Signs Reduced to Noise

Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’. This is a polite way of saying that she delights in denying her audience traditional consolations: human encounters, a sense of narrative possibility. Instead, she deploys words for words’ sake. In a fragment from 1983, she dreamed of a piece of theatre without actors, a play like ‘a fashion show’ in which ‘one could … send out the clothes by themselves.’ Her work is an attempt to stage such a depopulated performance. ‘My characters are only coat-hangers on which I hang the language,’ she has said.

Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946. Her father, a Jewish chemist whose work was deemed important enough to spare him the camps, ended up in a mental asylum after the war. Her mother, a domineering Catholic with outsized ambitions for her children, enrolled Jelinek in convent school and then at the Vienna Conservatory to study the organ. ‘Mother is an absolute ruler,’ Jelinek wrote in The Piano Teacher (1983), a text she acknowledges as autobiographical. ‘There is only one possibility for the child: the top of the world.’

In 1968, aged 21, Jelinek had a mental breakdown and retreated to her parents’ house for a year. When she emerged, she had abandoned music in favour of writing. She went on to win all the major literary prizes in the German-speaking world, and married a man based in Munich, but carried on living in her childhood home. Her mother died in 2000, but Jelinek still occupies the house they shared (her father died many years earlier). Her agoraphobia is so severe that she was compelled to give her Nobel acceptance speech virtually, and it has been decades since she attended one of her plays.

It’s no wonder she employs formal constraints. These, too, are both shelter and stricture, and their inescapability is one of her recurrent themes. Women as Lovers (1975), perhaps her most successful book, is a parody of a primary school textbook and an object lesson in the way language can function as a vice, holding a character in its grip. As lovers, one of the women, Brigitte, is a shining example; the other, Paula, is a cautionary tale. Their roles follow neatly from the repetitive grammar of the textbook. See Spot Run. See Consumerism Deaden. See Small-Town Austria Stultify.

As Jelinek puts it, Brigitte ‘must make sure, that she gets a nice house. she must make sure, that she gets children. she must make sure, that she gets nice furniture. then she must make sure, that she doesn’t have to work any more.’ She wins the hand of a promising young electrician by tricking him into getting her pregnant. The life that results – dingy and drab but at least comfortable, in a flattening sort of way – is the height of what Brigitte has been permitted to imagine. Paula, by contrast, struggles against the constraints of the story in which Jelinek has placed her. At fifteen, she is ‘old enough to be allowed to think about what she wants to be one day: housewife or sales assistant. sales assistant or housewife’. At first she rejects this dichotomy and dreams of becoming a dressmaker, but the world soon exacts its revenge. Paula is pregnant before her sixteenth birthday. When the baby’s father reluctantly agrees to marry her, he proves neglectful and belligerent. Worst of all, he is a poor breadwinner. Paula, who is neither a housewife nor a sales assistant, must find an income. ‘Paula is a whore,’ the narrator explains with affected simplicity. Things do not end well for her.

The characters in Women as Lovers are schemas, not people. The chapter in which Paula first appears is titled ‘the example of paula’, and Jelinek emphasises that Brigitte and her dependable husband ‘are not out of the ordinary. they are simply symptomatic of everything that is not out of the ordinary.’ Indeed, they are archetypes. ‘at the end of their youth the young men take a hard-working thrifty woman into the house,’ Jelinek observes. ‘end of youth. beginning of old age. for the woman end of life and start of having children’. For Brigitte and Paula, patriarchal customs acquire the force of natural laws.

Demanding language (and style, as in her occasional aversion to capitalisation) is characteristic of Jelinek’s work: the difficulty is part and parcel of her masterful brutality, and each of her early novels invents a fresh idiom. For the past thirty years, however, her writing has taken on a punishing and vacant quality. Her sentences have become long and tortuous, and her paragraphs are separated by strips of space, like stanzas in a poem. She uses eccentric metaphors (an alpine lake ‘freezes like a horse that gets a piece of steel driven up its anus to make it pose nicely for the slaughterer’) and makes desperately clever puns (‘eaudor’ for odour, ‘screwtinised’ for scrutinised, in her translator’s rendering). She favours a curious pastiche of registers: literary allusions appear alongside the slangy argot of advertisements and the kitsch of Austrian German, with its mania for diminutives (‘dada’ for father, ‘nightie’ for nightgown). There are lines from Rilke, sly references to Romantic fairy tales and the guttural grunt of that quintessential Austrian greeting, ‘Grüss Gott’, preserved in the English translation.

