With Anneliese, Elkins has managed to create the most viscerally discomfiting character I have ever come across. I've never wanted a character to stop talking more than Anneliese, never felt such mortification as I have on behalf of others who have to experience her.
For that, Elkins must be applauded. I think it's because, with most monologues in fiction you have a barrier between the monologue, and reality. It is optional or controlled by the listener/reader
(e.g., it is being directed to the audience; there is truly only a single character; the speaker is being eavesdropped upon; or, as in Bernhard for example, the monologue is being delivered second-hand, or read over and reported at a character's leisure)
Here, we are strapped into the Ludovico device and forced to confront Anneliese in all her surfeit volumetrics situated in quotidian situations that implicitly or explicitly demand the back and forth of conversation is followed. You begin to question why other characters aren't interjecting?; why is Anniliese's behaviour tolerated?; and, crucially, why is it so intolerable for Anneliese, a living piece of literature, to have breached her way into the "real" world; of unsatisfying jobs, senile loved ones, and empty time.
What does it mean? That reality subjected to itself by a torrent of unmediated engagement is intolerable to, and others, its interrogator?
With Anneliese, Elkins has managed to create the most viscerally discomfiting character I have ever come across. I've never wanted a character to stop talking more than Anneliese, never felt such mortification as I have on behalf of others who have to experience her.
For that, Elkins must be applauded. I think it's because, with most monologues in fiction you have a barrier between the monologue, and reality. It is optional or controlled by the listener/reader
(e.g., it is being directed to the audience; there is truly only a single character; the speaker is being eavesdropped upon; or, as in Bernhard for example, the monologue is being delivered second-hand, or read over and reported at a character's leisure)
Here, we are strapped into the Ludovico device and forced to confront Anneliese in all her surfeit volumetrics situated in quotidian situations that implicitly or explicitly demand the back and forth of conversation is followed. You begin to question why other characters aren't interjecting?; why is Anniliese's behaviour tolerated?; and, crucially, why is it so intolerable for Anneliese, a living piece of literature, to have breached her way into the "real" world; of unsatisfying jobs, senile loved ones, and empty time.
What does it mean? That reality subjected to itself by a torrent of unmediated engagement is intolerable to, and others, its interrogator?
Isn't this what art should do?