The paradox of the double post
ENIt is often claimed that modern social and cultural processes, which were shaped over hundreds of years in the West, occur suddenly in Eastern Europe, at an accelerated tempo, in big leaps forward and breakthroughs. This has been determined by continuous cultural and life tensions in those nations, the hybrid nature of reality, the inconstancy of history and memory, and ongoing complications of identity. Nevertheless, as writer Günter Grass has said, quoting an aunt of his: “It is better to live in the West, but it is more fun in the East.” In Lithuania, in the early 1990s, just as it has happened several times throughout history, everything changed at once: political and social relations, the economy, and the horizons of value and culture. This time, the historical change and civic freedom coincided with the shift of a globalizing culture toward greater heterogeneity. Literature very suddenly found itself in a double “post” situation – post-Soviet and postmodern. What language should be used to convey the changes in the world with so many reference points changing all at once? Or which form of discourse to employ- existential dramatization, or carnivalesque humor, or nihilistic absurdity, or the deconstruction of traditions, or eye-witness documentary? How should literature overcome the sudden rupture between the customary forms of language and a society that finds itself in a twofold “post” situation and does not yet fully comprehend all of the new changes and inherited traumas of memory?.
