Using a Microscope to Scan the Horizon

Abstract

Oskar Gruenwald in his article, Camp Literature: Rediscovering Ghost of a Nation's Past-Present-Future ' posits that and prison is a literary genre, one that provides missing link between past and future in Communist party states (p. 513). The article paints a stirring picture of dissenters bravely raising issues of human rights and dignity in face of opposition and oppression government, thus nurturing the values of individual freedom, tolerance, and basic human rights that form basis of true civic culture (p. 528). The image is an attractive one at first glance but is marred on closer examination by two flaws. The first is with structure of model of puiported genre, which is not delineated with sufficient clarity and is apparently so oveily broad as either to encompass officially sponsored writings or to be internally inconsistent. The deeper flaw is in basic concept, at least as applied to Yugoslavia, in that its adoption leads author to see, and thus to transmit, a distorted picture of events in Yugoslavia. By viewing world through polarizing lens of a supposed he loses sight of, and thus misrepresents, political and intellectual currents in country.' To invoke image of Solzhenitsyn's archipelago and surrounding it in Yugoslav context is grossly misleading because much of Yugoslav debate is being held openly, bluntly, even in official forums. This is not to say that discussion is entirely free of attempts at political control, but that Yugoslavia's search for ghosts of its past is not based mainly on an underground samizdat of suppressed drawn ranks of oppressed. Gruenwald defines camp in admittedly broad terms as literature that originates from, or is likely to lead to, prisons or (p. 514). This definition is nonspecific. Works like Solzhenitsyn's, which try to reveal a prison system that authorities wish to keep hidden, obviously qualify. But do all writings that discuss prison camps or human rights or political oppression originate from prisons or camps, and therefore qualify for genre'? If so, then genre has many official contributors in Yugoslavia, at least if we take seriously Gruenwald's references to Yugoslav as party-controlled media (p. 514) and controlled press (p. 523).4 Much of one of tiers delineated for Yugoslav camp literature, that concerning prison camp on Goli Otok and reanalyses of period following break with Stalin, has appeared in widely circulated public media. Thus Gruenwald himself (p. 519) refers to 1982 publication in NIN of a long series of articles on Goli Otok, simply first of many