Eye on the Big Ones: the Fearless Bathurst and Bohemian Woman Bathurst - Ford v Holden; Stockholm - Far-Right v Jelinek and her musical flow of voices and counter-voices
Until this morning, not many Australians knew that a woman called Elfriede Jelinek existed. James Cumes being one of the rare exceptions as he is aware of her ability to reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.
Elfriede Jelinek, is an avant-garde Austrian-Czech author and dramatist known for politicized prose that stabs at social convention and sexual oppression.
Jelinek means a Stag, or a Deer, in Slavic.
Without any doubt the Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire. In her home country, Elfriede Jelinek is a controversial figure who sharply criticized the 2000 government that included the far-right Freedom Party. Austria was slapped with European Union sanctions for seven months because of the party's inclusion in the government.
At the time, she banned performances of her plays in Austria. She said of the rise of the rightists:
I tried to work against it as soon as I saw it. But thank God, the rightists are not as strong any more.
Although her plays once again can be seen in Austria, Jelinek said she had mixed feelings toward her homeland.
It's a love for Vienna and for a few other places. But I have no patriotism for this country.
The prize includes a check of more than $1.3 million, which Jelinek said would give her peace to work.
The biggest luxury is simply to write what one wants to write.
Jelinek, a translator by trade, conceded her works are very difficult to translate because of her use of musical alliteration and might be difficult for foreigners to understand. But all her work, she said, is focused on revealing truth.
I am trying to demythologize. I try to give things their history back, to not tolerate hypocrisy, to force the language to tell the truth.
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Elfriede Jelinek’s heroine Erika Kohut (Kohut means Rooster in Czech) in The Piano Teacher takes a fall because she has not been able to develop emotionally and looks at relationships only in physical terms. This is not a relevant point, not least because the reason for Erika’s trauma is the emotional content lacking in her relationship with her mother; it is not begotten of her voyeurism or the sex shops she visits. The problem lies not in the act of watching pornography but in a troubled life that forces her to look at pornography in a certain way. In Erika’s case, pornography and physical gratification assume a primary function simply because something else has happened that should not have happened.
Jelinek described Erika's as the story of the unraveling of one of the women who carry on their backs, who carry to term, the high culture that Austria so idolizes. The unlived sexuality expressed in voyeurism: a woman who cannot partake in life or in desire. Even the right to watch is a masculine right: The woman is always the one who is watched, never the one who watches. In that respect, to express it psychoanalytically, we are dealing here with a phallic woman who appropriates the male right to watch and who therefore pays for it with her life.