Background

Elfriede Jelinek is the first female writer we’ve covered in our Nobel Laureate reread project, and she is a truly distinctive voice in contrast to what else we’ve read in this project.

Jelinek was born in Austria shortly after the fall of the third reich but with a family that connected both to Austrian high society and Czechoslovakian Jewish community. She began her writing career as a poet before moving into fiction and then drama, all the while maintaining frequent poetic interludes that border on free verse stream of consciousness (the kind that is…challenging to parse). While she has long been widely appreciated in German literature, but less widely known in translation. She was taken aback by being given the Nobel in 2004: “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”. She was not alone as one member of the Swedish academy resigned following her prize calling her work: “whining, unenjoyable public pornography”, and “a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure”. She’s also had a documentary that calls her a “linguistic terrorist”.

Jelinek still writes, but as someone who struggles with agoraphobia and paranoia, she did not accept the award in person (like Jean Paul Sartre 40 years before).

Works

“Erika distrusts young girls; she tries to gauge their clothing and physical dimensions, hoping to ridicule them”–The Piano Teacher

“We made these nothings [athletes] into greats, into disturbers. Into heavyweights. We commoners, we who can never get used to our lives. The quiet want to be loud, but the loud don’t want to be quiet”–The Sports Play (Die Spielstruck)

“As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace; football is a kind of Geiger Counter of civilization, a catalyst for good as well as bad.” (2012 Interview)

Message

Elfriede Jelinek is a truly combative writer. While the Nobel committee first cited her musical flow, I found myself considering another aspect of her writing the committee also noted. Her works “present a pitiless world where the reader is confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey.” The psycho-sexual drama of The Piano Teacher (as seen in the well regarded 2001 film) is all about hunter and prey. While sports is all about two opponents, her play about sports builds that to an extreme degree leading to violent confrontations and ideological duels. To me, her writing seemed to revolve around a rather dark and dire message: we must constantly struggle–with one another for power, and with ourselves for control.

Position: #3 Left Back

That combative confrontational tone put me in mind of a defender, especially an aggressive one who might both attack down the flank and also have to rush back to stop others, so I’m going to play Elfriede as a fullback. (I’m also tipping my cap to her socialist politics by putting her on the left side, and using the colors of my favorites at Freiburg who also have a fondness for defensive Austrians.) While there’s some real powerful ideas in Jelinek’s work it is also QUITE difficult to understand and “mass of text shovelled together” seems a fair critique to me. I’ll gladly acknowledge she can do some impressive things, but it’s often hard to wade through the confusion to find it.

Now there are definitely flaws with my assessment so…for the 14th time, I invite someone, anyone to write a comment rather than just leave a like. Would I see it differently if I saw her work performed on the stage or the radio? Would it be different if my German was stronger? If I wasn’t blinded by my masculinity? Seriously, anybody, help me out here…

Next Time, 2024 Honoree ??

We’ll cover the possible contenders at the start of October and review the winner in November. Then start this whole mishagosh over again in January with the 20 year cycles of ’05 Winners

Background

Jensen was a bit of a nomadic spirit in an age of expanding empires. He went from a medical student to a foreign journalist to a historian, poet, and novelist. After a hiatus during the second world war, the Nobel committee made him its first new recipient in five years: “for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style”

Works

Memphis Station

The day exposes mercilessly
The cold rails and all the black mud,
The waiting room with the chocolate vending machine,
Orange peel, cigar stubs and burnt-out matches,
The day gapes through with spewing gutters
And an eternal grid of rain,
Rain I say from heaven to earth.

How deaf and irremovable the world is,
How devoid of talent its creator!

The day dawned so mournfully,
But look – the rainfall gleams now!

Do you grudge the day its right to fight?
After all, it is light now. And the smell of soil
sets in between the rusty iron struts of the platform
Mixed with the rank breath of the rain-dust –
A hint of spring.
Isn’t that consoling?

They Caught the Ferry

Message

It was a little hard to track down Jensen’s work (even in Danish it wasn’t easy to come by). If I were to judge by my extremely limited sample, I might say that he focuses on the ebb and flow of emotion is a universal experience. At times he’s bubbling over with hope, at times he’s mindful only of loss. The characters in his short film are confident, crazed, and terrified in short order. He seems to know that each emotion will only last until the net one comes.

Position: #3 Left Back

Like a daydreaming kid with equal turns doom and hope, I can see Jensen running down the flank thinking about a possible attack, only to realize he’s out of position and go screaming back the other way, and yet…being totally happy and natural doing it. I may never write like him…but that’s exactly how I played soccer during my youth, so I appreciate it.

