored dozens of faces, dozens of chance gestures, sounds, and sentences. It’s a house that does not exist, but of which I regularly dream, full of staircases, balconies, cubbyholes, cobwebs, and holes in the wall through which a harsh wind blows. This archive is home to the real and imagined conversations I’ve had, objects and memories of objects, images, scents, and books whose contents resemble the house from my recurring dream. But the thing is, I’m not the one who walks this subconscious archival space picking out files: files rush out at me. They leap from the archive, jostling for my attention, pushing and shoving, hustling, all so embarrassingly “promiscuous”: so many things slip into bed with so many other things, and I’m really not sure why.

I recently visited the island of Bali. Night falls early on Bali, and the morning rises late. In the silence of the evening I would listen out for the sound of heavy leaves falling from the trees. Always one leaf after the other, never two at once. The giant ants that would come crawling down the computer screen from out of nowhere, and the books grey with damp, left behind by tourists and stacked on an open shelf for anyone to read, were the triggers for the “file-storm” to come. (I mean, I think they were?) The hotel staff spent the day with brooms and rubbish bags in hand, diligently sweeping up every fallen leaf. They’d even do so when it was windy — actually, especially then — as if they were having a competition with the wind. Other staff changed the bed linen daily, and the hand towels several times a day. I’d wake up at night, sit out on the veranda in a wicker armchair, and stare out into the muggy tropical darkness. Invisible files from my archive would fall on me like leaves, and at times I thought I was going to faint, lose control, and be forever submerged beneath that lush and invisible pile.

My recently-deceased mother was with me on Bali, as was my long-deceased father. The town of Bol on the Adriatic island of Brač also appeared, the place my mother and I spent our last summer holiday together. (Look, there, out of nowhere an image of my mother’s clothing pops up: a petite silk blouse and a little straw hat! Had Bali become Bol or Bol Bali?) A few people who really had no business being there also turned up, people who I hadn’t seen for more than thirty years, and with whom I’ve long since had any contact. What do they want from me here on Bali? I asked myself. And what would happen if the hotel staff found out about all the people staying in my room on the sly. How much would that cost? I wondered.

On Bali the locals use palm leaves as miniature trays and every morning place offerings (a flower, some rice, and a joss stick) in front of their houses, food for both good and evil spirits. As I understand it, with this daily religious ritual they pacify the Archive in which the living and the dead, the visible and invisible worlds reside. “You need to feed them, because when they’re hungry, man they can have a mean streak,” a local taxi driver confirmed.

The Encyclopedia of the Dead

It is said that Danilo Kiš’s short story “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” was inspired by a newspaper clipping about a secret Mormon archive in Utah, the Granite Mountain Records Vault. Today, thanks to the Internet, photographs of the archive, its impressive location, and equally impressive information about the archive, are widely available. Thirty years ago, when the short story was written, a small newspaper article about Mormon biographies stored on microfilm in hidden caves in Utah appears to have fired Kiš’s historically sensitive imagination. The narrator of “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” is a theatre scholar by profession (“Last year, as you know, I went to Sweden at the invitation of the Institute for Theatre Research”[1]) and narrates her story to an unnamed listener. In Stockholm she is shown a mysterious archive containing the biographies of people whose names are not recorded “in any other encyclopedia.”[2] The narrator’s experience of the archive is so incredibly romanticized that fragments from a gothic novel come to mind. The narrator is ushered into the archive by a guard “holding a large ring of keys.”[3] The guard — whom the narrator refers to as “Mr. Cerberus”—locks the door behind her, leaving her alone in the library as if in a casemate. In this sense, entry into the library is entry into Hades, into the world of the dead.

A draft blew in from somewhere, rippling the cobwebs, which, like dirty scraps of gauze, hung from the bookshelves as over select bottles of old wine in a cellar. All the rooms were alike, connected by a narrow passageway, and the draft, whose source I could not identify, penetrated everywhere.

[4]

I therefore started skimming through the paragraphs, turning the open book, insofar as the chain would allow, in the direction of the pale light shed by the lamp. The thick layer of dust that had gathered along their edges and the dangling scraps of cobwebs bore clear witness to the fact that no one had handled the volumes in a long time. They were fettered to one another like galley slaves, but their chains had no locks.

