Notes of dissent

Elfriede Jelinek, the controversial Austrian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2004, takes a politically confrontational view of women's writings, writes Shelley Walia.

Elfriede Jelinek, the controversial Austrian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2004, takes a politically confrontational view of women's writings. She hoped that if they were to recognise the politics of their own theory, they would become politically effective. Her detached depiction of female sexuality, its abuse and the power play in human relations, and forthright political views expressing her anti-conservative stance, have estranged many of her countrymen but have also won her esteem as a daring feminist writer who makes a robust use of language.

Jelinek was a member of Austria's Communist Party from 1974 to 1991 and at the same time kept herself busy with criticism in her novels and plays which blatantly represent aggression against women, investigate sexuality and denounce conservative politics in Europe. The politics of literature and the subterranean ideologies that lie under the texts have been largely her concern taken up with extreme moral rectitude and sincerity. At a young age she was instructed in piano, organ and recorder and went on to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory which finally resulted in her semi-autobiographical novel The Piano Teacher, made into a movie in 2001. The novel offers a release for daughters who are oppressed by their mothers, a rebellion towards all authority; and along with this, it vehemently attacks all the trappings of a bourgeois society, including its education system.

Jelinek's serious and long training as a musician is visible throughout her work: "as theoretical debate in essays, as literary project in librettos, as a principle of linguistic composition, and as thematic or intertextual reference, e.g. to the texts of Franz Schubert's songs which are of deep interest to her."

The personal, the political and the philosophical is important to Jelinek but not that it must always turn out to be a mere autobiographical account. Like Simone de Beauvoir she uses the personal, but only as an anecdotal method to illustrate the larger issues concerning women, not merely as a pressing need to incessantly talk about oneself. One can use oneself as a philosophical case study to strike a robust dialogue with the reader through common experiences and language. Her novels and plays create a personal and comprehending voice which initiates a vigorous debate to sensitise readers towards the problems of women.

At a young age she joined the student movement and her writing took a singularly critical course. Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry's clich`E9s seep into people's consciousness and paralyse opposition to class injustices and sexual oppression

What is significant about her interest is the accent on subjectivity as opposed to the concept of identity. In the play Bambiland she offers a contemptuous assault on the US-led war in Iraq. The play Das Werk is concerned with the human craze for technological advancement. In her novel Wonderful, Wonderful Times, an Austrian officer browbeats his wife into posing for pornographic pictures. Often using obscene, offensive and profane language, she succeeds in shocking the readers out of their middle-class complacency.

The Piano Teacher has been called a blend of "Schubert, self-mutilation, and porn." This arises out of the motivations of her interest in bringing theory and practice together. The subject is presented through acts, including speech acts which have a literary and political reason often missed out by her detractors. The linguistic rebellion is inherently used as a literary tool to critique the popular culture and entertainment industry as well as the misleading lifestyle of complacency. It is the polemical world of violence and submission, of victim and predator that her novels are made up of.

Her anger takes the form of the politics of rejection of a pitiless world, a world where the media and the state conspire to kill any opposition to its agenda.

The public consciousness so complacently accepts violence against women, which is the subject of her novel Lust. Maltreatment and aggression, class injustice, gender oppression through pornographic details disturb the far-Right in her country.

However she is of the view that a bitter description of all this is essential in demonstrating the moral failure of our social system. A pastiche of filmic scenes and theatrical devices conspire to give her writings no definite category except a significant nudge towards the polemical. The form so dexterously becomes the content in Elfriede Jelinek's hands.

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