Works
Pukytė, P. (2013). Bedalis ir labdarys. Vilnius: Apostrofa.
Translation link: http://www.pukyte.com/styled-15/
[Accessed 26/02/2023]
Excerpt from A Loser and a Do-gooder. Dialogues and Monologues
A Loser and a Do-gooder
'You see, when I first came to this country, I met some bad people - they took my passport and I had to slave for them a whole year, but finally I ran away.'
'To slave for them? What do you mean by that?'
'To do everything... For nothing. But I ran away from them.'
'And where do you live now?'
'By the palace.'
'What palace? Buckingham Palace?'
'I don't know. By the large one. Where the demonstration was yesterday. A lot of people were there.'
'What sort of demonstration? The Tamil one?'
'Who? I don't know, there were a lot of people there.'
'Was it by the Houses of Parliament?'
'Maybe. A beautiful, large palace.'
'Who's going to let you sleep by the Houses of Parliament? They'd move you immediately.'
'Well, not right by the palace... I know a place there – on the grass – it's a great spot.'
'I need some information about you. Do you have any medical conditions?'
'No, I don’t. The only thing is I had my stomach removed, you see, I had three operations - they were very good doctors - they put in some kind of tube, I had to relieve myself into a bag, but then some good people took pity on me and did something so I didn't need those bags any more, and instead...
'Do you have any mental health problems?'
'My skull was split here when a bomb exploded.'
'What bomb? A terrorist bomb?'
'What terrorists? This was a long time ago.'
'Was this during your revolution?'
'What revolution? No, no, a German bomb.'
'German? What year was this? I don't understand.'
'There were lots of those shells lying around. Left over from the war.'
'Which war? The Second World War?'
'I don't know, probably. The last war. We found a shell and threw it into a bonfire. And then: bang! My friend was torn to pieces, and my head got hurt here a bit... Since then, I see these arrows on the edges of plates but as I haven't eaten off a plate for a long time, they –'
'Listen, I don't have a lot of time. Where were you born? In Lithuania?
'Both of my parents were deported. They met in Siberia, got married there, I was born there but I grew up in Lithuania...'
'So they were deported to Lithuania?'
'But I really want to ask you about getting my clothes back.'
'Yes, you keep asking about your clothes. But believe me, your clothes are not your biggest problem right now.'
'But if I go back to Lithuania, how can I go dressed like this?! How am I going to enter the country - looking like this? I don't have any other clothes. I don't have any money to buy any clothes.'
'Well, alright, what clothing was there and how many items, a lot?'
'No, not a lot. A pair of track suit bottoms, a black leather jacket and a t-shirt...'
'And that's it? That's all?'
'Yes, but you have to understand, those clothes are very important to me because...'
'Let's get back to the matter at hand. You're suspected of having stolen a carp. A very large and very expensive carp that has disappeared from a lady's pond. Worth a thousand pounds. The police were looking for the culprits and came across you in the street. They say that you had a very strong smell of fish on you, and for that reason they thought it was you who stole the carp. Since they didn't find the carp on you, they suspected that you had eaten the carp.'
'I didn't steal any carp!'
'So why were you smelling of fish?'
'Well, I met up with some friends - they also collect scrap metal. We wanted to get warm, we were drinking vodka in a park, I think we were eating herring... we had to chase the vodka down with something...'
