Reviewer:j myles
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November 15, 2022 Subject:
Jelinek's Theatre of Cruelty
In her interview, ‘My Characters Live Only Insofar as they Speak’ (2000), Jelinek identifies herself with the eastern part of Austria and urban Vienna
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rather than the western rural area. She describes Austrian identity as split, one side identifying with the rural, the ‘lightness’ whilst she associates herself with the urban: It is a very split identity: some look back to those times of glory, to culture, or rather, to that culture of lightness embodied by waltzes and savoir vivre, while others, I for one, believe that because of this association with lightness, Austria was much more readily allowed to become innocent again than Germany; and for that reason Austrian identity is in fact a non-identity, based on amnesia, so to speak. …Austria since then has not been able like other countries, to identify with the great important figures of its past, its culture, or its history, and is stuck in the alternative lightness or mountains of corpses. (62) Later in the interview Jelinek contrasts her feminism and writing to that of Ingeborg Bachmann whom she describes as a writer of ‘discretion’. Jelinek states she is, in contrast ‘an author of the axe’ (65). No one can deny the appropriateness of this metaphor to the sense of violence that permeates relations between the genders in her work. But Jelinek also brings the axe of her prose down on the Romantic tradition that is also a major part of the ‘light’ idea of Austrian national identity (i.e. seen in the film – but minus the resistance to fascism -The Sound of Music.) So, instead of romantic images of mountains and country folk, Jelinek associates herself with a ‘mountains of corpses’ position. In place of pastoral romanticism she writes instead of deathly Darwinian struggle, a struggle between humans and fauna, the despoilation of nature by industrial pollution, and pervasive sexual and physical/Sadeian violence carried out by men on women (and emotional violence between women). Because women are romanticized in western culture, more associated with nature and the biological than men, they experience the heaviest burden of the inherent violence of this culture. Romanticism, coinciding with industrialization (and, maybe in the longer term, with capitalism) is an ideology that works by aestheticizing nature and obscuring the violence that is actually being carried out against it. But what Jelinek’s novels achieve is to take the struggle against this ideology onto the very ground on which is operates – its aesthetic coding. Jelinek’s work acts to underline the role of misogynistic violence shielded by romantic ideology. She often invokes the gamut of metaphors associated with romanticism in this project, so that metaphors that usually work to mantle and obscure violence against women are reconfigured as violent ones. Jelinek subverts these codes by re-presenting them in Darwinian and Sadeian clothes. Jelinek’s early novel Women as Lovers (1975) opens with reflections on the pollution of nature by industrialization. In the interview referred to above, Jelinek goes on to state that she was concerned to get away from ‘small town’ mittel-European fictional depictions of Austria seen, for example, in Bernard and Handke’s novels. In this novel Austria’s working class is the central concern. When one thinks of the novelists concerned with working class experience in the 20th century they are nearly all men writing about working class men. But Jelinek focuses on young working class women – Bridgette a factory worker, and Paula, a shop girl. Jelinek portrays these women’s obsessions, almost entirely male-focussed, with marriage, domesticity and having children as being dependent on getting a man. Jelinek, though, also shows the fracturing of women as a gender by class in the figure of Susi - a ‘refined’ grammar school girl who competes with Brigette for the self-centred Heinze. Throughout this novel, very much under the sway of 1970s concerns of industrial society, class war and a growing awareness of environmental issues (at that period usually conceived in terms of pollution of natural habitats and water), Jelinek hacks away at romanticism in showing the feelings and attitudes of these women. Paula is constantly calculating her market value by the measure of who is at present interested in ‘molesting her’ (251). In this Darwinian scenario we find Bridgette’s vagina