Transforming Disillusionment Poem by gershon hepner

Prose presents us with a chance
to transform disillusionment and cuddle
with reality, whereas romance
requires poetry to clear the muddle.

Inspired by Nicholas Spice, who in the LRB of June 5,2008 reviews Nobel laureate Elfriede Jellinek’s Greed (“Up from the Cellar”) :
Remaining an outsider has been the vital project of Jelinek’s career. The more she has been beckoned inside the fold with prizes and awards, or ridiculed for remaining outside it, the further she has tacked towards the margin and the odder she has become. This contrary movement was at its most pronounced when Jelinek won the Nobel Prize. She greeted news of the prize with circumspection: she said she was delighted with it, but she thought Peter Handke would have been a worthier winner, and she expressed the fear (justified, as it turned out) that such prominence would draw down yet fiercer attacks from her detractors. Too nervous to go to Stockholm to deliver her acceptance speech, she recorded it in her front room in a suburb of Vienna. Though her social phobia was quite genuine, her absence on the night was something of a rhetorical master stroke. Her theme was ‘apartness’, the necessity for a writer to be ‘im Abseits’, to stand outside the game of reality (im Abseits also means ‘offside’ in football): and her absence spoke of this more eloquently than anything she could say, while – with her image projected onto a giant screen at the back of the auditorium like that of a leader at a political rally – it lent her an oracular authority which she could never have hoped to command had she spoken in person at the podium. ‘Im Abseits’ opens with a question: ‘Is writing the gift of adaptability and suppleness, of cuddling up to reality? ’ The answer takes the form of a figurative cadenza about hair. To write is to have one long metaphysical bad hair day. A writer cannot properly smooch with reality, because it’s so disordered – like unmanageable hair, tousled (‘zerzaust’) and refusing to be smoothed down. The writer is someone who uses a gap-toothed comb, a hairdresser whose Sisyphean creations quickly become dishevelled again, flopping forward over the face or standing on end in horror at what happens out in the world. ‘Im Abseits’ is a dense thicket of a text, an involuted tangle of image and idea like hair which has got into knots that need combing and teasing out. It is also intensely introspective, not over concerned with intelligibility, and reading it is like overhearing someone talking to themselves trying to figure something out. There’s something virtuosic about such a refusal to rise to the occasion, and in the solemnly self-important context of the Nobel award ceremony the strangeness of Jelinek’s delphic utterances must have riveted the attention of her listeners.

6/8/08