[5]

The secret initiators of The Encyclopedia of the Dead. .

believe in the miracle of the biblical resurrection and they complete their vast catalogue in preparation for that moment. So that everyone will be able to find not only his fellow men but also — and more important — his own forgotten past. When the time comes, this compendium will serve as a great treasury of memories and a unique proof of the resurrection.

[6]

Danilo Kiš’s short story was published in 1983, long before the Internet was in widespread use. In skimming the encyclopedia, the manner in which the narrator finds and reads the biography of her recently deceased father is almost a literary foreshadowing of today’s navigation of the Internet. The narrator doesn’t really read, she skims the pages, she looks (“Then, as if it were all unfolding before my eyes”[7]), and sees that every detail of her father’s biography is intricately bound up with the details of other events.

For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings. That is why it records every action, every thought, every creative breath, every spot height in the survey, every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a book from the ruins.

[8]

We don’t learn anything about encyclopedists, about the archivist, or about systematizers of human destinies from Kiš’s story. They remain hidden. Only The Book of the Dead (or The Encyclopedia of the Dead, or just The Book) exists, an all-knowing, all-seeing, and therefore, divine mechanism of memory, one that eliminates hierarchies, which belong to the human world, and restores a higher justice. This supreme mechanism of memory, which thirty years ago emerged from Kiš’s humanistic and utopian imagination, and his painful firsthand knowledge that the majority of human lives end as anonymous dust, has today, thanks to technology, slipped its ethical, aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical coordinates and become the dominant cultural obsession of our age. Superficially, this obsession is expressed as a mass orgy of self-representation. Below the surface breeds an anxious fear, the fear of death.

The Archive Is Real, Life Is Virtual

The archive (or, more accurately, an archivist) given voice by Pete Postlethwaite is the narrator of the film The Age of Stupid (2009). The film opens with devastated symbols of the contemporary world (London under water, the Taj Mahal in ruins, Las Vegas buried under sand, the Sydney Opera House in flames) before the camera leads us out across the oceans towards a giant platform shaped like a flower — a kind of Noah’s Ark stranded and suspended above the sea. “Welcome to the Global Archive!” the voice of the archivist greets us. The year is 2055, and with the assistance of a super touchscreen the archivist takes us back to our time, to the year 2008. The film is about global warming and how humankind, instead of salvation, chose suicide. The archive, located in the middle of nowhere, has been left for future intelligent beings as testimony to our existence. The archive, which to the man in the street first prompts associations with a secret police or state archive, and then perhaps a lonely and forlorn gathering place for eccentrics, works its way into the popular imagination as a virtual Noah’s Ark — one devoid of specimens of the human species, sent out in an unknown direction to an unknown recipient, like a message in a bottle. I suspect that those watching the film don’t actually notice the upended relationship between the virtual and the real worlds, a relationship the authors of this emotionally charged ecological manifesto simply disregard. Relationships are set up contrary to expectations: the archive is a real place, where real, physical exhibits are housed, and attended to by a real archivist. Humankind and its history are virtual, only coming to life when the archivist lowers his finger onto the touchscreen.

How Did That Happen?

For the man in the street the archive is a synonym for the original, the authentic. Whoever controls the archive possesses significant manipulative power. And for this reason the price of the archive on the market of our values is in constantly growing, irrespective of whether we are dealing with the shoes Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz or the archives of a writer. Writers who strike a deal on the sale of their archives in their own lifetimes guarantee themselves immortality. Even a certain Croatian poet cottoned on to the connection between the archive and immortality, and he gave his all to outlive his contemporaries. And he succeeded, dying in his one-hundred-and-first year on earth. He spent his whole life carefully building his archive, collecting everything — people say that he even kept his tram tickets. The only thing he messed up, tragically, was the context. He and his archive turned up in the wrong century, in the wrong country, and in the wrong circumstances.

Until the discovery of photography came along, the poor never left any proof of their existence. It was some time before the privileged let the less privileged have their turn in front of the camera, those who only could afford a single, once-in-a-lifetime shot. In Russian peasant huts there was a place called the “pretty corner”—krassnyj ugolok—set aside for icons and candles lit to honor God and the family’s patron saint. It was also some time before photos of the pater familias and other family members made their way into the “pretty corner,” before this miniature domestic shrine became a miniature home archive, before family photos made their way into boxes (inevitably shoe boxes), and then finally into family albums, at last uncoupled from God and the saints.

