Arnon Grunberg
PEN Blog

Taboos and Literature

All book fairs are uncivilized, but some are more so than others. One of the most uncivilized is the famous Frankfurt Book Fair. What a slaughterhouse is to a lamb, this fair is to an author, or so a publisher once said. This still rings true to me.

Each spring a more civilized equivalent of the Frankfurt Book Fair takes place 200 miles to the east in Leipzig. The Leipzig Book Fair is above all a fair for readers, meaning that there are many readings, interviews, book signings, etc. One attraction at the Leipzig Book Fair are the so-called “manga girls.” They dress up like characters from Japanese comic books, manga. Nobody can explain to me why these girls flock to the Leipzig Book Fair, but they seem to love it.

For this year’s Leipzig Book Fair, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB) had asked me to give a reading about taboos and literature—a topic that can hardly be covered by one lecture.

I argued that for authors in Western Europe (and probably also in the U.S.), there are not that many taboos anymore. In the name of literature, anything can be said. This is probably true for artists as well. The flip side of the coin is that this freedom goes hand in hand with marginalization. That is not to say that people cannot be offended anymore, or that authors are by definition immune from the law. In the U.K. for example, there are strict libel laws. But by and large, those who still read serious fiction are addicted to the idea that literature is inoffensive. (Nevertheless, my German publisher still refuses to bring out my novel The Jewish Messiah—which was published in the U.S. by Penguin in 2008—because some of the editors are afraid that German readers are not yet ready for this novel. This says more about sensitivities at this particular publishing house than it says about the actual situation in Germany.)

When I was done with my lecture, the chairman of the conference asked if I wasn’t interested in making the world a better place.

“Who isn’t?” I answered. “But I’m not sure if we make the world a better place by breaking taboos for the sake of breaking taboos. And writing about the act of breaking a taboo is not the same thing as breaking a taboo. In the same way as writing about stealing horses is not the same thing as stealing horses.”

At that point, a woman from the publicity department of my German publisher husked me away to the next event. On my way there, I noticed a few manga girls. They had a particular look in their eyes, as if they were convinced that they were breaking lots of taboos, just by being there.


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