How Elfriede Jelinek unleashed language to smash society's cliches.

The 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Elfriede Jelinek who unleashed language to smash society’s clichés. She was a controversial but brilliant choice.

This week the Nobel Laureates are not all dead white males. For the first time since I began the 120 Nobels Reading Challenge, most writers in this post are still alive! Three out of the seven winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature between 2003 and 2009 were women. The best gender balance so far. Even if they are mostly European.

My feature writer is one of those three women, Elfriede Jelinek. Paradoxically, her magnum opus, The Children of the Dead, presents characters who are undead.

Elfriede Jelinek is a major Austrian playwright and novelist. Her writing is feminist, satirical, and critical of complacent cultures, high and low. She unleashed language to expose a comfortably numb society that lied to itself that its complicity with horrors in history would never happen again.

I discovered Jelinek this week. Her magnum opus, The Children of the Dead, was only published in English in 2024. I picked it up this week from the new books shelf of my local library.

Let me introduce you now to my new friend from the Nobel Laureates of 2003 and 2009. The seven winners of this period were:

• 2003 John Maxwell Coetzee (b. 1940) South Africa

• 2004 Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946) Austria

• 2005 Harold Pinter (1930–2008) Britain

• 2006 Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) Türkiye

• 2007 Doris Lessing (1919–2013) Britain

• 2008 Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (b. 1940) France

• 2009 Herta Müller (b. 1953) Romania (Germany)

I will profile them all on the Burning Archive Youtube Channel on Sunday night.

2024 Nobel Prize Live Stream - 10 October - Save-the-Date! 

This post introduces you to Elfriede Jelinek who was a surprise choice, at least in the Anglophone world. Will there be another surprise choice this year? 

You can find out live by joining my YouTube live stream of the Nobel Prize announcement. Put it in your calendar. I will commence at about 9 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time on 10 October 2024. 

Drop in and chat about the 120 Nobels Challenge. The announcement will be at 10.00 pm approximately. I will include the announcement in the stream, and then discuss the winner.  

My guess for the winner is Geetanjali Shree (India). I started reading her novel, Tomb of Sand this week. It won the International Booker Prize in 2022. The Swedish Academy may make a political statement by choosing the Ukrainian poet, Serhiy Zhadan. But I suspect Ukraine’s star will fade without Nobel glory. 

After 10 October, the 120 Nobels Challenge will live on at the Burning Archive substack. The archive will feature all 121 Nobel Prize winners, with my profiles, links and samples of their work. More news at the end of the post.

Elfriede Jelinek on smashing society’s clichés

In February 2024, Elfriede Jelinek wrote a message of protest against far-right nationalist politics in Germany, Austria and Europe. Right-wing nationalist, populist parties were surging in advance of the European Parliament elections. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Austrian People’s Party were forming a new broad church of some moderates, some resentful ethno-nationalists, and too many fringe-dwellers reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s. 

At the demonstration in Vienna, an actress read out the elderly writer and former Communist’s words of concern that the spectre of fascism was again haunting Europe. Jelinek warned that she “can hear a monster breathing.” 

Political monsters haunted Europe again. Our extreme thinking habits were again on the prowl. ‘Them’ fought ‘Us’ again. The past and present were foes again. Jelinek evoked Walter Benjamin, who was a Marxist cultural historian and Jew, who fled Germany, but died, before the Holocaust, by his own hand as a thwarted refugee.

Benjamin’s poetic essay “On the Concept of History” (also translated as “Theses on the Philosophy of History”) has inspired many writers on history. I explain how the essay sparked the images of the Burning Archive in my book, From the Burning Archive. Jelinek summoned Benjamin’s memory to condemn the lazy rhetoric of “never again”:

Is there, as Benjamin says, a secret agreement between the former generations and ours? Did this agreement not irrevocably declare that the past must never happen again, never again, not differently and not alike? This "never again" we have so often heard, in lip service, in conversations, in lectures, at celebrations, yes, the lips moved eagerly, you could see that. That should never happen again, that is a constant of civilization for us. Nothing that has ever happened is lost to history, says Benjamin, and I would add: Nothing that we want to learn anything from. We have been taught this for decades.

Jelinek warned ‘Never again’ has become just another of society’s clichés, as I commented on in my post this week, “How to face monstrous events and not turn your heart to stone”). Jelinek excoriates society’s clichés with shattered poetic language. That is why she won the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee commended how she composed the:

“musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."

Overview of Elfriede Jelinek’s work

Jelinek has composed radio plays, poetry, theatre texts, polemical essays, anthologies, novels, translations, screenplays, musical compositions, libretti and ballets, film and video art. Her main literary works published in English are:

• The Piano Teacher (1988)

• Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

• Lust (1992)

• Women as Lovers (1994)

• Greed (2006)

• Bambiland (2009)

• Three Plays: Rechnitz, The Merchant's Contracts, Charges (The Supplicants) (2019)

• rein GOLD (2021)

• The Children of the Dead (2024).

