Vienna roast: Marjorie Perloff on Elfriede Jelinek.

THE PIANO TEACHER

BY ELFRIEDE JELINEK, TRANSLATED BY JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL

LONDON: SERPENT'S TAIL, 280 PAGES. $15.

WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL TIMES

BY ELFRIEDE JELINEK, TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HULSE

LONDON: SERPENT'S TAIL. 253 PAGES. $15.

In the English-speaking world, the decision to award the 2004 Nobel Prize in literature to the Austrian novelist-playwright Elfriede Jelinek met with puzzled incredulity or downright outrage--that is, when it was met with any reception at all. Last fall, British papers such as The Scotsman chuckled that the Nobel could go to an obscure Austrian feminist communist "porn author," whose small independent publisher in Britain, Serpent's Tail, supposedly sold only 270 copies of The Piano Teacher in 2003, "while three other novels [Women as Lovers; Wonderful, Wonderful Times; and Lust] sold barely 50 copies between them." Other papers were less amused. In the Daily Standard, Stephen Schwartz declared: "The infamous snobs of the Swedish Academy ... have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic.... This time they got a two-fer shot at destroying literary standards, since Jelinek's writings mainly verge on gross pornography." This sentiment was echoed by the New Republic, where Ruth Franklin concluded that Jelinek's sexual and political notions were so "appalling" they alone should have disqualified her from consideration for the prize.

Normally, such put-downs of a radical feminist and onetime communist author (Jelinek was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991) would trigger a defense from the Left; but since Jelinek does not yet have a US publisher, and only four of her novels (and none of her plays or poems) are available in English, there has been little debate, even though German feminist scholars have argued--and I shall take up this point later--that Jelinek's "pornography," like her seeming allegiance to communist doctrine, must be understood in the context of her excoriating critique of Austrian neofascism, especially with regard to its impact on women.

Ironically, the one work that does seem to be known in the United States is not actually a work by her at all but Michael Haneke's film adaptation of her novel The Piano Teacher (starring Isabelle Huppert), which won the Cannes Film Festival Grand Jury Prize in 2001. On its own terms, Haneke's psychological thriller--about a psychotically repressed middle-aged piano teacher whose masochistic and morbid sexual fantasies turn into terrifying realities when she becomes involved with one of her young students--is a haunting film, particularly because of the ironic tension generated between the gorgeous classical-piano score and the sinister violence of the film's surreal imagery. But the film in fact has little to do with the novel; on the contrary, a comparison of the two makes clear just how remarkable a novel The Piano Teacher is, and how little of its verbal energy and complexity were translated onto the screen.

First and foremost, The Piano Teacher--or, more accurately and ambiguously, The Piano Player (Jelinek's title is Die Klavier-spielerin)--is about post-Nazi Vienna, as seen through the eyes of a half-Jewish writer who grew up in the Austrian capital and attended both the Vienna Conservatory and the University of Vienna. Although the film is nominally set in Vienna, by making it a French film with French-speaking actors, Haneke gives Jelinek's raw and jumpy interior monologues a very different spin: One forgets that Jelinek's is a tale not just of bourgeois hypocrisy and capitalist commodification, but quite specifically of the middle-class venality that characterized Austria in the aftermath of the period euphemistically called "the seven years" (1938-45), when, in the wake of the Anschluss, Austria was a willing accomplice of Hitler's Third Reich. During the Allied occupation that followed, the Austrians came to fear and despise their Russian occupiers more than they ever hated Hitler, and thus the de-Nazification campaign so prominent in West Germany never quite took place in postwar Austria. From the revelations of Kurt Waldheim's military role in the Nazi SA (revelations made while he was serving as president of the republic in the late '80s) to the prominence of the far-right Freedom Party leader Jorg Haider in recent years, Austria has been haunted, despite a succession of Social Democrat and centrist governments, by the shadow of fascism.

There is thus no parallel between the bourgeois, upwardly mobile Musikkultur of Vienna and its counterpart in Paris. For one thing, Vienna was the great capital of classical music, from Haydn and Mozart to Schoenberg and Webern. The study of music was--and in part remains--integral to Austrian life in a way that has never been the case in France. Indeed, Jelinek's Erika Kohut, the failed concert pianist turned conservatory music teacher, has a cachet not applicable to piano teachers elsewhere. She is after all a professor--a title that attracts the young, petit bourgeois Walter Klemmer, triggering fantasies of possessing his cold, condescending teacher. More important, however, the real center of the novel is not, as in the film, the sadomasochistic sexual relationship between teacher and pupil but the deathly union, very much played down in the film, between Erika and her monster of a widowed mother--a mother who had been married for twenty years before giving birth to her only child. As for Erika's father, he evidently cracked up soon after her birth and was put away in an asylum.

