10 - TV Nation: The Representation of Death in Warfare in Works by Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek

Summary

IN HER STUDY This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust investigates social and political changes in the reality and representation of death during the Civil War era. Although Faust does not dispute the universal nature of death, she is acutely aware that, in spite of its universality, “death has its discontinuities.” Technological innovations and changing social formations have a profound impact on our experience and perception of death. While Faust discusses the cultural repercussions of the staggering death toll of the Civil War, this essay focuses on the socio-political conditions that determine the perception of death in the postmodern era. For the majority of the population in the Western world, the experience of death in warfare is profoundly shaped by our dominant media: television and the Internet. In our global visual culture, the immediacy and perpetual accessibility of images on television and on the Internet radically transform our perception of violence and death as death is normalized, de-realized, and commercialized. On television, death is both perpetually present and always absent, and it is this oxymoronic structure that produces what Ann Kaplan has referred to as “empty empathy.”

In the following, I will analyze the intersection of death, gender, and the media in Peter Handke’s essays on the war in the former Yugoslavia, published between 1991 and 2000, and Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland and Babel (2004), her texts on the war in Iraq. I chose Handke and Jelinek because the juxtaposition of these male and female authors shows clearly what we gain by reading women writers. As we shall see, an acute awareness of gender bias informs every stratum of Jelinek’s texts. She addresses gender directly and explicitly. Handke also redefines traditional notions of gender, but this redefinition is a side effect, an unintentional byproduct of his analysis of how the media change our perception of war. Handke’s texts do not seek to draw our attention to gender, and his subtle revision of gender concepts may well go unnoticed. Jelinek’s texts, in contrast, make it impossible for readers to ignore gender issues. As I will show, both authors are acutely aware of the marketability of death, and both portray the media not as observers but as immediate participants in warfare.