Jelinek’s admirers often compare her to Karl Kraus and Thomas Bernhard. (She has insisted on more than one occasion that she is a ‘provincial’, inextricable from her country and its colloquialisms.) But the writer to whom she bears the closest resemblance is not one of her compatriots. ‘Never has the spray of speech as it is actually spoken so drenched the reader to the bone,’ Walter Benjamin wrote of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). It is a braying novel that echoes with snatches of conversation, music wafting from windows and animals shrieking on their way to the slaughterhouse. Both Döblin and Jelinek understand the novel as a collage of sounds. Who is speaking in Berlin Alexanderplatz? Sometimes a character, but just as often a city, a street, a situation.

In her later novels – Lust (1989), The Children of the Dead (1995), Greed (2000) and Envy (2007) – Jelinek resists individuating her speakers. The results are occasionally ingenious and often offensive. Rapists speak and then, seamlessly and suddenly, so do their victims; Nazis speak and moments later we hear from the Jews they murdered. Sometimes there is an ‘I’, apparently an authorial overseer; sometimes the reader is startled to find themselves enfolded unwillingly into a ‘we’. Language is free-floating, over and above its mouthpieces.

There are no longer characters, as there were in The Piano Teacher, or facetious facsimiles of characters, as in Women as Lovers. There is only a setting and a distinctive form of speech. The setting is almost always a small town in the Austrian state of Styria, where Jelinek was born and spent her childhood holidays. There are mountains and country inns. There are swarms of skiers and hikers – ‘numberless slaves of sport’, as Jelinek calls them in Lust – and smiling waiters who serve Sachertorte. There are the locals: the men who work in the factories or the forests, the wives who age gracelessly and throw themselves at uninterested younger men.

The Children of the Dead, translated into English for the first time last year, is about the Holocaust, perhaps the ugliest subject of all. The setting is a Styrian resort town, a picturesque landscape completely at odds with the gruesome crimes committed there. What distinguishes it from Jelinek’s other novels is the barrage of zombies.

Three members of the undead find themselves at the Hotel Alpenrose, an establishment that oozes sinister Gemütlichkeit: Edgar Gstranz, a home-town hero, a skier on ‘the National League’s former B-Team’, who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a mediocre philosophy student who slit her wrists for fear of failing her exams; and Karin Frenzel, a middle-aged secretary who died when two tour buses collided. They are accompanied by a supporting cast that includes two unnamed young men who shot themselves in the head and now wander the grounds in their ‘forester’s traditional costumes’. Thousands of murdered Jews begin to emerge from the soil. If the guests at the Alpenrose took the time to listen, they would hear, ‘down below, way down below, a mass of people, a human massif, bigger than the Snow Alp over there, [that] wants to come up out of its earthly dimension, out of this Disneyland below the dawn of the day, a mass that could never be fully counted, let alone grasped’.

But no one listens to the gurgle of discontent. The staff and guests at the Alpenrose continue to behave as though everything were normal, even as everything becomes increasingly abnormal. A character who recognises the undead Edgar decides to bite back her questions: ‘One can’t just blurt out, aren’t you dead, Herr Gstranz, it would be too embarrassing.’ When the innkeeper encounters a corpse, she ‘does not want to admit it to herself, but she cannot detect the face of this man. The skull simply breaks off beneath the hairline.’ The polite denials continue as the discrepancies proliferate.

Proliferation, it turns out, is the order of the day. The novel involves several traumas that never quite congeal into a plot. Some of the dead acquire doppelgängers: Karin splits into Karin One and Karin Two, and Gudrun sprouts a double who is as adventurous as she is retiring. It’s easy to lose track of the many characters who are introduced only to be killed off. A child dies in a pool in Vienna: ‘an arm, frayed, drifts along half a metre away from the body.’ A nurse is killed by a petty thief. A tennis player is shredded to death in his fancy sports car. An elderly couple gets electrocuted, grilled ‘like pieces of poultry’ by an unexplained supernatural force.

Ghosts are often troubled by matters left unresolved at the time of their death, but Jelinek’s undead are amnesiacs: their bloodied bodies are indices of horrors they can no longer remember. Gudrun looks down at the slashes on her wrists, straining to recall what happened to her. It is the crucible of forgetfulness, not the burden of memory, that keeps her from succumbing to the grave. Austrians both undead and alive try to stifle any memory or mention of their history, while the murdered Jews of Europe return to remind them of their sins. Riffs on the idea of homeland and ‘unhomeliness’ (unheimlichkeit) are ubiquitous. A hotel, Jelinek reminds us, is a non-home that imitates a home. The Alpenrose, which tries so hard to be homely, is caught in limbo between life and death – between the uncanny and the familiar, between remembering and repressing.

The central metaphor​ of The Children of the Dead is clear enough, but the book is riddled with inconsistencies and confusions. Sometimes the undead are presented as ghosts, distressingly fleshless and ineffectual (Gudrun tries to catch a hotel attendant by the sleeve and finds the material ‘running through her fingers like a foreign breath in a foreign throat’), but sometimes they are proper zombies, with bodies that bear the marks of their fatal accidents. Jelinek never bothers to clarify why the three main characters function as a conduit for legions of murdered Jews (or why there are so many Jews rising from graves in Styria, which was not the site of a major death camp). She is no more interested in these technicalities than she is in her characters.

