All the Rage

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1: Two Noras

Fig. 2: Nora and stove

Fig. 3: Das Werk (Burgtheater, 2003)

Fig. 4: Das Werk (Burgtheater, 2003)

Fig. 5: Meeting of Gods, Fury / Wut

Fig. 6: Bomb-jacket cat, Fury / Wut

Fig. 7: Book Cover of Jelinek / Mahler der fremde!

Fig. 8: the stranger is a very pretty girl …

Fig. 9: and just then the baker’s wife appears …

Fig. 10: even though the elegant leather bag … appears to be empty …

Fig. 11: the stranger gestures dismissively …

Fig. 12: The shadow of Nosferatu in Murnau’s film

Fig. 13: the stranger accelerates - the coffin-motor revs up …

Fig. 14: the opposite is actually the truth

Fig. 15: it is as though the stranger had never been here

Acknowledgments

The editors are thankful to all contributors for their collegiality and sharing their enthusiasm for Jelinek’s work. We are grateful to Professor Pia Janke and Susanne Teutsch for supporting the concept to organize the international symposium Elfriede Jelinek—Theater.Music.Film: Materiality and Mediality to mark Jelinek’s 75th birthday. The Joint Research Network Elfriede Jelinek of Vienna’s Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität and the University of Vienna, together with the Max Kade Center for German Studies at Lafayette College and the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, held the first symposium in the United States in November 2021 that dealt exclusively with Jelinek’s oeuvre. We thank Lafayette College’s offices of the President, Provost, and the Department of Languages and Literary Studies for generously supporting the symposium. In addition, we express our sincere appreciation to Dr. Lya Pfeifer, President of the Max Kade Foundation, for her support of the symposium and the publication of this volume. We also thank Dr. Christian Schenkermayr of the Elfriede Jelinek Forschungszentrum for assisting us with research, the University of Arizona for supporting a sabbatical leave, and to photographer Christian Brachwitz and Carlsen Publishing House for granting permission to reproduce images and illustrations. We thank Elizabeth Ametsbichler for her careful reading and thoughtful input.

Lastly, the editors express their deep gratitude to Elfriede Jelinek for inspiring scholars, her readers, and audiences to think deeply about the world we live in.

Introduction

Barbara Kosta and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger

Acclaimed Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize, is known widely in Europe for her theater and its creative productions. A prolific writer and commentator of contemporary issues, she has been celebrated for her innovative writing, for airing Austria’s unreflected fascist history, for challenging nationalist political agendas, and spotlighting gender inequalities. This edited volume aims to introduce U.S. audiences to a range of Jelinek’s works and their critical relevance for understanding contemporary Western society while gaining insight into the vibrancy of her theater, literature, essays and literary and musical collaborations. More specifically, the topics here focus on those works that address global issues.

As one of the leading representatives of the European literary avantgarde, Jelinek’s writing is marked by aesthetic innovations whose individual elements developed early on into a complex distinctive style. While her writing has evolved over the course of her career, drawing on different literary traditions from antiquity to contemporary artistic movements, what remains constant are her provocative, at times controversial interventions in structures that perpetuate abuses of power. We refer to her experimental, radical aesthetic in this volume as an aesthetic of passionate subversion.

An uncompromising aesthetic innovator, Jelinek’s experimental reconceptualization of literature and theater is driven by a critique of public discourses that support, promote, and endure social injustices.¹ In her early career, Jelinek embraced the post-WWII revolution in the arts in Austria and became associated with Vienna’s New Left scene and Robert Schindel’s actionist commune.² Immersed in art activism from the start, her texts combine political content with new aesthetic forms strongly influenced by the progressive language experiments of the Wiener Gruppe and the radical art movements such as the Vienna Actionism that played with linguistic and artistic expression to challenge conventional epistemologies, and by the international pop art and literature of the 1950s and 1960s Beat Generation (Antonic 227–252). Her rebellious linguistic experimentations are exemplified early on in her radio play bukolit (1968), and her novels Wir sind Lockvögel, Baby (1970, We are decoys, baby) and Michael: Ein Jugendbuch für die Infantilgesellschaft (1972, Michael: An adolescent’s novel for the infantile society), which demythologizes consumer culture, media and popular culture with its deceptive promises, and reflect the influence of the avantgarde movements and William Burrough’s cut-up pop literature. Years later, Jelinek expressed her strong affinities with U.S. artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelly, who are known for their installations, and in Jelinek’s words “are building a bit on the foundation of the Vienna Actionism, so to speak. Except that the Viennese were so dead serious; … while the American’s shit on everything” (Kovacs, “Criticizing” 190).

