American Fictionary - Softcover

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work.

Celia Hawkesworth is the translator of numerous works of Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian literature, including Dubravka Ugresic’s The Culture of Lies for which she won the Heldt Prize for Translation in 1999.

Ellen Elias-Bursać is a translator of South Slavic literature. Her accolades include the 2006 National Translation Award for her translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer. She is currently the Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association.

“Personality”

I call an acquaintance, a New Yorker, I haven’t seen her for three years. “Oh, great to hear from you! How are you?” “And how are you?” . . . We chat, we condense three years of our lives into brief reports: she’s finished her doctorate and found a job and had a daughter.
“Oh, you must come and see her! She is such a strong personality.”
This footnote—strong personality—pricks my ear like an acupuncture needle and won’t go away.

I imagine a spoiled brat, which is what “strong personality” means in this case. The brat part doesn’t bother me, it’s the intonation. Because she, my acquaintance, doesn’t know I’ve heard this phrase, spoken with that same intonation, countless times since I’ve been here, and that suggests to me that there is a predominance here of people with strong personalities, so, therefore, my life here was going to be remarkably exciting.

There’s an entire industry for the production of personality. Child psychologists, adult psychiatrists, laws, established codes of behavior, newspapers, publishing houses, television. Everything is for sale, from textbooks with ego-building exercises to audio-cassettes advising us how to turn a grating voice into one that is deep and agreeable.

But still, in order for a person to have a personality, he must, it would seem, earn it, he has to have a destiny which will be authentic and his alone. But the praxis of everyday life rudely quashes one’s right to a personal destiny simply because it instantly transforms it into a public, collective one.

In totalitarian systems the individual preserved his privacy like the family valuables. What he did not himself succeeded in preserving in the “house safe,” was preserved in police safes—by the police. The police were as discreet as one’s most loyal friend. The genre of the personal confession is unknown to the literatures of totalitarian systems (the less you talk about yourself, the thinner your police file will be!). Indeed, literature begins where the personal confession ends. Literature under totalitarian regimes has exploited the rich strategies of literary devices, lies—the essence of literature, in other words—in order to express its truth indirectly about the world. With the fall of communism the genre of the personal confession sprang into being: suddenly it transpired that our lives were as like as two peas in a pod. The freedom of confession has destroyed the aura of uniqueness the author used to have, the aura of tragic personal fate.

It seems that America does not produce anything other than the genre of collective autobiography. The average American appears to be lurching unconsciously towards a large media interviewing room where they will confess their lives. The role of the discreet police in totalitarian systems has been taken over in the American democratic system by the indiscreet media. Bookstores are full of personal stories that describe the author (he or she) being raped, surviving incurable disease, curing depression, dragging themselves out of the jaws of drug addiction, doing this and doing that.

American television programs, too, have become public collective confessionals: they compete as to who will confess more, better, more keenly. TV-confessionals are like gladiators’ arenas in which the fighters wrestle with emotions, and the audience enjoys the fresh, authentic bloodletting. Confessions are sometimes produced like real Greek plays: relations, sisters, brothers and children are brought on to play out an authentic family melodrama before the eyes of the viewers. Americans today make public confessions of their personal experience—to order.

And what has happened to the sacred American right to privacy?

If you stare at an American’s house for longer than three minutes, the owner has the right, according to one of the many laws that sanction the sacred right to privacy, to call the police. On the other hand this same American will not hold back from telling you his whole life’s story at the first available opportunity. If he holds back, the media will do it for him. Because the private is public. It is not advisable in America today to shut the door of the office where you work. During office hours professors keep their doors wide open so as not to be accused of harassment. And the right to personal illness has also been withdrawn. This is why Magic Johnson briefly informed the media as he emerged from the delivery room: “He’s negative!” The whole of America knew what this “negative” referred to. Johnson’s newborn baby did not have HIV! Even the right to personal suicide has been withdrawn, as the very next day the media will make your tragic, fresh, personal corpse into a collective sociological theme.

America today is writing its great collective autobiography. And when everyone writes what ensues is a universal deafness and lack of understanding, as Kundera once wrote. The American market of ideas is not giving up, the commercial effect of the personal obliges it to establish new aesthetic criteria: only what is truthful, authentic, personal is of aesthetic value.

Will Americans soon begin to wonder how it is that they—who have believed their whole lives in ideologemes about individualism, individual choice, personalness—are so remarkably like their next-door neighbors? The American media market, which anticipates all problems by immediately giving them voice, offers its new great, global, safeguarding idea of self-esteem. Work on self-esteem (national, professional, age-specific, physical, private, sexual) anticipates the awareness of defeat, the awareness that something isn’t quite right after all—because this implies in advance that something is wrong. Work on self-esteem is a form of ego-training as a safeguard, a new fashion product on the American market of ideas.

And if I change the lens for a moment and ask myself who I am, the observer, I’m acutely aware that my self-esteem suddenly melts away. Have the sick the right to judge the healthy? Am I not a sort of invalid observing the reality around me from a wheelchair with the eyes of a limited and therefore superficial observer?