Toronto, Capital of Ukraine: The Ends of Desire and the Beginning of History in Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Green Library

Abstract

THE SLOVENIAN CULTURAL THEORIST SLAVOJ ZIZEK posed a timely question in his 1993 book Tarrying With Negative: Why was West so fascinated by disintegration of Communism in Eastern Europe? (200). The standard response is that West wanted to see liberal and a market economy flourish in region, but Zizek proposes a more caustic answer. The real object of fascination is the gaze, namely supposedly naive gaze by means of which Eastern Europe stares back at West, fascinated by democracy (200). In this gaze, he says, West sees its own lost origins, own lost original experience of democratic invention, and it is in this sense that Eastern Europe represents an Ego-Ideal, the point from which West sees itself in a likable, idealized form, as worthy of love (200). Zizek's account of narcissistic spell by which West views collapse of communism as an affirmation of own values is significant on a number of counts, not least of which is that it explains alarmingly widespread belief that over last ten years world has broken free of age-old patterns of ideological confrontation and national difference and emerged into an era of rootless cosmopolitanism. This hypothesis of a definitive settlement in how we organize our politics and economies, claim that social antagonisms which for many years gave us our sense of being in history have withered away, has been repeated tenaciously over last decade by liberal pundits and intellectuals alike. It was first articulated by U.S. State Department's philosopher-in-residence Francis Fukuyama, who argued with breathtaking simplicity in a 1989 essay that of communism marks end of history, or less bluntly the point of mankind's ideological evolution and universalization of Western liberal as final form of human government (4), and it has been taken up since then, albeit less euphorically, in Jean-Marie Guehenno's The End of Nation-State and Robert Cooper's The Post-Modern State and World Order The problem is that this hypothesis stands in contradiction to data of recent events in Eastern Europe. At very moment in history when people previously yoked to Soviet empire should be taking up citizenship in post-historical world--at this very moment, nationalism and historical consciousness to which it is attached are coming back in their most basic form. The emergence of ethnic causes from Kosovo to Kaliningrad, revival of national rivalries, assertion of historical divisions of language and religion, appearance of genocidal racism and anti-Semitism: untimely phenomena such as these fly in face of Western claim that of communism has ushered in universal civilization of consumer-citizens built on pillars of and free market. However extraliterary this speculation on ideological landscape of post-communist world order may at first seem, it presents critics and literary historians with a clearly defined challenge. For one thing, there is a remarkable thematic congruity between liberal assertion that history and ideology have run their course and vaunted post-modernist claim that it is no longer through collective conceptual and social structures but in sphere of individual autonomy that we define ourselves. As Jean-Francois Lyotard so famously put it, world has grown sceptical of master-narratives and this scepticism results from redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism, particularly valorization of the individual enjoyment of goods and services (37-8). The line of thinking behind this argument--the rejection of socializing forms of life in favour of a postmodern apparatus attune to desires of sovereign individuals--has a remarkably strong hold on literary studies today and versions of it have been repeated in recent Canadian literary scholarship. For example, in his aptly titled essay Generation X and End of History G. …