How did it happen, the transfer of power from the archive to the archivist, from the institution to the profession, and then, from the professional to the amateur archivist? The process began, I think, when photos were first placed in the household shrine, and continued with the destruction of the old order, with the deconstruction of systems of power, of institutions of state and religion, of history as a science, and with the emergence of psychoanalysis and the mass repudiation of established beliefs. Art, the Russian Revolution, and avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, Dadaism and Futurism, and their poetics of subversion of established values — whether aesthetic, moral, or of any other nature — all played their part.

In Russian culture the theme of archivomania begins with Russian realism (with its emblematic scrooge figures). A century later the theme of the archive sprung into life in the novels of Konstantin Vaginov, a Russian writer from the 1930s. Vaginov depicts a world of obsessive, half-crazed collectors and archivists, those who in a time of revolutionary chaos scavenge the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday. Svistonov collects books, newspaper cuttings, and even real-life characters for the novel he is writing. The heroes of Bambocciada found the “Society for the Collection of Trivia,” while the hero of Harpagoniana, a certain Zhulonbin, is a systematizer of all kinds of trash, from chewed pencils to cigarette butts and fingernails. These carnivalesque losers, inhabitants of the world of yesterday, are the antithesis of a revolutionary time (re)constructing life from the very beginning.

Archivomania burst back into thematic life in the 1970s in the artistic program of Russian Soc-artists. Sensing that the Soviet epoch was on the wane, Soc-artists set about defamiliarizing their everyday surroundings. Based on the traditions of both the Russian avant-garde and Pop-Art, Ilya Kabakov obsessively deconstructs the Soviet everyday by simply making it visible. Kabakov’s installations bring all manner of things together and to life: social realist imagery, bureaucratic forms, slogans, posters, Soviet school primers, consumer products, and not least, the language of Soviet clichés. Kabakov’s projects are tragic archives of the “rubbish” that the Soviet epoch, embodied by a loyal representative — the anonymous Soviet citizen — left behind.

After the symbolic Dadaist gesture of Duchamp’s (in)famous Fountain and the epoch of the avant-garde, the Pop Art movement, marked by the iconic figure of Andy Warhol and his famous Campbell’s Soup cans, continued to breathe life into and develop the archival line. Contemporary art practice today is largely based on the idea and practice of the archive; moreover, the archivization of the work in progress is frequently transformed into the work of art itself.

One of the most important figures in contemporary art, Christian Boltanski, was back in the news last year when, in a bizarre artistic gesture, the sixty-five-year-old sold his life to the Australian millionaire and art collector, David Walsh. For eight years, commencing January 1, 2010, four cameras will film (that is, archive) the artist in his studio day and night, projecting this unusual one-man-big-brother-show in a cave in Tasmania. If Boltanski lives for the next eight years, he will receive the full asking price for his life. If he dies within the eight years, he gets nothing. In doing what he is doing, Christian Boltanski is putting into practice the human archivization on which his own art centers, an art exemplified by his ongoing collection of anonymous human heartbeats. The artist has finally put his head on the block of the archive and symbolically returned the whole endeavor of art to its beginnings — to a cave. (Weren’t cave drawings the first archival exhibits?!)

As a longtime archivist of anonymous human destinies, Boltanski has now put himself in the position of the archived object, an act completely in accord with our time, one in which we all, as if in a kind of pact with the devil, are simultaneously archivist and the archived.

Archive Fever

I first showed symptoms of archive fever in 1989, although at the time I didn’t pick them up. All of sudden I was overcome by a feeling that the world I knew was under threat from a terrible amnesiac tsunami. A rescue project to save symbols of Yugoslav everyday life and popular culture — an idea that was to become the Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology—was sketched in a document of not more than two or three pages and briefly kept alfoat by the enthusiasm of three people. The common Yugoslav home fell apart barely two years later. When a house is collapsing, normal people look to save life and limb, and rescuing their favorite books is the furthest thing from their minds. But actually, I’m not so sure about that. Warned to take only their most essential belongings, when the air raid signals blared people took the most bizarre things down into the shelters. During the first alarm in Zagreb an old lady admitted to me that during the Second World War she found herself in the basement with an alarm clock in her hand. Why an alarm clock, of all things, was so essential she wasn’t able to explain.

