Un/worlding Literature: Dubravka Ugrešić as a Post-multinational Writer
Rezumat
Abstract: In Dubravka Ugrešić’s view, the usual celebration of the historical events of unification tends to disregard their disuniting corollaries. The right to the happiness of ones results in the unhappiness of others who, in given circumstances, must invent their mode of survival. The case in point are today’s East Europeans, the inferiority of whose position in the united space of Europe is all too often disregarded. Faced with the West European ‘marketing’ unification of Europe, they adopt the technique of ‘breathing under water’ in order to survive. Considering literature, Ugrešić renders this asymmetry as follows: On the one hand the West European writers, tacitly supported by their worldwide acknowledged national traditions, confidently pave the way for the post-national market of world literature. On the other hand, the East European writers of petty post-multinational literatures are coerced to enter this market under their national labels. The latter transform them into exotic commodities, thus exemplifying what Heidegger called unworlding (Entweltlichung). As a result, world literature amounts to a discriminatory category that worlds some writers at the price of unworlding others. This polarization of its celebrated unification recalls the bifurcating effects of liberal democracy. “What democratic freedoms are left to the vast majority of people,” Ugrešić asks, “who do not have money to pay a lawyer, dentist, doctor, educate their children, or provide them with a roof over their heads.” In the final effect, willingly or not, world literature keeps (re)producing unworlded writers who master only one skill, breathing on the reed. In her writerly strategy Dubravka Ugrešić epitomizes this skill.
Keywords: worlding, unworlding, nationalism, multinationalism, breathing on the reed
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