being referred to as a ‘snatch’ (62) and like a vagina dentata it ‘snaps’ (44). The urine and sperm that the men produce are associated with industrial or chemical outfalls – they ‘shoot’, ‘squirt’ and ‘discharge’. The women’s wombs in turn are ‘ravaged’ by the ‘slimy muck’ (57) of male semen. This violence is shown as marking generations of women in the figure of Paula’s battered mother with her experience of traumatic pregnancy and abortion. Paula’s mother doesn’t hear the singing of a blackbird because of the cancer which ‘saws and eats away at her’ (57). When Paula entices Erich to have sex in (pointedly) a barn in the countryside, Jelinek’s narrator intervenes with ‘You cannot expect descriptions of nature for your money as well! This isn’t the cinema after all!’ (77). Any romanticized descriptions of nature transmute into Darwinian ones: the men are described as ‘lock[ing] horns’, who ‘sow wild oats’, whilst Paula is referred to as being ‘so small’ (84) against these ‘laws of nature’. In her next novel, Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1980), a novel set in the 1950s, the crisis years of the Austrian economy, these themes continue. The small, inchoate, group of students and revolutionaries seen here mark this novel as Jelinek’s most consciously political. Rainer and Anna of the group articulate anti-romantic ideas. They ‘hate the provinces’ (29), the ‘dismal sky’ of the ‘dreary landscape’. The ‘light’ idea of Vienna as the ‘city of flowers’ (78) is ridiculed and Stifner’s descriptions of mittel-European landscape are derided by Rainer (54). Rainer is an existentialist anarchist who reads Camus’ The Stranger and Sartre’s Nausea and integrates the sexual violence of Bataille and de Sade into the group’s thinking. Jelinek conveys the ‘order of mutual violence’ in the group (90) as much as that obtaining in bourgeois society. So the novel shows the contradictory political consciences of members of the group. Anna, for instance, doesn’t want a life in which she would have to ride in trams, she wants a Mercedes. The group’s ideology is all over the place, so that Sophie is described as wanting Hans’ ‘freedom to submit qua freedom. She knows she is causing him pain, but she is coercing that freedom by torturing him, as it were, into identifying of his own free will with the flesh that suffers the pain…’ (213). Sophie is shown enjoying inflicting emotional violence on this timid, soi-distant, group member and quotes Musil to the effect that ‘love’s ecstasy is no more than ambition satisfied’ (92). In turn, Anna uses her sexual attractiveness to distract groping male commuters on the trams so that her accomplices can pick their pockets. The social order shown is one steeped in violence, in particular this is embodied by Rainer and Sophie’s father, an ex-Nazi who delights in physically and sexually abusing his wife and daughter and photographing the results. Their mother’s menstrual blood and blood from domestic and sexual violence is described as ‘stinking’, having dried on the marital bed mattress (31). The atmosphere of sadistic violence permeating society, manifested in routine sexual and domestic violence is comprehensive in these two novels. But, overall, men are shown as the main agents of violence whilst women, nature, the biological are its objects. This dramatically changes in The Piano Teacher in which Erika is shown to be the instrument of an insinuating all-encompassing violence, physical and mental. This novel also extends Jelinek’s anti-romantic metaphors, superficially in the association of the classical music she teaches, as well as in the naïve figure of Klemmer and his romantic idealization of Erika. But there are many anti-romantic metaphors. Erika is seen by Klemmer as a sweet meadow (69) and towards the climax of the novel (and of the breaking of this illusion) Jelinek piles on other metaphors: Klemmer ‘offers nature to Erika’ (238), their rural sexual encounter is described as a ‘ramble’ (243) whilst Erika is said to ‘stink’ and her skin is blood blistered as a result of open-air sex (249). Erika imagines her body as something to be ‘grazed on’ (224). When in bed with her mother she (like Paula’s mother, above) finds the birdsong outside their window ‘irksome’ (236). Her mother is a ‘malevolent plant’ (277), art is a ‘porno mag’ (86) and human culture is ‘gruel’ (189) and a ‘pitfall of scythes and sickles mounted in concrete’ (194). There is a somewhat discordant postmodernist stylistic quirkiness in Jelinek’s later novels, particularly Lust and Greed and Rheingold, although this starts in The Piano Teacher. In Wonderful Wonderful Times the style is modernist – seen in the novel’s multiple time frames, motivated objects a-la-Nabokov (‘Go on, eat me, there may be worse times ahead’, admonishes the spurned slice of bread and margarine’ (170). But in The Piano Teacher it is as if Erika’s own, violently self-harmed, body parts have independent status: ‘She assigns difficult tasks for her body, increasing the difficulties by laying hidden traps wherever she likes.’ (This is immediately complemented by an anti-romantic metaphor: ‘She swears that anyone, even a primitive man, can pursue “the drive” if he is not afraid to bag it out in the open’ (111). Consciously mixed metaphors interrupt the narrative: an imagined predatory man in the woods is likened to big bad wolf and ‘she will spot him from far away and catch the sound of skin being torn and flesh ripped. By then, it will be late in the evening. The event will loom from the fog of musical half-truths’ (50). When the sound of Erika’s piano recital reaches the outdoors, her mother and grandmother are said to ‘bask in their own hubris’ (37). But it is the later novels that become more marked by postmodern play whilst still concerned with anti-romanticism. At many points in Lust Biblical vocabulary (i.e. ‘verily’, ‘unto’) and Old Testament phraseology are adopted. Off-the-cuff puns and ironicized mixed-metaphors like ‘he tries out ever new positions to kick his cart down his wife’s quiet waters and start paddling like a maniac’ (31) regularly clutter, pull-back the reader from conventional expectations of reading a novel. The narrator of this novel is leadenly interventionary and much less restrained than in earlier manifestations such as in Women as Lovers. In Greed these postmodern elements continue but Jelinek still continues in the anti-romantic vein. The murdering police officer Kurt Janisch’s female victims are shown to have become cloned by the fads promoted by cosmetics and fashion industries that they all look alike, like dolls, a fact that serves to thwart detection of any particularities in their abduction. The postmodernism continues, here marked at many points by absurdist logic and surrealism, like a mix of Lewis Carroll and Dada: ‘The woman has been warm all this time, for days now; yet as if out of embarrassment, to distract attention from herself by pointing at herself, she tumbles out of her container, meals would be astonished, for no other reason, than to be taken out and polished off’ (210). The later novel Rheingold and the dramatic monologue ‘Shadow, Eurydice Says’ are a difficult read, inchoate, allusive and highly metaphorical, but appropriate, perhaps when dealing with the meta-language of European myth. Both these works, however, are unsurprising developments when considered in the light of Jelinek’s anti-romanticism. She reevokes these classical legends and figures, the Rhein Maidens and Eurydice, to suggest a lost feminist anti-romantic heritage. In Rheingold Jelinek’s earth goddess Enra, in contrast to Wagner’s redemptive figure, appears as a vengeful spirit. The Rheingold itself becomes a metaphor of the corruption of nature by money, capitalism, greed. Jelinek’s Eurydice is a shadow that is also vengeful, associated with anti-romanticism (‘nature will vanish after me’) and who has ‘no exchange value’. Eurydice rejects the aestheticized sign of the woman she has become in classical myth and talks of ‘slits, not feelings’. Women will have to stop being shadows: ‘little girls too are not seen but have to voice their desires’. And, if the ‘female sex is everywhere – those girls in their slippery slits’ are agents, ‘pissers’ who would ‘love to have more orifices, so they can be wide open and ready.’ The later works continues Jelinek’s very first concerns with taking an axe to the sexual violence and violence against nature hidden by the ideology of romanticism. But now the axe is honed, it cuts deeper into the historical oots of romanticism found in classical myth. The postmodern novels, particularly Rheingold, are difficult reads, and Jelinek’s manner of telling acts, consciously, as a drag on the readers’ eyes, slowing the flow, making us think, dwell, consider the legacy of romantic myth. But Jelinek’s postmodernism, multiplying what were minor stylistic features of the early novels, still continues her feminist retelling of romantic myths long dominated in their telling by men.
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