File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1999/baudrillard.9910, message 4


From: CathB2-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 23:32:34 EDT
Subject: Re: Nobel Prize in Literature: Gunter Grass


I have read only bits and pieces of Tin Drum, so I can't really comment on 
its literary merit. I would think that the attempt to make some response to 
the collapse of the pretense of modernism-- German culture, Western Civ-- 
which had previously succeeded in placing the Heart of Darkness long ago and 
far away-- is an important artistic project.

There has always been the tendency to cancel out unpleasant stories that rob 
the community mythos of its coherence.  The rewrite process is already 
underway on the concentration camps, even though eyewitnesses are still alive 
to protest.  

Baudrillard may be right. Perhaps all records of human experience are 
irrelevant outside the Big Picture; the little squeaks from the 
biodegradables are doomed to be drowned out in Surroundsound. Artists and 
revolutionaries, by definition, have never accepted "no" for an answer, 
however. So if such loudmouths continue to exist, and if they deserve prizes, 
the likelihood is that Gunter Grass deserves one so that he can get his 
picture on TV like today's intellectual heavyweights, Pat Buchanan and Jesse 
Ventura.
  

   

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