by Tim Parks
Bernhard must have known that this stipulation would not long be respected, that he would inevitably and rapidly be appropriated into the Austrian canon. But with Bernhard it was always the yearning for independence, the gesture of opposition, that served to confirm the deeper complicity between the artist and the world he works in. As the East German playwright Heiner Müller commented of the controversy surrounding Bernhard’s plays: ‘He writes as if he had been hired by the Austrian government to write against Austria … The disturbance can be articulated that loudly and clearly because it doesn’t disturb.’22 And the reason it didn’t disturb is because Bernhard always presents his criticisms in such a way that the critic, the author, Bernhard himself, seem just as unbalanced and guilty as the world they deplore. Nor does any alternative form of behaviour appear to be imaginable. Indeed, it was in his staging of the modern liberal individual’s interminably lost battle with his origins and milieu, which is to say with the whole human condition, that Bernhard becomes such a powerful voice even outside the world to which he was so fatally attached.
Let Sleeping Beauties Lie
* * *
[Elfriede Jelinek]
IN HER AVOWEDLY autobiographical novel, The Piano Teacher (1983), the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek has her alter ego Erika Kohut engage in a variety of voyeuristic activities. She pays to sit in a booth at a peep show, smells a tissue into which the man before her has masturbated and watches attentively as the girls on display feign sexual pleasure. On another occasion she takes greater risks spying on a couple having sex in a car and again on a ‘turklike’ ‘man emitting foreign yelps [as he] screws his way into a woman’ in the park at night. The descriptions are lengthy.1
Despite this assumption of what is normally a male role, Erika herself does not masturbate. She does not remove her gloves. Loathing ‘anything pertaining to bodies’,2 a musician whose insistence on technical perfection is a scourge to her students, she seems eager to contemplate scenes so alien to her nature that she will then be happy to escape unscathed to the apartment where she sleeps in the same bed with her mother, wishing sometimes to ‘creep into’ the older woman ‘and rock gently in the warm fluid of her womb’.3
Reading the five novels that over twenty years Jelinek has published in English, each more determinedly and uniformly unlovely than the one before, all ferocious in their denunciation of a still patriarchal Austrian society, it is not hard to see those voyeuristic scenes of The Piano Teacher as a key to understanding the author’s, or at least narrator’s, relationship to the stories she tells: she dwells on what is repugnant in order to congratulate herself that she has steered well clear of the world. It is a strategy that invariably divides her readers into fiercely opposed camps. Many, particularly in academic circles, believe Jelinek has achieved a triumphant combination of avant-garde technique and progressive social criticism. In 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Prize, ‘for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.’4 However, one member of the Nobel committee resigned over this decision, describing Jelinek’s work as ‘whining, unenjoyable public pornography’ and ‘a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure’.5 Newspaper reviewers have frequently agreed.
Born in 1946, an only child of Jewish origin, Jelinek was educated in a convent school and pushed by her mother towards a musical education, taking an organist’s diploma at the celebrated Vienna Conservatory. A university course in drama, however, had to be interrupted when an anxiety disorder led to the young woman’s being unable to leave the family home for a year. Meanwhile, her father had been shut up in a mental asylum. Withdrawal from life or openness to it would become key themes in Jelinek’s work, openness exposing one, and particularly women, to every kind of violence and degradation, withdrawal allowing for the sterile calm of a living death. A dramatic dialogue entitled Sleeping Beauty (2003) has the female sleeper reluctant to be woken and immediately in conflict with the presumptuous prince who has kissed her into life. ‘Mine is a social intelligence that does not derive from knowledge and experience,’ Jelinek explains in interview with the German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, ‘but from avoiding them.’6
Paradoxically, this apparent preference for isolation and withdrawal has always gone together with a reputation for vigorous political engagement. The earliest of her novels available in English, Women as Lovers, was written in 1975 shortly after Jelinek became a member of the Austrian Communist Party, then a fringe movement with Stalinist leanings. In an aggressive, rhythmically repetitive prose the book presents a group of young characters uncritically adopting the shallow, money-driven conventions that, as Jelinek sees it, regulate sex and marriage in provincial Austria. The tone is one of sardonic, even comic-strip Marxism where love is an empty word whose coercive repetition mostly serves to get a girl out of the factory where she is ‘replaceable and unnecessary’7 and into a home paid for by her husband.