Going abroad was like finding oneself an air raid shelter — one only takes the essentials. Most of all I missed my books, my Zagreb home library. The truth is that new books stuck to me like magnets, as if trying to compensate for the loss. I don’t exclude the possibility that I made Amsterdam my home just so I could give a home to my books, to both the new and the old, which lay in boxes, lonely and neglected in a friend’s Zagreb basement. It was a number of years before I felt able to confront the boxes. During a visit to Zagreb I spent a few days going through them, sorting out the books that I’d one day take to Amsterdam with me. A couple of years later my Zagreb friend offered to pack the books I’d set aside in a combi-van and taxi them to Amsterdam. I planned a welcome reception for their arrival, cleaning up my Amsterdam cellar and having special shelves built. At first I’ll put all the boxes in the cellar I thought, and then slowly, one by one, I’ll take them up to the apartment. I gave up after unpacking the first few boxes. Holding them in my hands again, the books no longer meant what I thought they would mean to me. Their order had been lost forever; their arrangement in my old Zagreb library impossible to reconstruct; their significance lost along with the codes of memory, as if they were written in a dead, undecipherable language. Ten unopened boxes still languish in my Amsterdam cellar.

In the meantime the Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology has been published as a book and is apparently even in its third edition. A handful of enterprising people copied the online corpus I had begun collecting with my Amsterdam students and gave it a hardcover. These memory fragments of the former Yugoslav everyday assembled by a group of anonymous young contributors don’t set my heart aflutter. The authenticity of the impulse has petered out. Because things that I was sure would disappear forever (the Internet was not yet in widespread use), today, twenty years later, pop up like jack-in-the-boxes. Everything the ordinary Yugonostalgic heart could ever desire is on YouTube. There are Internet sites loaded with old Yugoslav films and TV series, sites with ethnic jokes from the Yugoslav-era, virtual collections of objects from the Yugoslav everyday, the packaging of pioneering Yugoslav products, exemplars of socialist design. There are new “Yugonostalgic” souvenirs: men’s socks with Tito on them, bottles of wine with Tito’s signature, cookbooks with Tito’s favorite recipes. Memory of the Yugoslav everyday, which just fifteen years ago was an act of political and cultural subversion, is today just a bit of fun; things once considered irreplaceable relics are today cheap souvenirs. An authentic need to reestablish a brutally broken cultural continuity has been transformed into political kitsch and the cultural program of a well-funded NGO.

Serious and historically relevant analyses of the Yugoslav system have yet to appear. Equally lacking are reliable analyses of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. The diligent historians are for the time being maintaining their silence. Tito’s monuments have been destroyed, but a cookbook with his favorite dishes is, it seems, a bestseller. The virtual and physically-existing souvenir industry is broadcasting false signals, offering symbolic and high-speed acknowledgement of an unacknowledged history.

I am from the generation born after the Second World War, experience of which I gleaned directly from my parents and Yugoslav post-war culture, one that in spite of its proclaimed future orientation was actually deeply immersed in the wartime past. I am a witness to the recent “Yugoslav” disintegration and war (the war officially ended fifteen years ago), the change of ideological and political systems, and the collapse of a cultural system. I am a witness to multiple strategies conceived to organize the erasure of the past: the burning of books; the deletion of biographies; the rewriting of school textbooks and official truths; the change of languages, flags, and ideological options; the excavation and burial of bones; the fabrication of history; and the renovation and renaming of an entire landscape. I am also a witness to the overnight disappearance of an untold number of people.

In my life experience I also know something of the rapid replacement of technology (and it seems that technology shapes our consciousness far more than ideology). With enviable elasticity I replaced the ink pot and quill with a typewriter, and a typewriter with a computer. I also possess intergalactic experience — from the Gutenberg galaxy I’ve moved, like or it not, into a digital one. Since achieving mass penetration (and this happened barely fifteen years ago!), the Internet has turned everything we knew on its head. And here an important question arises, one that I suspect has no quick answer. Would Marcel Proust have written In Search of Lost Time if he had had a Madeleine cookie on the computer screen in front of him?

