How To Read Elfriede Jelinek

By Tim Parks

In her avowedly autobiographical novel The Piano Teacher, the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek has her alter ego Erika Kohut engage in a variety of voyeuristic activities. She pays to sit in a booth at a peep show, smells a tissue into which the man before her has masturbated, and watches attentively as the girls on display feign sexual pleasure. On another occasion she takes greater risks spying on a couple having sex in a car and then on a “Turklike” “man emitting foreign yelps [as he] screws his way into a woman” in the park at night. The descriptions are lengthy.

Despite this assumption of what is normally a male role, Erika herself does not masturbate. She does not remove her gloves. Loathing “anything pertaining to bodies,” a musician whose insistence on technical perfection is a scourge to her students, she seems eager to contemplate scenes so alien to her nature that she will then be happy to escape unscathed to the apartment where she sleeps in the same bed with her mother, wishing sometimes to “creep into” the older woman “and rock gently in the warm fluid of her womb.”

Reading the five novels by Jelinek that over twenty years have been translated into English, each more determinedly and uniformly unlovely than the one before, all ferocious in their denunciation of a still patriarchal Austrian society, it is not hard to see those voyeuristic scenes of The Piano Teacher as a key to understanding the author’s, or at least narrator’s, relationship to the stories she tells: she dwells on what is repugnant in order to congratulate herself that she has steered well clear of the world. It is a strategy that invariably divides her readers into fiercely opposed camps. Many, particularly in academic circles, believe she has achieved a triumphant combination of avant-garde technique and progressive social criticism. And, of course, in 2004 Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” However, one member of the Nobel Committee resigned over this decision, describing Jelinek’s work as “whining, unenjoyable public pornography” and “a mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure.” Newspaper reviewers have frequently agreed. more…

Literary perspectives: The Netherlands

“Profound Holland” and the new Dutch
By Margot Dijkgraaf

The liberal, atheist era has come to end in the Netherlands and contemporary Dutch literature reflects that, writes critic Margot Dijkgraaf. The new need for security is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction, free of references to contemporary life, evokes the “profound Holland” overturned in the 1960s; and Arnon Grunberg, whose representations of male disintegration blankly refuse any such reassurances. But there is a parallel strand of current Dutch literature that sidesteps such concerns: novelists and poets with migrant backgrounds introducing new styles and identities into the Dutch literary repertoire.

Does the Netherlands have any great literature to boast of? This question is often put to me when I am abroad. So who then are the doyens of that Dutch literature? Many of the people I talk to are unable to name even a single writer from the Dutch-speaking world. Erasmus, Spinoza, Anne Frank – it appears that none of these are directly associated with the Netherlands, even though Erasmus lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, and Het achterhuis [The diary of a young girl] was written in an Amsterdam house overlooking a canal.

Anyone wishing to sketch a picture of Dutch literature of the past fifty years must look at five major writers: Willem Frederik Hermans, Gerard Reve (both now deceased), Harry Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom, and Hella S. Haasse.

Willem Frederik Hermans (b.1921) liked to call himself – and may well have been – the Netherlands’ foremost writer. After his death in 1995, his publisher, De Bezige Bij, began the task of assembling a collection of his complete works: 24 large volumes featuring his novels, letters, essays, poetry, and drama. Hermans’s main theme is man’s futile endeavour to discover some order in the chaos that is reality. His characters find themselves in situations they cannot handle and are unsuccessful in their quest for an identity. Four of Hermans’s major novels are set during the Second World War, a setting that befits his philosophical and sometimes nihilistic tone. Early this year in Le Monde des Livres, Milan Kundera expressed his admiration for and fascination with the novel De donkere kamer van Damocles [The darkroom of Damocles] (1958), which, although published in French translation, had been overlooked up until that point. The novel centres on a tobacconist who carries out acts of resistance at the behest of his macho alter ego. After the country is liberated, he discovers that he is suspected of having been a collaborator.

Kundera describes the book as at once obsessed with the real and in thrall to the improbable and the peculiar. He praises the dark lyricism and moral ambiguity of Hermans’s world and notes, with something bordering on incredulity, that this major novel is also an exciting thriller. Hermans demonstrates how an individual living during the Second World War can completely break with what is known to be the collective memory of that very same period.

Gerard Reve (b.1923) died in April 2006. Despite his controversial lifestyle, he was a popular writer in the postwar Netherlands, always seeking to push the limits in his work. His language combined the solemn and ironic with the quotidian, making him a ground-breaking writer. His debut, De avonden [The evenings] (1947), introduced an entirely new voice in Dutch literature and featured a style that was to leave its mark on many future generations. As a writer of novels, poetry, and epistolary works, he saw himself in a tradition linking romanticism with decadence, and he searched for a higher entity behind the many manifestations of “being”. Consequently, his style often conveys a sense of biblical exaltation. God, love, and death are Reve’s main literary themes. In both life and work, he had no qualms about raising taboo topics, whether of a religious, sexual, emotional, or literary nature.

