Jelinek's Radical Radio: Deconstructing the Woman in Context
[In the following essay, Levin examines the gender and feminist themes explored in a selection of Jelinek's radio plays.]
Australian expert in bioethics, Paul Gerber, commenting on the possibility of using braindead women as incubators for implanted fertilized eggs and as storage for donor organs, stated that this development would not only be ethically sound but in fact “progressive” and “a great” idea. The professor from the University of Queensland made his views known at a recent conference on medical ethics.
(Brutkästen, 1988, p. 8)
At their international conference in July, 1985, FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) issued a statement deploring the “expropriation” of “the female body,” its dissection “as raw material for the technological production of human beings.” Warning against the power relations informing the new technologies, the delegates declared: “We do not need to transform our biology, we need to transform patriarchal, social, political, and economic conditions” (Spallone & Steinberg, 1987, p. 211).
Central to any analysis of this threatening phenomenon is the context: In whose interest is the current “externalization of conception and gestation” occurring? Not in the interests of women. Technocrats claim they are helping the sterile. But desire to give birth at any cost betrays a suspect origin in male dominance. Patriarchy's control of female fertility has been a cornerstone of disempowerment; in a phallocratic world, genetic manipulations further cement women's exclusion from power.
In the 1980s, reproductive technologies have witnessed an astonishing rate of development. But the destructive logic behind such macabre procedures as fishing for eggs or grafting of species could have been foreseen earlier and appears in fact in a little known but startlingly revealing radio play by Austrian Marxist Elfriede Jelinek, broadcast on March 27, 1976, The King Bees. In it Jelinek addresses issues central to feminism—power relations between the sexes and who controls fertility—in a poetic language that unmasks the motives of the dominant discourse and, through displacement, irony, and emphasis on the context of an utterance, offers tools for resisting manipulation, hence of defying, as the FINRRAGE women do, the hegemony of the technocrats. In the most effective sense, The King Bees, because it addresses itself to a well-schooled audience conversant in these issues, can perhaps challenge the seeming inevitability of increasing power differentials between females and males that threaten to result from the reign of “male mothers.”
We can more easily understand how Jelinek's project works if we focus a deconstructive lens on it. More recently than their European counterparts, American feminist literary critics have turned to the French theorists for insight into the fundamental questions of subjectivity and language. In an issue of Feminist Studies devoted entirely to feminism and deconstruction, Mary Poovey sets the tone when she asks whether deconstruction constitutes an adequate methodology for feminist critics, pointing on the one hand to the theory's “antihumanist premises” that undermine “a feminism … [whose] epistemology and practice [build] on women's experience” (Poovey, 1988, pp. 51-52). In this view feminism is “simply another deluded humanism” (Poovey, 1988, p. 52). At the same time, post-structuralist theory is an “endeavor … to imagine some organization of fantasy, language, and reality other than one based on identity and binary oppositions” (Poovey, 1988, p. 56), although, admittedly, this is difficult: Images of utopian future(s) often elude the pen.
Jelinek's work has been discussed in terms of a similar conflict, between her humanism, inspired by Marxist/feminism, and her aesthetic, variously described as elitist, esoteric, inaccessible, but mainly faulted with negativity. Irony, her principal tool, reverses, opening up the void between expectation and fulfillment, emphasizing what is not. Similarly, deconstruction seems to feed into reaction: Its refusal of identity and its engagement in endless unravelings of meaning, while challenging the economy of the One, do not empower the Other. Insight into the mechanics of domination does not per se erase it. Yet, as a methodology, deconstruction has been held by some to be a useful arm in the radical's arsenal. Specifically, by destablizing the dyad male/female, uncoupling the sexual signifier from its anatomical referent, it may increase the range of options for “women” and “men.”
This explosion of the sign, an important dimension in Jelinek's novels, is perhaps even more striking in her radio plays. If a prose work like Michael: A Children's Book for the Infantile Society (1972a) functions as a take-off on the consciousness industries like radio and television, how much more cutting is the parody within those media themselves. Critiquing her form in her content while undermining content in her form, Jelinek refuses to participate in the illusionist tradition sucking an audience into the very structures that silence them. Instead her radio drama makes hierarchies the object of her radical reversals. If deconstruction offers a method of reading the individual's relation to the system, so Jelinek's metaproject would seem to be offering an inspired opportunity for deconstructive thinking.
To take an introductory example from The King Bees: Post-structuralism emphasizes moving beyond the production of meaning(s) dependent entirely on linked elements in a closed system. Jelinek sets up and explodes such a system. In Terrana I after the maximum holocaust, language, literally the same as that used in the contemporary world, is radically dislocated as soon as the context is invoked. One particularly macabre illustration is an ordinary “patriotic text”—the perennial discussion concerning relations between the individual and the state:
MALE voice 4:
(very affected, almost gay) That [soldiering] is a wonderful thing for a young person.
MALE voice 3:
(enthusiastic) When I was young I would have given my right arm for a job like that.
