by Tim Parks
he wants a crack at her. He’s cancelled two appointments in order to have it. The woman opens her mouth to cancel this appointment, she thinks of his strength and shuts her mouth again. This Man would play his tune even in the bosom of the mountains, his violin stroke would echo off the rocks, he’d stroke his rocks off. Time and again the same old song. This resounding banging tune … She’s threatened with a beating. Her head is still full of music, Johann Sebastian Bach … going round and round in circles on the record player, chasing its tail. The Man is chasing his tail too, or his tail is chasing and he is following.30
This sexual domination is explicitly compared to his treatment of his factory workers:
The Direktor’s weight keeps the woman down. All he needs to keep down the workers, as they joyfully return from their labour to their leisure, is a signature, he doesn’t have to lie on them.31
Or again:
He’ll screw the ass off her, it’s all he wants in life, except to screw the rest of the world and draw his massive salary.32
Remarkable throughout Lust is the torrent of angry energy that fizzes up in metaphor after metaphor, some crass, some brilliant, but always in the total absence of any convincing presentation of character or society. The absence of an Erika Kohut figure who might put us in an interesting relation to the unpleasantness described leaves the novel drifting, albeit with admirable panache, into mannerism. Thus, having started out by observing how cliché possesses and oppresses the minds of ordinary people, Jelinek now allows her own work to be driven by a simplistic, ever predictable polemic that many readers will find decidedly dated. Preaching only to the converted, Lust cannot encourage constructive reflection, rather it polarises debate, dividing readers into those who can still subscribe to a radical and embattled 1970s feminism and those who always suspected the feminists of overstating their case. Nowhere is there any trace of nuance: every man is violent, every woman a victim. At the end of the book, finding life irretrievably ugly, the industrialist’s wife chooses a withdrawal from which there is no return, killing her son and herself.
Jelinek has a habit of using interviews to anticipate or pre-empt criticism. ‘The men are really malicious’,33 she tells Honegger, complaining that an editor with the magazine Spiegel has attacked her on his website, though it then turns out she hasn’t read the criticism. Readers who don’t respond to her style are people who have no background in music, she explains to Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. The controversy over her winning the Nobel has merely confirmed her opinion that women are treated with condescension, she says, and the world is indeed as she describes it.
The effect of all this is like a distant echo of the letter Erika Kohut wrote to her would-be lover inviting him to mistreat her; we are in a no-win situation. If we react angrily to her work, we confirm Jelinek’s view that a patriarchal society is hostile to women; alternatively, we can confirm that view by agreeing and applauding. It is extraordinary how consistently critics move to positive or negative extremes when reviewing Jelinek, the academics (who perhaps share an inclination to withdraw from the ugly realities of society and see their analytical powers flattered and stimulated) being positive, the journalists (who see their clichés ridiculed and tend to feel the author’s approach is pathetically simplistic) negative. This is the force field Jelinek invariably creates around herself. Hence, as a male critic coming to her most recent, most ambitious and most difficult novel, Greed, I am aware that any reaction of mine has been foreseen and discounted and in some cases even incorporated in the book: ‘I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before’ the narrator taunts the reader at one point. ‘But consider this: there are nevertheless unbelievably few of you worldwide.’34
The plot of Greed takes up perhaps five per cent of the book’s 330 dense, often impenetrable pages. Rather than coat-hangers for suits of language, the characters are intermittent and precarious stepping stones in a flood of sardonic generalisations about life’s awfulness: ‘Every poor man wants to be rich, that is just as natural a phenomenon as the fact that one can introduce all kinds of things into one’s asshole, both small and surprisingly large objects.’35 Many readers will feel that neither phenomenon is natural and Jelinek’s ‘wit’ here more coercive than illuminating or amusing.
