Peter Weiss - 3

While reading Jan Christer Bengtsson's study of the films of Peter Weiss I was struck by the amount of  hostility and opprobrium Weiss appears to have attracted during his varied career as a creative artist. While the main text of Bengtsson's dissertation is largely neutral on issues relating to Weiss's intentions and orientation as a creator, the footnotes to the text often contain comments that from time to time call into question Weiss's good faith and integrity. In particular, the lengthy and minutely documented examination of the history of  the 1960 Swedish feature film Svenska flickor i Paris (known under several English titles, but mainly as The Flamboyant Sex), which Weiss co-directed together with Barbro Boman, seems to be aimed at demonstrating that, far from being upset and angry about the way in which the film developed (though it contained little material that could be considered overtly pornographic, it was ultimately marketed as a porno flick), Weiss acquiesced in the film's more doubtful episodes, and only later, during the long period of his career as a left-wing radical, attempted to dissociate himself from his part in its production.

There are also digs at Weiss's profile in general, both as an artist and as a human being. Bengtsson quotes the left-wing Swedish author and poet, who in 1966 (in a book called En orättvis betraktelse) wrote of Peter Weiss and others of his ilk that they were

känsloparasiter, äventyrare, hysteriker, små sökare efter stora ämnen, folkhemsflyktingar, kvantitetsromantiker, sökare efter tillräckligt starka skäl till oproportionerligt starka aggressioner, tomgångsexperimentatorer som griper efter ett engagerat halmstrå, förnyelseegoister, kontaktvägrare som ser en chans att älska på avstånd, Belsenpornografer, godhetsexhibitionister och vanliga kvalterrorister. Därför tycks rätt sakliga litteraturkonventioner av nöden, och sådana bryter också allt starkare fram i Europa. Expressionistiska indignationspjäser ger plats för featurepjäser av typ Rannsakningen.

[emotional parasites, adventurers, hysterics, small seekers of big topics, welfare state refugees, quantity-romantics, seekers of sufficiently strong reasons for disproportionately harsh aggression, experimenters with idleness grasping for a straw of commitment, renewal-egoists, contact-deniers who who see a chance to love from afar, Belsen-pornographers, goodness-exhibitionists and ordinary pain-terrorists. So really factual literary conventions seem to be required, and they are breaking through in Europe with increasing intensity.  Expressionistic indignation-drama is giving way to feature plays like The Investigation.]

Although it's quite possible to see what Palm is talking about, and to sympathize with some of the characterizations in this portrayal (which Palm himself apparently considered somewhat exaggerated), one also wonders if there was not an element of literary (and ordinary) politics involved in such polemics - a cloud of Vietnam-dust that makes it hard for us now to see what was really going on in the Europe of Weiss's time, with its extreme tension  between a posturing, theatrical international political radicalism on the one hand, and a self-satisfied, philistine social and political conservatism on the other.

From a reading of the available biographical sources it seems hard to deny that Peter Weiss did engage in a  fairly advanced degree of creative and political opportunism, often tailoring his writing, painting and films to the intellectual fashions and preoccupations of his era - and with a degree of single-minded, humorless obduracy that led at least one contemporary observer to describe him as a "steamroller". Yet, if one can make the right allowances, realizing now that the literary and spiritual gargantuanism that characterizes a work like The Aesthetics of Resistance proceeds not only from the author's personal need (admitted in the course of his own psychoanalysis) to affirm himself as the producer of something "great" and "classical", but also from the intolerable pressures exerted by the political establishments of both West Germany and the DDR, I believe that in some ways it's possible to see Peter Weiss as a victim of his time who nevertheless succeeded in creating work of a high aesthetic quality, work that deserves to be studied and re-examined in the light of more recent history. That there is currently no shortage of such studies is evident from the increasing though little-publicized flow of writing about him. It's to be hoped that the second and third volumes of the Aesthetics will be translated into English and published before long, to complement Joachim Neugroschel's fine translation of volume 1 - this will, I daresay, achieve a great deal more than the website of the International Peter Weiss Society is currently doing.

Monsters of omission

A film and a play were reviewed on the Newsnight Review (regular arts programme on BBC2 on Fridays at 23:00) this week. The film looked to be a sensitive portrait of child abuse and children's homes, with a good child actor, Molly Windsor. The film director Samantha Morton, herself a victim of abuse and care homes, was interviewed for several minutes. All the names were there.

But when it came to the play Monsters, the Brits turned narcissistic. It was a safely British story, so suitable for viewing by monoglots. The subject was the James Bulger murder. This play has already been tackled on this blog by Harry here but it is tonight's reception I want to focus on.

Presenter Kirsty Wark may have briefly mentioned the name of the playwright Niklas Rådström at the start of the programme, but during the whole item and discussion of the Rådström play, the author was quietly left unmentioned, except by the valiant Kate Mosse, the Orange lady, who mumbled Rådström's surname at one point, saying he was revered or similar in his native Sweden. But no interview with this foreigner or his translator.

The programme went on to mention a book by Anne Michaels, whose name was dropped several times. And once they'd got onto Dan Brown, they were chattering away as if Niklas Rådström had never existed.

I reckon they were scared of having to pronounce a name with an "å" and an "ö". Too much for the average British brain, although most Brits can manage "nickel arse road strum".

And the translator of this play? Not a mention. The Guardian usually links up with the Newsnight Review. So things appearing in the Guardian Review, also appear in the Newsnight Review. I hope the Guardian is feeling European this month and we get the names of more foreigners who can write splashed across the pages of the Guardian Review. Such discoveries will inevitably seep through to the Newsnight Review.

Niklas Rådström

The Swedish poet, novelist and playwright Niklas Rådström has written a play about the abduction and murder of the Merseyside toddler James Bulger in 1993 by two ten-year-old boys. The English version, "Monsters", is having its UK premiere at the Arcola, London E8. In today's Guardian, the author is interviewed by Lyn Gardner.

How do you turn a crime like that into art without being accused of feeding off other people's pain and misery?

"I thought long and hard," says Rådström. "I thought for five or six years. There is no new information in the play; everything is on public record. If the media can give it miles of column inches, why shouldn't theatre deal with it?... "With every word I wrote, I tried to imagine how it might be if the parents of James Bulger, or the parents of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were in the audience. Theatre is unique in the way that it brings artists and audiences together in a room and enables them to have a conversation."

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Rådström insists he isn't trying to upset people: "The intention is always to create a space for dialogue ... In Scandinavia, audiences didn't want to leave, they wanted to talk, because the play had given them permission to think about what had happened, and why and what they might be able to do about it ..."

I met Rådström at a conference many years ago when his main claim to fame was being the son of Pär Rådström. Having outlived his father (who died at 38) by a good few years, he has now pulled off the Martin Amis trick of being more famous than his father ever was.

Harry