(Jelinek, 1982a, p. 29)
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: Such sentiment serves the ruling class. Here, however, the euphemism of sacrifice is unmasked by the context. The ruling technocrats, after discovering a life-prolonging substance, have determined to exterminate their younger male rivals and store their organs for future transplants, initiating an economy to harvest human beings. The figurative subjunctive statement—I would have given my right arm—must now be taken literally, and the interested ideology behind it is revealed. Similar pious language—“We'll think about them always, they'll live on in us”—is equally inverted by repartee perfect in this context: “Maybe even in the form of a kidney or a heart!” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 29)
To continue the illustration, a second important moment in Jelinek's project is her deconstruction of the term “woman.” In Terrana, those with the power to name call themselves King Bees, a type that, significantly, does not exist at all in nature. Women they divide into the Mutas or incubators and the Hetis or courtesans. Because the Mutas have been isolated in cubicles like honeycombs, they have been styled euphemistically Queen Bees. Now, in Poovey's words, breaking the concept of “woman” into “independent variables … show[s] how consolidating all women into a falsely unified ‘woman’ has helped mask the operations of power that actually divide women's interests as much as unite them” (Poovey, 1988, p. 59). If the feminist task includes mitigating the political ramifications of essentialism or biologism, then a deconstructive vision can reveal the interests served by the ruling ideologies of “woman.”
At the same time, however, Jelinek's myth risks essentializing “man”: The patriarchy appears so seamless, so monolithic, that it suggests a “natural” marriage of masculinity and dominance. But a deconstructive reading discourages this impression: Women are not alone in their exclusion from power. Nor are all women equally far from the governing circles. In a gesture of Marxist inspiration, Jelinek links the Mutas to the technocrats and the Hetis to the sons, these new political alignments exploding “sex” as a marker of class. This, too, recalls post-structuralism: Disconnecting anatomical sexuality from gender, it might be possible, as Poovey notes, to cease “relegating all biological variants into the two categories, ‘male’ and ‘female’ (with ‘abnormal’ absorbing everything that is ‘leftover’), [and] enable us both to multiply the categories of sex and to detach reproduction from sex” (Poovey, 1988, pp. 59, 60). I see a similar projection in Jelinek's work.
READINGS IN CONTEXT
Unmasking the context of veiled brutality is Jelinek's metaproject in two early radio plays, Demise of a Diver (1973) and Kasperl and the Chubby Princess or Kasperl and the Skinny Peasants (1974). Both offer an acoustical mirror of the early prose work Michael: A Children's Book for the Infantile Society (1972a) laced with the cartoon brutality of We're Decoys, Baby! (1970). Like the novel, they parody “die heile Welt,” the unsullied world of television and mass media. Written mainly in cliché, the platitudes of “performance” and “place” are revealed as antithetical to the interests of those for whom they are broadcast, mainly the powerless. As Jelinek explains in a 1978 interview, she is concerned with “this society of minors infantilized by a gigantic consciousness industry functioning like the Super-ego of psycho-analysis, like all-powerful fathers. … Models to emulate are placed so far above the norm, taken from the level of wealthy sports car drivers and lottery winners that people never even consider making any political demands. … Nobody thinks of questioning, let alone dismantling, the dominant structures” (Levin, 1979, p. 130).
Her principal theme is subjectivity: how the majority has come to think as it does, and how the sedative effect of ideology is to be counteracted. Demise of a Diver (1973), inspired by the bourgeois myth of individualism, suggests several answers. A caricature of the modern citizen, the title figure, with a wife and two children, is a professional snorkler despite old war wounds and has set out on holiday in hopes of encountering some famous person to adulate. Lassie and Flipper soon appear, emissaries of the “realm of the children's laughing eyes” who, however, reward expectations of kindness with brutality. Gratuitously, the television dolphin tells his “speechless” admirer, “I'll bite off two of your fingers and throw them in the trash” (Jelinek, 1973, p. 6). Threatened by this misfortune, the diver responds with the time-worn adage, “I'll pull myself back up by my own bootstraps” (Jelinek, 1973, p. 8) but the bourgeois promise of success and humanist view of the worthy idol are disappointed time and again. In fact, the radio drama translates the slogans of the status quo, like those of working yourself up, into literal catapults and stressful climbs, and the “diver,” although he surfaces for air, is headed straight down, doomed to experience the “demise” of his entire class, prey to its internalized illusions.
This radical critique extends to the very idea of the “Mensch,” the concept of the human being used to sedate suspicion and deflect awareness away from inequalities of power. The respected television personalities, parodied by Lassie or Flipper, constantly deny the possibility of differences in both essence and position, spouting such pieties as “There are no winners or losers, there are only people” (Jelinek, 1973, p. 41); or relying on the liberal illusion: “Wars would be superfluous with only a little understanding” (Jelinek, 1973, p. 29). Hence the call for “a little more kindness from mensch to mensch to mensch to mensch to mensch” (Jelinek, 1973, p. 20). The repetition heightens our awareness of the utterance as cliché and, while seeming to broaden the field of individuals designated “mensch,” it actually collapses distinctions, particularly in the context of brutality Jelinek presents, sparing no one. Extending from child abuse through rape to medieval methods of torture, the radio's play-by-play descriptives redefine menschlichkeit (humaneness) as cruelty. For example, the job interview à la Jelinek: “The boss is merely going to finish listening to Mozart's Symphony in G-minor. Then he'll be ready to crush your fingers and toes” (Jelinek, 1973, p. 32) Clearly, in this world of systemic violence, the “humanities” also fail.
