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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | ELFRIEDE JELINEK: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity: A Critical Anthology
ISBN# 9780838641545
Reviewed by: Jack Davis (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Monatshefte |
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Both the preface and the introduction to this volume end with the hope that the essays it presents will help international audiences "appreciate" the art of Elfriede Jelinek. At first glance, this might seem like a misguided approach to an author whose work seeks to undermine complacent reader or spectator reception through radical alienation techniques. After all, appreciation is a mode of aesthetic response that Jelinek often satirizes in her work, for example, in subtitling her novel Gier "Ein Unterhaltungsroman," daring audiences to find value in internationally puerile wordplay and graphic depictions of sexuality and violence.
Nevertheless, Jelinek's international reception, which began in earnest only after she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004, shows that non-German-speaking critics often have trouble doing exactly that: appreciating her work. The specific Austrian context, translation difficulties, and often repellent subject matter sometimes lead those critics who do not dismiss her work outright to see it as either a relic of 1970s feminism or as the product of a sadistic misanthrope. A July 2007 article in the New York Review of Books by Tim Parks is a good example of this second view. While this volume is unlikely to bridge the gap between the academic and journalistic reception of Jelinek scholarship, not only as an introduction for global audiences, but also as a collection offering new critical perspectives on both well - and (especially) lesser-known texts.
The volume consists of a preface, an introduction, and three sections containing four essays each, almost all by scholars at American universities. The sections represent thematic areas loosely aligned with the three categories listed in the subtitle: "Voices of Dissent," "Conflicts of Nationhood and Citizenship," and "Negative Aesthetics, Body and Commodity." All titles and quotations from works in German are also provided in English, using standard translations wherever possible.
The introductory material will be especially helpful for readers unfamiliar with the social and political context of Jelinek's work. Matthias Piccolruaz Konzett's preface describes Jelinek's reception in Austria and the obstacles to her global reception, making several convincing arguments for her work's importance in an international context. To explain how Jelinek's oeuvre straddles the line between provincialism and Weltliteratur, he reads the country of Austria as represented in Jelinek's works as symptomatic of the West as a whole. This 'Austria as symptom' trope has precedents in the work of Kraus and Freud, as Konzett rightly indicates, but retains its relevance today (indeed, it seems almost prescient, given the crimes uncovered in Amstetten last year). Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger's introduction provides an overview of the essays in the book as they fit in Jelinek's biography, and her introductory article offers a helpful theoretical, historical, and biographical context for Jelinek's work, including some paragraphs on several major works not covered in the volume, such as Gier, Lust, and Bambiland.
The first set of essays, by Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Rebecca Thomas, Kathleen L. Komar and Edna Epelbaum, concerns Jelinek's early work and political engagement. All of the essays do an excellent job of introducing the works and elucidating the social criticism contained within them, but in some cases this comes at the expense of attention to the satirical, linguistically playful nature of the texts, which are certainly more than sociological or historical documents.
The essays on the second section, by Michael Grobbel, Barbara Kosta, Nancy C. Erikson, and Maria-Regina Kecht examine Stecken, Stab und Stangl; Das Lebewohl; In den Alpen; and Die Kinder der Toten. The common thread uniting these works is their concern with the legacy of fascism and its persistence in Austrian politics of the past several decades. Since relatively little attention has been paid in English-speaking scholarship to any of these works, this section stands out as probably the most valuable to an English-speaking academic audience. Especially notable is Kecht's article "The Polyphony of Remembrance: Reading Die Kinder der Toten," which aims to help readers navigate Jelinek's 667-page magnum opus (as it is referred to no fewer than four times in this volume), a novel that remains unknown and inaccessible to most because of its length and uncompromisingly experimental aesthetic. Given the size and complexity of the novel, Kecht makes good use of the limited space at her disposal, providing solid general context and close readings of several representative passages.
The final section contains essays on the body in Jelinek's work, as well as readings of the novel Die Klavierspielerin and its film version, contributed by Helga Kraft, Karl Ivan Solibakke, Willy Riemer, and Sunka Simon. Since Die Klavierspielerin is without a doubt the mist familiar of her works in the English-speaking world, it is appropriate that Solibakke's article, the only one to deal solely with the novel, goes beyond a general introduction, connecting the musical discourses in the novel with the construction of gender and nationalism. Helga Kraft's contribution, "Building the Austrian Body: Jelinek's Celebrity Workout" starts with the promising intention of showing how Jelinek's work interrogates constructions of the body in the figures of Jorg Haider, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Claudia Schiffer, but is weakened by quirky citational practices which include using a dubious post to establish a fact about human communication.
Sunka Simon's essay, a thoughtful examination of Jelinek's script for a film version of Bachmann's Malina, makes a fitting end for this volume. Bachmann, whose Todesarten-Zyklus is referred to by almost every essay in this volume as a precedent for Jelinek's aesthetic and political project, is an important literary predecessor, but her inclusion in the final essay is also part of a larger effort in the volume to find historical legitimation for Jelinek's work. This tendency, and the stated goal of aiding appreciation of Jelinek's art, means that few of these essays problematize her political or aesthetic program in a serious way (one notable exception is Rebecca Thomas's article in the first set of essays, which nicely draws out the tension between Jelinek's postmodern critique of subjectivity and her Marxist-feminist political program). This is quite understandable given the contentious nature of her work, but is also evidence of the gradual (and most likely inevitable) process of turning Jelinek into a classic. Whether this process will ultimately make her work more or less appealing to global audiences remains to be seen.
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