Column_A SAD STORY
I hasten to loyally warn all the people who expect this text to be optimistic: there will be no opportunity to laugh.
All the readers (and they are in fact reasonable readers) who believe, and indeed believe justly, that a feature article should be written in a light manner, reminiscent of the movements of a knight figure on a chessboard, jumping from joke to joke, all those readers, then, must acknowledge that this time I resolved to defy the rules. And instead of fooling around when writing on serious subjects, laughing at a funeral and acting as an utter idiot, I decided to describe the situation bluntly. And it is, to put it simply, a tragedy.
But, all right, after all, I don’t mind, before I get to the point I can allow myself to clown around a bit: there is nothing you wouldn’t do for a Client. To keep up appearances I can for instance tell a joke, it may even be a fresh joke and a true story. The first thing that comes to my mind is the following: some elderly lady, an owner of a six-storey tenement in the elegant Świętojańska Street in Gdynia, a tenement which was worth about one million Euros or more, this lady, then, humped, in mediocre clothes and by no means resembling a wealthy person whom she in fact was, told me this story: ‘I go home the other day and then, just in front of MY gate, I notice a cigarette butt lying on the ground so I bend to pick it up and to throw it in the bin when this young man runs up to me and says: All right, Ms, I will give you the cigarette...’
Happy? In any case, all those who read feature articles in search of cheap entertainment are requested to stay away. From now on the mood will be serious; it will be gray and gloomy, chilly and scary. Getting to the point, and this story can still be regarded as a humoristic element, in a certain weekly magazine (it does not matter that it was a long time ago – in February this year – and that the weekly magazine in question was ‘Newsweek’ and the author was Leszek Bugajski) I read an article for which I should have received the author’s honorary.
No, it’s not what you think; I don’t allege that the author stole this article from my laptop or that he was eavesdropping through the keyhole when I was humming the content of the article during my morning shave. Nothing was taken off me, everything is correct in my accounts and in Inland Revenue. When writing about copyrights to this article I mean that I would have written exactly the same thing, I would have employed the same examples and would even have put full stops in the same places. I had been repeating the same statements for years, statements which now – much to my horror – have been confirmed by a very reliable magazine.
And what was the reason of my dismay? At first glance it was nothing serious, an apparently innocent and obvious thought, not distinguishing itself in any way from the abundance of information about suicide attacks, harassed politicians or ‘horrendous traffic jams’. All this complex reasoning could be brought down to one statement: (almost) nobody is interested in literature these days. That’s it. Nothing more to be said.
How can this be? I can already see surprise on your faces. Who is he talking about? Surely not about me: I make personal effort to search through book reviews so as to find interesting publications, I buy and read them, at least half of every book so as to be up to date. So who claims that I’m not interested in literature? If this were so, why would I bother to spend my hard earned money on the hundred or so printed pages?
I’m very sorry but that’s the truth. Even if you do buy books for it’s own sake, though I’m not really inclined to believe this, you belong, and I’m saying this with a heavy heart, to a species of radiation mutants, a bizarre race verging on extinction. When it comes to literary preferences, the so-called majority, which in a democracy is always right, uses completely different indicators. To the most popular of these criteria belong since recently: the author’s age (the younger the better), the number of political parties which the author established (the more the better), the number of judicial trials (as above) and a degree of the complexity of sexual preferences (the more....). Some criteria are referred to as ‘specific’ e.g. duration of flogging oneself with sausages or a number of hairs presented on the chest in the photograph in a popular magazine. However, the main categories have already been divided between the people concerned and any self-educated usurpers are generally frowned at.
In the same vain, the article which I mentioned above described a case of a certain lady, a writer, who emigrated to the West and during her stay there she carried out an in-depth scrutiny of the publishing market. She extrapolated her observations onto the purely Polish reality, thus obtaining a mathematically certain conclusion: in our country, too, some day (i.e. today) literature won’t excite anyone, nobody will be moved by a majestic sentence or a vividly portrayed character; the only thing that will matter will be a scandal, preferably a double one, like in the case of a certain famous clitoris. I must respectfully admit that the lady prophesized this situation quite accurately. The events unfolded exactly as she foretold. The manner in which books are sold, preferably packed as whole sets, is a tribute to capitalism. Content is of less importance than shrewdness of marketing and promotion specialists, the shape of a package, the colour of a sticker, the location on a shelf or the power of a ‘media patron’. Books have been squeezed among the multitude of other products; after all, who said that they were superior to a fizzy drink or to a set of plastic cutlery? Like in the case of every product on the market ruled by customers, a book, in order to sell, must somehow stand out against other products performing the same function.
The above article featured the name of Wojciech Kuczok. I will admit straight away: it was while reading this part that I wailed the loudest. Indeed, Kuczok’s case is the most painful assault on my steadfast faith in the power of literature. As is generally known, Kuczok had dabbled in literature in the half-shadow of anonymity until he raised the subject of violence towards a child, thus finding himself in the spotlight of media attention. He basked in this light for a while but as soon as he strayed from this controversial subject, the media abandoned him in search of a different, more substantial prey. And the darkness fell.
And now what? Should Wojciech Kuczok, in a fit of despair, bring up some other sensational topic (I can provide a list for a small charge)? Should he remain faithful to himself as a writer but, at the same time, listen to the sound of cracking chairs and to the weakening patter of feet of angered readers?
I am not inside Wojciech Kuczok the writer’s mind and body so I can’t tell whether he is already practicing flogging himself with sausages, whether he is setting up an alpinist and caver party (abbr. ACP), trying on women’s clothes or falsifying his date of birth with a razor. Or maybe, just like some other man nourished by illusions about the power of words and so overcome by the sheer act of writing that he lacks the force and imagination to undertake inventive autocreation (as once said by a certain respected writer: ‘every art seeks fame: this is its aim’), he is waiting peacefully for a sinusoid curve to bounce off the bottom of absurd and return to the level of a moderate sense.
Adam Ubertowski
Translated by Marta Wójcik