For a long time, the Second World War was considered to be the most fertile theme in Dutch literature. The period 1940-1945 spawned a great many probing testimonies and autobiographical novels – by Jewish victims such as Marga Minco and G.L. Durlacher, for instance – while dozens of writers turned to the subject of second generation issues (Leon de Winter, Adriaan van Dis). more…

Ivan Turgenev

By Henry James (1903)

WHEN the mortal remains of Ivan Turgenev were about to be transported from Paris for interment in his own country, a short commemorative service was held at the Gare du Nord. Ernest Renan and Edmond About, standing beside the train in which his coffin had been placed, bade farewell in the name of the French people to the illustrious stranger who for so many years had been their honoured and grateful guest. M. Renan made a beautiful speech, and M. About a very clever one, and each of them characterised, with ingenuity, the genius and the moral nature of the most touching of writers, the most lovable of men. “Turgenev,” said M. Renan, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others: he was born essentially impersonal.” The passage is so eloquent that one must repeat the whole of it. “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous: it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”

I quote these lines for the pleasure of quoting them; for while I see what M. Renan means by calling Turgenev impersonal, it has been my wish to devote to his delightful memory a few pages written under the impression of contact and intercourse. He seems to us impersonal, because it is from his writings almost alone that we of English, French, and German speech have derived our notions–even yet, I fear, rather meagre and erroneous–of the Russian people. His genius for us is the Slav genius; his voice the voice of those vaguely-imagined multitudes whom we think of more and more to-day as waiting their turn, in the arena of civilisation, in the grey expanses of the North. There is much in his writings to encourage this view, and it is certain that he interpreted with wonderful vividness the temperament of his fellow-countrymen. Cosmopolite that he had become by the force of circumstances, his roots had never been loosened in his native soil. The ignorance with regard to Russia and the Russians which he found in abundance in the rest of Europe–and not least in the country he inhabited for ten years before his death–had indeed the effect, to a certain degree, to throw him back upon the deep feelings which so many of his companions were unable to share with him, the memories of his early years, the sense of wide Russian horizons, the joy and pride of his mother-tongue. In the collection of short pieces, so deeply interesting, written during the last few years of his life, and translated into German under the name of “Senilia,” I find a passage–it is the last in the little book–which illustrates perfectly this reactionary impulse: “In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my native land, thou alone art my support and my staff, O great powerful Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee how should man not despair at the sight of what is going on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to a great people.” This Muscovite, home-loving note pervades his productions, though it is between the lines, as it were, that we must listen for it. None the less does it remain true that he was not a simple conduit or mouthpiece; the inspiration was his own as well as the voice. He was an individual, in other words, of the most unmistakable kind, and those who had the happiness to know him have no difficulty to-day in thinking of him as an eminent, responsible figure. This pleasure, for the writer of these lines, was as great as the pleasure of reading the admirable tales into which he put such a world of life and feeling: it was perhaps even greater, for it was not only with the pen that nature had given Turgenev the power to express himself. He was the richest, the most delightful, of talkers, and his face, his person, his temper, the thoroughness with which he had been equipped for human intercourse, make in the memory of his friends an image which is completed, but not thrown into the shade, by his literary distinction. The whole image is tinted with sadness: partly because the element of melancholy in his nature was deep and constant–readers of his novels have no need to be told of that; and partly because, during the last years of his life, he had been condemned to suffer atrociously. Intolerable pain had been his portion for too many months before he died; his end was not a soft decline, but a deepening distress. But of brightness, of the faculty of enjoyment, he had also the large allowance usually made to first-rate men, and he was a singularly complete human being. The author of these pages had greatly admired his writings before having the fortune to make his acquaintance, and this privilege, when it presented itself, was highly illuminating. The man and the writer together occupied from that moment a very high place in his affection. Some time before knowing him I committed to print certain reflections which his tales had led me to make; and I may perhaps, therefore, without impropriety give them a supplement which shall have a more vivifying reference. It is almost irresistible to attempt to say, from one’s own point of view, what manner of man he was. more…

Alfred Hitchcock – Master of Paradox

by Ken Mogg

At one moment below I make passing reference to how, in Hitchcock’s radio version of The Lodger in 1940, Herbert Marshall played both the likely killer and the story’s objective narrator. I call this “a dualism which is itself suggestive”. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but it’s possible I was unconsciously remembering the passage in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music that evokes the rare artist who in the act of creation resembles “the creature that can turn its eyes around and look at itself; now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and audience”.

