Context N°13
by Dubravka Ugresic
“This is not a battle to fight.” —Graffiti in a New York restaurant
I read in the newspaper that at an auction at Sotheby’s in London a small tin of shit sold for £17, 250. I see that the word “small” slipped out as I wrote that, as though the news would be more acceptable if it had been a bigger tin of shit. In his day, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni produced ninety tins filled with shit. The tins were numbered and signed, and sold at the current price of gold. An acquaintance of mine, an art dealer, assures me that the price was laughably low.
“If I had a Manzoni tin I could get 150,000 bucks for it without even trying,” he assured me.
It turns out that Manzoni’s tins are very rare today. Maybe skeptical buyers opened them to check whether they really did contain shit.
“While the price of gold is more or less stable, the price of shit has seen astronomical growth in the last thirty years. And it’s still rising,” claimed my acquaintance.
The transmutation of shit into gold is nevertheless no simple thing, for if it were we would all be rich. You need institutions, galleries, media, a market, publicity, interpreters (those who will explain the meaning of the artistic gesture), promoters, art dealers, critics and, of course, consumers. Even when the shit is well packaged there is no guarantee that the transmutation will succeed.
The greatest shock for an East European writer who turned up in the Western literary marketplace was provoked by the absence of aesthetic criteria. Criteria of literary evaluation were the capital which our Easterner assiduously accumulated his whole literary life. And then it turned out that this capital wasn’t worth shit.
In the noncommercial East European cultures, there were no divisions into good and bad literature. There was literature and there was trash. Culture was divided into official culture and underground culture. Underground literature, as a resistance movement, occupied far more space (justifiably or not) on the unofficial scale of literary values. East European writers moved in a world of clear aesthetic coordinates; at least that’s what they believed. In their underground literary workshops, they diligently tempered the steel of their literary convictions. In return, they received abundant moral and emotional support from their readership. Both writers and their readers had endless amounts of time at their disposal, both everyday and “historical” time. And for someone to have any idea at all of what is really good, he needs time.
When East European writers finally began crawling out of their underground, they stepped into the global literary marketplace like self-confident literary arbiters, as unfailing connoisseurs of difference. They brought with them an awareness of their chosen position in this world (the Muses decided, not them), and a conviction that they had an unalienable right to literary art.
Their encounter with the literary market was the biggest shock of their writing lives, a loss of the ground under their feet, a terrible blow to their writers’ ego.
“Oh, you’re a writer?”
“Yes,” our Easterner replies, trying to sound like a modest and well-brought-up person who does not want to humiliate those who have not been chosen.
“What a coincidence! Our ten-year-old daughter is just finishing a novel. We even have a publisher!”
And this is the first insult that our Easterner has to swallow. He himself does not even have a publisher. And he will soon discover that the world of the literary marketplace is densely populated with the “chosen,” with his fellow writers. His fellow writers are prostitutes who write their memoirs, sportsmen who describe their sporting lives, girlfriends of renowned murderers who describe the murderer from a more intimate perspective, housewives bored with daily life who have decided to try the creative life; there are lawyer-writers, fisherman-writers, literary critic-writers, innumerable searchers after their own identity, a whole army of those whom someone has offended, raped, or beaten up or whose toes have been stepped on and who rush to inform the world in writing of the drama of their long-repressed injury.
Our Easterner is profoundly shaken. He does not believe that all these “colleagues” have the same rights as he does, that in the world of literary democracy everyone is equal, that everyone has the right to a book and to literary success. He does not, however, abandon the hope that (literary-historical) justice will prevail in the end, that the very next day everything will resume its place, that housewife-writers will stay housewives and fisherman-writers fishermen. He has nothing against democracy itself. On the contrary, coming from where he has come from he is the first to recognize its value, but not in literature and art, for God’s sake!
Our Easterner is mistaken. The highly exciting life of a fisherman has greater commercial value than an East European’s thoughts about what good literature is supposed to be. And the world of the literary marketplace is not only a world of momentary glamour, as our Easterner believes by way of consolation. It is not writers, arbiters of taste or critics, but the powerful literary marketplace that establishes aesthetic values.
Recently, during a short visit to Moscow, I met a writer. She looked most impressive, covered in sequins and feathers. If I had met her in New York I would have thought she was a transvestite. She gave me two volumes of her book Notes on Bras (Zapiski na liftchikakh). The author was a so-called woman of the people, a former chambermaid or something. She had written a novel about her feminine communist experiences. And the book was selling like hotcakes, she said.
“And what has Solzhenitsyn been doing lately?’ I asked stupidly. I really wasn’t that interested in Solzhenitsyn at the time.
“Huh?” gawped the author of Notes on Bras blankly.
In the world of trash, wrote Vladimir Nabokov, it is not the book that brings success, but the reading public.
Recently, out of curiosity, I visited the website of the author of the iconic book The Alchemist. The work, which critics describe as interdenominational, transcendental, and inspirational, is a bag of wind with millions of readers throughout the world. Out of some two hundred enraptured readers on the web, only two expressed mild reservations about the alchemist’s talent. The skeptics were immediately pounced upon by The Alchemist’s devotees, who asked that Amazon.com deny web access to any such comments.
