Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  And then, as I studied the students’ faces, I felt a sudden twinge of compassion for them. The names of their literary models told me nothing except that, like most people, they were susceptible to fashion, whatever was currently “cool,” that they were “pumped”; that they were impressed by the fact that they were paying to study at this expensive and preeminent storytelling school, taking part in a new form of cultural power, which was being engineered by a select fraternity: a prosperous writer, a prosperous businessman, a powerful bookstore chain, and an international chain, currently chic, of restaurants and foodstores. For years now cultural power has not been stowed away in the dusty national academies and university departments where somebody was able to keep it under his thumb. I found myself wondering if the crusty old power structures were not so very attractive, why would these new-fangled ones be? What about the Scuola Holden’s triumphalist slogan Capitale Umano, Narrazione d’Impresa (Human Capital, Corporate Identity)?

  My friend Bojan, no longer among the living, said he knew time had left him in the dust, but, to his surprise, nothing hurt. I wondered whether time had left me, too, in the dust? And if it had, hadn’t there been a similar social dynamic before as well, accelerated and given potency by digital technology? Because many of my literary models were no more laudatory or interesting than theirs. An early model for me (I was only ten at the time) was Minou Drouet, a little girl, a poet, who became a world-wide sensation at the age of ten. More enduring were the fame and sway of Françoise Sagan, a young rebel who published her first book at seventeen, the bestseller Bonjour, Tristesse, simply because it was part of the new Euro-American cultural text fabricated by the movies and books of the 1960s. This cultural text rose up from the rubble of the Second World War, the millions killed in the war, the grief, the hopelessness, the incredulity that such a thing could even happen, the clearing away of the ruins, the denial of reality, the accelerated manufacture of a future in which, of course, there would never again be war. I was born after the Second World War, the same year that Holden Caulfield spent his three December days in New York, and yet I managed to catch the rebel-without-a-cause bug and then convalesce as from the measles. In my time, “rebels without a cause” like James Dean were cool, and the division of the world into the genuine and the phony shielded my fragile self-confidence, and not just mine, from collapse. How many incongruous things were cool! I remember that I went for the rebel look Jean Seberg sported in the movie Breathless, though that was not why, soon after that, I wept while watching Love Story with Allie McGraw and Ryan O’Neal. Joyce, Proust, Bergman, Kafka, Kurosawa, Erich Fromm, some of the values that I proudly strutted as a first-year student of comparative literature did not stop me from feeling protective about poor Allison MacKenzie in the American soap opera Peyton Place, just like the student who used De Lollo and DeLillo to form his ideological-aesthetic badge.

  These students are showing off (so did I!) because they are insecure (I was too!). They are a generation atttending an expensive private storytelling school: the school bears Holden’s name, but most of them haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye. The fact that I, as I prepared before the trip, re-read it, doesn’t give me the right to show off in front of them and pester them with questions such as: What is the name of the school from which Holden was expelled? Whose literary work does Holden refer to at the very beginning of the novel? Who is Holden’s favorite writer? What are the most frequent words in Holden’s vocabulary? And so forth.

  To be left in the dust by time, as long as nothing hurts, is a liberating sensation. The sensation, however, is wrong, because time doesn’t flow as we’d like it to, or as we imagine—in any case it doesn’t age along with us. Reading The Catcher in the Rye again I realized that Holden Caulfield, who was seventeen in 1951 when the novel was first published, is eighty-two today. I also realized that his rebellion is actually nothing more than the puerile rant of an old codger stretching over two hundred pages. At the very beginning of the book there is a detail, where Holden says that one side of his head—the right side—is full of millions of gray hairs, which confirms symbolically that Holden is actually ageless, or that he was always in his eighties. Millions of young readers the world over took Holden Caulfield as their central focus for identification. Readers everywhere read The Catcher in the Rye. In Eastern Europe, for instance, it spawned “jeans prose.” Other Holdens cropped up in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, East Germany; they told their stories with “lousy” vocabulary, used vernacular equivalents for Holden’s “and all,” experienced the world of grown-ups as “phony,” acted dumb (“I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life”), or only pretended to be dumb (“I’m the only dumb one in my family”). Whether he wanted it or not, Salinger also became the symbolic spokesperson for the post-war culture of “rebel without a cause.” And the more these “rebels” insist that the world around them is “phony” and makes them “puke,” the more efficiently the world shunts them into the mainstream. Even when I was an adolescent I found it hard to identify with Holden, perhaps because he was a boy and there wasn’t a single girl in my vicinity who’d have wanted him as her boyfriend.