Ute Nyssen, in her “Afterword” to the Prometh edition of Jelinek's plays, writes of the author's “overriding method,” that her reliance on “a pastiche of quotations from the media and advertising” evidences not only a satiric impulse, but perhaps more importantly constitutes an attack “against strategies of obfuscation” (Nyssen, 1984, p. 156). This is clearly the case in Kasperl and the Chubby Princess or Kasperl and the Skinny Peasants (Jelinek, 1974). An allegory in which the obese noblewoman represents the propertied class and her suppliers the working majority, the tale focuses once again on the myth of mobility and, in its didacticism, offers intellectual tools for unmasking it. The gourmand's royal father makes a proclamation in fine fairy-tale tradition: Whoever can help his daughter lose weight and regain her health will be rewarded with her hand. The effect is not unlike the appeal of a lottery, to individualism, for hypothetically, anyone can win. In fact, rigid material distinctions are maintained. The mystification this implies warrants such a clear lesson in political economy as the following:
SPEAKER:
If somebody wants more than anybody else, then he has to take it away from them. Of course it may happen that the others don't even notice that anything's being taken away, or else they think its O.K. to lose out if the person doing the taking is a powerful man or if he has a pretty face or simply drives a fat car or has a gigantic castle or even a private airplane and so forth.
(Jelinek, 1974, p. 32)
The icons of wealth identify the idols of the meek who are trained in self-effacement by those placing themselves above others. Here Jelinek attempts to disassociate the symbol from the emotion it evokes, to bring the powerful down to the level of selfish children for whom Kasperl is king. He in turn holds the discourse of the status quo: “Industry and sacrifice make the good child” (Jelinek, 1974, p. 8); “We always want to obey our King … by not eating too much and not drinking too much and not snacking too much and not playing too loud.” And “whoever gives up his lunch for a day makes the King particularly happy” (Jelinek, 1974, p. 7). The interests propagating “sacrifice” as a civic virtue are visible in this fable despite the masquerade: Motivated by fear of authority, the “altruistic” spirit is omnipotent Father State internalized by the infantile. Only the “common sense” of that underestimated outsider, the kitchen maid, breaks into the closed discourse of mystification.
If the princess—a woman—seems at first a dangerous choice to represent privilege, another female stands for the counterpart of sceptical resistance, creating an effect that makes biological sex far less significant as an indicator of status than type of work and distance from power. If the first remains a ruling class accomplice whose interests differ markedly from those females of the unpropertied group, the character called Gretel is the single questioning voice. The person in charge of the kitchen, who knows first when the pot is empty and whose stomach knots with what has been taken away, she is less easily duped, more strategic in her “morality,” the type of down-to-earth mother courage capable of rippling the smooth flow of jargon with her irreverence: “I didn't really hear that, did I? And you really believe all that junk your teachers stuffed your heads with?” (Jelinek, 1974, p. 7).
DECONSTRUCTING WOMAN
The silence of women (and the disempowered of both sexes) is a commonplace of feminist literary criticism, and, in fact, the princess in Kasperl never speaks. But slapstick disfigures the voice of the powerful also, treating it like white noise against which Gretel's “common sense” stands out. As the stage directions make clear, the king's language, for example, is incomprehensible apart from the key words: “Crisis, work, hard work, heavy work, love, the well-being of the people, sacrifice, work … ballet dancer …” (Jelinek, 1974, p. 18) while his sidekick Pezi echoes the ends of Kasperl's sentences. Thus floating freely without anchor in a comprehensive discourse of authority, the terms are easily deflated by the pinprick of audience complicity.
This manipulation of a sign's context is a strategy applied to portraits of biological women in a number of the radio plays and can be viewed as an attack on essentialist interpretations. Specifically in For Some, the Setting Sun Means the End of a Working Day (1972b), What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband or the Pillars of Society (1982b), and Bringing up a Vampire (1986). This reorientation is effected either by clearly equating “female” with “function”—no matter who, male or female, is subordinate, that is the “woman”—or by transgressing the boundaries of “sex,” exaggerating the exclusivity of the label “woman,” inadequate to cover the multiplicity of incompatible characteristics associated with anatomically female characters or, in the case of Emily, with disembodied female anatomies, the ultimate in reversal and absence.
Function, not biology, defines the female in Jelinek's prize-winning radio play For Some, the Setting Sun Means the End of a Working Day (1972b) where we encounter the familiar pastiche modus and self-conscious broadcast. Gaby, a dreamy teenage department store clerk, accepts the advances of Markus, an established man in his late thirties. He courts her gently, in the fashion of romance heroes, with suspense stemming from his frequent disappearances and reappearances in the company of a mystery woman. At last we learn she is his doctor; he is stricken with a fatal illness that he wishes to hide from Gaby in order to live out his last days in idyllic harmony. All the soporific appeal of the soaps is here, impinged on, however, by the media's self-reflection: This tale is itself a radio soap whose performance is frequently interrupted by a parody of audience involvement. After Gaby and Markus have exchanged good-byes, a professional announcer's voice initiates the “dialogue.” First with a hypothetical female listener:
Whom did you say I should ask your?—husband.—What do you think is important, that a woman should make herself pretty for her?—husband. You can tell what by looking at whom your?—that. husband. … What do you have that's the most beautiful in the world?—profession. Who always suffers when the mother works the?—children.
