Elfriede Jelinek
Siegal, Nina
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Nina Siegal Elfriede Jelinek Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek wasn't an obvious choice for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Her dense,...
...The war is lost, it should never have been started...
...Q: What can literature do to change the political landscape...
...I lost the illusion that it could a long time ago...
...Elfriede Jelinek The world is a terrible place...
...And because only a few of her novels have been translated, her work is largely unknown outside the German-speaking world...
...And there is still a strong feminist movement in the U.S...
...But her novels, such as the satiric Die Liebhaberinnen (1975), translated into English in 1994 as Women as Lovers, and Lust (English version, 1992), which was marketed as "female pornography" by her German publisher, tend to focus on sexual politics, often exploring women's social behaviors through- yes, indeed-their sadomasochistic impulses and self-abnegating behavior...
...And Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised her ironic nihilism, saying, "If literature is a force that leads to nothing, you are, in our day, one of its truest representatives...
...Jelinek: Unfortunately, literature can't make anything happen...
...And I'm trying something new: I'm trying to inscribe more of myself as a person into the text, in the combination of a thoroughly formed literary language and the fleeting quality of a blog...
...Q: A lot of your critics talk about the "bitterness" ? or "nihilism" that is expressed in your writing...
...Austrian identity was based on a historic lie: on innocence...
...it's my impetus...
...Jelinek: I'm working on my private novel, Neid (Envy), which is going to appear only in installments on my home page...
...Jelinek: I am only able to write out of a feeling of rage at social conditions...
...In April, Seven Stories Press published Jelinek's Greed, her latest novel to appear in English...
...In Europe, women count for less...
...Jelinek: If only I knew, I'd tell you right away...
...I can't see it any other way...
...I'm resigned and also despairing about the way things are, and how things change very slowly or not at all...
...Q: Your work is not widely translated or very well known yet in the United States...
...Q: You often mention that being part Jewish plays an important role in your work...
...Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing...
...As Hegel says, human relations always lead to master-slave relationships...
...Nina Siegal is living in Amsterdam this year under the auspices of a U.S...
...The novel was adapted for the screen by director Michael Haneke, and the film version starring Isabelle Huppert won several awards at Cannes in 2001...
...I'm unable to be in crowds," she told The New York Times when asked why she wouldn't attend...
...It's not only the direct violence of men toward women, which expresses itself on so many levels, but also the much more subtle (and brutal) violence of the patriarchy in setting the norms to which all must conform...
...Q: How has receiving the Nobel Prize changed your life and your work...
...I never could...
...And unfortunately, women are complicit in this and take on these norms-they submit to them...
...I understand your father was part Jewish...
...Jelinek: Yes, it's true...
...It might implode...
...Jelinek sees her exploration of the darker side of the human condition as a creative mandate...
...Her first novel, "A Little Trouble with the Facts," is forthcoming from HarperCollins...
...This made me sort of an avenging angel for him and others, to avenge his destiny and the destiny of the Austrian Jews...
...Q: · Your work explores the dark side of human relations: brutality, ugliness, and savagery...
...Her play, Bambiland, a stream of consciousness monologue spoken by a series of actors, was an allegory about the war in Iraq and made references to Abu Ghraib...
...One of the panel's eighteen lifetime members resigned in protest, calling Jelinek's writing nothing but "degradation, humiliation, desecration and self-disgust, sadism and masochism...
...the posters said...
...As a result, the announcement by the Swedish Academy was greeted with everything from confusion to vitriol...
...I respect it, its art, its literature, and also the integrative power of U.S...
...How do you think about Judaism in relation to your work or heritage...
...She has told interviewers that she finds President Bush frightening, and she frequently weighs in on world affairs on her website...
...Jelinek didn't travel to Stockholm to accept her award in person because she suffers from crippling agoraphobia...
...The man has market power because he has the economic power (there are only a few women anywhere in the world who have this same power), and it is he who decides that a woman must be young and beautiful...
...I would never dare that in a book...
...I am certainly not a person who thinks very positively...
...Violence goes from the top down, and in the end a child gets beaten or an animal is tormented...
...But I'm afraid the religious fanaticism they wanted to suppress, and that didn't even exist before the war in Iraq (it was a relatively secular state, since dictators don't tolerate religions alongside themselves), will now really flare up with special intensity, as will the violence...
...The story centers on Kurt Janisch, a country policeman who takes advantage of middle-aged women and who may be connected to a young girl discovered dead in a nearby lake...
...She is writing it as she goes, and so far she has four chapters, and is working on the fifth...
...Q: You've been called a feminist writer...
...a troop withdrawal is unavoidable...
...Being partly Jewish was an experience that brought me to writing in postwar Austria...
...Jelinek: It's our special situation in Austria, where participation in killing with the Nazis was long denied, until the middle of the 1980s...
...Chapters 1 and 2 can be found on her website: ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/elfriede...
...So many of my father's family were killed, and he lost his job as a chemical engineer and was forced to work for the Nazis...
...Jelinek: That's really hard for me to answer, since I don't know much about the United States...
