How would you describe today's world to 17-year-old Zahari Karabashliev?
Zahari Karabashliev: I'll tell him, look, boy, this is the easiest world to live in, unexpectedly free, very interesting and completely different from yours, but with one exception: if you are in Bulgaria around New Year's and turn on the TV with countless channels, in several of them you will see the same “Bulgarian pop artists” singing on playback the same worn-out pop songs that, I know, you couldn't stand once. Don't you believe me? Yes, it sounds incredible, but it's a fact. It's just that in this world everything is different, but some things remain the same.
In “Wound“ you turn to the past to draw more thought, social and native inspiration, courage, anti-militarism and a hundred other things. But if you turn to the future: what would a world dystopia by the writer Karabashliev look like in the style of “Huxley“ or “Zamyatin“? Improvise.
Zakhari Karabashliev: I would build a world in which human beings are in a state of permanent parasomnia, i.e. they sleep soundly, but 2/3 of the time they are “switched on” in somnambulism mode. They are somnambulists and they look exactly like us — like us, they get out of bed in the morning, have breakfast, go to work, receive salaries and strokes, make love and go to the mountains, they can have a deep philosophical conversation, go shopping and write poems. But while we, non-somnambulists, sleep a third of the time, they sleep one hundred percent of the time, only seemingly "awake", participating in the outside world. However, in reality they do not possess self-awareness, i.e. they somnambulize. Their bodies are sent into the real world, but they are sleeping individuals who only imitate waking life. The somnambulist does not have self-awareness, i.e. he cannot think about himself in the first person. It is not that he does not use "I"-statements, but he does not have the capacity to think about himself introspectively, he cannot observe himself, he does not even suspect his existence at this moment. All he does is go through the motions, i.e. he lives mechanically, by inertia. When asked whether he is a somnambulist, he will not answer in the affirmative - just like a person who is dreaming but does not know that he is dreaming.
However, there is something that can shake his mental status and "wake him up". And that is physical pain. If we prick a somnambulist with a needle, he will experience physical pain and will probably wake up, but he will be completely inadequate to the environment in which he finds himself, like a mentally ill person. However, if he is not physically challenged, he will remain in his state until it is time to fall asleep again. Since the somnambulist lives only physically, not in consciousness, the only way he can be awakened is through physical stimuli.
This dystopian somnambulist world may be ruled by elites who, in order to maintain maximum stasis, gradually eliminate one by one all physical contacts in the population. Because only physical stimuli cause awakening. Mostly physical pain. And when awakened, the masses are difficult and unpredictable to control. And so on, until one day… What does this world look like to you?
In fact, I hinted at this dystopia in my novel “The Tail”, introducing the concept of “philosophical somnambulism”, a term of one of my characters, who is a university professor, philosopher and author of the (non-existent) book “Consciousness and Sleep”.
While I was writing “The Tail”, I reread some of the dystopias again and became convinced that each of them has come true in some part of the brave new world today — and “Us”, and “1984”, and others, but it seems that Huxley manages to “predict” most accurately — control through the soft power of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, psychological manipulation, entertainment and a regime of constant pleasure… Fukuyama writes about the world today, divided between Orwell and Huxley.
Is there a real danger that tech billionaires will rule the masses not only meta-ideally, but also in reality?
Zakhari Karabashliev: They do.
Is liberalism really setting, i.e. is it possible that a bunch of freedoms, won with blood, sweat, tears and, above all, an enlightened mind, will disappear (or at least seriously fade) and we will return to some of the most sinister practices in history?
Zakhari Karabashliev: The sunset of Western civilization has been postponed for a long time, and so is that of liberalism. But it was time to part with its poisonous woke counterpart, which had become the opposite of liberalism. The woke nonsense “awakened” (pun intended) nothing but the most oppressed, dark forces of human nature. And liberalism lost the battle for normality. Unfortunately, we didn’t just let the genie out of the bottle, we didn’t just leave it open, we ended up breaking it.
That is why we are now seeing the rise of other demons, which unfortunately will be exploited politically, will be stirred in the darkest waves of human nature. We may be on the threshold of a political order that threatens the principles of humanism, which until 20 years ago were politically represented in liberal democracy. However, it turned out to be more clumsy than we would like, and authoritarian regimes have turned it into a caricature of a poorly made-up joke, which they spread on social networks and scare their own subjects, as well as the citizens of this same liberal democracy. Apparently, it had to come this far in order to continue liberal democracy in a different, more conscious, more meaningful way for both the individual and society.
As someone who has lived long enough in American democracy, albeit some time ago: why is the pendulum there (and accordingly, on a global Western scale) swinging towards “neo-con“ and its real expression – Trumpism?
Zakhari Karabashliev: To understand Trumpism, we need to go back a little in this cultural collision. I remember the great rupture that occurred immediately after 2000, first with the election won by George W. Bush and then with his “response” to the terrorist attack of 9/11. The war in Iraq was based on a lie (weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons), was not approved by the UN Security Council, took the lives of many thousands of civilians, destabilized the region, and practically gave birth to the “Islamic State”. And most importantly, the American army in occupied Baghdad turned the United States into a usurper and ruined (probably forever) the reputation of America. The moral authority of this great country, which embodied the ideals of freedom, justice, and human rights, was compromised literally in days. And soon after, the unprovoked invasion of Iraq was conveniently given as an example by all kinds of autocratic regimes to justify their aggressions and will continue to be a “guiding star” - from Putin to Trump - to new world outrages. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the entire “neocon” junta around Bush Jr. inflicted the greatest wound on America. Bush Jr., a sissy in his father's shadow (with all the complexes that come with that), a man whose business reputation does not include a single successful page, about whom they joked that he did not even manage to find oil in Texas, nevertheless succeeded in one thing - to prepare the way for the figure of Trump (another sissy). It is an acknowledged fact that America does not remember a worse president than George W. Bush.