  I started to move slowly toward the door. Nobody saw me out, not the administrator, not the comparatist. As I was leaving the school, a student, the one who’d chosen Kafka as her favorite writer, came running to the door . . .

  “Sorry, I wanted to ask you . . . I don’t want to be a bother, really, but . . . Can storytelling be learned? What do you think? I had the impression you’re a little skeptical about the school . . . and us . . .” she said, slightly out of breath.

  The girl was not, in fact, asking what she said she was asking, she was shrewdly using the same sort of mask she’d used in telling me her favorite author was Kafka. And yet her dilemmas weren’t phony, she was no phony. I was the phony . . .

  “Every school is good. What matters is that you’re writing . . .” I said.

  Why did I respond with this cheap drivel? Why didn’t I show more compassion? Maybe because I had no choice. I couldn’t say much about the school because I knew only what I’d gleaned from the brochures. Even if I’d thought the school was a bad choice, it’s unlikely I’d say so because she’d already invested a hefty sum in her tuition and she’d not be able to earn it back with her writing for the next ten years, unless she stumbled onto a bestseller, or unless her tuition had been paid by rich parents, which was most probably the case. I could quote her Holden: “The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has!” but I didn’t. That would have been cruel and, besides, untrue.

  In his story “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written,” Boris Pilnyak says: “if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then the person’s tribe is accursed. The fox is the writer’s totem.” How to explain to the young woman the risks of her future vocation, the profound, dangerous, and painful occupational hazards, which cannot be resolved by pain tablets the hue of raw meat. The fox in most Slavic languages, and in the large part of Slavic (as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) folklore and mythological imaginary, is gendered as a female. The fox is Scheherazade. Scheherazade is a fox. Scheherazade tells about how stories come to be written. Because with each story Scheherazade is buying another day of life. Her school of creative writing lasts for one thousand and one nights, and instead of paying her tuition with cash, she pledges her head.

  The fox—the totem which, according to Boris Pilnyak, is allotted to us poor writers—is cunning, a sly trickster, a deliverer of divine messages, a servant of Inari, goddess of food-production. The fox is a trafficker in dead souls; the fox is a country-fair juggler, a liar, a charlatan, a flatterer, a brownnoser, a harpy, a skinflint, a crook who risks her life for a shabby catch: a chicken’s backbone, a goose leg, a nubbin of cheese dropped from another’s mouth. The fox is condemned to isolation, to a life outside its kind: a brief mating period, the mothering, true, lasts a little longer, but not long enough to fill the abyss of the isolation. Th
e fox, as a chicken thief, is the alibi and target of the more pragmatic hunters. A fox pelt is not the most highly prized, but it never goes out of style. The fox has magic powers, it can rise to the status of divine fox and be granted its nine tails, but that takes a wait of a thousand years.