(Jelinek, 1972b, p. 8)
Then with a man:
What's your profession?—butcher. … What is it after all that men don't have the? children.—What is your ideal your?—work.
(Jelinek, 1972b, pp. 11, 12)
This takeoff of the magazine quiz parodies biologism as it informs the pedagogic impulse of the media and the slogans of the everyday. Prejudice thus becomes conscious. The catechism of female submission is sabotaged by turning declarative statements into interrogatives, the resulting broken clichés to be mended by the listener whose participation lends new meaning to the hackneyed phrases. They appear as the binary oppositions on which deconstructive critics find Western culture to be based and as such contain the source of their own displacement. That is, the man's ideal can be his work only so long as anatomy, and specifically the birthing of children, places “women” in a wholly separate category. This in turn is the case neither in the listeners' world nor in the radio play whose women also work, one as a sales clerk, the other as a doctor, even though marriage and motherhood represent the illusion in which Gaby is trapped. But as parts of a system dependent on each other, the wage-earning male implying the child-bearing female, challenge to one will also undermine the other and the system. Thus anatomy, the fact of women's bearing children, is significant only as part of a system of ideas, one also confronted by Jelinek's Nora (1982b).
In this radio play Jelinek continues to deconstruct the concept of “woman” by disassociating anatomy from social category in a gesture moving well beyond the ending of Ibsen's masterpiece, as implied by the title: What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband or the Pillars of Society. Similar in inspiration to Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1982), which exposes the Victorian repressed by exploring the insanity of Jane Eyre's double in the attic, Jelinek deflates her model's upbeat implications by revealing the futility of various positivistic theories of women's advancement, in particular emancipation through entry into the wage economy. Instead the bourgeois woman's attempt to escape domination by men lands her in the working class where differences among women are highlighted, thereby calling the category itself into question. The factory workers stand by their men, against Nora's advice: “You've got to burn whatever makes you unfree. If you have to burn your men, too, so what? They've put machines in your hands and doubly and triply exploited you without giving you anything in return” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 189). Nora, distinguished by her background and verbal skills, appears to be more radical than her colleagues in naming and denouncing sexism, going so far as to employ a deconstructive lens herself. But she ultimately reverts to a type of bourgeois individualism that allows events in context to cement and not dismantle gender and class hierarchies.
The context is the plot. In forsaking the security of bourgeois marriage, Nora drops in status but only temporarily. In a skillful parody of Ibsen's entertainment scene, she is selected from among the troupe of women workers to amuse the industrial bigwigs on their factory tour. Her tarantula seduces the politician Weyland who courts her with the material goods she has begun to miss, the “long done-without,” namely furs. The remainder of the action merely underscores the impotence of her feminist theory: As Weyland's consort, she gains privileged knowledge of secret plans to construct a nuclear power plant but cannot parley that information into any kind of constructive opposition. Instead, after having maneuvered her ex-husband Helmer out of a fortune, she rejoins him as a petit-bourgeois shopkeeper.
Staged in the twenties, events in the play occur under the sign of Hitler's and Mussolini's pronouncements on gender, which ironically encourage an equal-rights feminist response. The educated Nora quotes both men:
“A majority of the people are supposedly so feminine that its thought and action results less from cool reasoning and much more from emotionality,” says Mr. Hitler.
(Jelinek, 1982b, p. 174)
and
“The moment a woman touches a machine she loses her femininity, unmans the man at the same time and discourages him by taking the break out of his mouth,” says Mr. Mussolini.
(Jelinek, 1982b, p. 174)
Both statements lift the term “woman” from its exclusive application to female anatomies by including less powerful males in the category. Yet no female anatomy is freed from the stigma of “womanhood.” Difference means inferiority.
Historically there have been two responses to this, the equality vs. difference debate in which neither answer seems adequate. Illustrative of the latter, the contemporary radical feminist project, according to Chris Weedon, “is not to deconstruct the discursive processes whereby certain qualities come to be defined as feminine and others as masculine nor to challenge directly the power relations which these differences guarantee. It is rather to revalue the feminine the patriarchy devalues” (1987, p. 81). The women in the factory lean toward this position. Jelinek's Nora, however, begins by taking the former, but equally impotent, track, turning away from difference to claim political equality with men in an economy that makes a mockery of her pretensions. Claiming, “by working for wages I wanted to transform myself from object to subject. … And most importantly, … to become my own person” (Weedon, 1987, p. 171) she echoes the humanist school whose bankruptcy becomes even clearer as both terms, “person” and “woman,” are emptied of meaning.
This occurs in the political discussion among Nora, her former colleague Eva, and other women on the assembly line, Nora having dropped by the factory because she is experiencing a crisis “touching upon her existence as a feminine being” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 159). Management's motives in having just agreed to provide the workers with both a library and a child care facility are being debated. Some of the workers take the liberal bourgeois line: This is progress, as woman worker number 2 suggests, “Since the French Revolution equality and justice have shimmered through the branches of the tree of enterprise” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 198). But Eva, armed with Bebel and Marx, warns against cooptation. And Nora cuts in as an amazon:
If I have to listen to you for another minute I'll go crazy! I'm a woman. The history of women to this day has been a history of gynocide, and you're talking about your ridiculous books! I don't see how murder can ever be balanced out if not through another act of violence.