...Everybody can change it (me too, I can rewrite it again and again if I wish...
...Hope Hague, a staff member at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, translated the interview...
...The weakest one always takes the blows...
...Jelinek: On the one hand, the prize gives me the financial possibility to try things out (like the private novel I'm working on), things that don't bring in money...
...That's just the way I motivate myself to write...
...Q: You have been deeply critical of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq...
...It can only increase the awareness of things...
...She's still not shy about placing herself at the center of political controversy...
...But Jelinek has her backers, too...
...Texts using experimental language are always very hard to translate- in that sense I'm a provincial writer...
...In the late 1990s, she became a household name when she began to publicly criticize the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, which participated in the ruling government from 2000 to 2006 in a coalition with the Austrian People's Party...
...If you would choose one book that best represents what you'd like to say to Americans, which would it be and why...
...The German version, Gier, was first published in 2000...
...You are not shy about making the world seem to be a terrible place...
...For many years, she lived with her mother in a house in Vienna, the inspiration for the difficult and abusive relationship at the heart of The Piano Teacher...
...When a young male student seduces her, the two fall into a similarly abusive but erotically charged power struggle...
...They've achieved the opposite of everything they were trying to do (or pretending to try to do...
...Jelinek is currently in the midst of publishing her newest novel, Neid (Envy), on the Internet, chapter by chapter...
...They always lead to violence, as subtle as it may sometimes be...
...Along with being the first Austrian writer to win the Nobel Prize, she's been granted many other awards, including the Heinrich B?ll Prize for her contribution to German literature, in 1986, and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2004...
...It's quite possible that Iraq will collapse completely and slide into chaos...
...Q: You have said of your book Greed that "people are just marionettes of their social conditions...
...She says she prefers to have an impact during her lifetime than to be famous in perpetuity, and that she writes out of a "sense of social and political obligation...
...She currently splits her time between Vienna, where she lives in her mother's former house, and Munich, the hometown of her husband, Gottfried H?ngsberg...
...Her dense, strident political satires exploring sexual perversion and social decadence aren't exactly mass-market fare...
...I'm very uncomfortable around people, and now I'm afraid to even leave the house...
...It's very well translated, and it's not as experimental as my later works...
...Even an artist like myself who has achieved something in her work is subjected to measurement by the male gaze, and it's exactly the same thing with the female body, as well...
...It's a surprising admission from one of Austria's most public figures...
...The Weekly Standard declared that the Nobel panel was "destroying literary standards" by selecting an "unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic," citing her membership in the Communist Party of Austria from 1974 to 1991...
...I wrote in English and she responded in German...
...Do you feel bitter or nihilistic...
...But in the new novel I'm working on, I'm trying to see it with more irony-above all, more self-irony But I've always used irony to try to refract the horror, to see it with more distance...
...In granting the prize, the Swedish Academy wrote that the "extraordinary linguistic zeal" of her writing reveals "the absurdity of society's clich?s and their subjugating power...
...The Austrian Freedom Party counterattacked, running a series of ads criticizing Jelinek by name: "Do You Want Jelinek . . . or Do You Want Art...
...Jelinek: I'll always be a feminist, because as a woman you can't be anything else...
...I think they don't change decisively, but only gradually...
...I wanted it for everybody (without the need of buying a book) and for free," she told The Progressive, explaining the decision...
...Dependency is always violence, in the final analysis...
...Right now, this especially interests me: the intermixture of the literary, the essayistic, and myself as a person...
...Or is there some other motivation to this process of writing...
...I interviewed Jelinek by e-mail...
...I wanted something which is never finished, something mobile, a mixture between literature and blog (and I can risk a personal view on things and on me too...
...She turned to writing at age seventeen after what she's described as a nervous breakdown and has since published ten novels and sixteen plays...
...Now and then something gets covered over with a little new paint...
...I always wanted to stay in the background...
...Do you like the term "feminist...
...And I can't bear to be looked at...
...In these old societies, the patriarchy is much more strongly developed and powerful, in spite of the fact that Germany now has a woman chancellor, which is a great step forward...
...Q: What are you working on now...
...What do you think should be done in Iraq now...
...I'm afraid human relationships aren't based on equality, but on dependency (and for women that can easily be "only" financial dependence on a man...
...Do you feel that exposing brutality between people can help expose social conditions...
...And how is your approach different than in your previous work...
...The easiest book would be The Piano Teacher...
...maybe that's a tradition left over from the early pioneer society...
...Women in the United States count for more and have a greater voice...
...On the other hand, the prize forced me into the foreground, so to speak, where I've never wanted to be...
...Born in Austria in 1946, Jelinek grew up in and around Vienna, where she attended the famous Vienna Conservatory to study composition...
...Her most famous novel, The Piano Teacher, published in German in 1983 and in English in 1988, focuses on a bitter, frustrated former concert pianist who lives with her abusive and controlling mother and works as a music instructor...
...society, but I'm not that well informed about it...
Vol. 71 • July 2007 • No. 7
