Erih Koš

FINIS LITERATURAE

I should now, in my later years, keep in mind a witty saying by Jovan Skerlic, referring to a piece of writing by an older Serbian author. At one time, I quoted this saying in a book of casual notes entitled ‘Between the Lines’ (published by ‘Prosveta’). An approximate quotation would be: ‘To an older man, a pen is equally dangerous as a knife is to a child.’

Still, I dare say that a ‘tsunami’ wave of world globalisation has deleted all the differences between the European nations and peoples, or at least diminished to a great deal an interest in them and, concurrently with the former national currencies (liras, Deutschmarks and francs), cancelled their national literatures as well. The opaque cloud of subculture has covered them with a veil of ‘best seller’ literature, ‘Coca-cola’, drugs and ‘turbo-noise’, causing a never before seen crisis of literature. So many literatures do no exist any more: Danish, Spanish, French, German, Italian – they do not concern us any more; and neither do Lithuanian, Latvian, Finnish and Irish literatures, if there are any writers left there at all. The people from these countries are equally not interested in our, Serbian, literature, and even less in Montenegrin or Bosniak unimportant writings. Occupied by their current existential problems, jobs, earnings and profit, they have very little or no understanding for sad, personal lives of unknown individuals, let’s say, an Ostoia from Babusnica, or for the romantic woes of a certain Smiljka from Kosieric. What I want to say is that, nowadays, in the contemporary globalist world of market economy, everything has become more or less identical and monotonous and the world merely keeps rolling and stirring under the waves of global events, or tumbles about like the sand dunes in the Sahara or the Kalahari Desert, whipped by the gusts of wind. A personality does not exist any more and neither does it play an important role. Therefore, it is futile to analyse and emphasise it, and pointless and unproductive trying to build literature on it.

But globalisation and market economy are one thing, and quite another is their companion, and at times even their leader – modern electronics with it magno-systems of global, multinational media communication cartels. It has gained control over the world and human habits. So, for example, no one writes letters any more, and letters are what great novels were made of once - from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther to Dostoevsky's Poor Folk. Young men do not court young ladies in a romantic fashion, with poems and serenades, standing under their windows, but talk in a business-like manner, on their mobile phones, while walking down the street. There are no more patriarchal families to be an inspiration for the Budbenbrooks: The Decline of the Family, The Forsyte Saga or, for example, Rugon-Makarevys, to name just a few. ‘Small business firms’ which are now formed have nothing to do with family craftsmen in the days of the old, depicted by Stevan Sremac and Bora Stankovic, and are, actually, only small links in the big chains of international companies. Neither an individual, nor his surroundings are interesting any longer. An individual is now but a product of the mass market, a subject of surveys conducted by statistics bureaus and agencies and a cheap item on the shelves of big supermarkets. Consequently, the so-called ‘bildungsroman’, a ‘novel of formation and education’ (and within the genre, an Entwicklungsroman or the novel of general growth) like Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), has no place in the contemporary literature. The psychological analyses of individual cases, depicted by Dostoevsky in his novel about Prince Myshkin (The Idiot) or the novel The Brothers Karamazov, are no longer of any interest to readers. Nowadays, profit is the only valid measure and proof of success; everything is subordinated to it and conditioned by it. Along with the destruction of centuries-old European nations, their ruling morals were destroyed as well, and those morals were what the arts were based on - from music and painting, to literature. But America, and that means the whole world, have very little interest in that, for example, as much as like a large coffee producing company would be interested in a single coffee bean.

It is said that this year’s literary jury panel for the ‘NIN’ Magazine had 128 novels to read in order to choose ‘the novel of the year’. It was, undoubtedly, a difficult task, especially considering the short time of less than a month that they had to complete it. But then again, it was a relatively easy job because of the dubious quality of the novels offered to them – all that had already been done fifty or sixty times before, and it is not very likely that lives of certain Stoians, Jovans, Dimitrijes, Vukans or Jovankas, Andjelijas, Marias and Savkas could offer anything new or exciting that had not already been said before. Certain more ambitious and persistent writers were also aware of that, so, in order to avoid the monotony and meaninglessness of these motifs, they used linguistic and stylistic ruses and variations. For a while, it worked, but in years, it became less and less original and all the attempts boiled down to the same empty, worthless repetition and boredom.

