Over at Parachute of a Playwright, Ben Ellis has an excellent update on the Handke affair. He translates an article from Le Figaro (Paris' right wing newspaper) in which M. Bozonnet, manager of the Comédie-Française, defends his decision to take Handke off next year's program: "I didn't ban the producing of Peter Handke, but I'm refusing to invite to the Comedie-Francaise a man who doesn't respect essential values."

Ben pertinently comments: At the phrase, 'essential values', my blood also runs cold. It's a phrase which has the potential to destroy the recognition that an audience (in concert with a production, no less!) possesses the capacity to reconcile contradictions within and outside a work - this recognition goes back to the way theatre as we know it functioned in antiquity. If we junk this recognition, I dare say that we junk a bit more of our capacity to be civilised. It may be all very well for theatre administrators to become barbarian kings, to deal with purging inessential values from theatre, but it infantilises the rest of us and diminishes the capacity for complex engagement, for the rest of us to entertain, experience and thus acknowledge complexities.

He also points to claims by Handke that he never denied Serbian war crimes, but rather was pointing out that others - Croats, Bosnians - were equally culpable of atrocities. I have a rather complex reaction to this: my reading of A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia certainly left me with the impression that Handke believed that the Srebrenica massacre was a libel against Serbians created by the Western press. But I also believe, as I have said elsewhere, that there is some justice in Handke's critique of the mass media's demonising of certain select targets, to the political advantage of Western powers. The scandal of the New York Times' Judith Miller's uncritical and interested reporting of the famous Iraqi WMD snowjob is only an obvious example.

Whatever the political whys and wherefores, Handke's work has found its defenders. Ben again:

Nobel Laureate playwright and novelist, Elfriede Jelinik and others have signed a petition against what they term censorship. ...I'm quite moved by the last paragraph of the petition:

"[Handke's] ouevre, fortunately, doesn't need us to defend it. It ignores opinions. It is there, rich and quiet, vast and alive. It will not have 'the last word', besides, it doesn't seek to have it. It awaits nothing. It gives no response. Those who do not understand everything beforehand will savour finding it."