As ever we’d love to hear from people with other thoughts. I see you clicking like, why not write the words “I liked it” below. Or give me a link to more of Jensen’s work so I can get a fuller understanding of him.

Next Time, OH BOY, One of the guys I already read: 1964 Honoree–Jean Paul Sartre (But to have some fun, I’ll try reading him in French)

Background

Wladyslaw Reymont had a rather adventurous life for a failed tailor. He scrupulously studied his family’s struggles with money, but rather than try to provide for them, he ran off to join a travelling theater group (don’t get any ideas Owen). When he failed there he returned to Warsaw, wrote somewhat successfully and then got his big break when he got in a train accident and landed a nice settlement. With that financial independence, he had more time to write, and delivered his award winning works including the specifically namechecked: “great national epic, The Peasants“. (I read the first volume of The Peasants)

Works

‘The wind is always blowing in the face of the poor’

“In front of the crowd, and of the twinkling sinuous lines of tapers moving on, there gleamed a silver crucifix; following this came the holy images, dimly seen through a haze of cambric, and surrounded with flowers and lace and ornaments of tinsel. The procession arrived at the great church door, through which the sun irradiated the clouds of incense that it pierced; and the banners stooped to pass, the breezes made them float and flutter and flap, like the wings of some great green and purple birds”

Wladyslaw Reymont (trans. by Michael Dziewicki) p. 68

“Ah me! for in this world there is naught but trouble, and wailing, and woe!
“And evil increases and multiplies, as doth the thistle in the woodlands!
“All things are vain and to no purpose…like tinder-wood, and like the bubbles which the wind maketh on the water and driveth away.
“And there is no faith, nor hope, save in God alone”

Wladyslaw Reymont (trans. by Michael Dziewicki) p. 179

Message

Is it possible to have the message that everything stinks? It seems overly simple, but that’s the biggest takeaway I had from reading Reymont. I’m not alone, the Nobel website itself notes that his other work presents a similarly “dark vision of man”. The whole book I read seemed to obsess with pointing out how the “simple farmers” were petty, venal, greedy, bitter and cruel to one another. Sadder still, the volume of The Peasants that I read might have been his peppiest, even though the climactic celebration of a wedding allows people to ignore the brutal and lonely death of a farm hand (yeah…it gets worse for characters after that). Just to ice the stink cake, he makes sure to throw in a healthy dollop of anti-Semitic stereotypes that go beyond the general “everyone stinks” to really castigate (and in other works specifically blame) people of a different faith.

Position: #5 Center Back

Reymont’s cynicism brings to mind the brutality of Central defenders whose primary value seems to lie in fouling other people right before they score. Like the legendary Spanish Cynical-Foul Folk hero Sergio Ramos…only, you know…much, much worse…and injured…and even more unlikable. Man, I’m hoping I can find literally anyone who will replace this schmo.

Did I totally misread Reymont? Is his writing more anti-capitalist than anti-Semitic? Did I get a cruel translation? Come on Polish literary scholars…let me hear from you.

Next Time, 1944 Honoree–Johannes Vilhelm Jennsen

Background

William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in literature for his poetry in 1923. The committee noted “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. The nation in question was Ireland, but the from and expression in question is something else.

Yeats was a part of an artistic family and carried on the family business quickly. He adopted the style of the time in his early years. He celebrated all things artistic, beautiful, and emotional while studying and employing references to otherworldly and the occult. As he aged, and as the country around him became a hotbed, first for revolution and then sectarian violence, he left behind some of the more philosophical studies and became more physical and combative, but remained just as artistic.

Works

To a friend whose work has come to nothing

NOW all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

–1913

The Four Ages of Man

He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.

–1934

Message

In poetry, every work deserves to be judged on its own accord and its own merits. No poet adopts a single perspective or message, but their style often evokes a common trend. So it is with Yeats.

These works do a very good job of capturing the idea that one must be ever ready. It’s an aggressive defensiveness, and a robust reaction to the challenges of life. You should expect to face difficulty, and you should prepare to fight through it.

Position: #4

Yeats strikes me as a center back, but not your typical stout and serious center back. He’s more overeager, like someone who played striker as a kid, but kept being moved back on the pitch as they grew older. Now their job is to stop attacks, but they still yearn to be set loose at the spear of the attack. As time goes on he grows more blunt and aggressive than before. In short he’s both more physical than he needs to be and a little more confident in attack than he ought to be. It makes him a dangerous defender (both to the opponent and to his own side).

What do you think? Should Yeats end up somewhere else on the field? Did I critically misunderstand his style? Leave a comment below.

Next Time: 1943 Honoree TS Eliot