To return to your question about the pendulum of the “neocon” agenda - it is wrong to think that it is recent. It swung in full swing after Bill Clinton and actually slowed down a bit under Obama, but only slowed down, not stopped. These are serious cultural clashes that affect the world order, shift political tectonic plates. Such is the time.
But let me note something that seems important to me. I lived in California during both Bush terms, as well as both Obama terms. No matter who is president, almost nothing in the neighborhood where you live is affected by it — people go to work, children go to school, cars are bought and houses are sold, movies are made, highways are built, bridges are repaired, friends visit, life goes on, and everything is fine if you pay your taxes. America’s decentralization makes people’s lives relatively independent of their choice of president. Trump won’t fix your life if you’re unlucky, nor will he send you to prison if you don’t like him.
Is the West setting at the expense of China and India?
Zakhari Karabashliev: No. It’s just that the East is stealing its strength, experience, and light and trying to displace it. But it’s impossible for the East to become the West. “Freedom“ and “West“ were and will remain synonyms.
Where and how did we go wrong in the so-called “Bulgarian transition“? Or is everything cyclical in history?
Zahari Karabashliev: We suffer from an acute deficit of intransigence. Many compromises. And maybe that is exactly what saves us from greater evils, I don't know.
What is our original “bug“ anyway?
Zahari Karabashliev: One of the most common epithets with which the Bulgarians are called in the medieval Byzantine chronicles is “arrogant”. Another is “stubborn”. “Vulgarokefalos” in Greek it means “stubborn Bulgarian head”, in the sense of “great stubbornness”. This epithet is used both by Byzantine chroniclers 10 centuries ago and to this day by the grandmothers in Sozopol. Stubborn, stubborn people, impossible to manage, difficult for public work, individualistic, without organizational culture. I am now trying to recall something I read many years ago in the magazine “Thought” — I think Dr. Krastev wrote there something like that the Bulgarians are like an army in which everyone wants to be a general.
Why do the democratic forces in our country also seem to be victims of cyclicality, such as “high hopes-relative joy-depressive collapse“? Weak “civitas”, i.e. weak “citizenship“? Or something else?
Zahari Karabashliev: I don't know what the democratic forces in our country are victims of, but we, their voters, are victims of their inability to build a community and party networks, to be loyal to the people who vote for them. I don't want to join the ranks of the eternal critics, so I'll stop there. But I would like the elections to be only the beginning of the voter-politician relationship, and not its end, as this practice has become necessary in our country since the beginning of the transition. I wish the whole political process would stop being some kind of monotonous humming, I wish there was life, a real connection with voters, a normal dialogue with ordinary people. Nothing can replace live communication, which, unfortunately, is not easy for "ours", and it turns out that all sorts of kopecks and other "greats" use social networks better than them. On top of all this chronic political indecision. So much lively, spontaneous, civic energy has been wasted, chances have been missed, look at what political subjects have crawled out in the last few years, and we, the voters, are all to blame for the democratic forces that we have not been enough. And as for citizenship... Well, where does it come from, when the Enlightenment has stopped by us for such a short time? Entire eras have been skipped, communism has trampled us, and we are only now building this civic culture. And in fact, I think we have achieved a relatively large amount in the last 20 years or so.
I have often said that for Bulgarians, freedom is a value only when it is not there. What is it for you?
Zahari Karabashliev: You know that joke that David Foster Wallace used to tell somewhere. About the two young fish who are swimming somewhere and an old fish comes towards them. As they pass each other, it nods and says: ‘Hello, guys, how is the water?' The two young fish continue to swim a little longer and at one point one looks at the other and asks: 'What the hell is “water”?’"
So, the Bulgarian no longer cares what freedom is, he swims in it. He will only think about it if he stays on dry land. And maybe he doesn't think about it.
Who are the writers who have decisively influenced your style?
Zahari Karabashliev: Over the years, they have been different and countless - from Jonathan Swift to Jonathan Franzen. But if we talk purely about style - Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Camus, Proust, Erich-Maria Remarque... There are also specific techniques, narrative approaches that an author, consciously or not, adopts from specific books - I remember how strongly William Wharton's “Chicken” influenced me in my adolescence and I used something from there in my first novel, or how it had “hit” me Philip Jian, when I read “37.2 in the morning”, or Nabokov's language in “Lolita”, Kazantzakis' generosity, Umberto Eco's breadth, etc. My creative “studio” is like a magpie's nest. Of the Bulgarian authors, I am most influenced by the humor of Zahari Stoyanov, by the simplicity of Dalchev, by the absurdity of Radichkov, by the urban narrative of Viktor Paskov and Georgi Markov, and “Wound” is entirely woven from Bulgarian literary memory until the middle of the last century.
What illusions have you abandoned over the years?
Zahari Karabashliev: I used to live with the idea that everything had to be perfect, I didn't show anything to anyone until it was finished, I still didn't believe it was good enough... That's probably why my first novel came out at 40. Something had to happen for me to overcome this insidious attitude. And it did.
Is there still a place for “old book dogs“ like us?
Zahari Karabashliev: I don't remember there ever being one. That's why it's interesting.
How do you want us to remember you if we outlive you?
Zahari Karabashliev: I don't care. If one of my books outlives me, that's enough.
Author: Ivaylo Noyzi Tsvetkov