the piano teacher (w&d haneke, w. elfriede jelinek)

The Piano Teacher was scheduled by Mariana Enriquez as a part of a ciclo she curated, very little of which I am able to watch, due to rehearsals for Birdland. Nevertheless, I caught Huppert and her funny games. The film was more savage than I remembered. It might be one of the most extreme films ever made. Sexual violence, self-mutilation, and the closest Haneke perhaps gets to really letting the handbrake off. For all his cold art, The Piano Teacher feels furiously visceral. In all the wrong ways. By which one means - in all the ways that truly disturb. Unlike, say, Titane, which for all its extremism is nevertheless kind of alluring. Haneke is the high priest of deconstructing western materialism. His uncompromising vision, allied with where Huppert is willing to go as an actress, backed up by Jelinek’s source text, makes for something that seems designed to get its audience to walk out. Or stagger out, bloodied and beaten like the film’s titular protagonist. 

the piano teacher (elfriede jelinek, tr. joachim neugroschel)

I finished the Piano Teacher, yesterday, Christmas day. As anyone who has read the book can testify, it’s a gruelling read. One that gathers pace as the book unfolds, measured out in long scenes of increasing psychological and physical horror, told in a distanced, ironic tone which one suspects never quite translates, no matter how effective Joachim Neugroschel’s English version. The memory of Haneke’s film and Huppert lingers in the back of the mind throughout. In a book where the issue of physicality is so potent, the image of Huppert’s austere, skinny attractiveness perhaps works against the depiction of Erika in the novel. Huppert is on the cover, she’s become the Piano Teacher. But the piano teacher existed before Huppert claimed her. 

The brutality of the novel generates a classic horror reaction. The more we are shocked, the more we want to read on. The first half of the novel is more mundane. Erika Kohut observes, she lives on the edge of the world. We share her observations, her consciousness. It’s only as she starts to engage with the sub-Nazi youth, Walter Klemmer, that things move from the conceptual to the actual. Contemplated inflicted pain is not the same as actual inflicted pain. Contemplated rejection is not the same as actual rejection. The novel explores the gap between the workings of the mind and the workings of the world; something that is all the more pertinent in a time where the conceptual warriors are given a platform in the  virtual world to wage their conceptual battles or indulge their conceptual perversions. 

Yet, beyond the terror the book inspires, why is this novel so compelling? It contains the perversity of Maldoror. The cruelty of Bataille. Many might question its morbid fascination with the dark side. Whilst the novel depicts the abuse of a woman in harrowing detail, it’s hard to view it as a feminist tract, when Erika’s mother is also her psychological oppressor. What perhaps marks the novel out is the courage with which it converts Erika into a tragic heroine not of someone else’s abuse narrative, but her own transgression. Erika, who is more than capable of committing a cruel action herself, is hoisted on her own petard. She inhabits a world whose atomisation, to use a phrase, means that her mind, brilliant as it is, turns and twists inwards, in the process catching her in a trap of its own making. The relentless way in which the author traces this process seems to articulate a literary courage on her part. Jelinek is prepared to reveal those things we would rather not acknowledge exist. The terrible contradictions of the human heart. Society is constructed on a basis of these elemental yearnings, which acquire shape in fantasies which have veered so far off beam that when they come to be realised, they destroy the subject entirely. The reason for the Piano Teacher’s power as a novel is that it mercilessly tears back the veil and shows the Western world in all its hideous deformity. Where we think we perceive beauty, there actually hides savagery. Behind the pretty child in the advertising poster, there lurks a grinning skull. 

lust [w. elfriede jelinek]

Lust is not a straightforward read. In theory it tells a small story, which takes place, so far as I could make out, over the course of a couple of days. Gerti is married to the swinish factory owner, Hermann. She meets a student, Michael, and they have sex. Later she tries to run away to be with Michael, but he's not interested, Hermann comes and gets her and brings her home, and she murders their child. 

That's what happens, but Lust isn't really about what happens but the way in which these actions are described. Jelinek's prose is composed of dense, poetic, pornographic  paragraphs. She's a writer who can't resist a pun, which suggests that her translators have their work cut out. Trying to get to grips with her text is like wrestling with a bibliophilic python. It's hard work, and matched by the writer's bleak analysis of modern life. 

Lust is a book about lust, and large chunks of it are dedicated to painstaking descriptions of sex. Gerti is fucked every which way by a husband who has remarkable stamina and who sees his wife as his chattel, to do with as he pleases. It seems somewhat surprising that this hasn't put Gerti off sex, but when she meets Michael, the attraction seems to be primarily physical. You won't read a dirtier book than Lust, but that doesn't mean there's anything particularly erotic about it. Sex is another commodity in a world which has been reduced to pure commodification.

For what it's worth, my favourite chapter was the one which described the skiers, in all their florescent gaudiness. It reminded me of a Peter Doig picture I saw earlier this year, a white mountainside populated by small figures in bubble gum colours. Jelinek's critique of modern living merits the application of words like 'coruscating'. Her unremitting bleakness and baroque prose isn't going to appeal to a mass audience, although it has secured her the Nobel prize.