(Jelinek, 1982b, p. 197)
“Violence” is the key word here: Nora understands the present context as the result of force but experiences the dilemma of the intellectual whose insights are unacceptable to the women workers attached to husbands and their identities as mothers. Nora's statement that “a woman's refusal to please is the first step toward emancipation. A kick against the pyramide of covert violence” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 199) is irrelevant to them because it is applicable to another class of creatures. Even though Eva claims, “I'm a woman, too! A woman like Nora here! I hop around with little cries of joys” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 199) the consequences of her womanhood are so different as to belie the accuracy of the common label. When Nora admonishes the workers—“Anything's better than a sexual parasite, which I refuse to be any longer” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 198)—it is clear that bourgeoise and laborer are not participating in the same discourse. Working women are hardly sexual parasites. And finally, when Nora claims that: “Woman has been decapitated and dismembered. Allowed to be only body, she's had her head knocked off” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 198) her words apply not only to women but to the entire silenced working class. Only when she declares: “I want to find out what it means to be a woman because as yet nobody knows” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 198), does she speak exclusively for women without regard to class, and although she may appear to universalize, her terms are so close to post-structuralist thought that this danger is avoided: “Woman stands in the place of the secret, that which cannot speak nor be spoken about” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 178). Ultimately there are no “women.”
Jelinek's attacks on essentialist views of “woman” culminate in Bringing up a Vampire (1986) for in this very figure we have a complex transgression of sexual categories. In a gothic take-off of Emile Brontë's famous work, Jelinek literalizes aspects of the Victorian repressed suggested by the original, particularly the defiance of female sexuality. After all, Emily has visited the dentist and gynecologist Heidkliff—the vagina dentata inspiring this combination—to receive some extraordinary and transparently symbolic bridge work. She wants her incisors “to be made expandable. … They should be able to lunge forward and then disappear. Like me. I need an apparatus like men have! I want to impress! I want to be able to demonstrate my lust! I have juices, but they don't count for much in daily life. I want to be allowed to function according to a principle, too!” (Jelinek, 1986, p. 17).
This principle is elucidated in an article, “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula,” (1988) by John A. Stevenson, which sheds light on the Austrian writer's project. After noting that Dracula makes “blood and semen interchangeable,” Stevenson points to a discrepancy in that “the ‘vital fluid’ is being withdrawn from women, … the nightly visitor [being] a man.” And he concludes:
Clearly, in the vampire world traditional sexual roles are terribly confused. Dracula penetrates, but he receives the “vital fluid”; after Lucy becomes a vampire, she acts as a “penetrator” (and becomes sexually aggressive), but she now receives fluid from those she attacks.
(p. 146)
These liquids also include milk, as in one of Stoker's scenes Dracula forces his victim's face onto “‘his bosom,’” the couple's “‘attitude … [bearing] a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk …’” (Stevenson, 1988, p. 146). This breast-feeding combined with oral sex in a single tableau leads Stevenson to ask: “What is going on? Fellatio? Lactation? It seems that the vampire is sexually capable of everything, [and] like Tiresias, … has looked at sex from both sides … [thus making] it difficult to say, simply, that [Stoker's] novel is hostile to female sexuality.” Rather, “the nature of the ‘female’ has itself been made problematic” (Stevenson, 1988, p. 146).
That radio should be an especially appropriate medium for exploring these sex/gender fluidities and disconnections has been noticed by others. Frances Gray, for example, in her article “The Nature of Radio Drama” (1981) chooses Angela Carter's Vampirella (1976) to highlight this. She writes:
The play explores the attempts of reality and myth to come to terms with each other. The hero sensibly offers his beloved vampire-countess a context in which to be loved; he wants to take her to Vienna—where presumably Freud, who destroyed one lot of myths only to set up another, would psychoanalyze her out of existence after a dentist had fixed the fangs that deter the hero from taking her straight home to mother.
(Gray, 1981, p. 57)
The heroine, however, refuses. She will stand by her negativity, disparaging any comfortable identity: “I am not a demon, for a demon is incorporeal; not a phantom for phantoms are intangible. I have a shape; it is my own shape; but I am not alive, and so I cannot die. I need your life to sustain this physical show, myself” (Carter cited in Gray, 1981, p. 57). And Gray concludes, “Only on radio can this kind of nonbeing be given, a body without any kind of filmic illusion to falsify its nature” (Gray, 1981, p. 57).
Because “radio's ambiguity is its major strength” (Gray, 1981, p. 57), the “physical show” of which the vampire speaks is pure discourse, especially well suited to exploring sexual difference and alterity as a product of language. This would also appear to be Jelinek's foreground project in The King Bees (1982a).
NOT FOUND IN NATURE: KING BEES
“Irony,” writes Michael Seidel, “is a kind of subversive allegory, a doubling that cancels …” (1986, p. 14). Like science fiction generally, The King Bees stages such an allegory, its secondary “plot” implicating those citadels of unabridged male power, business and government colluding in the nuclear industry.
The tale of Terrana is narrated by one of the “boys” who survives a revolution directed by the Hetis or courtesan class of women. But leading up to liberation is a complex history. With the world's population having reached 35 billion and raw materials exhausted, the fear of increasing totalitarianism proves justified: “In an unprecedented economic and technical effort involving all the world's governments, they succeeded in centralizing energy production” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 9). The docility of the masses has been assured by strict control of resources: “At that time, the fact that people had nothing left to drink, eat, or breath made them peaceful” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 11).
