Sunday, July 02, 2006

Virtual conversations are imaginary; therefore, they are real. Imagining an audience, taunting it, deliberately showing your contempt, you can engage your imagined listeners in an unpleasant conversation.  Even if the talk is internal or mediated through the web, though, the exchange is real. Example Peter Handke, whose first major play was called Offending the Audience, recently won Dusseldorf's Heinrich Heine Prize, with a promised payout of E50,000 euros. But then he went to the former Yugoslavia, a state he feels nostalgia for. He spoke at the funeral for the man who had just beaten the international court of Justice by dying, before receiving a verdict in his trial for crimes against humanity—Slobodan Milosevic.  Shocked to see someone showing solidarity with a politician who had profited from a campaign of genocide, Dusseldorf withdrew its prize (Handke is no longer mentioned in the mealy mouthed description of the prize), editorial pages attacked Handke, and the Comedie Francaise cancelled its production of his latest play.  If you offend your audience, they take their money back.  Handke often says that the language used in conversations between people is like a game, artificial, a bit hackneyed, not very real. So why does language exist?  What is the purpose of language? Handke's jokey answer is that language exists so it can appear in great books. The New York Times sent Deborah Solomon to interview him. She asked Handke, "Aren't we using language now in this conversation?"  Handke said: "The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing."  Heine talks to his audience The poet Heine himself thought that his audience—that vague, floating assemblage of people he could not see, or touch—became real to him as he imagined conversations with them.  As he wrote, Heine sometimes addressed the audience directly: "Eventually, a writer becomes accustomed to his audience, as if it were a rational being. You too seem saddened that I must bid you farewell, you are touched, my dear reader, and precious pearls fall from the bags beneath your eyes. But worry not, we will meet again in a better world, where I also intend to write better books for you. —Heinrich Heine's Holy Hits Translated by Nicholas Grindell, assembled by George Klein. That's the spirit!  --Jonathan Notes Solomon, Deborah, July 2, 2006.  Facing His Critics. New York Times Magazine, Page 13. Heine, Heinrich. Heinrich Heine's Holy Hits, translated by Nicholas Grindell, assembled by Georg Klein, at http://www.signandsight.com/features/686.html 3:49:21 PM    comment []