Reader, if you’re like me and can readily imagine Hitchcock being intrigued by an idea like that one of Nietzsche’s – to the point of wanting to make Rear Window to test its possibilities! – then you may find yourself on the wavelength of what follows. It’s an argued piece, with plentiful footnotes despite my original intentions. But I suggest that you skip the footnotes on a first reading. They are often discursive and will be more rewarding, I feel, if visited only after you have taken in the argument as a whole.

That argument concerns the nature of what Hitchcock called “pure cinema”, and the Nietzsche passage just quoted is not irrelevant to it. However, I rather soft-pedal Nietzsche below because I’m more concerned with two other formative authors whose works we know Hitchcock read: Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and G.K. Chesterton (one of whose collections of short stories was called The Man Who Knew Too Much). I see Wilde as a “pessimist” and Chesterton as an “anti-pessimist” – self-avowed as such, in fact. I also happily follow Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval’s sumptuous catalogue called Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (2000) in claiming Hitchcock as a Symbolist, which in turn allows me to bring in the Symbolists’ favourite philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his notion of cosmic Will.

Finally I focus on one of Hitchcock’s personal favourites among his films, The Trouble With Harry.

–K.M.
– Alfred Hitchcock (1)

Throughout his work Hitchcock reveals a fascinated and fascinating tension, an oscillation, between attraction to the feminine… and a corresponding need to erect, sometimes brutally, a barrier to the femininity which is perceived as all-absorbing.

– Tania Modleski (2)

“He who knows the male, yet cleaves to what is female
Becomes like a ravine, receiving all things under heaven”
And being such a ravine
He knows all the time a power that he never calls upon in vain.
This is returning to the state of infancy.

– The Tao Te Ching

Alfred Hitchcock, destined to make sublime film thrillers, was born in London at the end of the Victorian era. He was the youngest child of an East End family whose father ran a poulterer’s and greengrocer’s business and whose mother came of Irish stock. The family was Catholic. Hitchcock loved his mother dearly and took after her in her quiet constancy (3). He grew up an independent youth given to attending films and plays on his own. He also read widely, including works by Dickens, Poe, Flaubert, Wilde, Chesterton, and Buchan. With training in electrical engineering and draughtsmanship acquired at night school while working for a cable company, at age 20 he joined the London studios of Famous Players-Lasky, already affiliated with Paramount Pictures. In these early years he worked under two top directors. The first was an American, George Fitzmaurice, noted for the holistic way he conceived a picture, including its sets and costumes. The other director was Graham Cutts. Cutts’ vitality was reflected in both the subject-matter of his films – often emphasising theatrical spectacle – and their mise en scène invoking a sadomasochism of “the look” (4). Cutts’ influence is obvious in the opening scenes of Hitchcock’s first feature, The Pleasure Garden (1925), set in and around a London music hall. But in fact the film was shot in Germany. For a year both men were employed there as part of a deal by producer Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures. Hitchcock seized the chance to observe F.W. Murnau on the set of The Last Laugh (1924). Afterwards, he would describe Murnau’s film as an almost perfect example of “pure cinema” – visual storytelling employing a minimum of title-cards.

No less crucial to Hitchcock’s later development was his marriage in 1926 to his assistant Alma Reville. By all accounts, including that of the Hitchcocks’ only child, Patricia (born 1928), the couple always remained devoted to each other. Alma made an ideal working collaborator. An experienced film editor and scripter, for 50 years she served as unofficial consultant on her husband’s pictures, and could be his severest critic. The marriage, though affectionate, was hardly a grand passion. By Hitchcock’s admission, he led a celibate lifestyle full of sublimations, foremost among which was his work but which included travel, gourmandising at exclusive restaurants, attending both wrestling matches and symphony concerts at the Albert Hall, and collecting first editions and original works of art. A persistent theme of his films is the battle of the sexes. It’s tempting to speculate how much he drew on his own marriage. One hears that the diminutive Alma more than stood up to the often grossly overweight Alfred – being described as “peppery” and given to “bossing” her husband.

Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) was promoted as Britain’s first full-length talkie (though that claim is still disputed). Then, in the mid-1930s, the director gained an international reputation with a series of brisk and audacious “chase” thrillers for Gaumont-British, including The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). In turn, Rebecca (1940) launched his American career. That film began Hitchcock’s systematic emphasis on “the subjective” (much of the film is ostensibly told from the point of view of one character) and thus, I would argue, immeasurably deepened his capacity to bring audiences out of the cold, to engage us at a fundamental level. Such Hitchcock masterpieces as Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho all owe a debt to Rebecca.

