Of course there is. But we cannot ignore the diversity that constitutes Switzerland and the fact that somehow the definition of national literature is always going to be challenged. Yes, we can define “Swiss Literature” whatever is created, written and printed in the country of Switzerland, but then it comes to other fundamental aspects as well: linguistically and culturally, Switzerland is composed of three main regions (except for the smaller portion of the country where Romansch is spoken) which inevitably look up to other cultures and embrace the influences of French, Italian and German literatures.
Although Switzerland clearly has its own publishing market and its independent literary context, what stops the major cultural areas of France, Italy and Germany from attracting each and every literary seed born in Switzerland, so as to incorporate new authors into their own national literature? Language is perhaps one too strong bond and surely attention is also given to marketing purposes: why would a publishing house in the German-speaking region of Switzerland aim at a particular author’s book being read just in that region and not in Austria and Germany as well? It seems that these practical features, which are obviously part of the structure of Switzerland itself, often overshadow the cultural identity of the content of a Swiss author’s book. Even authors themselves can sometimes choose to be part of the linguistic and cultural heritage they belong to; it is the case with Zürich born writer Gottfried Keller, the author of 1855′s “Der grüne Heinrich“, who always though of himself as an exponent of German Literature and opposed the concept of a national literature in Switzerland. But it is not always the case.
Despite tradition and culture being deeply rooted in our society, the modern world of technology and global languages have probably generated new languages and methods of communications as well as innovative new ways to portray Switzerland. New generations have absorbed this element, turning it into a trend and this is certainly visible in the novels of the young Swiss author Arno Camenisch.
His trilogy (“Sez Ner“, “Hinter dem Bahnhof” and “Ustrinkata“) is a picturesque portrayal of the inhabitants of the Grisons canton and creates a unique approach to the concept of language and culture (he writes both in German and Romansch), presenting a challenge to the translating world. Could this have to do with the fact that the Romansh language has no relation to other countries or major cultural poles abroad? The fragmentation and political situations in the valleys where the Romansch dialects were spoken had prevented them from becoming a cross-region language until the 1950s, when a development and unification into a common language finally happened.
Other authors do not experiment much with language and yet they can give it a Swiss twist. Bernese German is in fact the language of the novel which also tends to challenge other kinds of stereotypes attached to Switzerland: Bern based author Pedro Lenz describes drug problems in “Der Goalie bin ig“, for instance. Things have changed. At a glance, one is under the impression that there was a time when you had to talk about mountains and farms in Switzerland for you to be acknowledged as a Swiss writer abroad, beyond the linguistic connection to other literatures.
Whether a Swiss author is a native speaker of German, Italian or French there is a big chance the critics, the media and the public opinion in general do not ever acknowledge their Swiss origins. Blaise Cendrars is for instance one of the most popular exponents of Swiss literature in French, and yet he is often portrayed as a Modernist French (well, he became a French citizen in 1916, but still). Nonetheless, this is a pattern which has haunted Swiss authors in the past, but the shadows of linguistic fragmentation are never overlooked and will always somehow represent a cultural challenge to literary Switzerland.