I wondered why the consumers of victorious products were so fierce and intolerant. I had encountered the same aggressive tone, the same readiness for a fight to the end, each time I had expressed doubt in the value of any work which has millions of devotees. What is it that unites the million-strong army of lovers of The Alchemist so firmly and so easily divides the small group of lovers of Bohumil Hrabal? What is it that drives millions of people to shed tears as they watch Titanic, and drives a lunatic to deface a well-known painting in a Dutch museum? What is it that drives millions of people all over the world to weep for Lady Di, but to be indifferent when their next-door neighbor dies? I think I know the answer, but I would prefer to keep quiet, for the answer makes me tremble with terror.
“I know perfectly well that the book is shit,” said a friend of mine, a teacher of literature at a European university, about some book. “But I looooove it!” he howled, drawing out the “o.”
“Americans love junk. It’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love,” said George Santayana. He said it at a time when he did not yet know that we were all one day going to become Americans.
But still, there is, presumably, something in the very nature of shit that makes it so loooooved. And however much the theoreticians of popular culture try to explain why shit ought to be loved, the most attractive aspect of shit is nevertheless its availability. Shit is accessible to everyone, shit is what unites us, we can stumble across shit at every moment, step in it, slip on it, shit follows us wherever we go, shit waits patiently on our doorstep (“Like shit in the rain,” goes one popular Yugoslav saying). So who would not love it! And love alone is the magic formula that can transform shit into gold.
“Long Live Socialist Realism!”
I don’t know why, but the rules of market-oriented literary culture remind me of good old socialist realism. I admit that my head’s a bit muddled from the trauma known as EasternEurope, but that’s what I think. I also admit that I travel too much—here, there, backagain—so I see things all mixed up. And maybe it’s just nostalgia. But isn’t that understandable? My entire country has been destroyed by murderers and criminals, my libraries have been burned by thugs, surely I have a right to nostalgia, at least.
Today there is hardly anyone who knows what socialist realism is. East European artists have an allergic reaction to it. For the last fifty years East European artists have developed elaborate strategies of subversion and have given socialist realism such a hammering that they have killed it stone dead. They were so bloodthirsty that they erased all trace of it. That’s why no one can explain what the socialist realist scourge was anymore. For Westerners, and more surprisingly also for Easterners, the idea of socialist realism has been sealed in its monumental icon: Muhina’s Worker and Cooperative Farmer (Rabotnik i kolhoznitsa), which also appears as the logo for movies produced by Mosfilm. And, of course, in the figure of the hypothetical father of the term itself, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
A brief recap. Socialist realism demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. That truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism. Socialist realist literature must be accessible to the broad mass of readers. This fundamental didactic demand produces a novel structured around the struggle of positive and negative heroes (Superman vs. Lex Luthor!), and various types of novels: the “production novel,” the “pedagogical novel,” and so on.
If we ignore its victims for a moment, then we can say that the art of socialist realism was a happy art, even when it dealt with darker themes. My personal favorite is the “disability” theme, introduced by Nikolai Ostrovsky in his novel How the Steel Was Tempered, which is considered to be an official cornerstone of socialist realist literature. Ostrovsky’s novel is a story about a war invalid, a blind man, a positive hero who in the end overcomes everything. The Yugoslav film Just People also used this theme. The main characters are a man and a woman: an engineer with a missing leg (a former partisan, a war invalid) and a young, blind doctor. They fall in love. They spend days working hard, he to build the society of the future, she in her hospital. They often go skiing together: the engineer skis on one leg, the doctor by memory. The doctor subjects herself to a risky operation, after which her sight is restored. I shall never erase from my heart the magnificent happy ending, when the limping engineer and the formerly blind woman meet on a mighty socialist dam. Their kiss, accompanied by the mighty roar of the water and the ecstatic applause of the workers, will remain in my cultural memory forever.
The art of socialist realism was not only happy, but also sexy. Nowhere have so many muscular and healthy bodies been put on display, so many entwined haymakers and tractor drivers, workers and peasants, strong men and women. Nowhere, to put it in contemporary terms, were so many Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Roseanne Barrs, and Sylvester Stallones joined into one powerful body. Socialist realism was an optimistic and joyful art. Nowhere else was there so much faith in a bright future and the definitive victory of good over evil.
Nowhere except in market-oriented culture. Most of today’s literary production bases its success on the simple socialist realist idea of progress. Bookstore counters are heaped with books which contain one single idea: how to overcome personal disability, how to improve one’s own situation. Books about blind people regaining their sight, fat people becoming thin, sick people recovering, poor people becoming rich, mutes speaking, alcoholics sobering up, unbelievers discovering faith, the unfortunate becoming lucky. All these books infect the reading public with the virus of belief in a bright personal future. And a bright personal future is at the same time a bright collective future, as Oprah Winfrey unambiguously suggests to her impressive world audience.
To be successful, market literature must be didactic. Hence the enormous number of books with the word “How” in their titles. How to this and How to that—How the Steel Was Tempered. The American best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back has roughly the same healing effect on the American black oppressed female proletariat as Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother once had on its.
Contemporary market literature is realistic, optimistic, joyful, sexy, explicitly or implicitly didactic, and intended for the broad reading masses. As such, it ideologically remolds and educates the working people in the spirit of personal victory, the victory of some good over some evil. It is socialist realist.
Some seventy years have passed since the birth of socialist realism. East European writers are the ones who lost out in this story—they’re the ones I am sorry for—because they lacked the self-confidence to stand up for their own art, and threw the old, hard-working socialist realist writers in the trash without learning from them the skills they need in the literary marketplace. They battered their child to death.
And so, socialist realism is dead. Long live socialist realism!
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Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth.
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