Both rein GOLD and The Children of the Dead were translated by Gitta Honegger. These fresh translations have generated renewed attention to Jelinek in 2024 including in this review of The Children of the Dead in the American magazine, The Nation.

This is the author’s most lacerating critique: Not only can genocide be perpetrated with a lack of feeling, but such callousness will also, invariably, mark its monstrous, uncanny un-perpetration. It is here that The Children of the Dead, for reasons well outside its author’s presumed intent and imagination, feels brutally contemporary, at a time when “Never Again” is happening now. The human capacity to bury, repress, and flush away that which is repellent, or merely inconvenient, can outmatch any army, living or dead. “I see nothing.” They never have.

Biography of Elfriede Jelinek

Jelinek is a radical, feminist Austrian novelist and playwright who writes in German. The “musical flow of voices and counter-voices” in her writing expresses the biography, culture, and history of Jelinek in Austria.

Her family background has bits of Czech and Hungarian, and bits of Jewish and Catholic. Austria itself was a broken multiethnic, multilingual empire that many believed in the 1920s and 1930s was truly part of the pan-Germanist world. When Jelinek was born in 1946, Austria was broken again by its own disgrace, the subjection to Germany in the Anschluss, the collaboration with a toxic German European empire, and the participation of its elite in the Holocaust and German killing machine.

Austria struggled to redeem itself after 1945. It became a neutral state, though partial to the West during the Cold War. It made a virtue of its diplomacy. Its most famous post-war diplomat, Kurt Waldheim became Secretary-General of the United Nations in the 1970s, and then President of Austria between 1986 and 1992. Even now the recording of his voice is an emissary of the human race in outer space, as Max Sebald memorably wrote in The Rings of Saturn. Yet Waldheim hid his service to horror in the Nazi Party and Wehrmacht.

Many Austrians did. Its musical traditions and legacy of high culture were convenient covers. After 1945, the Salzburg Festival, one of the leading musical festivals of the world, promoted a cultured image of Austrians. It concealed their complicity in a dark past. Jelinek would smash the cultured clichés of that deceit.

She was herself a childhood musical prodigy within Austria’s high culture of music. Her mother urged her to excellence, too intensely. In early adulthood, she suffered crippling anxiety. She abandoned a career as a musical performer. She isolated herself and took up writing. Initially, poetry was a form of therapy. But she found writing became her means to challenge the high art, high culture pretence of Austria that had almost captured her. She decided to smash the language of Austrian deceit that was a ‘cog in the machine of forgetting’.

After recovering from anxiety, she set her new course as a radical writer.  From the late 1960s, she became more politically engaged. While she broke from the aristocratic world of the Salzburg Festival, she refused to play along with the anodyne replacement of American pop culture. In 1974 she joined the Communist Party and remained in the Party until 1991. She drew on Austria’s literary tradition of critique. Writers like Musil, Krause, Thomas Bernhard, and the Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti, influenced her. But Jelinek devised her own unique way, in her words, to “smash language, to strip it to the bone, to tear the last bits of truth out of it, to rip open its chest.”

Themes and Style of Jelinek’s Writing

Jelinek wrote about three dimensions of her historical experience. She exposed remnants of Austria's fascist past in public and private life. She excoriated how capitalist consumer society commodified all human beings and relationships. She critiqued the exploitation and oppression of women in a patriarchal society.

Together these themes presented a savage critique of the ‘indecency of human relations’ in post-war Austria and the post-war West. It is a critique of both elites and ‘ordinary people’. Jelinek offers no consolation that Art or High Culture can redeem suffering. She presents no comfortably numb lies that cheap, commercial entertainment can conceal the crimes, violence, and horrors of humanity.

Jelinek’s project demanded a style that shook the reader out of the dreams of the end of history. She wrote in an idiomatic dialect of Austrian-German, in defiance of the Anglo-American new world order. It challenges translators, and Elfriede herself has joked her style may be “incomprehensible even in Germany”. It has puns, digressions, localisms, and references to political history.

But I found the recent translations effective in converting this smashed language into contemporary literary English. After all, many others in the modernist, post-modernist, and post-post-modernist ages have sought to strip language bare. Her style reminded me of the musical rants of Jelinek’s fellow Austrian playwright and novelist, Thomas Bernhard. 

Her style is maximalist. It breaks from Beckett’s minimalism, and Hemingway’s commercially successful economy. It is rich, full of allusions, obsessed with wordplay, and relies on good translations. It goes against Anglo-American editing orthodoxy. But if you settle in for the ride, it is a thrilling performance. Think of it as a vibrant, savage, playful monologue written by a brilliant playwright and social critic, who aims to smash complacent clichés that betray the secret agreement between past generations and ourselves. That is, think of it as the prose of Elfriede Jelinek.