Similarly, Jelinek’s texts are known to revel in sarcasm and humor as a means to strike out at the rule of reckless entitlement or intentional maliciousness that she perceives at work in both public and private spheres. Here she positions herself in a lineage of Johann Nestroy (1801–1862), the nineteenth-century Viennese dramatist, and Austrian Jewish writer and journalist Karl Kraus (1874–1936) for her understanding of irony and satire: “It is, so to speak, a bending of reality, as I believe Karl Kraus once said. It throws a sharp spotlight on reality” (Jelinek, “Die Anmessung”).³ Full of irony and deconstructive ambition, her texts resist easy consumption and the effortless decipherability that mass media relies on to sell its ideologically empowered illusions. Rhian Sasseen provides a succinct summation of the experience of a reader of Jelinek’s work: “To read a book by Jelinek is to find oneself in a world of florid violence, of hyperkinetic puns” (Sasseen). Well-known for her word plays and puns (Kalauer), Jelinek specifically notes the effectiveness of the Kalauer to reveal truth: “If you pound on language long enough, it reveals its own truth, sometimes reluctantly, but nevertheless, a truth that is inherent to it, that dwells deep within it” (Jelinek, “Kalauer”).⁴

Indeed, her stylistic strategies both linguistically and structurally mine the potential of language. She rebuffs conventional narratology and resists linear narrative structures; she upends temporal progression and rejects psychologically developed characters. Her figures exist one-dimensionally as vehicles for language. “For me,” Jelinek asserts, “they are actually zombies, bearers of action or meaning, who act as they must and cannot act otherwise.”⁵ Language is the protagonist on display like in er nicht als er (zu, mit Robert Walser), her 1998 play on the life of Swiss writer Robert Walser, in which she states: “Language is worth as little as life itself, for it is life itself” (qtd in Sasseen).⁶ Thus, Jelinek rehearses the discourses that support hegemonic power and inflates them to a point of collapsing in upon themselves. By defamiliarizing language to expose its meaning within the networks of knowledge production that support the status quo, Jelinek transforms narration into meta-narration. Her inextinguishable firestorm of language reformulates and exposes well-worn narratives to produce fresh perspectives. From her solitary perch, she brings to light universal human rights violations, political, economic and sexual exploitation, unaccounted for historical crimes, and systemic violence that often lays buried and repressed (Degner 20–24). The torrential flow of language, never halting, produces a dense mass of text, a polemical textual surface that Jelinek herself calls a Textfläche.⁷ Like a tapestry, she weaves together a vast array of discursive materials to present a polyphony of voices. Her texts also are built on musicality, which the Nobel Prize committee lauded as follows: “her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays reveal with extraordinary linguistic zeal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”⁸ The polyphony of disparate voices, unceasingly twisting and turning discourses in on themselves and the amassing of counter-discourses (role reversals, changes of perspective and roles) aim at dismantling premises and myths that are held widely as truth while serving inequitable power structures that do harm. Jelinek’s myth-busting work that explores language and power, and its ideological manipulations presents an unnerving depiction of the wiles of our everyday speech. It comes as no surprise that Jelinek often leans on Roland Barthes’s 1957 Mythologies, which unveils modern myth making that supports capitalism and nation building through ploys of language and images. Jelinek’s quotational writing, one of her central poetological strategies, further reveals the inner working of knowledge production. She collects, modifies and assembles a collage of sound bites from popular culture, political slogans and quotations from canonical literature and well-known philosophers, most notably from Martin Heidegger, without ever referencing the original source.⁹ She frequently ventriloquizes and unleashes the everyday language of superiority, exclusion, sexism and racism, “in works that are as punishing in their linguistic excess as a slap across the face” (Sasseen).

