Happily, this kind of language is rare, and much of the book is devoted less to the making of a new European consciousness than to the definition and preservation of the cultural importance of small nations, specifically Slovenia, their languages, and their cultural heritages. In fact, Debeljak begins by discussing issues of national identity, particularly important to Slovenes because, beginning with independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, they have been riding “the last car on the last train of nationalism.” Like any citizen of a small country, he is, sometimes reluctantly, aware of the necessity for “concentric circles of identity.” Once part of the Habsburg Empire, then of various avatars of Yugoslavia, now of the European Union, Slovene writers must either find a way to export their visions or to retreat within their own borders. On the one hand, “liberal tolerance” (as distinct from cosmopolitanism) “camouflages what is essentially something passive” and “cannot be fully divorced from a self-congratulatory and highly patronizing attitude.” At its worst, it can reduce a minority culture to the status of folklore, or to Disneyfication. An example is the German writer Peter Handke’s desire to keep Serbia isolated so as to retain its charm. [Blind to the Truth, 20 July 2005]
Looking up and out rather than down, Slovene writers must neither overvalue other traditions nor, like Hungary’s nepi or “folk,” who wish to concentrate exclusively on local traditions and ethnicity, ignore them in ultra-nationalist fervor. Debeljak realizes “that the boundaries of my language [are,] to a considerable degree, the boundaries of my world” – not just “linguistic skills” but “a whole symbolic, mental, and social experience deposited in the layers of a nation’s historical existence and collective mentality” – and that they constitute “the encapsulation of a metaphysical worldview.” On a less abstract level, one’s language allows one to give names to everything, to understand inside jokes, and to follow the implications of subtle cultural references – the kind of things that can make poetry untranslatable.
As a result, in Debeljak’s desire to make literature an important instrument for constructing the “common grand narrative,” he rejects purely esthetic approaches to literature. Postmodernism blurred “the distinction between the pragmatic and artistic dimensions,” so that “Postmodern art is no longer the embodiment of an alternative world that derives meaning from its aesthetic and ethical tensions with the existing order; on the contrary, postmodern art by and large supports, maintains, and justifies the existing order.” In Debeljak’s view, “the artist brings together a variety of existential, social, and national aspects of experience in a search for meaningful balance.”
Debeljak does not always follow a consistent line of argument, nor was it his intention. The four chapters that constitute this book, revised and expanded for an American audience from a collection published in five Central European countries, are conceived as “a kind of intellectual poetry,” “neither fully a work of academic scholarship nor fully a work of creative nonfiction.” The book’s appeal should be similarly diverse, for it speaks of problems common to the so-called New Europe, presents a challenge to the older nations of the EU, and, one hopes, will shake at least some Americans out of their insularity. If Debeljak presents problems more clearly than he does solutions, that is the nature of essays, a form whose tentativeness seems particularly attractive in the current context of slogans, wild assertions, and lies. And his search for “the hidden handshake of solidarity” amid so much division can only be seen as heartening.
Buy The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in the Post-Communist World at the TOL Store.
Published on TOL, 18 January 2006