In the Tentacles of the Murmur (The literature of crisis)

Fluidity, volatility, chaos, confusion, fragmentation, uncertainty, anxiety, crisis, polarization – these words are often used to describe the modern world. And even though we often find them inadequate, we feel subconsciously that they capture feelings we have that can’t be described in any other way. When I looked for a word that best captures our present era, out of nowhere came the strange expression “murmur”. We can understand it as a sort of animal growl, an unarticulated dissatisfaction, an expression of disagreement or frustration that we can’t force into words. A dissatisfied hum without a form has pushed its way into the light of day and has influenced societies across the world and nobody knows what to do with it.

Literature offers an untraditional antidote to uncertainty, chaos, and confusion. It’s one option for protecting ourselves from the disorder. The act of writing creates a different mode of thought and self-expression: when we write or read, time slows down and we try to give some sort of form to our fluid, disorganized thought – or, together with the author, we observe the movement of their complicated, branching thinking. What does our world look like when viewed through contemporary literature? And how can we break free from the tentacles of the Murmur?

2nd episode Gender Trouble

Gender, sexuality, and the most intimate human relations have today become one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the culture wars. Spreaders of disinformation, right wing ideologues, and conservatives from around the world have been relatively successful in creating a caricature of feminist thought and gender studies. According to them, the primary domain of these “progressive tendencies” is culture, with a special emphasis on Hollywood productions. However, if we take these ideas out of the toxic fog of the murmur and try to apply them to specific works, they slowly start to crumble. Contemporary fiction that takes a feminist stance and is focused on gender shows us a complex, nuanced view of male and female societal roles, and it’s all but impossible to summarize them in a few simple slogans or teachings. Although there are ever more successful, interesting female authors, few of them depict literary worlds that serve as banal illustrations of patriarchal suppression, or, on the other hand, spaces for a utopian feminist imagination. To a much greater extent, they are interested in creating new cultural spaces in which female identity can move around more freely. They offer multilayered views on relationships between men and women, and between women and other women. Perhaps all that can surprise us is the diversity and extreme sophistication of works of contemporary feminist literature. They are indeed quite far from stereotypes, agitprop, and mere ideology. Similarly, there are also men writing books processing toxic masculinity, or else containing expressions of the so-called new masculinity. In the second episode of In the Tentacles of the Murmur, Gender Trouble, we take a slow-motion view of literature to look at how contemporary authors understand gender and the norms of feminine and masculine behavior, the effect of queer perspectives in their work, and what it is that they’re trying to tell us about our sexuality and identity.

List of literature in the 2nd episode:

Kristen Roupenian – Cat Person, a short story from the collection
You Know You Want This

Leila Slimani – Lullaby (translated by Sam Taylor)

Elena Ferrante – The Neapolitan Novels: Book 2, The Story of a New
Name (translated by Ann Goldstein)

Karl-Ove Knausgard - My Struggle: Book 2, A Man in Love (translated
by Don Bartlett)

Maggie Nelson – Argonauts

Author: Jan Bělíček
Translation: Guy Tabachnick

Voice: Michael Pitthan and Rebecca Rose Riisness

Sound postproduction: Jonáš Richter
Music and sound desing: Ondřej Bělíček
Teaser: Barbora Kleinhamplová

Special thanks to: Ondřej Mikula