Memory Stick

And here we are, in a time in which a Kamchatka pensioner doing the crossword can check the Internet for the image of a cookie that made a French writer famous. We live in a time in which the bizarre collectors of Vaginov’s novel, the founders of the “Society for the Collection of Trivia,” should be acknowledged as visionaries. A quick Internet search for unusual museums proves the point: Museum of Toast Portraits of Famous People, World Carrot Museum, Virtual Museum of Scams and Frauds, Museum of Odd Socks, Gallery of Obscure Things, Museum of Funeral History, The Trash Museum, Virtual Museum of Cigar Box Art, Zymoglyphic Museum, Banana Museum, Pretzel Museum, Museum of Toilets, Museum of Modern Madness. . Theorists of popular culture would no doubt claim that virtual museums are an ironic subversion of the cultural canon, for as we all know, the institution of the museum is there to keep strict watch on the canonical order. But even this is a moot point, because we live in a time in which museum architecture has turned the traditional concept of the museum on its head, a time in which a museum’s architecture is inevitably far more important than its contents. Today, museums are rarely built to house art, rather, they are, in and of themselves, works of art. The hypothetical notion — those with art will also need a museum — has today become — those with a museum will get art.

We live in a time of archive fever. We compete with our media gods and goddesses. There we are, walking through the world with our memory sticks around our necks, each of us with our own homepage, each of us with an archive stored on the web. There are also those who wear their archives on their own skin, in the form of tattoos. And we are everywhere: our fingerprints left on scanners at border crossings, in medical clinics and files, on all kinds of cards confirming our membership in different organizations — from fitness clubs to the Subscribers for Posthumous Assistance. We haul our invisible freight through the world, our documents, our power and phone bills, our address books, our bank and business cards. We walk through the world well networked and connected, with MySpace and Facebook, phone numbers stored in mobile phones, family albums stored on the web, with souvenirs and photos of our children in the windows of our apartments (a little Dutch quirk). All of these are our archives. They’re how we assure ourselves of eternity. And the more voluminous the archive that trails us, the less of ourselves there is. Yet we head off into battle with renewed energy: with camcorders and digital cameras, recording our voices, our thoughts, our everyday lives down to the minutest of details. In this private big brother show, this public big brother show, we record everything: the hypothetical moment of conception, the embryo, the baby in utero, birth, first steps, first words, first birthdays. And the richer our archives become, the less of ourselves there seems to be. We don’t communicate with each other. None of us has the patience for others’ photo albums, holiday pictures, or videotapes, which long went out the window in any case. Oh so modern, we put things on YouTube so anyone can gawk at them. We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives. We enjoy the orgy of being, twittering, buying new toys, iPhones and iPads, and all the while our hunger just grows and grows. We wear memory sticks around our necks, having of course first made copies. The memory stick is our celestial sarcophagus, our soul, our capsule, our soul in a capsule. One day we will be catapulted into the Great Archive, where someone will find and open us like a black box.

In the meantime, our work will see us turn up in some new place, in a cheap hotel room, with a completely unjustified sense of control over our lives. With indignation we’ll discover that the cheap room doesn’t have an Internet connection, or a television. We’ll try and fall asleep reading a book, but we won’t quite manage. .

You cannot get to sleep because you lie so narrowly, in an attempt to avoid contact with anything that isn’t shielded by sheets and pillowcase. The first sign then, in an excessive attention to the bed, an irresistible anxiety about the hundreds who have slept there before you, leaving their dust and debris in the fibres of the blankets, greasing the surface of the heavy, slippery counterpane. The dust of others, and of other times, fills the room, settles on the carpet, marks out the sticky passage from the bed to bathroom.

[9]

And as the pale morning light comes through the window we’ll helplessly watch the dust falling upon us like a fine snow.

June 2010

[1]Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. by Michael Henry Heim (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 39.

[2]Ibid., 43.

[3]Ibid., 39.

[4]Ibid., 40.

[5]Ibid., 41.

[6]Ibid., 43.

[7]Ibid., 42.

[8]Ibid., 56–57.

[9]Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 17.