Feature Jacek Dukaj
exchange” makes Dukaj leery, and he suggests that Poland’s right-wing government (which ultimately has put up the fistfuls of zlot required to be an LBF Market Focus) “doesn’t find me objectionable—yet”. “I’ve never been invited to one of these things before. I guess I’m atached to the old literary elite but I’m not dangerous in the political sense because [the government] thinks, ‘Oh, he’s just a SFF writer; he’s not important,’” he adds. Dukaj also believes that appearing in public is not really conducive to writers’ work. “I am of this peculiar opinion that authors should be invisible, it is beter for the books. Of course, I don’t follow my own advice— I somehow find myself doing events. But if I could go back to my younger self, I would follow the example of [famously reclusive novelist] Thomas Pynchon and never be seen in public. Or maybe only with a paper bag on my head, like Pynchon did in that episode of ‘The Simpsons’.”
LBF: temple of the doomed
Another reason Dukaj might appear an odd choice to be part of the Polish contingent at LBF is that he is not exactly on message for a fair celebrating books and writ- ing. “Text and content maters less and less. We are in a period of an ongoing degradation of literature. When you follow a discussion on the internet about a book, it doesn’t mater what the content is, it maters what the perception is. What do people today know about a book? “Mostly, it’s how an author looks—because they have seen them in the media or online. They know the prevail- ing opinion about the book, based on Twiter and Face- book, and they know whether it was a financial success or not. We should accept this as an inevitable future,” Dukaj adds. “The act of reading a book is essentially the same as the act of buying a book. No one really cares about what is inside.” Dukaj warms to this theme, with a slight smile and a twinkle in the eye. Part of this is clearly a wind-up—or at least, he is being deliberately provocative. But it chimes with his work, which is concerned with how technol- ogy will affect how humans think in the future. He leans forward and continues. “Maybe the whole history of the literature will turn out to be a relatively short period. The generation that has been brought up on iPhones and tablets is already moving beyond it. Technology can liberate us from the tranny of the writen word.” He argues that “long-form TV, of HBO and Netflix” is replacing serious literature. “Take ‘Mad Men’. It’s not a thriller, not plot-driven, it’s character-driven, a psycho- logical piece that focuses on moralit and changes over time. If you wrote this as a book, it would be high- brow literature, but most people who watch ‘Mad Men’ wouldn’t read it if it came along in book form,” he says. So why does he persist with the “tranny of the writ-
ten word”? He leans back and shrugs. “I was born in a time when it was natural to do so. It was a form of mental conditioning, an addiction. There is nothing rational in writing. If I was young today, I would probably be doing something visual, with video games. I am doomed to be in literature. There is no way out for me,” he says. So literature itself is doomed, then? He shakes his head. “Oh, books won’t die. Vinyl still exists, with a very
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strong following among music aficionados. But books will be very niche. And writers who are pecking away at our 100,000- word books are pure masochists, really only doing it for our own pain and pleasure,” he says.
The old prospector
Born in 1974, Dukaj was some- thing of a tro, having his first short story published at the age of 14 and his first novel at 23, when he was fresh out of Krakow’s Jagiellonian Universit. There is a commonalit between Dukaj and most of his fellow Polish writers at this LBF: he is barely published in English. Dukaj explains: “In Poland there is this notion that ‘important’ literature is not to be read for pleasure. Poles favour stle above story; most prose writ-
When you follow a discussion on the internet about a book, it doesn’t matter what the content is, it matters
what the perception is... [readers] know the prevailing opinion about the book, based on Twitter and Facebook
ing in Poland is like half-poetry. If it has a story that you can follow, there is already a point against it. That’s the climate of our literature. As a result, [Poles] don’t sell rights well internationally. Even our Nobel Prize winners have trouble geting translated.” Only one of Dukaj’s novels, the post-apocalyptic tale The Old Axolotl, is available in English, but only as an enhanced digital version through Polish e-book firm Allegro. But Dukaj says that only came about as “a busi- ness accident”. “It happened in 2015,” he explains. “Alle- gro wanted my book as a sort of showcase for its digital books. And I agreed, because it had a grand strategic plan... but that plan never came off.” It’s lamentable, as The Old Axolotl is a cracking read about a group of humans who live through the end of the Earth, but can only continue to survive by implanting their minds into robots. It is deeply philosophical, touch- ing on what it means to be human. “Selling rights to my books has not been a success- ful endeavour. I think maybe it’s because I am difficult to pin down,” Dukaj says, cheerily. “People say I’m not strictly for SFF fans as I don’t really conform to many of the genre’s tropes. I see reviews online and they are mostly like, ‘It’s a slow story, there’s no action, why does he have to write everything in such a complicated way?’ On the other hand, I don’t fit easily with readers of highbrow literature as I am ‘too sci-fi’ and write about things such as technology. Therefore, I am leſt alone in a desert with no one hearing my shouts, like an old, crazy prospector.” ×
Today
The challenges of Translating Conrad (13:00, Literary Translation Centre) will be discussed by Jacek and Dr Hab Magdalena, as well as graphic novelist Catherine Anyango, in a session chaired by Dr Stanley Bill
Tomorrow
Dukaj joins compatriots Olga Tokarczuk and Jacek Dehnel to discuss Writing History as Fiction in 21st Century Poland (14:30, Club Room, National Hall Gallery)
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