In the novel's first scene, Erika comes home to the flat she shares with "Mother," only to be subjected to an inquisition worthy of a criminal court, and all because Erika, the family's breadwinner, dared to buy herself a dress now hidden in her briefcase. Mother's outrage at this unnecessary expense is rendered through her unique language and syntax:

  They are saving to buy a large condominium. The cramped apartment they
  now rent is so ancient, you might as well just abandon it. When they
  decide on the condominium, they will be allowed to specify where to
  put the closets and partitions.
    You see, an entirely new construction system is being used. Every
  aspect is custom-designed, according to your precise wishes. You pay
  your money and you get your choice ... and Erika pays. In the brand-
  new, state-of-the-art condominium, mother and daughter will each have
  her own realm, Erika here, Mother there.... Even here, in this dump,
  which is slowly falling to pieces, Erika already has her own realm,
  her own roost, which she rules and is ruled in. It is only a
  provisional realm; Mother can walk in at any time. There is no lock on
  Erika's door. A child has no secrets from her mother....
    Erika has never had to do housework, because dustrags and cleansers
  ruin a pianist's hands. During Mother's rare breathers, she
  occasionally worries about her vast and varied holdings. You can't
  always tell where everything is. Just where is Erika, that fidgety
  property?... Mother worries a lot, for the first thing a proprietor
  learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is
  better.

Here and throughout the novel (ably translated by Joachim Neugroschel), plot is character and character plot, both being expressions of a larger cultural unconscious. The first sentence above seems to be matter-of-fact disclosure on the part of an omniscient narrator, but as the second and third sentences reveal, it is more accurately a condensation of Mother's typical thoughts, packed as they are with the truisms of her time and place, like the notion that when something is old, get rid of it! With the "You see" in the fourth sentence, the distinction between Mother's mental state and the ads she reads and sees on TV breaks down: She accepts the enticement of the custom-designed partitions with alacrity. If she is a dupe, though, she is a sinister one: "You pay your money and you get your choice"--meaning that it is mother who chooses and daughter who pays. Indeed, this genteel bourgeois household, where the young pianist's hands must be protected, is no more than a jail. A child has no secrets from her mother, and so the two women sleep in the same bed, the "proprietor" having learned a maxim that echoes recent Nazi rule: "Trust is fine, but control is better."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Of course, Erikamother, as she is often designated in the German original, wouldn't verbalize it this way; she is a respectable lady who knows something about music and proudly attends her daughter's recitals. Here, as in Wonderful, Wonderful Times, the viciousness of the portraiture is convincing because, in Jelinek's dark vision, the "victims" are just as poisonous as their victimizers. When Mother berates Erika for buying the unneeded, too brightly colored cocktail dress, Erika, in a moment of rage, pulls so hard at her mother's hair--hair Erika had painstakingly colored only a few days before--that tufts fall out and leave bald spots. Indeed, Erika's violent physical assaults on her aging mother are, to my mind, more shocking than Walter's physical assaults on Erika herself. For the violence against parent is the most blatant exposure possible of Austrian society's endless show of "correct" behavior and formal politesse. In concert settings, Erika is always addressed as "Professor Kohut," Walter as "Herr Klemmer," and Erika's mother, in her "black Persian-lamb-paw coat," as "Gnadige Frau." Thus the most shocking scene in The Piano Teacher is the one in which Erika brings Walter home to Mother, takes him into her "room"--a room with no lock on the door, which Mother has always entered at will--and has him wedge a heavy credenza against the door so that her enraged mother can only try to hear what is happening. She, not Erika, is now the voyeuse behind the walls that are not yet the movable partitions featured in the state-of-the-art condos to come. And the final irony is that the vile actions Erikamother imagines as taking place are not committed at all but only talked about, as Erika gives Walter her wish list of sadistic acts to be practiced in future encounters.