  My little niece and I had found our way, whether by chance or not, to the ultimate question, for which no clear answer is likely. All in all, stories will not tell themselves, just as a mirror cannot be turned into a lake, or a comb into thick grass, nor will the pike’s command come true if there is no deep compulsion for it linked to serious risk. (Who knows? Maybe that’s why my little girl inadvertantly murmured the wrong command, saying, Story, set thyself! instead of, Story, tell thyself!) Magic doesn’t happen unless the words are uttered in vain. Hence in every story, even a fairy tale, especially a fairy tale, there must be a component of some higher “truthfulness” (and truthfulness here mustn’t be confused with the truth, with cogency, with life experience, or with morals), because otherwise the story won’t “work.” There must be a good reason why this story, this very story, has to be told. The fox knows every trick in the book, yet still it comes up short. However, when its survival is in question (whatever that might mean)—as in the story about the poor man who steals a fox’s pelt to keep it in his house as his wife—the fox drops all further negotiation and returns to its authentic self. God exists only if we believe in the phrase do not take God’s name in vain. If we don’t believe in the magic of literature, it is just a meaningless string of words.

  The fox brings with it the curse of punishment; only the rare one among them is able to pass the thousand-year test and, at last, give those nine tails a swish. Still it seems that the fox cares little for a summons that could possibly come, one day, from the capricious heavens, because meanwhile it has to survive somehow: hence the rush of flattering words directed at the foolish crow up there on the branch in the hope that it just might drop that nubbin of cheese. Somebody will say, what a waste of time, wouldn’t it be wiser to use one’s words to glorify God, making speedier and more certain the path to redemption. Words glorifying God have no effect because God must not be corruptible, while words glorifying the conceited fool on the branch work reasonably well.

  The fox’s curse lies in the fact that it isn’t loved. The fox neither has great strength we’d fear and submit to, nor does it have beauty to stun us and leave us breathless. How, after all, can one love a creature who shifts face and character, who’s doting one moment and ready to sell us down the river the next, for whom we are not certain, what’s more, whether they belong in the world of the dead or the world of the living. The fox is neither of the beasts, nor of us, people, nor is it of the gods. It is forever a stowaway, a migrant moving with ease through worlds, and when it’s caught without a ticket, then it spins balls on its tail, performs its cheap tricks. The flash of admiration it receives—ah the myopic susceptibility of the fox—is its substitute for love. These are its glory days. All else is a history of fear, flight from the hunter’s bullets, the constant baying of the hounds; a history of persecution, beatings, licking of wounds, humiliation, loneliness, and cheap consolation—a chicken-bone rattle.

  Maybe the student with her pale complexion, her shining, wide-open eyes, the bare ghost of a smile, who is standing here before me will one day write a book, and who knows, maybe somewhere in that book she’ll include a description of me. And if that happens, I would have nothing against being described as an old lady who went out on a chilly night, prayed for the moon to give her light, and while she slowly makes her way for many a mile, around her legs, appearing out of the dark from somewhere, twine little foxes. And look, there are more and more of them, they’re skulking, forming a copper-colored royal train, until the train and the old woman are swallowed by darkness . . .

  Having taken five two-hundred-milligram tablets of Ibuprofen the hue of raw meat, I decided to walk back to my B&B, although the Scuola Holden and Via Giulia di Barolo were some distance apart. My back pain let up. There was a bounce in my step, as if I’d won, as if I’d nabbed my prey (A couple of you will grease my chin, before I leave this town-o, town-o, town-o, before I leave this town-o . . .), though I had nothing to show for my triumph. All the more so as I suspected that the honorarium, for which I’d signed the ecologically distasteful paper contract, would never arrive . . .

  August, 2016.

  Dubravka Ugresic is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, along with six collections of essays, including Thank You for Not Reading and Karaoke Culture, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She has won, or been shorlisted for, more than a dozen prizes, including the NIN Award, Austrian State Prize for European Literature, Heinrich Mann Prize, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Man Booker International Prize, and the James Tiptoe Jr. Award. In 2016, she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the “American Nobel”) for her body of work.

  Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating fiction and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including novels and short stories by David Albahari, Dubravka Ugresic, Daša Drndić, and Karim Zaimovič. She is co-author of a textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with Ronelle Alexander and author of Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War, which was awarded the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.

  David Williams is the author of Writing Postcommunism, and translated Ugresic’s Europe in Sepia and Karaoke Culture.

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