At the south pole, a reactor complex is thus constructed on several levels underground, with male personnel assigned to the safer, lower regions, wives and children housed closer to the dangerous surface. This both literalizes and inverts organizational hierarchy, while also parodying that archetypal literary form, the descent into hell.
Due to their increased exposure, the women are more devastatingly affected by the catastrophe—a melt-down—which leads to a scarcity of females and a reproductive crisis. The population now consists of 250 males and 18 females, 8 fertile and 10 infertile women, divided according to the classic mother/whore dichotomy into Mutas and Hetis. The former however are unable to carry normally to term. Instead they expel two months' children four times per year. This requires construction of artificial wombs. Yet an additional problem remains: All the foetuses are male. Now, if Hélène Cixous (1981) is right, this eradication of the female has been at the base of Western phallocratic discourse all along:
In the extreme the world of “being” can function to the exclusion of the mother. No need for mother—provided there is something of the maternal; and it is the father then who acts as—is—the mother. Either the woman is passive; or she doesn't exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of. She does not enter into the oppositions, she is not coupled with the father (who is coupled with the son).
(Cixous cited in Marks and Courtivron, 1981, p. 92)
Jelinek merely translates the poorly repressed desire into “fact.”
The King Bees then explores the consequences of this demographic fluke. On the one hand, a daughter is needed for humanity's survival, but experimental efforts to produce one vie for priority with genetic engineering. Ultimately, having discovered both a means to considerably prolong their lives and youth while also exercising “positive” eugenics, the ruling technocrats recognize to their dismay that the too perfect male offspring being run off the assembly line can be expected to rival and displace their “betters.”
Question: Once it has a monopoly on technological power and knowledge, as well as having achieved a quasi-immortality, what does a kingly society do with a generation, many generations of growing sons, of maturing young men, who perhaps can be expected someday to challenge their rulers?
(Jelinek, 1982a, p. 27)
In this scenario echoing Freud's “primal horde,” the answer is “Auswahlverfahren”—to initiate a selection process equivalent to castration, to remove the rival sons from the very category of “men.”
They are unmanned in two ways: denied access to women and put in charge of raising babies, a task linking them to the Heti's or courtesans. Both restrictions are highly significant. Lévi-Strauss has pointed out how the exchange of women is central to patriarchal status; without this power, even possession of the phallus does not confer the title “man.” This is implied in the discussion among the male technocrats assessing the situation in the early years after the melt-down. At issue is how to deal with the women:
MALE voice 3:
(enthusiastic) It's not enough to have men who conquer the world; you've got to have the world made pleasant for the men by self-subordinating women.
(Jelinek, 1982a, p. 20)
A tautology, this argument slots both “men” and “women” into their classic places as active and passive, their positions mutually dependent. The reflexive pronoun, however, is suspect: It leaves the women their complicity, making them also active in their passivity. This seriously destabilizes the dyad by deferring closure. An additional threat proceeds from the others eliminated from the category—males without access to women. Like members of racial minorities, they remain “boys.” The meaning of gender is thus derived not from anatomy but from function and context.
Unmanning is a further consequence of shared parenting. Relevant here is Nancy Chodorow's hypothesis concerning the preoedipal stage of psychic development, in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), linking differences in gender formation to the near-universality of the female parent with whom girls may identify strongly while boys feel compelled to separate. The conclusion for Chodorow's followers who wish to disrupt this order is precisely to disband the female monopoly on child care. This happens in Terrana: The socialization of women and introduction of “boys” as caregivers appear indeed to have initiated revolutionary consequences. The technocrats, no longer interested in perpetuating individual names and bloodlines through marriage, are content to engineer survival of the species with allegiance offered only to their own elites. This, too, functions ironically to unmake “men.”
Now the fact that, although all the powerful are males, not all males are powerful, marks a break between anatomy and sign, while power itself would seem to be no longer “phallocratic” but some other kind. Neither the Marxist nor as yet any feminist theory can define what it is, but coming closest is probably the deconstructive view for which it may comfortably remain unknown.
There are a significant number of other unknowns in the piece, among them the nature of “woman.” In Nora Jelinek has written: “Woman and nature together aren't necessarily natural. They can be separated” (Jelinek, 1982b, p. 186). The King Bees continues that disruptive project. Elsewhere Jelinek has pointed out the political folly of relying on procreative power as a route to empowerment. As Regine Friedrich notes in her “Afterword” to Illness or the Modern Woman:
The feminist movement has spread like a bacterial invasion, one of its varieties having landed in the same trap it had just broken out of. It sings in a witch's chorus of the mysterious link to nature, of the wonder of female biology …
(Friedrich, 1987, p. 85)
The King Bees takes the wonder of female anatomy to its logical conclusion, as the opponents of genetic engineering under male control have warned. Isolated from one another in cells like honeycombs, hooked up to “surveillance, feeding and impregnating systems” maintained in a twilight world of sedativa, biology becomes even more functional, legs atrophy and some women are no longer women but “Mutas,” mutations, allies of the Kings who, all together, are smothered in their cells when the Hetis and the sons revolt; inspired by the honeycomb, they seal all entrances/exits with wax as the entire ruling class assembles to celebrate the long-waited birth of daughters.
