/ world today news/ I was perplexed when I read in the latest 2016 issue 43 of the “Kultura” newspaper the conversation between the famous professors Al. Kyosev and M. Nikolchina, who are also popular TV experts on Bulgarian and world literature. As irreplaceable literary establishment figures, the two discuss a novel that has upset the status quo. This is the novel “Submission” by Michel Welbeck, long ago turned into a proverb in the tongues of European criticism, but also reluctantly accepted as a hot potato and therefore overexposed here as well, which is mentioned in a note (outside the text) about its double play: the first time on BNT and now – copy paste in “Kultura”.
The debaters, even with the very title, set us up that they will present their opinions in a column under the irritating title “Slow Reading Lessons”, taken from some ill-conceived (as if for degenerates) column on national television. Then, in the same style, intended as if for the underdeveloped, it is suggested that the conversation pass through the roles of the “good and bad cop”, with the role of the good being assigned to Mr. Kyosev, and the role of the bad to Mrs. Nikolchina. However, their self-irony would sound mischievous (as it is intended) if it were not illuminated by the haughty speech (of Mr. Kyosev) and an overplayed aggressiveness (of Ms. Nikolchina), and this reverses the intention and unintentionally connects, Mr. Kösev in the role of Welbeck’s defender in direct associations with the boasts of the glorious soldier Schweik to the Austrian emperor.
Suspicion is also aroused by the fact that only now, two years after the publication of Welbeck’s novel, he has provoked our experts, who are known for their ardent neoliberal convictions.
But perhaps all these preliminary doubts are suggestions of the apparently unsuccessful package and will be rejected by the conversation itself. Therefore, instead of giving in to suspicions, let us follow the action as concisely as possible.
Mr. Kyosev opened the discussion with explanations for the scandalousness of the novel and the clarification that the Bulgarian edition appeared at the same time as the French and English editions. In the role of the bad cop, Mrs. Nikolchina bursts in like in a boxing match, and the novel is sprinkled with fluff and feathers in an instant: “I think that the novel is the disease itself – she announces. /…/This is not a diagnosis of the situation we live in, it is not an attempt to see it more broadly, it is not an attempt to see it in depth. It’s not a diagnosis, it’s the boil we’re in now…”. Having barely finished this fine analysis, she offers her first conclusions: “From this point of view, I have very serious problems with this novel, which also seems weak to me. It’s written, it’s structured like porn.”
With this waterfall of outpourings, even the self-proclaimed defender of the novel, Mr. Kösev, is caught between the ropes and has no choice but to start with verbal maneuvers: “On the one hand – he begins – Welbeck is accused of nihilism, pornography, elementary… .” – pedophilia – Mrs. N. reinforces it – in pedophilia, in pamphleteering, in journalistic monotony… But on the other hand – Mr. K. dives between the ropes – he constantly receives literary awards and is one of the most the famous writers of the world. And a number of people, myself included, consider him one of the greatest and most interesting phenomena among modern writers…”
What a beginning and what a development!….
From here on, Mr. Kösev permanently seizes the floor in three long monologues, declaring at the very beginning that he reads Welbeck as “one of the greatest and most interesting phenomena among modern writers”, retells the plot, lists the changes taking place in France with “the slow creep not just Islam, but an entire Islamic civilization inside France” as a “slow, creeping leprosy,” lists the defeats in “Sorbonne, French tourism, cuisine, and ends with foreign policy.” “The realistic plan of the image shows how step by step something is changing in France,” he emphasized.
One gets the impression that he highly values the novel, that he considers it a strong realistic picture of French society, uncompromisingly touching its sores – coldness, selfishness, disintegration of family ties, consumerism and dull obedience to circumstances. And the reader gradually begins to expect a book that describes something familiar, as if very familiar. Running through the roles of the characters, Mr. Kösev hints at the degeneration of iconic images in world literature and suddenly in these real, observable processes he discovers …speculation: “I think that Welbeck’s way of writing /…/is very complex dual realism,/…/. Some call it speculative realism…”
After all the accumulated “superlatives,” the glorified Welbeck suddenly finds himself a writer benefiting from “double bottom realism.” Because “in fact, the space in which Welbeck writes is a space of phantasms and fears.” And if “(its) true genre is to be determined, it is the ‘horror story’ and thus all its realism hitherto proclaimed … turns out to be imaginary.”
Thus we go to the other extreme – realism evaporates.
Readers who know the novel are left stunned, swept away, amazed that after so many words of praise (a whole newspaper page), after so many plot retellings and thematic dispatches, suddenly it turns out that “all those taboo fears with which modern man lives , are played out as “theatre” that Welbeck’s character, as said earlier, is simply “an empty shell”, “a character without a center”, “without any existential point of gravity”, a character “without any awareness of the modern world ” (M.N) and after even an imaginary reader is hired as support, who “reads, constantly resisting, with great dissatisfaction, boredom, annoyance and anger”, nothing remains of Mr. Kyosev’s defensive theses, as nothing of substance remains in Welbeck’s own novel.
We find ourselves thrown into some absurdity, the like of which we have never dreamed.
And so, while at the same time liking one thing and not liking another, the two cops – both the bad and the good – find themselves embraced in a common goal: to save the Bulgarian reader from a treacherous book that can easily “seduce” him if he gets to the main message on his own of the novel: – the tragic-harsh warning to civilization, spoken with dark irony and strongly embedded not so much in the intrigue, but in the overall atmosphere of the novel – we die in our own stupidity and our superhistorical selfishness.
A literal reading of this warning, which our cops deploy as pornography, as arousing “fears and phantasms” and as characterizing the novel as a “disease”, diagnosing it as a “boil” turn out to be panicked gestures of “blindfolding”, to circumvent to the problem of the collapse of neoliberalism, spells of apophatic speaking to an increasingly skeptical audience. The many words that sound praiseworthy for the writer sound negative for the novel, shifting the message to everything else that it is not, until, after all, the very problem of what is happening in society is declared “just an idea.”
The magic of apophatic neoliberal talk doesn’t seem to work anymore. We are faced with a naked sophistry. For it is a perversion where the great writer stakes all his humanistic urge on the enlightenment of civilization, to read only phantasms and fancies that disgust you, turning out to be your own.
But isn’t our entire literary life here submerged in this perversion, masked as political correctness?
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I write these lines also because of a personal “conversion”, as the bad cop would say. It so happened that, a few months ago, when I read Welbeck’s novel, I had just published a review of a Bulgarian novel, “Biographies of Geeks” by Simeon Yanev. I was struck by the great similarity between the two novels, I could not believe my eyes – with the same anxiety and sense of doom, almost the same problems (to the point of literalism), in the same structure and the same comedic-tragic academic environment, with the same message in the Bulgarian novel . I read the two novels again and as a reaction I wrote a small article, the title of which says in one sentence everything that has just been stated: “Surprising correspondences between a French and a Bulgarian novel”. It was published just two weeks before the sudden teleconversation took place, the sudden copypaste of which we now rely on. Perhaps a coincidence?
But Mr. Kyosev, who more than twenty years ago announced the death of Bulgarian literature and even reaffirmed it, without ceasing to teach us how to read, has probably already mourned the dead, but missed in some slow reading to teach us how to we accept such afterlife signals. Therefore, he clearly did not give up on instructing us how to protect ourselves from the ghosts born in his own head.
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