Translated by Paulina Pukytė
Information about the work and context of creation
Paulina Pukytė is an artist of a wide profile known not only as a Lithuanian writer but also as creator of interdisciplinary art, curator of exhibitions and critic of contemporary culture and art. Her works belong with most recent Lithuanian writings about emigration and mobility starkly dominated by female writers: Dalia Staponkutė, Zita Čepaitė, Aušra Matulevičiūtė, Neringa Abrutytė, Vaiva Rykštaitė, Agnė Žagrakalytė and others, with one notable exception of the Paris-based male author, Valdas Papievis. Pukytė’s five books, Their Habits (2005), Fake Rabbit (2008), A Loser and a Do-gooder (2013), Fish Eyes (2014) and Lupin and Serradella (2021), stand in cultural opposition to the dominant literary discourse in Lithuania. She is attracted to what is ‘marginal’, ‘of little artistic value’, or ‘insignificant’, banal. Even though she works in a variety of genres such as essays, plays, poetry, dramatized dialogues and monologues, etc., all the texts are united by a common denominator, the ‘ready-made’ method. British literary scholar Kaye Mitchel notes that abandonment of the narrator’s authority and deliberate (thoughtful and authoritative) manipulation of linguistic and genre forms make important hallmarks of experimental literature. A feature of Pukytė’s perfected literary technique is to recompose through montage or collage phrases she hears of finds in other texts. For example, her book A Loser and a Do-gooder (2013) mostly includes overheard conversations or stories of Lithuanian emigrants, while the creative material of her latest book, Lupin and Serradella (2021), has provided a platform for the formation of public opinion created by the mass media. These strategies are quite rare in the Lithuanian literature; they have been tried in part by writers such as Marius Ivaškevičius, Kęstutis Šapoka and Herkus Kunčius, but Pukytė puts together quotations from various sources in a very peculiar manner, which allows her to extract most unexpected meanings, reveal the typical characters of current society, and unmask the ideas that are usually not spoken out loud.
Also characteristic of Pukytė’s visual and literary works is a deliberate play with genres, contexts and intertexts. Doubt, which implies freedom of choice, is often a significant word in her texts, which creates a state of uncertainty and indecision involving the perceiver; it points to the Pukytean artistic strategy to extract ambiguity and create or eliminate opposition by combining things that are incompatible, thus producing ever new meanings (‘And what is better, is it light or truth? / And what is better, is it spirit or soul? / And what is better, is it a bunny or a hare?’, Lupin and Serradella, p. 61). The significant phrase ‘freedom of choice’ turns into as a gesture directed at the perceiver who has to create their own strategy to decode meanings in Pukytė’s textual networks.
One of the earlier themes of Pukytė‘s work is emigration. The ironic relationship with becoming an emigrant is perhaps most evident in her books Their Habits (2005) and Fake Rabbit (2008), whose genre definition is somewhat blurred between an essay and a feuilleton. In the introductory text of Their Habits, the reader is given a reading code that divides the world into ‘them’ and ‘us’: ‘For me, “them” is detachment. It is revenge. It is the fear of disappearing without a trace in a sea of strangers. Here, in emigration, I cannot resist the feeling that to identify with “them” would mean losing something very important in you, probably the homeland’ (Their Habits, p. 7). The author's (narrator's) view of the emigrant’s situation is twofold: the politically incorrect admiration of the Other (sometimes openly mocking them) helps to look at yourself and your culture as the Other. This dual position testifies to the fact that emigration is nonetheless gaining momentum; it finds itself in an inevitable ‘in-between’, which is ironically described as a chaos of self-awareness.
The third book, A Loser and a Do-gooder (2013), depicts the life habits of emigrants from Lithuania and immigrants to the United Kingdom but the position of the author and the vantage point of the story are very complicated because there is no narrator in the book and the structure of the story is highly unconventional. The first dialogues of the book are conversations between Lithuanian immigrants and British officials. The Brits represent authorities, i.e., institutions of power, they initiate conversations and dictate the rules, hence they not only ask but also accuse, and immigrants find themselves in an extremely vulnerable situation, they answer questions, evade and make excuses. The readers volens nolens begin to look at them through the eyes of British officials, with some cultural distance, but being Lithuanians, they probably realise that there is a lot of real ignorance in the behaviour of immigrants and thus find themselves in a superior position. This way, the literary collage of a thoughtful structure, words and their combinations acquire unexpected sociocultural and political connotations. Especially since the names of the parts and chapters of this book are not what they pretend to be.
Pukytė’s artistic texts feature the motif of miscommunication, which includes not only the ‘Other’ in a foreign country or gender relations (‘The woman is the earth, the man is the rain. The woman is a pot, the man is a spoon. The woman is a canvas, the man is a paintbrush’ (Mountain Pose, p. 55), but also a deeper layer of what his and her words mean, what they are talking about, the weight of their words.
All in all, the writer gives the code for reading her texts suggesting that this is a subtle game with culture and language. Each reader will recreate the conception of the world proposed by Pukytė in their own way, combining what they find and perceive in the text, in specific dialogue situations, and depending on their life experience and freedom of choice. The perceiver is drawn into an ‘either-or’ game and infected with doubt.