i need you and I love you, says brigitte, her hair shines in the sun like ripe polished chestnuts, love is the feeling that one person needs the other. i need you, says brigitte, so that i no longer have to go to the factory, because really i don’t need the factory at all, what i need is you and being near you. i love you and i need you.8
The pay-off for her young man Heinz who, as an apprentice electrician, is learning a trade that ‘one day will put the whole world at his feet’,9 is sex, which, in Jelinek’s work, is never coloured by sentiment:
Unbuttoning and into brigitte only takes a moment and today we can announce, that something has clicked at last between these two young people [i.e. she is pregnant] … and so brigitte will not after all have to end her life in cold and loneliness, which otherwise she would have had to do.10
Meantime, Brigitte’s friend Paula seeks a man thus:
paula sometimes goes onto the dance floor, if there’s a party. sometimes paula is led away into the woods again by a drunk dance-floor visitor, which no one must see, because that would immediately cause her market value to go through the floor.
in the woods then paula is grabbed by her breasts or at worst between the legs or by the arse.
paula has been taught to assess who is grabbing her there between the legs. Is it someone with or without a future.
is it someone with a future or a work horse.
if it is a work horse, then he cannot become paula’s fate. paula’s brain has learned to work like a computer in such cases. here’s the printout: married, two children.11
This technique of stringing together clichés to expose the shallowness of the character’s lives and ‘the subjugating power of language’ is sustained for nigh on 200 pages.
Five years later in Wonderful Wonderful Times (1980), Jelinek gives us a more sophisticated group of 1950s Viennese youngsters who bend the jargon of revolutionary dissent to justify violent street crime and hence satisfy selfish appetites, all this under the depressing influence of their war-damaged parents. The prose is more flexible now and there is more psychological development but the peremptory irony and resolute rejection of emotional engagement remains, while the sex grows more unpleasant. Here is the father of two of the youngsters, an ex-SS concentration-camp guard, who, having lost a leg, is now obliged to transform his bestiality into ‘art’ by taking pornographic photos of his long-suffering wife. Shouting at her as he does so, he is reminded of the joys of killing, thus drawing a parallel between Nazi war crimes and man’s violence towards women:
You have to look afraid. It’s always a terrific feeling to smash down resistance, I smashed resistance quite often myself in the War and liquidated numerous persons all on my own. Nowadays I have this wretched leg to contend with, but back then the women couldn’t get enough of me, it was the magical attraction of the uniform that did it. That smart uniform. I remember how we were often up to the ankles of our riding-boots in blood in Polish villages. Look, thrust your pelvi
s further forward, you slut, where’s your pussy got to again? Ah, there it is.12
Favourable reviews of Wonderful Wonderful Times praised the novel’s political commitment and withering criticism of a post-war Austrian society that had never come to terms with its Nazi past. Jelinek, however, embraces only the negative, denunciatory energies of left-wing politics and shares none of its constructive optimism. There are no positive experiences to relate and nothing to hope for. In particular, victims are as unattractive and perverse as their persecutors and can thus be dispatched without regret. Of a woman and the man who regularly beats her in the later novel Greed (2000), the narrator remarks, ‘She can throw him alive into boiling water, for all I care, and jump in after him …’13 At another point she wonders: ‘Why do I always only see the negative?’14 The answer, perhaps, is that such a consistently dark view of life confirms the decision to ‘avoid experience’.
