Elfriede Jelinek

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Brute Encounters

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SOURCE: Hulse, Michael. “Brute Encounters.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4503 (21-27 July 1989): 802.

[In the following review, Hulse discusses the satiric elements and disturbing subject matter of Lust.]

The main characters in Elfriede Jelinek's new novel Lust are the managing director of an Austrian paper-mill and his much-abused wife Gerti. The man is referred to as “der Direktor”, much as one might refer to “der Führer”; his attitude to women matches that expressed in Hitler's table talk. Hermann is Schiller's “Ewig-Gestrige” with a vengeance, a man whose life is spent in the pursuit of power.

His exploitation of Gerti's body is rendered in formidably horrible terms. In the age of AIDS, the Direktor has reluctantly decided that gratification begins at home, and he uses his passive wife to satisfy his needs. There is nothing mutual about this satisfaction: Gerti is merely a machine for fornication, and she no longer even attempts to express her wishes. Deploying a repertoire of familiar images for the genitals and the sexual act, Jelinek gives us many that are singularly degrading. Those who found Die Klavierspielerin painful to read will find Lust altogether repugnant.

But then, that is the point. Elfriede Jelinek has said that she set out to write an erotic, indeed pornographic novel from the woman's point of view but found it impossible because the brutalized language used to describe sex was a purely male language of exploitation. If the unrelenting, nasty sameness here reminds us of “the inescapable monotony of pornographic writing” (in George Steiner's phrase), that too is part of Jelinek's intention.

Gerti, who has taken to drink, wanders out for a winter stroll, where she has a brute encounter with a self-centred student who then discards her for the younger women he routinely seduces. Gerti, however, mistakes this for love, has her hair done, and goes to find Michael on the ski-slopes he frequents; there he abuses her physically before a giggling crowd of youngsters. If the lonely middle-aged wife thought she had found the archangel to deliver her from her sorrows, she was pathetically wrong. The novel ends on a despairing note reminiscent of the infanticide dramas (written by men) of the Sturm und Drang: Gerti suffocates her son, already grasping and domineering, and sinks the child's corpse in the stream. The killing is the inevitable outcome of a growing abhorrence of the self-perpetuating male principle.

There are no new insights into sexuality, language and power in Lust. Jelinek avoids originality and achieves her satiric effects through pastiche and misprision. As in Die Ausgesperrten, she is still keen to épater les bourgeois, and is particularly scathing on sports, cars and savings banks. But her more searching scrutiny is reserved for the old gods of male culture; and textually, her satire is impressively rich. Her sardonic approach to “Natur”, with its exaggerated sense of concomitant savagery, often reads like a commentary on Goethe's “Wie ist Natur so hold und gut, / Die mich am Busen hält!” In the processes of assimilation and absorption that underpin power in her world-view, Jelinek seems to be restating the gist of Elias Canetti's Masse und Macht in a form that exposes the limits of its maleness. Above all, Jelinek's obsessive subtext is the history and teachings of Christ, for her apparently the archetype of male domination.

With twenty years of fiction, theatre and a little poetry behind her, Elfriede Jelinek has now attracted a wide readership. Like Die Ausgesperrten and Die Klavierspielerin, Lust is written in a vigorous, metaphoric prose unlike anybody else's in German. Her wit, contempt, satiric observation, and taste for the distasteful, are all impressive. But for a writer who does not intend to remain an enfant terrible, these gifts may not suffice.

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