But be prepared for violence, sadism, sex, cruelty. and the dead. Be prepared for a writer who will take no excuses that we are just ordinary people. In Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Jelinek wrote

“De Sade says you must commit crimes. In using the word crime we're adopting the consensus term, though among ourselves we would not describe any of our actions as such. We need the universally valid norm to get a kick out of our own extremeness. We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people, but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils.”

And be prepared for the comforting simplifications - that we all read every day in every media and need just to live and to get through the night - to be ruthlessly mocked, torn and burned. As the Swedish Academy representative said at the presentation ceremony, honouring this feminist radical in the company of Swedish royalty:

“Elfriede Jelinek deliberately opens her work to the clichés that flood the news media, advertising and popular culture—the collective subconscious of our time. She manipulates the codes of pulp literature, comics, soap operas, pornography and folkloristic novels [Heimatsroman, which is more like ‘homeland stories’ in German], so that the inherent madness in these ostensibly harmless consumer phenomena shines through. She mimics the prejudices we would never admit to, and captures, hidden behind common sense, a poisonous mumble of no origin or address: the voice of the masses.”

Jelinek warns the world about that “poisonous mumble” still today. It is the breath of the monster she heard for the demonstration in February 2024.

Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

Jelinek’s earliest and best-known work in English is The Piano Teacher. It is best known because it won book-of-the-year awards and was turned into a film with Isabelle Huppert in 2001.

The novel is a loosely autobiographical psychodrama about a repressed, middle-aged piano teacher who yearns to be dominated by a jockish pupil. The abusive and abused piano teacher has failed in the games of Austrian high culture. In compensation, she becomes caught up in sado-masochistic, self-destructive, and voyeuristic sexual practices.

I have not read the book nor watched the film. Its subject is not really my style. Yet I felt the chill of Jelinek’s mockery in this brief passage, in which the piano teacher laments the decay of high culture (a nostalgic sentiment the Burning Archive sometimes succumbs to):

“Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.”

― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

Jelinek, The Children of the Dead

But I have read a fair sample of Jelinek’s magnum opus, The Children of the Dead.

The publisher described this book as:

"a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria [...]. Concocted from experimental theatre, splatter film, Gothic literature, philosophy, religion, and more, Jelinek’s phantasmagorical masterwork is a fierce confrontation with our fraught legacies in the name of the innocent dead.”

To my ear, this blurb sounds like a lurid pitch to the pulp-fiction American market. Jelinek herself described The Children of the Dead as a “ghost story written in the tradition of the Gothic novel."

It is a remarkable reckoning with the Holocaust, with her culture’s crimes, and humanity’s guilt for its past. The novel’s characters are undead. Their bodies are decomposing. Their minds are displaced. They walk through history, memory, and the memory palace of literature like zombies in a horror film. 

The three primary characters - Gudrun Bichler, Edgar Gstranz and Karin Frenzel - walk through a winter wonderland of scenic tourism in the Austrian Alps, in the southern state of Tyrol. We meet hikers, holidaymakers, and the living dead. We see not sun-kissed snow but fields of waste, garbage, mud, menace, and corpses. The undead are incapable of speech, obsessed with sex, and brutal. They are pressed into encounters with Holocaust victims, and seek to use history’s fodder to breathe new life into their zombie lives. But they fail, and there is no happy ending.

One reviewer wrote of this freak of a novel:

Even by the standards of Jelinek’s own freewheeling fiction, The Children of the Dead can feel unmoored: equal parts exegesis on consumerism, mother-daughter relationships, Heimat (the German concept of the homeland), and elaborate stage directions for a piece of bizarro black-box theatre mounted in hell.

But summer is over for my Northern Hemisphere readers. The winter of Jelinek’s prose may be coming for you?

You can prepare yourself for the winter winds by listening to this theatrical performance of a section of The Children of the Dead here.

You can also seek out the 2022 documentary, Elfriede Jelinek – Die Sprache von der Leine lassen (Elfriede Jelinek – Language Unleashed) by Claudia Müller. The trailer is available on YouTube here.

To live well now in conversation with the past

I write The Burning Archive to seek the wisdom of “living in tune with the mode of a changing world” (Thiruvalluvar). I aim to rescue from the Burning Archive insights, from writers like Jelinek or historians like Emmanuel Todd, which can help you live well in conversation with the past.

You can join that conversation more deeply by becoming a full member of the Burning Archive. 

From November 2024, full members will be able to explore the new Nobel Archive, where I will feature all 121 Nobel Prize winners, with profiles, links, and samples of their work. 

Full members will enjoy deeper dives into the Burning Archive, with shared readings of historical fiction (“read-alongs” like

Simon Haisell

who does this with War and Peace and Wolf Hall), my guides to the best world history books, and our conversations, inspired by literature and history, about how to live in tune with the mode of a changing world.

Please join me to live well now in conversation with the past.