But if it is any consolation, the other countries are not doing any better either. Not a single book of any importance has been published in any of the European counties for decades. As a result, even the esteemed jury panel of the World Academy has obviously had great difficulties in finding a book worthy of the Nobel Prize. The cause of this is that the ‘tsunami’ wave of northern American supremacy has swept throughout the world and its populism has erased or blurred national, regional and even personal characteristics and idiosyncrasies, mixing them all into a big mishmash, like the sea creates uniform shapes out of all the pebbles on the shore.

The end of literature! Who and what could authors write about now, and who should they speak to? An individual exists no more, nor is his fate significant. There is but a big, enormous mass of producers and an equally huge mass of consumers. Both comprise anonymous individuals, with no name or importance, with no formed life of their own or a personal, idiosyncratic destiny. Let me make myself clear: there are no more literary characters like Gogol’s Akaki Akakievich who, at one time, excited the world as a new type of hero and gave a new direction to literature; Dostoevsky later breathed life and spirit into him. In the globalist universe in which we live now, from the Eskimo Arctic to the Antarctic Tierra del Fuego and Ross Island, we have all become members of the same society, the same masses consisting of millions of people and resembling a huge, global anthill. It is still being formed, but its crucial components can already be discerned: workers, consumers, warriors, police officers, presidents of multinational concerns and a small, privileged circle or rulers. Their biographies are probably being written at the moment, but not like works of literature, but as intelligence for the special, secret files, whereas the masses, now consisting of billions, have only their ‘personal numbers’ in their ‘identification cards’. Actually, we have become Chapek’s ‘R.U.R.s - Rossum's Universal Robots’, into whom not even that shrewd author managed to breathe personal characteristics and souls, though he did try to make them smile and express feelings at the end of the play.

At the same time, modern, highly developed and constantly improved electronic communications (television, cable networks, the Internet, interside, satellite images and messages, E-mail, websites, or whatever the names of all those new electronic means of communication are) have pervaded and permeated the entire world and reached even the smallest and remotest of towns and villages (even the Nusic’s village of Babusnica), thus destroying the age-old homely atmosphere of family and kin, which was, until recently, the core and the pillar or our predominantly prose literature. The electronic subculture of rock, turbo folklore, striptease, lotto, whiskey and Coca-cola, and even commercial, political, economical and trading tableaux which can now be seen at the main squares of all our towns and cities have become the colour and content of every single thing taking place in our country, as well as in the whole wide world.

I have stopped writing! I have nothing to add, not even in my diary, which I have kept diligently for years. Neither do I have a reason to add another part to my complete works, consisting of approximately thirty books. The whole literature has been in a crisis for an entire century. There is nothing left to write about. Barren, as it has become, the literature tries to save itself with formal tricks, but in vain. For the time of sentimental romantic novels is long gone. There are no more tragic, seduced heroines from the works of, let’s say, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, in our age when girls in French secondary schools are regularly given condoms so they wouldn’t become pregnant or infected with HIV. Globalism has rooted out the feeling of patriotism, and trading competition the feeling of solidarity and ‘fair play’. In short, there is nothing left that a writer could offer to his/her readers as a firm, uncompromising attitude. Not even the most stinging, the most savage satire can be convincingly critical, since there is nothing left to do it for, since nothing is honest and steadfast any more. Consequently, my opinion is that the only attitude worth adopting is irony, and as a literary expression and form: persiflage. And not just any irony, but the kind that mocks even itself and its author, since everything visible and tangible has become a crazy mishmash, like in the late works of Umberto Eco, Mario Vargas Llosa, John Updike, and even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not to mention our authors Milorad Pavic and Svetislav Basara.

Translated by Sofija Milanovic