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| Sunday, 19 December 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Melody of resistance : 'My calm life is at risk' 'On the one hand it's an honour and I'm happy, but on the other hand, I fear that my calm life is at risk,' says Elfriede Jelinek on her being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A profile by SHELLEY WALIA.
Elfriede Jelinek has shown an extraordinary linguistic zeal that reveals the absurdity of society's cliches. Many women writers are obviously naive in their passions and sloppy in their scholarship. My own view is that this simulated position of critical superiority is one of the reasons that the women's movement has no clear agenda before it; and more often than not, writers personalise the issues, with no concrete outcome from any debate. I cast my doubts on their sincerity and I believe they are doing more harm than good to the cause of women. There are many who 'never finished' reading The Second Sex, a text that is according to Toril Moi "rapidly genuflected to in prefaces and introductions; and then when it is engaged in, the text is usually read from a stance of critical impatience and superiority." Use of the personal The personal, the political and the philosophical are central to Jelinek but not that it must always turn out to be a sheer autobiographical account. Like Beauvoir she uses the personal, but only as an anecdotal method to illustrate the larger issues concerning women, not merely as a pressing need to talk incessantly about oneself. To illustrate an argument through one's experience is to only move towards an explication. One can use oneself as a philosophical case study to strike a robust dialogue with the reader through common experiences and language. Her novels and plays create a personal and a comprehending voice which sets up a vigorous debate and a response to the requirements of a positive development in issues pertaining to the problems of women. Very early in life she joined the student movement spurring her writing towards a deeply critical course. Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry's cliches trickle into people's consciousness and paralyse resistance to class injustices and gender oppression. At a young age, Elfriede Jelinek, the controversial Austrian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2004, was instructed in piano, organ and recorder and went on to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory which finally resulted in her semi-autobiographical novel The Piano Teacher, made into a movie in 2001. The novel offers a release for daughters who are oppressed by their mothers, a rebellion towards all authority. It is also a vehement attack on all the trappings of a bourgeois society including its education system. Her severe and extensive schooling as a musician is evident throughout her work: "as theoretical debate in essays, as literary project in librettos, as a principle of linguistic composition, and as thematic or intertextual reference, e.g. to the texts of Franz Schubert's songs which are of deep interest to her." Serpent's Tail, the publishers in London, are also responsible for bringing out Women as Lovers in 1975 and Wonderful, Wonderful Times in 1980 and giving a fillip to her huge readership and tall acclaim in the west. Accent on subjectivity What is remarkably significant with her interest is the accent on subjectivity as opposed to the concept of identity. This saves her from the general metaphysical mischief as her approach is to present an analysis of specific subjects. In the play Bambiland, she offers a contemptuous assault on the U.S.-led war in Iraq. The play Das Werk is concerned with the human craze for technological advancement. In her novel Wonderful, Wonderful Times, an Austrian officer browbeats his wife into posing for pornographic pictures. Often using obscene, offensive and profane language she succeeds in shocking the reader out of the middle-class complacency that numbs the senses of the public. The Piano Teacher has been called a blend of "Schubert, self-mutilation and porn". This arises out of the motivations of her interest in the subject as the subject of praxis - as the subject of acts, including speech acts which has a literary and political reason often missed out by her detractors. The linguistic rebellion is inherently used as an antagonistic literary tool towards popular culture and the entertainment industry and its misleading lifestyle of comfort and complacency. It is the polemical world of violence and submission, of