GEORGE KONRAD
Something Is Over
If everything around us is changing, we must be changing too.
Literature as we knew it under socialism - that is, literatu re as a na–
tional institution - has ceased to exist. Gone are our cheap books: the
state has no particular interest in whether its citizens read what its writers
have
to
say. We writers are no longer high priests, but we are no longer
heretics either. Nor was political dissent ever really the domain of litera–
ture proper: w hen criticism can be heard in parliament or read in the
dailies, it does not need
to
play hide and seek between covers.
Besides, political statements as such have lost their ability to shock;
indifference is a great leveler. And when it comes to the most heated
controversies of the day, writers are sudden ly rank amateurs. Writing is a
less serious profession than it was; it is more of a hobby, a pastime, a
sport. Priests have reclaimed their prerogative to speak on exalted topics,
and politicians are fed grandi loquent formulas by speec hwriters. Writers
have no more reason
to
wax lofty. In a libera l democracy our fellow
citizens do not need our spiritual guidance. What they need are good
books.
Under state socialism the writer assumed a positive or negative func–
tion; in bourgeois society the writer is a private individual capable of
providing certain information. And - insofar as we are actuall y li ving in
a liberal democracy - what w riters write is their affair and their affair
alone . If there is little interest in what they have to say, they can publish
it themselves in one o r two thousand cop ies. A year or two afte r the big
change, writers are still fretting over whether they serve a purpose, fill a
need. They have begun
to
suspect they are passe. The money is gone; the
power is gone. The market has not yet found a way to make them
profitable; the sta te no longer wants them.
The socialist state needed them if they didn't kick up too much of a
fuss. The state maintained its own cu lture , which consisted of books
passed by its censor, but that culture was supplemented by an un censored
one. Even today the state has money to subsidize a cu lture more or less
faithfu l to itself, but cu lture it does not perceive as faithful it leaves to its
Editor's Note: From
The Melal/choly
~r
Rebirth.
Copyright
©
1995 by George
Konrad. To be published by Harcourt Brace
&
Company.