The extremity of Jelinek’s tirades soon won her comparisons with the novels of Thomas Bernhard who had also remorselessly attacked the residual fascism of modern Austria. Seeking, in an interview with Gitta Honegger, respected theatre critic and biographer of Bernhard, to distinguish her approach from his, Jelinek claimed that as a man Bernhard ‘could claim a position of authority’,15 projecting an identity with which readers could relate and giving a coherent, rhetorically convincing account of Austrian society, whereas, being a woman, even this form of ‘positive’16 approach was denied her; a woman working in a man’s world and language could not present a coherent identity (a play of Jelinek’s has the female parts mouthing words that are actually spoken by male voices, as if women could not really possess the language). Starting from this position of ‘speechlessness’,17 a woman writer could only work by subversion, undermining the language’s prejudices, showing its crassness and attacking its perverse and mindless momentum. As the narrator puts it in Wonderful Wonderful Times, ‘everything that’s said is a cue for something else.’18
However, one hardly need resort to feminist theories of language to see more obvious differences between the two writers. Bernhard’s narrators are firmly placed within the stories they tell and a certain pathos attaches to the damage they do themselves with their constant negativity. In many of Bernhard’s works (Frost for example, or the later Correction) we see a narrator drawn into the orbit of a compellingly negative figure and are invited to feel all the danger of his being seduced and destroyed by the other’s despairing vision. There is never, that is, any complacency about what it means to see the world so darkly nor a conviction that withdrawal is any solution.
Jelinek’s narrator may constantly make her presence felt, addressing the reader directly and voicing the fiercest invectives, yet she remains resolutely outside the story, invulnerable in her sardonic detachment, her avoidance of experience. This separation is occasionally reinforced by reminding us that her characters are ‘only’ creations, something Bernhard never does. ‘It’s a frequent reproach’, we are told in the opening pages of Greed, ‘that I stand around looking stupid and drop my characters before I even have them, because to be honest I pretty quickly find them dull.’19 Or again, ‘I for example have nothing to say faced with the figures I create, bring on the stock phrases and some more, and another and another, until they squirm beneath me with pain.’20 ‘My characters are only coat-hangers on which I hang the language’21 Jelinek explains in interview. Only in The Piano Teacher is this static relationship between narrator and story excitingly threatened, no doubt because this is the only novel where we have a fully imagined, Jelinek-like figure inside the narrative, a woman torn between withdrawal from the world and openness to it.
With a wealth of detail we don’t find in her other books, The Piano Teacher sets up an unusual triangular power struggle. Despite dwindling energies, an ageing mother tries to keep her pianist daughter away from men, her ambition having always been ‘to squeeze money out of [her daughter’s] arduously achieved perfection’.22 Herself approaching middle age, ‘an insect encased in amber’,23 Erika, the piano teacher, is as it were hypnotised by the sexual experience that has passed her by. She dresses in unsuitably youthful clothes and stays out late after her lessons, but perhaps only to provoke her mother and cultivate the illusion of a freedom she doesn’t have or even truly want. Into this stale scenario steps a handsome young student, Klemmer, determined to add his teacher to a list of conquests.
The book is full of telling set pieces. A violent opening scene that has mother and daughter clawing at each other over a dress Erika has bought swiftly establishes the relationship between them. At a drawing-room concert we see how the piano teacher uses her music, not to give or communicate, but to separate herself from others in icy technical perfection. Later, disgracefully, she puts broken glass in the jacket pocket of a promising girl student who has also attracted Klemmer’s promiscuous eye.
In particular, the novel has two scenes of great dramatic effect where action, dialogue, description and reflection work powerfully together. The first is in the school bathrooms where the vigorous, sporty Klemmer boldly kisses his ageing sleeping beauty into life; Erika enjoys a moment of abandonment, then transforms this opportunity for passion into a frustrating masturbation scene in which the man, as if being taught a lesson, is brought almost to orgasm then forced to recompose himself.
