1-Year Plan
Post 17: 7/17/05
A
Paragraph of
Jelinek's Wonderful,
Wonderful Times
[1980]
Sophie is wearing a tennis dress because she has to go out to a match soon. Rainer's lower jaw grinds against his upper jaw. From the outside these jaws look white. What they are grinding is no less than a piece of chocolate cake that the maid brought him. They not only have occasion to grind, they also have a reason. Sophie is forever walking out of the picture just before you press the button. Sophie is a will-o'-the-wisp. Free as air. The maid has also brought a tray bearing whiskey glasses. The gang have seen the drink in films, where people live on it. In the latest films you can also witness social structure disintegrating. Marriage and the family will be the next system to go if we're not careful. Given that the War left almost everything in confusion, the class system can be overcome and you can even make it up into the higher social strata (or ruling class, as it came to be called) if you've got the required gumption. New German films demonstrate the economic flexibility of private individuals. While behind the scenes Capital is at work on its own flexibility. This is something that new German films have taken from victorious America. In America, boundary violations have always been possible, in Texas for example, where grazing land has boundaries. Creaking like icebergs, companies amalgamate to create amalgamated companies. The water sprays and boils up high. Divorce is in because people finally have time for a breach between partners, but the topic of capital accumulation is out because it's not supposed to be too visible. [58–59]
To re-function a text like Paterson, as I've set out to do in the preceding post, is to try to locate its implicit and active assumptions and bring them into the present. My working notion is that, when Williams wrote Paterson, he had in mind a present horizon in which the text would act; in other words, he did not merely imagine a completed form but saw the poem, for its day, as a kind of "online" intervention. Ironically, the creative and mechanical difficulty of composition—the very real trouble Williams had in his mid-to-late period in finding the thread of his argument amid the mass of materials surrounding him, compounded with delays and questions of production—made the possibility of such an intervention deeply ironic. One way to read the "turn to myth" through the poem is to see it precisely as a solution to the material irony of production, in and as time. To do so is, again, to rethink the poem in terms of a temporality that has been lost in its reception.
Elfriede Jelinek's paragraph from Wonderul, Wonderful Times offers an alternative for a temporal poetics, one that connects to what Williams wanted to do in Paterson, in my reading. From the novel's opening sentence, a poetics of history is engaged, in the present time of its telling as much as the organization of the past, so: "One night at the end of fifties an assault is committed in the Vienna municipal park. The following persons all grab hold of one solitary man out walking…." An epoch, a quotidian locale, and an act of violence triangulate here as the framing elements of a remarkably consistent demonstration, over the novel's duration, of a historicized narration. In other words, the narrative is being constructed in the course of the telling, but at the same time it sites a historical period (the 50s from the 70s) that it is both connected to and distanced from. That distance, in turn, is not simply the irony of form in relation to any temporal record, but the way in which history works in the language of its recall. The economics miracle of 50s Vienna, built on the destruction of the war, is being brought forward in the very act of making the account. Such an act of history in and as narration is also what Jelinek performs in the novel itself.
Reading Jelinek is a form of historical triangulation in its own right, as in the paragraph above. Though I am not aware of whether this affiliation has been offered or accepted, Jelinek's often mechanical use of erlebte Rede (indirect free style) reads as a postwar refunctioning of Döblin's technique in Berlin Alexanderplatz, which likewise triangulates epochal fantasy (the forbidden vulgarity of Zeitgeist), extreme localism (associated with the working class and its habits), and gratuitous acts of violence (informed by Döblin's medical practice as a neuropathologist). In German, "Die 'erlebte Rede' ist ein zwischen mehreren Polen oszillierendes Phänomen: Zunächst überlagern sich in ihr die Stimme der Figur und die des Erzählers"—free indirect speech oscillates between two poles, the voice of the character and that of the narrator; we know what is going on inside the character, in other words, as a function of what is outside it. From erlebte Rede to ideology is just a short but necessary step, and one that Jelinek evidently takes. In her destruction of the novel, it is not at all how the inner continuity of characters merges with the destinal world, but how the nothing that is inside the characters is simply a construction of social discourse.
Reading Jelinek's paragraph then does three things, exceptionally well. It sets up an epochal reading of ideological frames, so that the 50s of the rebirth of Central Europe is measured from the 70s following that point of departure, and thus any other decade. It locates this epochal construction in and among the objects that make it possible, here either Sophie's tennis outfit or the talk of capital accumulation. And it exploits the gap between times and materials as the site for the nothing that is crucial to the characters' nonmotivation, the nonprogress of the novel. In so doing, the continuity of the novel becomes a virtually static index of the time it depicts and is narrated within—an effect, we may note, close to that of the New Sentence's architectonics. Ideology critique is common to both narrative and nonnarrative here, but what is importantly presented in Jelinek is a voicing of ideology that is not reducible to any social position but, by default almost, can only be spoken by no one. The form of the novel is an empty frame for the voicing of nonentity, unlike what can occur in more strictly nonnarrative forms, where language as positivity returns to the horizon of the poet. "In the latest films you can also witness social structure disintegrating" and "The water sprays and boils up high" are spoken as if from outside, by nobody. And yet these are the terms by which the characters live—if regionally—and we do too.
From there, this reading seems a simple matter of filling in the blanks—in consultation with the text, which sequentially constructs its own interpretative frame. The tennis dress just is the elision of capital accumulation; the family is breaking down because the characters think it is; the war is the violence of class logics that are incompletely sutured in the present; and we are the inheritors of that history. Ideology is outside, the whiskey in the glasses—foregone conclusion—we drink. What Jelinek's text offers is a historical reflection on how this situation temporally came to be.
[Text copyright © Barrett Watten 2005. Quote from Elfriede Jelinek, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, trans. Michael Hulse {1980; London: Serpent's Tail, 1990}. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]