Beyond her prose and essays, Jelinek’s later theater texts have been discussed as epitomizing the postdramatic. It should be said, however, that her work rejects categorization as she seeks new forms of expression that radically steer away from theater conventions. Her “profoundly post-humanist theater [is] suspicious of the way in which Western drama has encoded notions of the human person, social conflict, and historical change” (Sieg 147). Her rich use of intertextuality draws on a variety of dramatic forms and structural elements such as a metrically bound speech, choric speaking, and intermediality, which reflect Jelinek’s fundamental preoccupation with theater traditions and their subversion. While her early dramas, Was geschah mit Nora, nachdem sie ihren Mann verlassen hatte (1979) / What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband, or Pillars of Society (1994), Clara S. (1982), Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen (1984, Illness or Modern Women, 1992) and Burgtheater, Posse mit Gesang (1985), still make use of identifiable characters and dialog, Wolken.Heim (1988, Clouds.Home) features quotations from writers Friedrich Hölderin and Heinrich von Kleist, philosophers Georg W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Johann G. Fichte, and Germany’s Red Army Faction. Fragments of dialog are interspersed to denote speech. Beginning in the 1990s, streams of language assigned to a panoply of speakers become the building blocks of her postdramatic texts. Like in her prose, her characters serve as ciphers of meaning; they are two-dimensional social actors who represent a concoction of linguistic registers. Her figures are products of discourses that live as long as they speak, and when they stop speaking, they disappear (Sieg 147–148).

To explain her approach to writing dramatic texts, Jelinek coined the terms “Sekundärdrama” (Secondary Drama) and “Parasitärdrama” (Parasitic Drama) to highlight the norms and ideological inclinations of conventional theater.¹⁰ The term Secondary Drama precludes a reference to a canonical drama, to which she avails herself as a point of departure for her own textual production. She cheekily compares the secondary text to a “yapping dog” that runs next to the primary text and ironically devaluates the primary text to “a makeover in a hair salon” (Jelinek, “Anmerkung”). Teresa Kovacs explains that the purpose of the Secondary Drama is to destabilize the hierarchical literary canon through the creation of a “Störgeräusch,” a disturbing noise that makes the objections of the secondary track audible in the primary track (Kovacs, Drama 11). Jelinek characterizes parasitic writing as writing that attaches itself to what already exists and causes it to swell, extend, or proliferate (Jelinek, “Anmerkung”). For instance, in her essay “Sprech-Wut” (2005, Speaking rage), Jelinek explains her attraction to the dramatic writing of German classical poet, essayist and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) and her use of his dramas as a playground for her passionate exposé of strong female protagonists in her own drama Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006). She explains:

What interests me most about Schiller’s dramas is the characters’ spoken rage. I immediately want to add my own rage to them, it’s as if they were just waiting to absorb even more rage. Schiller’s characters are always charged … Their poverty can impoverish, their wealth can enrich, he then does terrible things because he invites abuse. I would like so much to force myself into Schiller’s Maria Stuart, not to inflate it into something else like a poor frog that then bursts, but to insert my own speech into these two great women, these protagonists, whose bodies are already full to bursting point. Until you speak with your mouth full, everything sprays out, and you finally know why you shouldn’t speak with your mouth full. It’s impractical. These wonderful arguments between the two of them, each of whom throws her ego out of the stage window into the audience in the most unbearable, unimpaired way! I would like to fly with them. I think that two women like, say Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin could take on this task for me. Ulrike would be Maria, Gudrun Elisabeth. And they could fill the abyss in the theater where people usually sit, the auditorium, with their flight.¹¹