Now, a key to Hitchcock’s work is suitably psychological – “I like stories with lots of psychology”, he once confirmed – and is the key to be pursued here. To gay actor/screenwriter Rodney Ackland (Number Seventeen) he confided: “You know, if I hadn’t met Alma at the right time, I could have become a poof.” (5) There’s no reason to doubt it. The facts bear him out. In particular, biographer Donald Spoto reports that the youthful Hitchcock read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) “several times”; Wilde’s “decadent” novel may be the single most important literary influence on the director’s work. It was, after all, written by an Irishman, who converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, and it reads like an iconoclastic thriller. Hitchcock’s astute “everything’s perverted in a different way” probably derives from it. (Another of his favourite sayings, “Each man kills the thing he loves”, is classic Wilde.) To understand the importance of Dorian Gray to such pivotal films as The Lodger, Murder!, Rope, Vertigo, and Psycho, we must traverse some surprising territory, but it may bring us to the heart of “the Hitchcock paradox”.

What Wilde’s Dorian Gray gave Hitchcock; Vertigo

Hitchcock’s films, supposedly expressive of “pure cinema”, if not “art for art’s sake”, in fact have their basis in a sadomasochism that is universal in human affairs. Think of it, indeed, as a cosmic principle. That’s the vision I believe Hitchcock took from Wilde’s Dorian Gray, though it had received many prior formulations by artists and thinkers, both Western and Eastern (6). In Chapter Two, Wilde writes revealingly: “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” (7) Essentially, of course, Dorian Gray is the Faust story combined with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) (8); while the “book bound in yellow paper” (Chapter Ten) with which the dandyish Lord Henry Wotton tempts – and seeks to control – young Dorian is J.K. Huysmans’ misanthropic A Rebours/Against the Grain (1884). The literary critic in Wilde is at his most brilliant in such a passage as this:

It [A Rebours] was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed… The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style… that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. … The mere cadence of the sentences… produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.

Very palpably, there’s a foretaste here of Vertigo (1958). Especially striking is the quest for something that can halt time itself and sum up all human experience. In seeming to offer this to Dorian, Lord Henry is “playing on the lad’s unconscious egotism” (Chapter Eight). Earlier, he had exhorted him: “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” (Chapter Two) In Vertigo, the Mephistophelean Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) tempts Scottie (James Stewart) with “colour, excitement, power, freedom” and sends the ancestor-obsessed Madeleine (Kim Novak) to seduce him. The trap begins to take effect in the scenes where she leads Scottie around San Francisco. I once wrote of Vertigo:

With its missions, forts, shops and art galleries, [San Francisco] represents perennial human concerns – in the film it’s a city seen sub specie aeternitatis. (9) more…

Borges finds his Boswell

Adolfo Bioy Casares had his first conversation with Jorge Luis Borges in 1931 or 1932, when Bioy was about eighteen and Borges was thirty-two. From then on they enjoyed an extraordinarily intense literary friendship which lasted until Borges’s death in 1986. In 1947 Bioy started to write a diary, in which he recorded the often daily conversations that make up this gargantuan book. The diary clearly covered many other topics, and they are tantalizingly referred to by Daniel Martino, the editor of Borges, in a short, unilluminating preface. Martino says that “Bioy’s diaries open up a vast universe where his notes on his conversations with Borges coexist with his writings on everyday life and his frequent examinations of matters of conduct”. Martino seems to have had exclusive access to this material, but he does not tell us where the rest of it is, which is a pity because Bioy is a considerable writer in his own right, even if many critics still see him first and foremost as Borges’s friend, and collaborator in numerous stories and satires which they jointly wrote under the pseudonyms of H. Bustos Domecq and B. Suárez Lynch.
Whatever else he recorded in his diary, Bioy does seem consciously to have cast himself in the role of Borges’s Boswell. Bioy in his jottings often refers to Dr Johnson, one of his and Borges’s favourite writers (on a visit to England, Borges, a rabid Anglophile, tells a surprised audience that Johnson is more English than Shakespeare); and the two friends sometimes wonder whether Johnson knew that Boswell was writing down everything he said. Borges – in Bioy’s entry for May 18, 1960 – thinks Johnson did, and that he wrote little in his last years because he felt Boswell was doing the job for him. Borges adds that Johnson probably did not bother to ask Boswell to show him what he was writing or try to correct it, because to do so would have been inconsistent with his innate “sloth, nonchalance and generosity of spirit”. Bioy then asks himself whether Borges knows he is writing this diary, “whether he would be curious to read and correct it, if the fact that he has recently been writing so little is due not only to bad sight and sloth, but also to knowledge of this book”. There is no evidence that Bioy ever told Borges about it. Maybe Borges’s remarks on Johnson were enough to put Bioy’s conscience at rest. Which is just as well, because the book reveals intimate details about Borges, including his gauche relations with women, which Bioy, a renowned womanizer, meticulously avoids when it comes to himself. Or is Martino’s editing to blame here? Maybe Bioy’s own intimacies are revealed in those “examinations of matters of conduct”, which Martino is probably sitting on somewhere? Those of us who knew Bioy remember him as a generous, gentlemanly man. It is hard to imagine Bioy being so unfair in his diary as to reveal the secrets of his friend without revealing his own. more…