Elfriede Jelinek: To Cast an Incorruptible Gaze
24. September 2009 15:16
Marie Rivière: This is the first time that a work of yours has been adapted for the screen. What made you decide to let Michael Haneke go ahead with the project?
Elfriede Jelinek: For a long time I hesitated to give permission for a film adaptation, because my prose works are so language-oriented. That is, the images are created in and are transmitted through language. I couldn't imagine that film images could add anything essential. But I always knew that I only would work with a director like Haneke, who can juxtapose his own canon of images with the text.
MR: Like Michael Haneke, you are Austrian, and like him, you have constantly explored the dark, the monstrous side of the human heart. Should we see a strong connection in this?
EJ: That is another cliché. But it is true that we are not particularly "light" individuals - artistically, I mean. I, like Haneke, in so far as I know his work, am better able to criticize society from a negative perspective. Precisely because even the positive clichés in our
country are so stifling, I sought to take what it most prides itself on, its music and musical geniuses, and present their negative side: the renunciation by hundreds of female piano teachers of their libido.
MR: You were brought up by a tyrannical, middle-class Catholic mother who dreamed of your becoming a concert pianist, and your father died in a psychiatric institution. To what extent is your novel autobiographical?
EJ: I'd prefer not to answer that, and I'd also prefer my novel not to be seen as autobiographical, although naturally it contains many autobiographical elements. What interests me in a story is its resonance - in this case 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.
MR: How do you explain Erika's insanity?
EJ: She is certainly not insane, not at all. Neurotic, but not insane. As I just tried to explain, this is all the bloody (in the truest sense of the word) consequence of the fact that a woman is not allowed to live if she claims a right that is not hers and that she obtains only in the rarest of cases: artistic fame. The right to choose a man and also to dictate how he tortures her - that is, domination in submission - this she is not permitted. Indeed for a
woman almost everything beyond the bearing and raising of children is a presumption.
MR: You are not particularly easy on women.
EJ: That isn't my role. I seek to cast an incorruptible gaze on women, especially where they are the accomplices of men.
MR: When it was published, certain critics in Austria qualified the novel as pornographic. Were you hurt by this response?
EJ: The novel is the opposite of pornography. Pornography suggests desire everywhere and at every moment. The novel proves that this does not exist, that it is a construct meant to keep women willing, because they are usually pornographic objects anyway, while men
look at them, and can almost penetrate their bodies with their gaze. But I am used to being misunderstood. I am even blamed for what I attempt to analyze in my writing. As so often happens, the messenger is attacked, and not what she expresses. No one is interested in that.
MR: About your characters you have said, "I strike hard so nothing can grow where my characters have been." Is redemption impossible?
EJ: My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically (sarcastically), the horrors of reality. Redemption is the specialty of other authors, male and female. My writing, my method, is based on criticism, not utopianism.
MR: Behind the description of a pathological case, is there not a denunciation of Austria's musical culture, which contributes to your country's identity?
EJ: Yes, precisely. The idolization of high musical culture, which the country lives off, and how it is paid for. (Think how these great masters were often treated in their lifetimes, and how
contemporary artists are treated!) A sort of Hegelian master-servant relationship. High culture is the master, the female piano teachers are the maidservants. They have no right to any creative energy, not even to a life of their own (I suppose I carried this to its extreme in the text).
MR: Would you have made the same musical choices as Michael Haneke?
EJ: We discussed the choice of music beforehand. Anyway most of the pieces are specified in the text.
MR: Just like Michael Haneke with his camera, you wield your pen like a scalpel. Are there similarities in your work?
EJ: That is why Michael Haneke is so well suited to adapt this novel for the screen, because we both proceed analytically and dispassionately, perhaps like scientists studying the life of insects. You see the mechanisms better from a distance than when you are in the middle of them.
From Serpent’s Tail Publishers website.