the victim and the predator that her novels are made up of. Her anger becomes the politics of rejection of a pitiless world where the media and the state conspire to kill any opposition to its agenda. The public consciousness so complacently accepts the violence against women, which is the subject of her novel Lust. Maltreatment and aggression, class injustice, gender oppression through pornographic details disturb the far-right in her country, but she feels that a bitter description of all this is so indispensable in demonstrating the moral failure of our social system. And in a Bakhtinian mode, she uses, in her more recent writings, polyphonic voices intermingling as an interface that brings out various jostling ideologies from various levels of psyche and history. A pastiche of filmic scenes and theatrical devices conspire to give her writings no definite category except a significant nudge towards the polemical. Only fuming sentences, trite jokes, and crypto-citations; abhorrence of the hideous and derision for the oppressors in society make her prose dramatic and dissident, though often bordering on the profane. The form so dexterously becomes the content in Elfriede Jelinek's hands. Estrangement and esteem Elfriede Jelinek appears sanguine on taking a politically confrontational view of women's writings only if they are to recognise the politics of their own theories so as to become politically effective. Her detached depiction of female sexuality, its abuse and the power play in human relations, and forthright political views expressing her anti-conservative stance, have estranged many of her countrymen but have also won her esteem as a daring feminist writer who makes a robust use of language. Jelinek joined Austria's Communist Party from 1974 to 1991 and at the same time kept herself busy with criticism in her novels and plays which blatantly represent aggression against women, investigate sexuality and denounce Tory politics in Europe. The politics of literature and the subterranean ideologies that lie under the texts have been largely her concern taken up with extreme moral rectitude and earnestness. In all these areas, Jelinek has rehearsed, rethought and extended her distinguished contributions to feminist writings and analysis over the past two decades. Jelinek has over the years acquired a powerful reputation for her incisive and often controversial interventions into contemporary feminist assumptions as well as a number of other political and social issues concerning the world at large. **** Born on October 20, 1946, Elfriede Jelinek is a gifted musician and studied piano and composition at the Vienna Conservatory before turning to languages, theatre studies and history of art. Jelinek began writing poetry while still young. She made her literary debut with the collection Lisas Schatten in 1967 (Lisa's Shadow). Through contact with the student movement, her writing took a socially critical direction. Among her novels are Die Liebhaberinnen, 1975 (Women as Lovers, 1990); Die Ausgesperrten, 1980 (Wonderful, Wonderful Times, 1994); Die Klavierspielerin, 1983 (The Piano Teacher, 1988); Lust, 1989 (Lust); Die Kinder der Toten, 1995 (Children of the Dead). Her novels have been translated into 18 languages. Prominent themes in her work are female sexuality, its abuse and the war of the sexes in general. Novels such as wir sind Lockvoegel, Baby (We are Decoys, Baby), Die Liebhaberinnen or Die Klavierspielerin shock the readers with unemotional descriptions of brutality and power play. Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin was turned into an acclaimed movie by Austrian director Michael Haneke with French actress Isabelle Huppert playing the repressed pianist. In Lust, Jelinek's social analysis swells into a fundamental criticism of civilisation by describing sexual violence against women as the template for our culture. Jelinek is a highly controversial figure in her homeland. Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Oedoen von Horvath, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group. She has received many prizes, including the Georg Buechner Prize in 1998, and recently became the fourth person and the first woman to receive the Franz Kafka Award. ***** Brickbats and bouquets for LJP Cinamawe Panas Wasarak - Lester James Peries by Piyasena Wickramage Piyasena Wickaramage's Cinamawe Panas Wasarak - Lester James Peries is a book in Sinhala, launched a short time ago is the documented art history of Sri Lankan Cinema. It fills a lacuna which has been more evident in the Sinhala medium.