Superficially, there are reminders of The Piano Teacher. Gerti, a middle-aged woman who has been both pianist and translator, lives alone in the country with her dog, a situation similar to Jelinek’s. Having ‘for a long time behaved with excessive reserve’, she now ‘can’t stop herself busily and tirelessly’36 chasing a policeman who pulled her up for a minor traffic offence. So we have the same oscillation between withdrawal and involvement. Typical of Jelinek’s men, Kurt Janisch, the policeman and hence figure of patriarchal authority, is violent, insatiable, promiscuous and an eager sportsman, sport being invariably seen negatively as a manifestation of male aggression and desire for domination. Kurt, who goes about sex with Gerti in much the same way as the industrialist in Lust did with his wife, really only wants to get hold of Gerti’s property; this is the ultimate object of his greed, and the book insistently superimposes the image of the house with the image of the body. At one point we even hear that Kurt has tried to ‘build on’37 his erect cock.
To complicate matters, the policeman begins to bring a sixteen-year-old girl, Gabi, to Gerti’s house, locking Gerti out while he has sex with the girl. In the car one day he kills Gabi by pressing on her carotid nerve while she is giving him a blow job. He then dumps her body in a sterile man-made lake created to exploit hydroelectric power. Nodding back to Bernhard’s negative transformation of the Austrian tradition of the Heimatroman (the novel of the Austrian homeland), Jelinek parallels greedy exploitation of the Alpine environment with man’s violence to woman, the two coming together in this deathly lake, which, in a rant lasting a dozen pages, becomes the book’s central image of a ubiquitous ugliness that will ultimately prompt Gerti’s again terminal withdrawal: she kills herself after signing over her property to Kurt, thus confirming man’s triumph over woman, over both women.
Unpromising as all this sounds, the book might just have worked had Jelinek dedicated any energy at all to creating the dramatic encounters and characterisation that make The Piano Teacher such a strong novel, or alternatively if her ruminations were sufficiently coherent and convincing for us to take them seriously. I quote a typical paragraph where the narrator is denouncing the way a mountain has been tunnelled into and hollowed out as part of the hydroelectric project which produced the lifeless lake. The engineering work has led to landslides and since there are houses on the lower slopes a catastrophe seems imminent:
So, how can we help up to its feet this ground, which is just rushing down towards us, down the mountain flank, and promptly landing on its nose, not on ours please? This nice, comradely mountain – also a face which has fallen and no one wants to help up. The mountain has dropped its mask. Now it already looks different from how it did a little while ago, when it was still whole. Perhaps houses will even have to be evacuated? Watch out, that could mean loss of homeland and lead to critical situations! I wish I could plan an early warning system, but would need help, so that the life of these people here could be maintained to the same high standards they are used to inclusive of the deep-freeze cabinet, into which at least one whole deer would fit if it were foolish enough to go into it. And also inclusive of a glazed conservatory, in which things could very well be a bit more exotic, if we had been sent the appropriate catalog, which we ordered on the phone.38
What is one to make of such clumsy bludgeoning prose, such a wayward use of metaphor? And what is one to think of the fact that Greed was Jelinek’s most recent novel when she was awarded the Nobel Prize and hence the work most immediately before the Swedish committee? We are used to the idea that the Nobel usually goes to writers engaged in an anti-establishment polemic with their cultures of origin. It is hard to keep politics out of international prizes and the rebel from another land is an attra
ctive figure. Jelinek had been vociferous in her opposition to Jorg Haider’s extreme right-wing Freedom Party which caused concern in the European Community when it became part of Austria’s government in 1999. The Swedish judges also seem sensitive to the national literary awards that a writer has received, and perhaps precisely this continuing awareness that the Austrian Establishment has never confronted its Nazi past prompts the country’s liberal intelligentsia to reward those who speak out courageously on the matter. Jelinek has received every major Austrian and German prize. That said, the social criticism she offers seems simplistic, rancorous and wilfully unhelpful, while Greed itself is unreadable: I recall not a single moment of pleasure turning its pages, not a single insight that impressed. Jelinek’s selection for the Nobel, said resigning jury member Knut Ahnlund, ‘has not only done irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art.’39
