On November 9, 1989, an East German spokesman named Günter Schabowski accidentally announced on live television that all East German citizens would now be allowed to travel without restrictions. Effective immediately. The swell of German people—from points both East and West—who soon converged at the Berlin Wall took the guards completely by surprise. They were as confused as anybody else. They swung open the gates.
As the story goes, Günter hadn’t been to work that day. Party officials, who had just finished hashing out a new policy meant to relax (in orderly German fashion!) the prohibition on travel for East Germans, called a press conference, stuffed a memo in Günter’s hand and pushed him out in front of live television cameras.
They hadn’t meant for him to use a phrase like effective immediately. But Günter somehow misunderstood what was written on the memo, and did. And the wall was crushed to pieces and the pieces were then sold to tourists and collectors. Which, I suppose, represents the ultimate symbolic victory of capitalism.
That’s why today—the 20th anniversary—is a great opportunity to stop and think about the enduring power of mythology.
We’re taught in our anthropology classes that mythmaking comes as easy to we humans as eating and sleeping and other, less printable pursuits. And they’re right—it does. Nobody teaches us the rules for wielding metaphor. Every human child grows up with the capacity to use similes, to understand books and movies and television. Though there are, perhaps, infinite levels of such understanding, the underlying principle is undeniable: we are not strictly mathematical creatures. And even the most well-trained eggheads are at a loss to explain why.
Why, for instance, do Americans fawn over Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño? After he died in 2003, something like eight of his novels have been translated to English—most of them coming after the translation of The Savage Detectives became a smash hit with critics.
Call it sour grapes, but Horacio Castellanos Moya, one of Bolaño’s friends and contemporaries, wrote in this month’s issue of Guernica that there’s something a little disingenuous about how American publishers have turned Bolaño into an industry:
The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.
Moya explains that the endlessly marketable Bolaño pictured on dust jackets of his newly published books—the scruffy, long-haired revolutionary poet from the 1970s—is not an accurate picture of the Bolaño who wrote the novels he’s best known for. Moya knew Bolaño to be a quieter, family-oriented man. But the latter wouldn’t exactly excite American imaginations. In this era of Hollywood-made Che Guevara biopics, there are few things hotter than bottled revolution.
And then there’s the case of Aravind Adiga. The White Tiger, Adiga’s first novel, won him the 2008 Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world. Global fame followed—except for in Adiga’s native India, where the book received a lukewarm response.
In both cases we’re left with a curious disconnect between success in one’s own culture and success in a foreign one. Call it Big In Japan Syndrome—the old gag that an unexpected cult following in backwards little Japan is a sort of consolation prize among bands and actors for whom greater success has proven elusive.
Of course, the Western literature market isn’t exactly the bush leagues. Dollar for dollar, there’s little doubt that we Westerners spend more money on books than anybody else in the world. So when a foreign-born author is abstractly plucked from his or her own culture and aggressively sold here—to people who will literally buy whatever they’re told—it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Call it village-pillaging.
Which somehow brings us back to the Berlin Wall.
As Michael Meyer wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last week, Ronald Reagan did not tear down the wall. The famous speech—Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev!—was delivered in 1987. Which, if you’ve paid attention, was two years before the wall came down. Which isn’t to say that Reagan did nothing. His chummy relationship with the Saudi royal family proved instrumental when it came to starving the USSR of oil revenue. And the Afghanistan quagmire, which Reagan’s CIA helped exacerbate, certainly did not help. And then there’s the Marshall Plan. Economic containment. The Bomb.
But the USSR did just as much to defeat itself. After the Soviets built an empire on a one-dimensional oil economy and maintaining one of the largest standing militaries in history, successful revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania—not to mention the protests at Tiananmen Square—the bottom simply fell out.
So we must resist the urge to construct simple narratives from unbelievably complicated events. The full picture is one of infinite nuance. As Meyer describes it:
Americans have never bothered to understand how, exactly, it ended. Rather than appreciating its complexity, not to mention the element of chance, we credited ourselves with unambiguous victory.
In closing, all of this seems to beg the question: do we have the ability to just appreciate things as they are? Can’t we judge Bolaño and Adiga on the merits of their respective works? Can’t we just acknowledge that the Berlin Wall fell not because of a stubborn American president, but also because of decades of horrific institutional decay?
I’m not so sure. Here’s what I do know: last week, I bought the three-volume special edition of Bolaño’s 2666. I, too, have a weakness for mythology.