Wickramage's work does not contain a strident reiteration of superlatives about LJP who is the maestro of Sri Lankan cinema. The book is a painstakingly compiled account of the artiste and his career, and the aesthetic and cultural significance of that career. Wickramage has been fascinated by the cinema from the time he was a school boy. It was not confined to watching a film to while away two to three hours. His interest grew and deepened as he became an undergraduate and then a journalist. When he came across the creations of LJP, Wickramage was struck by their striking difference when compared to the naive song and dance sequences of the old school. As a widely read film critic Wickramage brings to the cinema critique enormous experience and conceptual maturity. Yet in this bibliographic achievement he does not pose as a know all critic. He strictly conforms to what he sets out to do, that is to describe what LJP has achieved in the arena of Sinhala cinema in the last fifty years. He calls it a memories of 35 years. That is thirty five years of his deep interest and enjoyment of the film. With careful classification and chronological accuracy the author records the information he has meticulously collected. The author's conversations/interviews with LJP are highly revealing and they throw light on the Maestro's character and background. LJP's detached, dry humour adds to the books readability. It was in 2000 that Wickramage compiled Lester James Peries's collected works. To the student, of the cinema and its development Cinamawe Panas Wasarak is indeed a valuable source of reference. This book therefore should find a place in every university library. In the author's note Wickramage says, that in this highly commercialised medium the 50 years of LJP's life are full of victories, defeats as well as highly laudable achievements. In spite of all the brickbats and the bouquets this Sri Lankan cinema maker has never sacrificed his ideals or artistic criteria. He goes on to say that this effort is an attempt through the print media to help the younger generation to understand and appreciate the scope of the artiste's achievements. The introduction to the book which is by Sunila Abeysekara is rich with information about Sri Lankan cinema and the interaction of LJP and the cinema and its growth. Sunila Abeysekara analyses not only LJP's creative career but also the service he has rendered to the cinema as a trade and industry and also in the way of welfare of those involved in the art. It enables us to appreciate the multifaceted service he has rendered to the film world. The chapter called Flashbacks discusses a variety of interesting facets of film production and direction such as the bearing that fiction has on it. LJP frankly mentions his lack of first hand village life experience. The biographical sketch given is as interesting as a short novel how he failed the then all important matriculation examination and decided to become a writer and then how he educated himself by reading. The foreward by Ajith Samaranayake too is most revealing and informative. It is not just another foreward with a few complementary comments about the author and the book. Stunning hyperbole and the superlative Samaranayake focuses on the realistic achievements of LJP. He shows us how LJP developed from black and white and stills to a full blown contemporary cinema production. LJP recalls his life in London, the exhilaration of youthful independence and the little recognition he got. I suppose that most of us know that cinema is a mix of art and technology. But the fact that the cinema is an art form which is inextricably woven with electronic based advanced technology and its impact on the mind of the audience are brought out in all its strength, through the discourse between the writer and the artist. Invariably LJP's comments are highly futuristic and anticipatory. He talks about the interaction between the brain and the film image and about sub minimal imaging, the impact of the computer, digital picture and sound. In the course of the discourse LJP says that the greatest service that the cinema did to him distinctly was to bring him in contact with his motherland, he extols it as the greater gain. He explains the difficulties of converting fictional writing into the visual medium and how it can easily run into failure and thus to critical condemnation. Even the best of artistes have faced criticism for deforming the original work. Cinema he says has its own language. Earlier writers avoided writing about his early film like Rekhawa. Even about Gam Peraliya critical response was slow and lethargic. It was only after Gam Peraliya won an international award that they woke up. Talking about the future he says that the narrative would stay but cinematic technology will necessarily change. Speaking in global terms LJP says that in many countries governments step in with assistance when this popular industry is in crisis and follows up by saying that the Sri Lankan governments have generally neglected it. Finally he says that the celluloid cinema will be a thing of the past and the disc, tape and compact disc will take its place. On the whole the discourse that is reproduced in this book, as well as the recount of interviews given by LJP to others years ago are most revealing and educative to, the laymen. The author Piyasena Wickramage deserves credit for collecting, selecting documenting and analysing material of great interest to the layman as well as the professional. Sita Kulatunga 'Channels' special edition 'Channels' magazine Edited by Anthea Senaratna is a special edition published by The English Writers Cooperative of Sri Lanka in memory of Mr M. I. Kuruvilla, a former English teacher of Aquinas University College, Colombo. Basil Fernando, well known human rights activist who is a member of the EWC and also a former pupil of Mr Kuruvilla, was responsible for sponsoring the publication of this issue. The magazine comprises three sections. The first contains tributes to the late Mr Kuruvilla by some of his past pupils. Part Two gives the names of those awarded Honorary Mentions and also the prize winning short story of the Short Story and Poetry Competition conducted by the EWC during this year. The Third Part consists of the submissions made to 'Channels' by the general public. The short stories and poetry are based on a variety of themes and have a wide range of writing techniques. This special M. I. Kuruvilla edition of 'Channels' is available at Vijitha Yapa Bookshop, Sarasavi Bookshop, Barefoot Bookshop, C. G. Associates at the British Council and the Lake House Bookshop at Hyde Park Corner |
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At the launch of this compendium. Lester James Peries (LJP) said, that
the cinema is the youngest of all the fine arts. Hence even fifty years is
a long time for a process so young. The cinema has become so much a part
of our contemporary life that we are taken aback when reminded of the
comparative newness of it.
