Literary Criticism

Nobel bodies

 In his diary for August 1, 1914, Arthur Schnitzler notes the receipt of a letter telling him that Austria had been selected to receive that year's Nobel Prize for Literature, which was to be divided between him and the impressionist sketch-writer Peter  Altenberg.

He was not best pleased, and his wife was extremely annoyed, at the prospect of sharing the Prize. A few days later, however, everybody had much more pressing things to think about. "World war. World ruin", Schnitzler noted.

The Prize was not awarded that year.

Contrary to Schnitzler's assumption, the Prize is clearly not allocated on a country-by-country basis. Otherwise it would hardly have taken ninety more years before the Prize actually went to an Austrian: the novelist and dramatist Elfriede Jelinek. Like Schnitzler, Jelinek has been pilloried in her native country as a "Nestbeschmutzer", someone who fouls her own nest by exposing the seamy side of Austria to the outside world. The tour of Vienna's sexual underworld that Schnitzler offered in the scandalous Reigen (Round Dance, 1900) has its even franker parallel in Jelinek's best-known, and probably best, novel. Die Klavierspielerin (1983); translated by Joachim Neugroschel as The Piano Teacher, and filmed in 2001 by Michael Haneke).

Jelinek takes the lid off Austrian cultural and domestic life by showing us a prim, smartly dressed pianist, Erika Kohut, who secretly visits erotic peep shows, spies on couples having sex in the Prater, and always carries a razor-blade with which she covertly cuts herself. The novel explores her dysfunctional relationship with her elderly, authoritarian mother, culminating in a scene where Erika physically attacks the old woman, and her dealings with her pupil Walter Klemmer, who discusses music with her sensitively and enthusiastically before forcing her to have oral sex with him in a lavatory. All this is recounted in a brisk, polished, deadpan style which, in postmodernist fashion, denies the reader any ready emotional response and signals its own literariness by intertextual references. The last page, on which Erika, having  been beaten up by Klemmer, wounds herself in the shoulder and walks home bleeding, is larded with quotations from the execution scene that ends Kafka's The Trial.                       

Jelinek is not alone in her harsh exposure of  Austria. She represents a whole generation Austrian writers - including Felix Mitterer, Peter Turrini, and the late Thomas Bernhard - who polemicize against their country's inhumanity and hypocrisy.
Jelinek has perhaps more reason to do so than most. Her father, who was half Czech and half Jewish, only avoided a concentration camp because, as a chemist, he could be useful to the Third Reich into which Austria was far from unwillingly absorbed. She has regularly, and with considerable courage, denounced Kurt Waldheim's wartime activities for the Wehrmacht and the machinations of the far Right politician Jorg Haider. Drawing on a play by the nineteenth-century dramatist Johann Nestroy, Hauptling Abendwind (1862), about semi-civilized cannibals, she has caricatured Waldheim as "President Abendwind", and she has credited Austria with the "world championship for amnesia".

Media attacks on Jelinek have been especially vitriolic, perhaps because an outspoken woman is hard to take, perhaps also because of her awkward politics. Her declared Communism makes her tough-minded and relentless in analysing the entwinement of economic and sexual power. Thus in her 1977 sequel to Ibsen's A Doll's House, Nora becomes mistress to a  businessman who makes her use her sexual wiles to extract information from her ex-husband, then discards her. Jelinek's brand of feminism examines how women collude in the sadomasochistic power games that keep them subjugated, responding with self-harm, like Erika, or, like the much abused housewife in Lust (Pleasure, 1989), with infanticide. And here problems arise. For Jelinek's Marxist anti-humanism manifests itself in her rigid authorial control over her characters, loosened only to some degree in The Piano Teacher, which seems to deny them agency, leaving them trapped in triumphant male sadism and helpless female masochism. Allyson Fiddler, the foremost Jelinek scholar in the English-speaking world, quotes an interview in which Jelinek admits: "I can't describe anything positive .... Although I'm a Marxist, I can't raise any revolutionary optimism".

Jelinek's pessimism is equally apparent in her "green" writing. Official Austria, the land of Mozart and Mozartkugein, also presents itself as an unspoiled mountaineering paradise. Jelinek joins a string of writers, led by Thomas Bernhard in Frost (1963), who have instead depicted decaying mountain villages, with diseased and violent inhabitants, in a landscape exploited for forestry, hydroelectricity, and hunting. Her play about Heidegger, Totenauberg (1991), attacks the cult of pre-technological rural purity and its ready alliance with reactionary politics. Her latest novel, Gier (Greed, 2000), includes a memorable description of a fetid lake, artificially created by explosives in order to dump rubble from road-building, seething with jelly-like matter. The novel's central character, a bent and brutal policeman who would fit easily into the Scotland of Irvine Welsh, throws into this lake the corpses of the women he has cheated and murdered.

We probably make the best sense of Jelinek if we read her as a satirist. Like Bemhard, whose obsessive fictional diatribes accuse Austrians of every misdemeanour from supporting Nazism to not changing their socks, she is - to borrow a useful term from the Austrian critic Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler - an "Ubertreibungskiinstler", an artist of exaggeration. Seen in this light, the powerlessness of her characters corresponds to the Olympian gaze of the satirist. I think especially of the scene early in Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead, 1995) where a bus, plunged by its drunken driver off a mountain road, lies in the meadow "like an incautious beetle, rolled onto its back by a giant's kick, all four legs stretched out in helplessly whirling motion". And "helplessly whirling motion" applies also to Jelinek's narrative patterns, where repeated scenes of abuse illustrate the stasis of the characters' lives. Finally, nature functions in her work not only as the object of man's abuse but also as satiric norm. Erika Kohut's corporeal nature, figured by animal imagery, mocks her attempts at self-control. And at the end of The Children of the Dead, nature takes its revenge: the tourist hotel with the kitsch name "Alpenrose" is engulfed by a giant mudslide, as though the truth of modem Austria could no longer be repressed.

I am not convinced that Jelinek is a great writer, but she is often a rewarding and salutary one. The award of the Nobel Prize may be taken not only as acknowledging her work and her awkwardly oppositional stance, but also as a belated gesture towards a distinguished Austrian salon des refusés that includes Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Broch, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth and Ingeborg Bachmann.

RITCHIE ROBERTSON
The Times Literary Supplement
Oct 15, 2004