Message to women: speak loudly, but make yourself small in other ways… how sad. How true.

Ann scooped the link that I’d been thinking about all morning – the NYT interview with the Austrian Nobel laureate, Elfriede Jelinek.

Ann’s post highlighted the same paragraphs that sent me spinning (emph. my own):

I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship
between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change. ...

A woman who becomes famous through her work reduces her erotic value. A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression.

(You're suggesting that your achievements, like winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, detract from your overall appeal.)

Certainly! A woman's artistic output makes her monstrous to men if she does not know to make herself small at the same time and present herself as a commodity. At best people are afraid of her.

The interview has other disturbingly vivid assertions that Ann bypassed:

I consider the current presidency to be dangerous to the world. I am really afraid of Bush, actually less of him than of the deputies standing in the shadows behind him. Compared to their activities, even Thomas Pynchon's paranoid conspiracy theories are just children's books.

And finally there is an interesting speculation about the relationship between art and political engagement:

(Why do you suppose European artists are so much more politically engaged than American ones?)

The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.