Language itself is a zombie in The Children of the Dead. In the Alpenrose, ‘new showers have also just been installed’ and there is a wealth of ‘oven-fresh food’. Dusche, Ofen: macabre resonances keep clawing their way out of the ground, clinging to every innocuous phrase. Zombies are a natural endpoint for Jelinek, whose characters have never been truly alive. If the undead are people reduced to corpses, then words, in this novel, become signs reduced to noise.

Jelinek’s defiant vernacular is notoriously difficult to translate, but The Children of the Dead is undisciplined, even in the original. Puns multiply pointlessly, and inapt similes baffle. When two characters make eye contact, one ‘tosses’ back the other’s gaze ‘like a piece of greasy wrapping paper snuggling against a ham sandwich’. A corpse with an injured head has an eye that ‘jiggles like vanilla ice cream on a stick’. Language, left to its own devices, neither lives nor dies. It shuffles senselessly on.

What about the actual dead, the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust? Jelinek could hardly fail to mention the crimes of the Second World War in a harangue about Austria that drags on for more than four hundred pages. At one point, a dirndl is likened to ‘a sort of lampshade made of human skin’. Later in the novel, there are repeated asides about Am Spiegelgrund, a clinic in Vienna where the brains of ‘defective’ children were removed, studied and stored in jars. Twice, Jelinek speaks from the perspective of a Holocaust victim: ‘In the night of November 14 to 15 of this year my parents and I were summoned out of bed and taken to a collection quarter. My 75-year-old father was beaten just because he asked the agents who appeared in civilian clothes for identification.’ Later, there is a desperate letter from a Jew begging a former schoolmate, now a Nazi official, for help.

But these passages are incongruous in a book that is otherwise a montage of imagery from bad horror movies. How can we square the quiet outrage of the letter writer with the outlandish schlock of a chair sprouting hair in the Alpenrose? In a novel about the Holocaust, such cheap thrills verge on obscenity.

And yet, the problem with The Children of the Dead is that it’s not obscene enough. In Aleksandar Tišma’s novel Kapo (1987), the central character, a prisoner serving as a camp guard, rapes the women he is charged to oversee, bribing his victims with titbits of extra food. He regards the starving women as ‘nothing but flesh, shape and colour’, and abuses them until they ‘spoil, just like apples or lemons, which carry in their meat the imminence of rot’. They are ‘fruit condemned to rot, tossed in a heap amid the stench of the camp’. Every page is a fresh injury. There is nothing so appalling in The Children of the Dead. Its violence doesn’t stick.

When Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize, a member of the committee resigned in protest, calling her work ‘whining, unenjoyable public pornography’. But she despises the body too completely to merit this insult (or compliment). Her prose is tinged with a prudish asceticism. ‘In their sickness and weakness people actually believe that fucking, of all things, happens between friends,’ she scoffs in The Children of the Dead. Sex can be nothing but humiliation. One character in Women as Lovers reflects that she is ‘full of evil-smelling slime’ after sex, while the female protagonist of Lust has ‘warm steaming cowpats of breasts’. She ‘is passive as a toilet, for the man to do his business in’: ‘This creature is his, belongs to him. To serve his regular needs, like a jar to pee in.’ A penis is a ‘corncob’ (Lust) or a ‘stubby-tailed flesh worm’ (The Children of the Dead). Vaginas don’t fare any better. In The Piano Teacher, Erika recoils from ‘the rancid rat known as her genital’ and the ‘rot between her legs’.

The zombie orgies in The Children of the Dead are meant to shock, but they are no more grotesque than the sexual encounters depicted in any of Jelinek’s novels. Gudrun consorts with a corpse whose ‘member stands up, a pole of rotting wood’, and, in one zombie’s penis, ‘there are countless worm burrows, animal holes, tiny nesting places leading into this seemingly intact, plump, pig intestine sausage skin.’ By the time the two headless foresters engage in incest, it’s difficult to feign even dutiful astonishment.

Jelinek’s late work does share a structural kinship with pornography: it is exhaustingly repetitive. The narrator of Lust admits as much: ‘Desire is always the same old film! An endless chain of repetitions, less appealing every time.’ This is a good description of The Children of the Dead. At times it reads like a slapstick comedy in which characters fall from buildings or beat each other senseless only to bounce back up, unharmed. In the cheap porn flicks that Erika sneaks off to watch in The Piano Teacher, the players ‘act without pain and without any possibility of pain. They are solid rubber.’ In Jelinek’s dystopia, even the final indignity does not matter: the dead do not stay dead.