Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 “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.” However, her works have been met with mixed reactions; many critics dismiss them as little more than quasi-philosophical musings, fused belligerently with obscenity. They often focus on the wrong aspects of her works, getting caught up in the gruesome sexual violence rife in her novels and plays, unable to see past this to the message she lays bare within. Neither do they see her intense fixation with language, which she carefully deconstructs and exposes to get to the crux of harmful societal discourses. This article hopes to provide an insight into three key aspects of Jelinek’s writing: her feminist-marxist stance, her position on Austria, and her use of language.
Feminism and Marxism
Jelinek’s texts depict “obscenities” – moments, in which sex and violence become intertwined. These scenes form a crucial part of her critique of the patriarchy, which she reveals to be a suffocating force which restricts her female characters endlessly. Sophie Mackintosh, the renowned British author, is drawn to Jelinek’s most famous novel Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher) “because of the white-hot fury in every page. The distillation of a very female sort of pain.” It certainly holds true that the author and playwright bears no false impressions of the androcentric world around her.
However, Jelinek’s ruthless criticism does not end there. The thread that runs throughout much of her work is the dissection of the complex relationship between the patriarchy and capitalism. In her works, Jelinek attempts to reveal the multi-faceted subjugation of women – whilst men can only be oppressed by capitalism, women are oppressed by both capitalism and the patriarchy. The interweaving of these two systems becomes particularly clear through cross-examination of her works. The play Was geschah nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte; oder Stützen der
Gesellschaften (What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband; or Pillars of Society) acts as her sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s classic play A Doll’s House. A Doll’s House sets up the expectation that Nora will come to escape the traditional, domestic role of a woman in the 19th century. In Jelinek’s play, Nora is not set free from the patriarchal objectification of her marriage. Jelinek instead subverts this, depicting her as merely fulfilling “a string of male projections on the image of woman: wife, mother, worker, lover, whore, mistress and business woman”, which serve to fulfil the twisted male gratification which Ibsen’s work revealed.
Her liberation appears to come in Jelinek’s play through factory work. Yet this is then undercut by the economic subjugation Jelinek’s female characters experience, such as Brigitte and Paula, the two main characters of her novel Die Liebhaberinnen (Women as Lovers). In this novel, Brigitte is subdued initially by her low-paid work in a brassiere factory, one of the only jobs available to the women of the novel. By the end, Paula finds herself working in the same factory that Brigitte seemingly escapes from. Viewed alongside this novel, Jelinek’s sequel to Ibsen’s play outlines her belief in the impossibility of female liberation in a capitalist system. Her work seeks to show that whilst economic independence is a vital step towards equality and the dissolution of the patriarchy, that in reality this alone is not enough in the 1970s Austrian landscape, within which this novel was written. Her female characters are offered the illusion of liberation through work, which actually serves to create the space for further economic and social oppression by the androcentric system of capitalism. The notions of capitalism and the patriarchy become almost indistinguishable from one another across the span of Jelinek’s writing.
Criticism of Austria
A further key aspect of Jelinek’s work is her national identity. It becomes clear that through her novels and plays she attempts to impart a scathing criticism of Austria. She makes no attempt to hide it, saying: “every day I carefully hone my hatred for this country.” Born soon after WW2, Jelinek perceives an ironic contradiction in traditional narratives surrounding Austria’s cultural canon. The view that Austria is characterised by “high culture”, its connection to classical music, art, and literature, even by its Gemütlichkeit (warmth and coziness), is torn to pieces by Jelinek. She demonstrates the way in which this cultural history is used to restrict women and deny its Nazi past.
In Die Klavierspielerin, she attacks the established cultural canon through her treatment of music, potentially the most celebrated aspect of Austrian high culture. In the novel, the main character, Erika, plays the piano in a conservatory, which Jelinek views as a tradition which trains women to attract a husband. She therefore associates Austrian high culture with the subjugation of women. An attack on Austria’s restrictive culture through music is one which begs to be compared to another Austrian playwright: Thomas Bernhard. His play Heldenplatz confronted an audience at the Burgtheater in Vienna with the reality of the country’s lingering anti-Semitism 50 years after the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany). In the play, music reminds Josef of Austria’s Nazi past. When his brother Robert listens to this music willingly, his actions contribute to an Austrian denial of the country’s connection to national socialism.
This criticism of Austria’s denial of its past is one directly comparable to much of Jelinek’s writing. Her play, Burgtheater. Posse mit Gesang (Burgtheater. Farce with Singing), precludes Heldenplatz’s commentary on Viennese culture. This play depicts the lives of Austrian actors who continued their acting careers after having acted in Nazi propaganda films. These actors were in Jelinek’s view too quick to benefit from National Socialism, and too quick to forget their involvement with it after the war. Jelinek’s work might therefore be inserted into a literary canon which renunciates its Austrian identity, criticising the country’s inability to confront its own history.
The Key to Jelinek's Writing
Whilst it’s easy to get caught up in a thematic approach to Jelinek’s texts, the key to understanding her work ultimately comes to the fore in her language. Throughout Die Liebhaberinnen, she uses simple sentence structure and almost completely omits capitalisation, contributing to the ironic tone of the novel. In essence, the language of the novel reflects the content. She strips her message down linguistically, to portray a world devoid of individuality, in which people are dehumanised, becoming mere “beispiele” (examples) of broader societal groups.
Moreover, her deconstruction of language acts as an interrogation of the language’s role as a tool of oppression. This satirisation of this language serves as the very premise of much of her work. Her plays Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V (Death and the Maiden I-V), made up of five one-act plays, centre around female figures from fairy tales, and the spheres of music and literature. Throughout, Jelinek subverts the narratives of traditional stories in order to point out the subtle discourse inherent in age-old literary traditions that propagate misogynistic worldviews. For example, Jelinek’s Snow White finds her way to the forest only to be slain by the huntsman; Sleeping Beauty, after being woken up by Mr. Right, freezes up at the prospect of further intimacy.
Whilst critics focus their attention on the challenging depiction of sexual violence throughout Jelinek’s works, it becomes clear that the backbone of Jelinek as a writer is her language. Through subverting the harmful discourses which inform the world around us, the stories she tells serve to deconstruct traditional narratives surrounding gender and romantic relationships.
