Elfride Jelinek:

Dauntless polemicist on contemporary issues

ELFRIDE: For only the ninth time in the 103-year history of the Nobel Prize, the award for literature went to a woman in 2004. Elfriede Jelinek was 57 years old then. Elfriede Jelinek was commended for her frequent critiques of consumerism and the subjugation of women.

Jelinek made her literary debut in 1967 with the publication of a poetry collection called “Lisas Schatten” (“Lisa’s Shadow”). But she first gained wider attention with the 1970 release of a satirical novel, “We Are Decoys, Baby,” which set the theme for much of her later work, in which she unemotionally — some would say coldly — illustrates the violence and power plays inherent in human relations, especially those between the sexes

Other well-known works include “The Lover,” the semi-autobiographical “The Piano Teacher,” which was made into a 2002 movie starring actress Isabelle Huppert (photo), and “Lust,” all of which paint the world as a brutal dance between hunter and prey, where sexual violence, particularly against women, is one of the defining characteristics of global culture.

It was the publication of her 1995 novel “Die Kinder der Toten” (“The Children of the Dead”), which set her on a par with other Austrian literary greats such as Karl Kraus, Ödön von Horvath and Thomas Bernhard.

Jelinek has said she considers it her defining work, in which she presents a razor-sharp critique of Austrian society what she once called “a ghost story of Austrian identity.”

While she has become one of Austria’s most influential voices, but her subject matter and style, sometimes considered pornographic, has drawn good deal of criticism. She is controversial to say the least.

Divese Influnces

Early in her adult life, Jelinek pursued a career in music, studying composition at the Vienna Conservatory. Later she added theater studies and art history to her resume and began turning her attention to poetry and prose.

It was after she became involved in the student movement in the late 1960s that her tone changed and she began exploring social inequalities and sexual power politics.

Her diverse background has led to a style that many find hard to categorize. The Swedish Academy described it as often floating “between prose and poetry, incantation and hymn.”

Her works contain theatrical scenes and film sequences and some of her later works for the stage have completely done away with the idea of living characters. Jelinek has opted instead for “talking surfaces” that interact with one another.

Since her 1974 marriage, Jelinek has divided her time between Vienna and Munich.

Praise from German literary community

Alexander Fest, head of the German publishing house Rowohlt, which released Jelinek’s work for many years, said he was thrilled with the Nobel committee’s selection, describing Jelinek as a writer “undreamt of indiosyncracy” who has consistently shown “great courage and great ruthlessness in the face of her subjects and herself.”

Germany’s perhaps best-known literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, said he was overjoyed that another female author writing in the German language had one the award. He called Jelinek an “extremely unusual, radical and extreme author, and as a result, a highly controversial one.”

Elfriede Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in the town of Mürzzuschlag in the Austrian province of Styria. Her father, of Czech-Jewish origin, was a chemist and worked in strategically important industrial production during the Second World War, thereby escaping persecution.

Her mother was from a prosperous Vienna family, and Elfriede grew up and went to school in that city. At an early age, she was instructed in piano, organ and recorder and went on to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory.

After graduating from the Albertsgymnasium in 1964, she studied theatre and art history at the University of Vienna while continuing her music studies.

In 1971, she passed the organist diploma examination at the Conservatory.

Elfriede Jelinek began writing poetry while still young. She made her literary debut with the collection Lisas Schatten in 1967. Through contact with the student movement, her writing took a socially critical direction. In 1970 came her satirical novel wir sind lockvögel baby!.

In common with her next novel, Michael. Ein Jugendbuch für die Infantilgesellschaft (1972), it had a character of linguistic rebellion, aimed at popular culture and its mendacious presentation of the good life.

After a few years spent in Berlin and Rome in the early 1970s, Jelinek married Gottfried Hüngsberg, and divided her time between Vienna and Munich. She conquered the German literary public with her novels Die Liebhaberinnen (1975; Women as Lovers, 1994), Die Ausgesperrten (1980; Wonderful, Wonderful Times, 1990) and the autobiographically based Die Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher, 1988), in 2001 made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke.

These novels, each within the framework of its own problem complex, present a pitiless world where the reader is confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey.

Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry’s clichés seep into people’s consciousness and paralyse opposition to class injustices and gender oppression. In Lust (1989; Lust, 1992), Jelinek lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilisation by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture.

This line is maintained, seemingly in a lighter tone, in Gier. Ein Unterhaltungsroman (2000), a study in the cold-blooded practice of male power.

With special fervour, Jelinek has castigated Austria, depicting it as a realm of death in her phantasmagorical novel, Die Kinder der Toten (1995). Jelinek is a highly controversial figure in her homeland.

Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Ödön von Horváth, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group.

The nature of Jelinek’s texts is often hard to define. They shift between prose and poetry, incantation and hymn, they contain theatrical scenes and filmic sequences. The primacy in her writing has however moved from novel-writing to drama.

Her first radio play, wenn die sonne sinkt ist für manche schon büroschluss, was very favourably received in 1974. She has since written a large number of pieces for radio and the theatre, in which she successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of polyphonic monologues that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit voices from various levels of the psyche and history to be heard simultaneously.

What she puts on stage in plays from recent years – Totenauberg, Raststätte, Wolken. Heim, Ein Sportstück, In den Alpen, Das Werk and others – are less characters than “language interfaces” confronting each other.

Jelinek’s most recent published works for drama, the so-called “princess dramas” (Der Tod und das Mädchen I–V, 2003), are variations on one of the writer’s basic themes, the inability of women to fully come to life in a world where they are painted over with stereotypical images.

Jelinek has translated others’ works (Thomas Pynchon, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Labiche, Christopher Marlowe) and has also written film scripts and an opera libretto. Alongside her literary writing she has made a reputation as a dauntless polemicist with a website always poised to comment on burning issues.

Literary Prizes and Awards: The Young Austrian Culture Week Poetry and Prose Prize (1969), the Austrian University Students’ Poetry Prize (1969), the Austrian State Literature Stipendium (1972), the City of Stadt Bad Gandersheim’s Roswitha Memorial Medal (1978), The West German Interior Ministry Prize for Film Writing (1979), the West German Ministry of Education and Art Appreciation Prize (1983), the City of Cologne Heinrich Böll Prize (1986), the Province of Styria Literature Prize (1987), the City of Vienna Literature Appreciation Prize (1989), the City of Aachen Walter Hasenclever Prize (1994), the City of Bochum Peter Weiss Prize (1994), the Bremer Literature Prize (1996), the Georg Büchner Prize (1998), the Berlin Theatre Prize (2002), the City of Düsseldorf Heinrich Heine Prize (2002), the Mülheimer Theatre Prize (2002, 2004), the Else Lasker Schüler Prize (for her entire dramatic work), Mainz (2003), the Lessing Critics’ Prize, Wolfenbüttel (2004), the Stig Dagerman Prize, Älvkarleby (2004), The Blind War Veterans’ Radio Theatre Prize, Berlin (2004).