All this activity is rendered in a deceptively simple prose, which, without actual dialogue or direct narratorial intrusion, shifts, within the space of a sentence or even a clause, from one point of view to another, so as to ironize the situation. Take a sentence like, "Mother, with less hair on her head, stands crying, in the living room, where her Erika often gives private concerts." The speaking voice seems to be the narrator's, but when we come to "her Erika," we see that the perspective is actually Mother's own. Indeed, the complex layering of Jelinek's text makes it impossible to view Erika as the sex-starved spinster she is in the film. Rather, she, along with Mother and pupil-seducer, is a pawn in a bitter satire on latter-day Vienna, a city that has tried to graft its brilliant prewar artistic culture--or at least the memory of what that culture might once have been--onto a new, suspect social order. In this postwar moment, elders (like Herr Witkowski in Wonderful, Wonderful Times) are former SS officers, returned--without enlightenment or even a change of heart--to seedy, petty bourgeois modes of life in the shell of the former imperial capital, a shell where thingness is all.

Jelinek's writing bears the stamp of the avant-garde poetics of the Wiener Gruppe, as well as the prose of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard. Like her two Austrian predecessors, Jelinek began as a lyric poet and writes sardonic elliptical plays as readily as novels, in both cases vigorously satirizing her native city. The musical soiree in The Piano Teacher recalls the all-night "artistic" dinner in Bernhard's Woodcutters or the Salzkammergut society luncheon in Bachmann's Malina. Jelinek's communism must be understood in this larger context. In a 1993 interview with Eva Brenner, Jelinek confessed that "being a communist means nothing more or less to me than taking a stance against capitalism--a system which despises human beings--and believing in the necessity of another social arrangement." This is as naive as Jelinek's radical feminism, assuming that communist societies do value the individual and treat women more humanely. But if we understand Jelinek's communism to be no more than a form of utopianism necessary to survive in an otherwise unbearable world, it becomes less problematic. As for the Austrian Communist Party, after 1989, when the horrors of the GDR were finally revealed, the novelist resigned her membership. Indeed, she tells Brenner that she considers her years in the party "the gravest mistake of my life."

The linkage, in The Piano Teacher as in the other novels, of the political and the sexual is more problematic. Jelinek's lurid descriptions of sex acts are not so much pornographic (they certainly don't titillate) as they are overwritten and overly long--especially in Lust (1989), where the factory manager-husband's endless sexual assaults on his submissive wife are related in such exhaustive and repetitious detail that the reader (at least this reader) loses interest. Is there, one wonders, no other form capitalist "perversion" and power play can take? Conversely, is women's experience of sex really never more than a sense of acute violation or rape?

Wonderful, Wonderful Times (the title is a particularly foolish one, giving the reader no sense of the original Die Ausgesperrten, which means "The Locked-out") is less dogmatic than The Piano Teacher on these issues. Both Rainer Wirkowski, the pseudo-intellectual, depraved teenage gang-leader son of a one-legged former SS officer turned night porter, and Hans Sepp, a fellow gang-member son of a Communist Party member who was killed in a concentration camp, are in love with the rich, beautiful, vicious, but virginal Sophie, an aristocrat's daughter who engages in the gang's depraved and gratuitous crimes just for kicks, knowing she will soon assume her rightful position in society. However perverted Rainer's half-baked political views, however garbled his analysis of Sartre, Bataille, and Camus, his love for Sophie is oddly disinterested. Only when he is finally forced to concede that there is no hope does he find his consummation--in the brutal slaughter of the final scene, in which Rainer, in his own distorted version of an existentialist acte gratuit, kills both his parents and his twin sister, Anna.

Wonderful, Wonderful Times probes, in a series of hallucinatory episodes, what happens when there is no past to illuminate the present, when history has become a mere hole, which no stuffing, not even the best straw, can fill. Jelinek's dissection of contemporary capitalism sometimes sounds shrill and simplistic, but in her best work, economics takes a back seat to larger, more metaphysical questions. Her Vienna is the site of a collective refusal of memory, the memory of How It Was not so long ago--and to a large measure still is--in our postwar, post-Holocaust landscape. Given the refusal to meet the past honestly, things--whether household gadgets or new clothes, elaborate meals or virtuoso performances, and especially human beings, objectified and commodified--come to dominate all relationships. In the Cafe Sport, where Rainer kills time before he is ready for the real kill, he takes momentary pleasure in being the owner of "fashionable diamond-shaped perspex sunglasses." Together with his new "Caesar haircut," they give his face just the right look.

Marjorie Perloff's most recent books are The Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2004) and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama, 2004), cowinner of the 2004 Robert Penn Warren--Cleanth Brooks Award.