Clearly then it is not anatomy but function that determines class, although the seduction of essentialism is hard to resist. One heti, for example, is tempted to see herself and the mothers as allies: Female voice 5: “They're women like us.” But the others disagree:
FEMALE Voice 4:
We can't expect any help from the birthing women.
FEMALE Voice 5:
They are happy with a happiness reserved only for mothers.
(Jelinek, 1982a, p. 42)
This tautology mirrors the mutas' ideological entrapment. Declared “Queen Bees,” “bestowers of life,” “most precious possessions” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 19) they receive compliments camouflaging condescension that create a seductive double bind. In sum, maternal subjectivity is the kings' creation: “They think with the heads of the kings” and must therefore be killed. “If you want to kill something, the head must die first” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 43).
The attack on conventional thinking about “men” and “women” continues on a semantic plain. The “head” to be severed is a metonymy for the chain of signifiers bound into the binary opposition rational/emotional or scientific/mystical (which, as Cixous notes, leads back to the male/female dyad: “the fact that logocentrism subjects thought—all the concepts, the codes, the values—to a two-term system [is] related to ‘the’ couple man/woman …” (Cixous cited in Marks & Courtivron, 1981, p. 91). Jelinek clearly challenges the hegemony of instrumental thinking, but without denying its importance. When asked in an early interview to comment on trends revaluing the female body, she agreed with the benefits of raising individual women's confidence but moved quickly on to the collective, warning: “If they are really going to spend ten more years concentrating on their bodies, that will mean ten more years in which men rule the world. They are the ones studying nuclear physics and biology and so forth and are running things, while the women go on with their consciousness-raising.” (Münchner Literaturarbeitskreis, 1978, p. 174).
Although linking science with power, this is neither a plaidoyer for “equality” nor a defense of technocracy. It does, however, open up a void, expressing that negativity for which Jelinek is known. “Her engagement is directed against the ruling class,” explains Roland Heger in Austrian Radio Drama. “What she is working FOR, in her books as in her radio plays, remains unclear” (Heger, 1977, p. 221).
Actually, it isn't a lack of clarity the critic notes but a staging of the indefinable, that empty space between irony and understanding. To illustrate, a child has died but its hobby horse survives. Comment: “The horse is fine because I suppose it's made of such resistent stuff” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 16). A mother's collapsed rib elicits the following: “She apparently wanted to throw herself over her son, to protect him with something as unperfected as her own body” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 16). Irony is the discrepancy between expectation and delivery: Here we are waiting for a focus on the human. Instead, material is emphasized. But far from having our humanism reconfirmed, it too is undermined, the chain of metonymies for “human being” having already exploded the concept: People are spoken of as “simple organic compounds,” “copies,” “female hosts,” “relics of women and children” (Jelinek, 1982a, p. 15). Deconstruction would read these terms not as a human tendency to cruelty but as creating the context for cruelty, a sadistic language paving the way for increasingly exploitative circumstances. And these lead to revolt.
Jelinek's final scene attempts to confirm the absence of “women,” “men,” and “Menschen” from the world. Cultural values have been erased. The hetis and sons emerge on a terra nova offering a sensuous counterpart to critic Elizabeth Meese's view of “deconstruction's utopic projection … assert[ing] its motion toward the unthinkable, unknowable point(s) beyond the system it deconstructs” (Meese, 1986, p. 87). Jelinek's “so-called landscape,” “bottomless,” is indeed an unstructured space, not yet bearing the imprint of human subjectivity. But as Seidel notes of exile, “… supplemental spaces conceived are supplemental spaces controlled …” (Seidel, 1986, p. 13). Like artists, poets, and mathematicians, the voices inscribe their need for markers on the unscarred land:
YOUNG male speaker 3:
Like the beaten yolk of an egg.
YOUNG male speaker 4:
The sun is like a drop of cream in a bowl of water.
FEMALE 4:
The horizon meets the so-called landscape in a far distant line.
YOUNG male speaker 4:
Shouldn't we try to move toward the horizon which is an imaginary, not a real line?
YOUNG male speaker 3:
It's like an egg-yolk being beaten in a bowl of milk.
YOUNG male speaker 4:
Namely the sun.
YOUNG male speaker 3:
It's like a draft in this deserted landscape. Everything is pulled away, it's like vacuumed off.
(Jelinek, 1982a, pp. 45-46)
This dialogue disrupts the economy of binary opposites, splits the sex/gender dyad, and levels the linguistic barrier between the poetic and the technocratic. First, Jelinek sets up oppositions staged throughout the piece: male/female, sciences/arts, truth/fiction. She then inverts these. For example, the male and female speakers are distinguished by their discursive fields but not in the way we have been lead to expect, the women in the arts, the men in sciences. Instead, the men parody literary creativity (while at the same time engaging in it), domesticating their strange new world with their culinary similes, thereby exhibiting a sensuousness in contrast to the women's mathematical approach.
And both subvert the approaches they have chosen. Specifically, the vocabulary of the sciences—of navigation (“coastline”), cartography (“distance”), surveying (“horizon”), and mathematics (“line”)—is used to negate the matter to which the terms refer. For example, the “imaginary line” as well as the “horizon” are at the same time mathematically calculable realities and mirages, ever-receding illusions. Thus, art and technology are no longer opposites but subversive dimensions in a larger project. For the current sweeping across this canvas is the seduction of the not-yet-inscribed and on this terrain, male and female meet not as themselves, but as others. Of course the threat of old history remains. Females voice the danger:
FEMALE 4:
… At some point our lives will have woven themselves once again into a destiny.
