Virulent episodic reversions to bestiality interspersed with interludes of wanton destruction. The threat of loss is preponderant.The sad films and melancholy literature case is probably overstated. Often detested and reviled. A repulsion by the normal. Elfriede Jelinek is the author of the the gruesome and beautiful , such as The Piano Teacher, and is a Nobel laureate. What is it in human nature, that has made such an appalling mess of our history and future prospects? Nature has let us down, and God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and Jelinek is responsible for recording long , idiosyncratic messages on its answering machine.
Scene from Play, Rechnitz, 2008, Elfriede Jelinek, playwright
Conservative critics call her pathologically hateful, twisted and perverse. A memeber of the Swedish academy resigned in protest after she was awarded the Nobel. There goes the neighborhood.Due to her themes of dominance and submission she has often been regarded essentially as a feminist writer, although in Jelinek’s work women’s subordination basically illuminates the relations of power, control, and manipulation in class societies. She can properly be regarded as following in the radical tradition of artistic dissent.An articulation of the grotesque error in human construction that deprive homo-sapiens of their survival value. Much like Kafka, in Metamorphosis and his overturned bug as a symbol of the human predicament. Jelinek does not engage in preaching sweet reason to the inherently unreasonable. This is a fairly hopeless task.
Elfriede Jelinek
”Days before this year’s literature prize announcement, a member of the Swedish Academy, which gives the award, resigned in disgust over last year’s unexpected winner, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. … .That member, Knut Ahnlund, sent a missive to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. He characterized Jelinek’s work as ”whining, unenjoyable public pornography” and said her prize ”has not only been an irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art.”In his letter to the newspaper yesterday, Ahnlund characterized Jelinek’s writing as ”a mass of text shoveled together, without artistic structure.” Perhaps the honorable member from Malmo By the Lake should tell the house what he considers to be enjoyable public pornography.
Jelinek, Steckem Stab Und Stangl, 2009
The controversy may in part, be based on the prudish concerns about the sex drives of her female characters. The world is non-linear, irrational and subject to emotional bubbles and crashes, often inexplicably driven over a cliff by profound base desires whose underpinnings are murky and not easily understood. Human nature is a composite and not all the parts like each other in a forced union. Jelinek’s work straddles the semi or partial autobiographical fiction line, that subverts all rationale for an understandable and desireable world, a comforting world. Her victims are not necessarily innocent, the concept of innocence is challenged, and numerous conceptual barriers block the road to surpassing their failings.
Jelinek’s work reveals the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power. These cliches restrain and contain, yet may ultimately augment the pathologies of destruction by relegating and nurturing the more base dynamic of brutality and power inherent in most human relations. Her descriptive elements of moral failings returns to a resume of violence as a byproduct of power and aggression as the principal driving force of relationships.The themes of sex, sadism, and authoritarianism in modern day Austria were eloquently and incisively examined in The Piano Teacher), a partly, which part whodunit autobiographical novel about the love-hate relationship of mother and daughter. In the story, Erika Kohut, a piano teacher, lives with her tyrannical Mother and seduces one of her students, Walter, into her secret, manipulative and self-destructive way of life. Walter rapes her and she returns to her mother, unable to kill Walter or commit suicide, paralyzed by the experience and even more emotionally frozen than before.
Anna Wallander, Prinsessdramer
Jelenik’s world is a tale of two Austria’s. Both connected, yet equally flawed.One outright tragic, one simply farcical,and equally dangerous. This is a repressed society, with hidden crimes, managed through camouflage and repression. Thus, part of her work is an inquiry into her country’s forces of amnesia and apparent normalization. Forces which conceal insidious forces of imperialism and racism beneath the wholesome public veneer of clean and wholesome sanity; old ghosts, restless, tormented poltergeists and apparitions rubbing shoulders with idealized notions of a just and open society. The old lice infested prejudices are simply repackaged in new and less visible form. Something akin to Aldous Huxley’s haunting fear coming to pass of an entire society as a sort of painless concentration camp of the mind, in which people will have lost their liberties in the enjoyment of a dictatorship without tears.
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Jelinek, Die Kontrakte des Kaufmann's
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