Bitef

Photo / Foto: Milia Fräs

GENERATION GAME "Sometimes, when I try to open my mouth, it seems as if there is a kind of membrane between my lips, membrane that quivers. The real oral hymen, a fluttering tissue that thwarts all my attempts to express a thought clearly and eloquently, and every intended communication makes seem unnatural; it translates everything into noise, mumbling or bursts. Does that happen to you?" (Botho Strauß, Das Partikular) In one of his works of fiction Botho Strauß, through the mouth of his heroine, speaks about the essence of his writing, pertaining both to his fiction and dramatic work. The heroine says: "When I listen to you, it seems that everything you say also happens differently and in a different way". This "last critic of the society among the German writers" (as Ulrich Greiner cleverly described him in "Die Zeit"), or "the best anachronistic author among the modernists" (as his French publisher Christian Bourgois described him), has survived for decades in his double role: an author-critic of the society and an author in search for new tactics. Strauß's dramatic work, compared to the plays by Jelinekova, are much more classical, dialoguebased, an illusion of the pièces bien faite. The important aspect of his plays is the contradiction between the engagement and vagueness of thoughts, deliberate lack of emphasis, lack of value judgments but, at the same time, an unusual structuring of the interruptions and disturbances in communication, which indicate the impossibility of establishing a mega-discussion about ethics in the modern world. As opposed to his new creative reading of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the play Desecration (Schändung) that attracted a wide attention, in which, through a contemporary story about desecration (read: rape), Lavinius, as pars pro toto, speaks about postindustrial and postcolonial desecration of the Planet Earth, in his two-act play The One and the Other Strauß is much more reserved, one could say para-tactical. The whole discord between words (ideology) and action (reality) he transformed into words, and for that he used all the available means of the classical dramatic form - story, protagonists, antagonists, and dialogue. Besides that, "everything that this play is about also happens differently and in a different way". The story about two mothers and two children is a story about hidden conflicts between one and the other generation: one that is sixty years old (same as the author), the rebellious generation from 1968, only 30 years after, and the post-television generation, or the inter-media generation that is thirty years younger than the generation of their parents, and which today represents the youth comparable to the generation of their parents in the moment of the student movement and sexual revolution. At the same time, The One and the Other can also be an intra-generation drama, or drama about the conflict between two mothers and their life philosophies, but also about the conflicts between their children, son and daughter, and their life philosophies that are very much connected to the philosophies of their mothers. That one and that other are connected by the function of the absent husband and father who is, of course, the same person for all four characters. This play, or better, this complicated farce about the communication of the protagonists, one can, and probably should, understand as a generation drama. The first is the one between the father and the mother - the generation of Botho Strauß - and the other one is the generation of their children, which is also classified as generation x, MTV generation, boomerang generation, hybrid xy generation and generation y. All these generations grew up, or are still growing up in the shadow of the so-called baby boom generation of their parents. This silent generation - that is seemingly apolitical, pressured by the previous generation - can only be pushed to action by some meaningless things -for example, only pain can bring back to life the twenty year old Elaine, otherwise it seems to her - as well as to the other child, the son Tim - that the psychopathology of everyday life does not concern her at all and that, for that reason, she functions as a well trained mechanism in a studio process with many possible purposes, and this is, of course - whether you like it or not - the neuralgic point of Strauß's (self)confrontation with his own generation, which is, at the same time, a confrontation with the civilization of Western Europe in the past thirty years. However, this (self)confrontation is always vague, subdued, never expressed loudly, and so - to borrow the introductory quote - "every thought that he tries to express clearly and eloquently turns into noise, mumbling or bursts". Therefore, it turns into the basic noises of communication. Exactly for this reason his play is intriguing. The author - rhapsode - and his commentary can be discerned in it. Despite that, the commentary is always present: on one hand, it is a detail of the repetition of always the same or similar thoughts of the parents' generation and, on the other hand, deliberate hesitancy of the young