FEMALE 5:
Female and male destinies.
(Jelinek, 1982a, p. 47)
A destiny reflects the urge of human subjectivity to tell its story, and narratives have, thus far, included heroines and heroes, men and women.
But perhaps the decentering of the human subject will effect a change:
FEMALE 4:
But do we dare weigh down the emptied earth with women's and men's destinies?
FEMALE 6:
Do we dare take our goal orientation to prop up the landscape's goallessness?
FEMALE 5:
Whose only goal is an imaginary line.
FEMALE 4:
While our goals are more grounded in reality.
(Jelinek, 1982a, pp. 47-48)
The drama concludes with this tension. Facing the empty landscape that seems to beg for a signature, and tempted to exercise artistic mastery, Jelinek's characters give in to another vision. It is no longer a question of humanity imposing itself on the wilderness but rather of “reality” accommodating humans:
FEMALE 4:
Can we trust something as empty as the earth to something as full as ourselves? … do we dare weigh down the emptied earth with women's and men's destinies?
FEMALE 5:
That is very much the question.
(Jelinek, 1982a, p. 48)1
NOTE ON TRANSLATION
None of the Jelinek texts discussed are available in English. All quotations are therefore the author's translations. All quotations from German language texts listed in the Reference section have also been translated by the author.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Josefine Carls for her translation of this article into German.
Note
-
Since this piece was written, Jelinek has become a cause célèbre with her latest work, Lust (Rowohlt, 1989). Attempting to take Georges Bataille as the model for an experiment in female pornography, the author asking whether heterosexual women become aroused by certain images and texts, Jelinek admits “failure” to critic Sigrid Loffler (1989, “Die Hose Runter im Feuilleton,” [Pants dropped in the culture section] Emma, May, 4-5): “I wanted to find a female equivalent of obscene language. But the very writing of such a text destroyed me—as a subject and in my intention to write pornography. I came to recognize that a woman can't do this, at least not given the contemporary social situation.”
Works Cited
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Chodorow, Nancy. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cixous, Hélène. (1981). “Sorties.” In Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron (Eds.), New French Feminisms. New York: Schocken.
Feminist Studies. (1988). 14(1).
Friedrich, Regine. (1987). “Nachwort [Afterword].” In Elfriede Jelinek. Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen [Illness or the Modern Woman]. Köln: Prometh Verlag.
Gray, Frances. (1981). “The Nature of Radio Drama.” In Peter Lewis (Ed.), Radio Drama. New York: Longman.
Heger, Roland. (1977). Das Österreichische hörspiel [Austrian Radio Drama]. Wien: Wilhelm Braunmüller Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1970). Wir sind lockvögel, baby! [We're Decoys, Baby!]. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1972a). Michael: Ein jugendbuch für die infantilgesellschaft [Michael: A Children's Book for the Infantile Society]. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1972b). Wenn die Sonne sinkt ist für manche auch noch büroschluss! [For Some, the Setting Sun Means the End of a Working Day]. Süddeutscher Rundfunk Archivexemplar, 1470. (First broadcast 16 November.)
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1973). Untergang eines tauchers [Demise of a Diver]. Süddeutscher Rundfunk Archivexemplar, 1506. (First broadcast 22 November.)
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1974). Kasperl und die dicke Prinzessin oder Kasperl und die dünnen bauern [Kasperl and the Chubby Princess or Kasperl and the Skinny Peasants]. Süddeutscher Rundfunk Archivexemplar, 1541. (First broadcast 10 November.)
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1982a). Die Bienenkönige [The King Bees]. In Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ed.), Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren mann verlassen hatte? [What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband?]. München: DTV.
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1982b). Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren mann verlassen hatte oder Stutzen der Gesellschaften [What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband or the Pillars of Society]. In Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ed.), Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren mann verlassen hatte? [What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband?]. München: DTV.
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1983). Die Klavierspielerin [The Piano Player]. Reinbekbei. Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Jelinek, Elfriede. (1986). Erziehung eines Vampirs [Bringing up a Vampire]. Süddeutscher Rundfunk Archivexemplar, 2039. (First broadcast 12 June.)
Levin, Tobe Joyce. (1979). Ideology and Aesthetics in Neo-feminist German Fiction: Verena Stefan, Elfriede Jelinek, Margot Schroeder. Ph.D. Dissertation. University Microfilms: Ann Arbor.
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Münchner Literaturarbeitskreis. (1978). Gespräch mit Elfriede Jelinek [Talking with Elfriede Jelinek]. mamas pfirsiche 9/10, 170-181.
Nyssen, Ute. (1984). “Nachwort [Afterword].” In Elfriede Jelinek. Theaterstücke [Plays]. Köln: Prometh Verlag.
Poovey, Mary. (1988). “Feminism and Deconstruction.” Feminist Studies, 14, 51-65.
Rhys, Jean. (1982). Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton.
Seidel, Michael. (1986). Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Spallone, Patricia & Steinberg, Deborah Lynn (Eds.). (1987). Made to Order. The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
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Weedon, Chris. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. London: Basil Blackwell.
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