Perhaps part of our difficulty, at least with the English version of Greed, lies in the limits of translation. Any serious quarrel with our culture of origin is also and inevitably a quarrel about language, the values it enshrines and thought patterns it tends to impose. Jelinek, who herself translated Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, has often observed that she does not see how her writing can be successfully translated, depending as it does on an intensive use of wordplay and intertextual allusion that only an Austrian or German could understand. Readers of this review will already have wondered, for example, how closely the puns I quoted in the English translations can have matched the original German. Indeed, comparing the German texts of The Piano Teacher and Greed with both English and Italian translations, one finds that puns turn up in different places, create different effects, and often come at the expense of clarity and fluency. Here, in Greed, is a moment when a young woman goes to church leaving an elderly, incontinent, bedridden woman alone with no one to change her nappy:
The old dear can just lie there in her own shit until evening, or until she rusts, we’re going to evening Mass now, she has to stand firm until it’s time to go to bed, the old dear, not the Church, it has already stood firm for much longer and doesn’t need nappies either.40
‘Durchhalten’41 is standard German for ‘holding on’ in the sense of not moving one’s bowels. It’s hard to imagine anyone using ‘stand firm’ for this in English. The expression is there only to prepare the pun. This feeling that a wrong note has been struck is constant throughout the translation and robs the work of the linguistic conviction it presumably has in the German. If there was the music that both Jelinek and the Nobel committee speak of, it has disappeared.
How far the translation problem contributes to the book’s failure in the English edition is hard to say. In any event, the comedy remains that Jelinek, locked as she is into a very specific cultural and linguistic context, was the least likely of candidates for international canonisation. ‘I’m a provincial phenomenon’ she tells us. ‘Just as I can’t take my body anywhere [Jelinek finds it impossible to travel] so my language can’t be moved around either. My language and I watch TV together of an evening since we can’t go anywhere else.’42 Readers of Greed may wish it had stayed that way.
A Polished Pessimism
* * *
[Emil Cioran]
‘FOR ALL THEIR merits,’ writes Emil Cioran, opening an essay ‘On Sickness’, ‘the healthy always disappoint.’1
I quote the line from memory, not because I have an excellent memory, or made any effort to memorise it, but simply because this Romanian thinker and philosopher is so memorable. Every sentence is at once eloquent and provocative, and, as his vision of the world gradually takes shape, dreadfully pertinent.
Here is another train of thought that I just haven’t been able to forget, though I read it a good year ago. Remarking, in a piece entitled ‘A Portrait of the Civilised Man’, on our determination to convert all to our likeness, Cioran declines to defend the cannibals (‘theirs is perhaps not the best humanity has produced’),2 but then takes his stand on behalf of the great masses of the world’s illiterate, ‘whom we pursue with a virulence that nothing can justify: is it such a great evil not to know how to read and write? In all frankness, I cannot think so. Indeed I will go further and say for certain that when the last illiterate has disappeared from the planet, we may dress in mourning for mankind.’3
Based in Paris after abandoning his native country to communism, Cioran published a dozen collections of essays and aphorisms. His subject is consciousness, or rather the impasse of consciousness, the irony that our greatest achievement, an increasingly refined self-awareness, has only made life more difficult. In this scenario the healthy and the illiterate of the two quotations above have something in common: they share the good fortune of a lower level of consciousness. And if we pursue the illiterate it is because, like the healthy person, they too ‘cannot help but disappoint’. ‘Do you devote yourselves to another’s conversion? You are not doing it to save him, but to oblige him to suffer like yourselves … No one saves anyone: one saves only oneself and there is no better way to do that than to clothe in convictions the unhappiness one wishes to lavish on others.’ ‘Better an innate vice’,4 the author concludes, ‘than a virtue acquired …’5