Some days later, back home, Erika barricades herself in her room with Klemmer and, while her mother bangs hysterically on the door, forces him to read a letter in which she begs him to mistreat her, beat her, tie her up, sodomise her and so on (the list is long). The letter inhibits Klemmer from showing any ordinary desire, prompting him either to leave her or to use violence as asked. Either way Erika, who is actually afraid of violence, will have controlled the situation.
Such an account of the book suggests a familiar kind of unhappy psychological drama, but Jelinek’s prose has now abandoned the transparency of the conventional novel. The sardonic, even facetious voice is stronger than ever, likewise the ironic use of cliché and allusion, but, as though these old habits were no longer sufficient to prevent emotional engagement with material so dangerously close to home, a barrage of new techniques ensures that the mind is never allowed to settle on the drama: frequent and flippant puns for example: ‘She belittles herself in front of his dick which stays little’;24 ‘Now he has to live with a charge that he could not discharge’;25 ‘Klemmer drifts along on his own head waters, he is never in over his head.’26
Very often, the narration is as it were derailed by some odd association (a word picked up and used in another sense) and heads off in a different direction, or into some extravagant metaphor. Metaphors, it should be said, are frequently mixed and collide oddly with both the story and each other creating unsettling shifts of register. Rather than clarifying the action or giving it emotional colour, they muddle and distract. Here, for example, are Erika and Klemmer at the point where he tracks her down in the women’s bathroom and climbs to look over the toilet door as she urinates. No sooner has this dramatic event been described than the narrative voice steps back:
These two lead performers intend to put on a love scene, completely private, no extras, no walk-ons, only one lead under the leaden heaviness of the other lead.
In accordance with the occasion, Erika instantly gives herself up as a person. A present wrapped in a slightly dusty tissue paper, on a white tablecloth. As long as the guest is present, his present is lovingly turned and twisted; but as soon as he leaves, the present is shoved aside … and everyone hurries to supper. The present cannot go away by itself, but for a while it is comforted by the fact that it is not alone. Plates and cups clatter, silverware scrapes on porcelain. But then the package notices that these noises are produced by a cassette player on the table. Applause and the clinking of glasses – everything on tape! Someone comes and takes the package. Erika can relax in this new security: she is being taken care of. She waits for instructions or orders. She has been studying for years – not toward her conc
ert, but toward this day.
Klemmer has the option of putting her back unused in order to punish her. It’s up to him, he can utilise her or not. He can even toss her around mischievously. But he can also polish her and place her in a showcase. Maybe he’ll never wash her, but just keep pouring fluids into her; and her edge would be sticky and greasy from all the mouthprints. A day-old coat of sugar on the bottom.
Walter Klemmer pulls Erika out of the toilet stall. He yanks her. For openers, he presses a long kiss on her mouth …27
To watch the same scene in the film (The Piano Teacher, directed by Michael Haneke, 2001) is to appreciate the work that Jelinek’s style is doing here. On screen, told in a direct, traditional fashion, the story invites ordinary identification and excitement, however brilliant Isabelle Huppert (Erika) may be at repelling our sympathy. In the book, the drama of the plot is distanced but also strangely intensified by another, greater drama that threatens to overwhelm it: that of a narrator who seems afraid to confront her story head on and is constantly taking refuge from it in sophisticated literary games and bizarre digressions. Always unpleasant and frequently irritating, The Piano Teacher is nevertheless a powerful and convincing achievement.
A strongly individualistic style ‘easily moves into a parody of itself’,28 Jelinek tells us. In her case, Lust (1989) is the novel where this development is most evident. A ruthless industrialist imposes his love of music on factory workers, son and wife, thus transforming the art form most frequently associated with Austria into a means of perpetrating violence. The workers must sing in the factory choir if they want to keep their jobs, the son must sweat over his violin lessons, the wife must listen to music while her husband, promiscuous by nature but concerned about AIDS, forces her to submit, ‘passive as a toilet’,29 to his violent and inexhaustible sex drive:
