Fission, Fusion, “Faccion”, Fashion these are the five enunciates that come to
mind when confronting the outcome of the deliberations that resulted in the
adjudication of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.
The Prize has been granted to the Byelorussian journalist
Svetlana Alexievich who has devoted most of her life to dig into the Soviet
soul. In short, she has given voice to the silent minority, or should I say to the
bearers of the Communist regime in her native country and the vaster Soviet
Union.
This she has done by “transcripting” hundreds of interviews with
common people exposed to the Communist ideology
throughout several generations. The only one of her five novels that has been
translated to Spanish and English is about the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl
(1986): over two hundred pages of horrors described by the protagonists giving
the reader a view over a patchwork made out of testimonies and numerous
questions about the future, not only theirs but also of the entire human kind.
Svetlana Alexievich is a documentalist, therefore war also
plays an important role in her book: the military language used by the
political leaders contaminates the atmosphere and she proves her point by
comparing the nuclear explosion of Chernobyl to previous war experiences, except
for the fact that in a nuclear one the enemy has become lethal yet invisible.
Without intervening much in the narrative, she also poses a
comparison of the true unbelievable facts to the ones that only an imaginative
science fiction creator could have come out with.
Of course, the fear and adoration of God represent a catch 22
for the survivors considering their ultra-religious backgrounds. People,
regardless of their faith, ask themselves, as did German thinker Theodor
Adorno, after the Second World War, how is it possible to live and create the
same way as ever, after such experiences? Is there not a before and an after
Chernobyl? Is it possible that it has just become another show for mediatic and even touristic consumption?
Fission
Certainly Svetlana Alexievich applies fission to her
narrative as “the act or process of splitting into parts”. Maybe her storyline mimics
the nuclear fission that occurred in Chernobyl where radiation spread and where
the blues in all shades and meanings overtook all living beings including the
earth itself.
Fusion
Without a doubt, Svetlana Alexievich rubs high temperatures
into her stories. The way fusion is described in the dictionary, she also “blends
different things into one by heat”. Such high temperature submerges the reader
in a time and place where no one wants to be, hence every detail counts as each
one belongs to a true life experience, none of which can possibly be left out. Alas,
in the reader’s eyes, the sum of the elements under scrutiny becomes itself an
atomic bomb that one needs to flee.
Faccion
A neologism had to be created to address the factual and the
fictional under a solo word. For the
questions of what is literature has aroused many eyebrows. Svetlana Alexievich
is not the first journalist to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Colombian Gabriel García Márquez is maybe the best example. Hence, his prose
was elaborate, his plots were threaded and he was sophisticated both in literary
and journalistic tasks. Borrowing language from the painters, Alexievich ultra-realistic
sketches may be considered as reversed expressions of Soviet realism.
There is hardly any narrative or description intervention on
her part. Her Voices of Chernobil (1997) is a series of terrible accounts narrated
in first person by dozens of protagonists of the catastrophe. Her permanent use
of colloquial language leaves space to deviations and derivations, even though
there are shared claims among the interviewed regardless of their social, educational
or political level: The terrible lack of information all the victims suffered by an omnipresent ideological and
propagandistic power, as well as their necessity to leave a testimony.
Fashion
It may be that the reality shows, the testimonials, the quotes,
and the unveiled truth are the trend of the Century. This may also be the tendency of the
literature juries: to privilege the factual over the literary skills. Perhaps
the pendulum has shifted back to a search for “the truth”. Even when what is
being unveiled is more of the same: the evilness of the Human Condition, the need
of notions such as love, solidarity and hope over fatality, pessimism or
depression.
Or is it that postmodernism has become an umbrella under
which everything goes?
By Eva Feld
Loveland,
October 201 