To say this is to offer only a crude introduction to the general drift of Cioran’s thought. For it is the resourcefulness and insistence with which this extraordinary thinker explores his subject, his ability to come at it from all angles, turn it inside out, wed wit and despair, find image after image for the paradoxes that beset us, that is so remarkable and so convincing. The essays included in the collection History and Utopia, perhaps the easiest of Cioran’s books with which to start, are no exception. The underlying thesis here is most succinctly (and fancifully) put as follows: ‘Man, once expelled from paradise, in order not to think about it, in order not to suffer from it, is given in compensation the faculty of will, of aspiring to action, of foundering there with enthusiasm, with brio …’6
Thus history begins: a will to action contaminated by a persistent nostalgia. Cioran’s observations in this regard win our immediate recognition: ‘Nothing shows more clearly the metaphysical meaning of our nostalgia than its incapacity to coincide with any moment of time whatever; hence it seeks consolation in a remote, immemorial past … somehow anterior to becoming.’7 Paradise. And so man girds up his will to recreate paradise, to establish Utopia, the end of suffering, the end of time. But in order to do this he must cultivate illusion, for ‘the very notion of an ideal city is a torment to reason, an enterprise that does honour to the heart and disqualifies the intellect.’8 Thus develops what Cioran wryly calls ‘the obligatory optimism’9 of modern political thought, its invention of Progress and again of the Meaning of History, since the fact ‘that history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit’.10
Likewise, few would be ready to accept, as Cioran does in an essay entitled ‘Odyssey of Rancour’, that it is this unsung sentiment which most galvanises action and ambition: ‘Let us beware of those who subscribe to a reassuring philosophy, who believe in the Good and willingly erect it into an idol; they could not have done so if, honestly peering into themselves, they had sounded their own depths or their miasmas …’11
But it is precisely at this point of his consummately pessimistic analysis that Cioran becomes most interesting, most attractive. For he is not simply a reactionary and a cynic. By no means. Driven as he is to dissolve illusion, he nevertheless sees that nothing can be done without it. And wishes that it were not illusion. For putting ourselves – disillusioned, unable to act – outside history would be a greater horror than engaging with it. Nor does he suggest that he has himself overcome all illusion, since one of the things that one cannot do without some sort of credulity is write. ‘We depend, in order to create, upon the opinion of our neighbours, we solicit, we implore their homage, we mercilessly pursue those among them who offer us nuanced or even equitable
judgements …’12 In short, one writes for admiration, for the illusion of success, and ‘all measured praise’ is ‘identified with injustice’.13
By implicating himself in this way, both with illusion and rancour, by keeping us constantly aware, partly through the sheer pungency of his prose, of the complexity of his own motivations, Cioran offers us the most lucid anatomy of our own perplexities with regard to any engagement in public life, any judgement of another’s engagement. Decidedly post-Nietzschean, clearly committed to continuing the ‘transvaluation of all values’, he thus brings us to see the sense of such propositions as ‘since we are unable to overcome our ills, we must cultivate them and take pleasure in them’;14 or again, ‘We should bless the man who stirs our rancour, stirs us to action.’15
Yet even as we warm to Cioran, to his strenuous provocation, his enviable eloquence, he introduces a worm of doubt into our enthusiasm: ‘Admiration,’ he says, ‘by eroding our substance, depresses and ultimately demoralises us; hence we turn against the admired – anyone guilty of having inflicted upon us the task of raising ourselves to his level.’16
All of which might make me hesitate to confess, in conclusion, that Cioran is the most brilliant thinker and essayist I have come across in many years, one of the few who make thought exciting to the point of intoxication. Were it not for the fact that he is now dead, and, as he wrote in ‘Odyssey of Rancour’, while ‘we resent everyone who has “chosen” to live in the same epoch as ourselves, those who … hamper our stride or leave us behind … we resign ourselves to the superiority of the dead man …’17 Thus resigned, I am presently progressing through Cioran’s recently published diary with only occasional fits of envy and anxiety.
