Mick Hartley

Tim Parks in the NYRB has a good article on Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek:

In her avowedly autobiographical novel The Piano Teacher, 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 then on a “Turklike” “man emitting foreign yelps [as he] screws his way into a woman” in the park at night. The descriptions are lengthy.

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,” 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.”

Reading the five novels by Jelinek that over twenty years have been translated into 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. […]

“Mine is a social intelligence that does not derive from knowledge and experience,” Jelinek explains in an interview with the German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, “but from avoiding them.”

Not perhaps the best recommendation for a novelist: avoiding experience and knowledge. A lack of experience, as commonly understood, needn’t of itself be a handicap of course: Huysman’s decadent hero Des Esseintes in A Rebours retreats to his room in disgust at the tedium of everyday life. Emily Dickinson, to cite one literary example from hundreds, hardly ever left her family home in Amherst. But that’s hardly the same as a boast that one’s social intelligence comes from a conscious avoidance of life. And it’s not hard to guess that her insights come second-hand:

The earliest of her novels available in English, Women as Lovers, was published 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,” and into a home paid for by her husband…

This technique of stringing together clichés to expose the shallowness of the characters’ lives and “the subjugating power of language” is sustained for nearly two hundred pages.

Then there’s Lust:

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… Preaching only to the converted, Lust cannot encourage reflection; rather it polarizes debate, dividing readers into those who can still subscribe to a radical and embattled 1970s feminism and those who always suspected that the feminists overstated 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.

Despite having won every major Austrian and German literary prize, Jelinek clings to her beliefs in patriarchal oppression:

Jelinek has a habit of using interviews to anticipate or preempt criticism. “The men are really malicious,” she tells Honegger, complaining that an editor with the magazine Der Spiegel has attacked her on his Web site, 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.

And here’s Parks’ view of her latest novel:

The plot of Greed takes up perhaps 5 percent 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 generalizations 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.

Many readers will feel that in drawing such dubious analogies Jelinek’s “wit” is more coercive than illuminating or amusing…

[T]he social criticism she offers seems simplistic, rancorous, and willfully 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.”

The title of Parks’ article, “How To Read Elfriede Jelinek”, is somewhat ironic given the clear conclusion that we shouldn’t bother. Still, if Jelinek’s unhappy about that she could console herself with the thought that, with her relentless criticism of patriarchal capitalism, she wouild surely have a fan in Terry Eagleton.