Psalm 44

Danilo Kiš Psalm 44

PREFACE

Let me start with a complaint: What is absent from much of contemporary fiction, which in the USA is conceived of as middle-to-highbrow entertainment, is the ethical import of literature. As it is, the word fiction largely stands for (deliberately) made-up narratives aiming to entertain the culturally enlightened reader. Literature, on the other hand, is nothing if not continuous ethical and aesthetical engagement with human experience and history; one reads/writes literature in order to confront the hard questions of human existence; entertainment might not be applicable. While the word fiction equally applies to The DaVinci Code and Remembrance of Things Past, only one of those is literature; the other one is trash. (“Do not argue that all values are relative: there is a hierarchy of values,” Kiš wrote in his “Advice to a Young Writer.”) American populism of the knee-jerk variety requires cringing at the thought of literature (and, for that matter, at any thought that is not confirming what is already agreed to be true), because it is — what is the word flung about by the humble sons of the one percent? — elitist. (Kiš’s advice: “Do not write for an elite that does not exist: you are the elite.”) But literature is inherently democratic, as it is the way for everyone and anyone who can read to enter the difficult and vast field of everything that comes under humanity. “Do not write for ‘the average reader,’” Kiš wrote to the Young Writer, “all readers are average.”

In the home of the brave, literature has been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by the systematic avoidance of difficulty, by the cultural laziness that spreads like brain-infecting flu out of the sunny realm of eternal, unconditional entertainment. Bullied by the cryptofascist, consumerist resistance to public thought — or thinking in public — American literature tends to avoid uncomfortable weight: the weight of tradition; the weight of civic and historical responsibility; the weight of language, which needs to be ceaselessly reinvented and reevaluated. The ethical fiascoes of the Bush era in perpetuity unfettered, the catastrophic wars and the insidious fantasies that prepared them and maintain them, the widespread collapse of the notion of a socially-responsible government and the related (reality-based) democracy, the rabid xenophobia indistinguishable from the socially-acceptable practices of American Patriotism, the mind-crushing lies reproducing the belief that capitalism is the best thing ever — all have been pretty much ignored in our contemporary fiction. Not many American authors know how to confront the history we’re living in; few attempt to, even fewer dare to claim an ethically/aesthetically-de-fined system of thought that would demand from the reader to engage with the difficulties of the early twenty-first century.

The reason for writing from a confrontational position would be less in the necessity for social engagement (“At the mention of ‘engaged literature’ be silent as a fish: leave it to the professors,” Kiš advised) than in the fact that recent history ought to be seen as a fertile creative ground, as an ethical and aesthetical opportunity, a chance to loosen the unstimulating grip of epiphanic psychological realism. Much of American literature has been paralyzed, producing nary a novel that would fundamentally — ethically, aesthetically — question and take apart the Matrix-like reality of what is commonly referred to as America. We need a literature that would do the difficult work of finding meaning beyond what is offered as self-evident (“Do not believe in statistics, figures, or public statements: reality is what the naked eye cannot see.”) and counter the steady production of systemic oblivion. It might turn out to be difficult; we might have to learn how to do it from writers like Danilo Kiš. As it is now, there seems to be a consensus that any whiff of difficulty coming from the contemporary novel would result in the already depleted literary readership retreating deeper into the mindless territories of Iron Men and the many shades of gray.

The greatness of Kiš’s work lies in his unflinching willingness to confront and (re)imagine the horrors of history as experienced by human beings. The aim of his work is not to bear witness (“Have no mission,” Kiš advises. “Beware of people with missions.”) but to reconfirm the value of individual experience; he is not merely reporting on the state of individual humanity, rather, he recreates it in language, thereby reestablishing its sovereignty, without which the very project of literature is inconceivable.