Austria and Elfriede Jelinek

[Otto]

Europa: Honors for Austrians, but with a dark lining
by Richard Bernstein, International Herald Tribune, Friday, November 12,
2004

 "(...) The biggest attention-getter was, of course, the Nobel Prize in
Literature, awarded to Elfriede Jelinek, who became only the second Austrian
writer to win that particular prize. Elias Canetti was the first, but he was
not really Austrian, or he was Austrian in the adoptive sense, and while he
lived many years in Vienna, Austria was not really his subject. Jelinek, by
contrast, wrote about Austria with what many Austrians feel was a poisoned
pen, penetrating to its dark heart, its invisible worm.
.
She gave an interview to a German newspaper this week in which she said
that, as long as there were writers like Thomas Pynchon around, it seemed a
bit strange to her that it was she who got the prize.
.
The mixed feelings about her prize among her fellow Austrians came from a
different source, namely that in giving the prize to her, the Swedish
Academy rewarded someone who was paradoxically both somewhat obscure and
also widely resented as a merciless critic of her own country. She was known
as a nestbeschmutzerin, a woman who bespoils her own nest, not the sort of
label that inspires unalloyed national pride.
.
"She's been a great observer of the petty-minded bourgeois environment,"
said Konrad Paul Lissmann, a professor of philosophy at Vienna University,
explaining the background to the national ambivalence about Jelinek.
"According to her, Austria has not confronted its past," Lissmann continued,
referring in part to Jelinek's virulent criticism of Austria's conservative
government, especially its willingness to have the far-right
anti-immigration Freedom Party of Jörg Haider as part of its governing
coalition.
.
"Above all," Lissmann said, "she deals with questions of sexuality, and she
approaches the topic in a very radical fashion." Her most celebrated book,
"The Piano Player," dissects and exposes the pathological and powerfully
sadomasochistic relationship between a mother and a daughter, stand-ins,
people who know Jelinek say, for herself and her own mother.
.
"Elfrieda Jelinek was hated," Hans Rauscher, a columnist for Der Standard,
one of Austria's two quality dailies, said more simply. "Art, for Austrians,
is beautiful music, beautiful paintings, beautiful theater experiences, and
we don't like to be disturbed. We want to live in a blessed little island."
.
In a way, you could see the Nobel for Jelinek and the beatification as
elements of a strange sort of moral equilibrium, a zero-sum game in which
Karl symbolizes the blessed little island and Jelinek the sexually graphic
Cassandra who says it's no island and it's not blessed.
.
"Jelinek stands for a type of intellectualism that is provocative and causes
resentment," Lissman said. "The Hapsburgs stand for the past that is
cherished and pampered."
 (...)"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/11/news/europa.html