Nikolai Jeffs
Sodobnost
Sodobnost
Eurozine
Crisis and the democratisation of literature
Nikolai Jeffs
Belief in the imperishable dicipline of word order is belief in the imperishability of the existing social order. Next to this, Literature then mainly projects or produces a certain defined community, the substance and boundary of which ar marked out, even by liberal poets such as Ales Debeljak, as being national. The ambition is still that of (the poet) Preseren, but the cause and consequence, i. e. the basis and ideological superstructure of society, have been exchanged; just as in Zupan's declaration: "Since times long past it has been generally recognised that we, Slovenes, are a nation of poets, that our foundation is lyric." In the defence of poetry in the face of hostile social forces, however, such proclamations have, alas, no greater value than the fact that they reveal themselves to us as being neo-romantic mechanisms of class self-legitimation, apologies for elitism, the ultimate horizon of which is terrifyingly self-destructive. The epistemological privilege which Literature demands for itself becomes, indeed, quite swiftly transformed into a political one (e. g. the "true" national interest), the consequence of which is also cruder instrumentalisation, and hence the end of creativity itself. Indeed, it is only a short step that separates us from Shelley's maxim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", to Stalin's wisdom that "writers are the engineers of human souls".