In photographs, she is glamorous and inscrutable. In one from 1970, she perches on a desk at the Austrian Society for Literature, aged 23, peering down at the camera with a mixture of mistrust and apprehension. Time and again, she appears in her Eero Aarnio “bubble chair,” a gift from her mother that became a kind of signature. She goes on TV; she develops a taste for Japanese fashion. In 1988, promoting her forthcoming “anti-porno” Lust, she poses in heels and a knockout suit on a bed at the Hotel Sacher, crossing her legs and smoking a cigarette. In 2004, the year of her Nobel Prize, she is photographed on a Viennese train platform in a pair of high-waisted, playfully elegant pants. But in the photo on her website, she seems at first glance to be absent: a handful of stuffed animals sit propped in the empty bubble chair. It takes a moment to realize that she is, in fact, in the photo—in the background, in another room, her image distorted by the convex glass of the chair, so that she appears as no more than a trick of the light, or a drop of mercury. A joke for the viewer.
For all her elegance, Elfriede Jelinek is the sort of writer who disappears beneath her work—who wears her writing like a mask. She once described her ideal kind of theater as a fashion show, where “the women speak sentences in their clothes.” Hers is a writing built of innumerable screens, of images that may be and do anything, images that may laugh or sneer or kill. Those who meet her often describe their surprise at being faced with the real person. “She has nothing of what appears in her books,” said Isabelle Huppert. “She is very tender, very pale, very beautiful.”
The writing, by contrast, is blistering. The basic features of Elfriede Jelinek’s sensibility had coalesced as early as 1970, the year of her debut, and the year after she left her first period of isolation. She had emerged from a nightmarish childhood saturated with anger, and intoxicated by the freedom she’d found in writing: “I’ll force you all to your knees,” she wrote in a poem from that period: “your dirty muzzles will squawk / out of your faces.” She never lost that first impulse to shock, that first intensity. “My literature will need to be hot like an explosion,” she wrote in another early self-portrait. “It will be like a mushroom cloud, like napalm.”
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In English, she has mostly been ignored. In the last few years, a few small editions of her plays have appeared in translation; in 2021, Fitzcarraldo published her “stage essay” Rein GOLD. None of these books have aroused much attention, certainly nothing like what she gets in German, where she is idolized, vilified, admired, repudiated. In the English-speaking world, she is most widely known by way of Michael Haneke’s film The Piano Teacher (2001), starring Isabelle Huppert, which was adapted from her novel of the same name. The last time she was discussed with any sustained interest was around 2006, when the translation of her novel Greed appeared, her first book in English after winning the Nobel Prize. That book was received without enthusiasm. The reviewer for the New York Review of Books called it “unreadable” and recalled “not a single moment of pleasure turning its pages, not a single insight that impressed.” The Telegraph called it “atrocious.” Nicolas Spice, the publisher of the London Review of Books, was more sympathetic, blaming a “disaster” of a translation and writing that “it’s hard to imagine that Jelinek’s reputation in the English-speaking world will ever recover. It would have been better to have left it untranslated.”
The Children of the Dead was published thirty years ago, and was finally released in English last year. At this point, the book’s publication in America is like the appearance of a strange comet on the horizon. Though the book is invariably described as her magnum opus, it has never been popular, even among her works. When it came out in German, the prevailing response was one of baffled awe; it gained a reputation for difficulty verging on unreadability. The English translation was under contract at least as early as 2007. And here, finally, it is, landing in an America hardly any readier to receive it than was the Austria of the ‘90s. Thankfully, the book is strong and sinuous enough that it might nevertheless reach a few receptive readers, hidden away like beetles in the crevices of the culture.
The Children of the Dead is a zombie novel. It takes place in the Austrian alps, at a hotel called the Alpenrose, where three people, named Gudrun Bichler, Edgar Gstranz, and Karin Frenzel, have been awoken from death, doomed for a certain term to wander around the hotel, climb in the mountains, have sex with each other, and die over and over again. They are doubled, displaced, erased, tortured. The events of one chapter may be forgotten by the time the next one pulls itself out of the mud.
The novel comprises a constant stream of new events, and yet the events themselves are almost irrelevant. They exist for the sake of accumulation, to build up mass, like the deluge of earth that buries the whole setting at the end of the story. To name a few: A bus, in which Karin Frenzel and her mother have joined a group for an outing, plunges off a cliff, killing Karin. Gudrun, a philosophy student who has slit her wrists rather than fail her exams, peeps in at the keyhole of her own door, where she watches herself having sex with Edgar. Edgar gets into an accident in slow motion. Two forester’s sons shoot each other to death using hunting rifles filled with water (and also, unfortunately, with bullets). Karin’s bus plunges off the road (again). The forester’s sons, now dead, have sex with Gudrun. Later, they have sex with each other. Edgar rots into the grass. Gudrun is raped by a crowd of the undead.
Gudrun and Edgar are visible, at the start of the book, to the living hotel guests, who simply ignore them, or call them by the wrong names, or wonder whether that could really be the skier Edgar Gstranz, whose death they were sure they’d seen announced in the newspapers. “One can’t just blurt out, aren’t you dead, Herr Gstranz, it would be too embarrassing to publicly admit such an obvious error.” Soon Gudrun and Edgar have become completely transparent. Karin meets a clone of herself in a deep ravine. In the end, she is visible to everyone except her mother, and she ascends to the ceiling and starts spinning like a fan.
The book makes no attempt to produce a well-ordered plot, in which cause would nestle up neatly against effect. Jelinek throws events onto the canvas like globs of paint. And yet the novel operates on its own strange yet fastidious formal principle. The hotel, this picturesque alpine hideaway, is crucial, since it has been chosen as the unlikely setting for this extended séance, in which all Austria’s sins are to be unearthed and held up to the light. Similarly, the protagonists’ deadness is crucial (dead characters appear as a motif in many of Jelinek’s works): they exist on a different metaphysical plane from the hotel guests (though not on a different physical one) and are not bound by the strictures of causality. Instead, they can only repeat: they live out “a repetition compulsion, like a melody you can’t get out of your head.” And they are, as becomes clear, only an advance guard for the many dead of Austria’s history, among them the victims of the Holocaust. “The infinite millions who are also dead no eyes have ever seen,” Jelinek writes. “How come only three of us have passed this test until now? One dead soul might not be enough to speak for so many. Where are they all? It must be no less than all.”
What binds this maelstrom together is the energy of Jelinek’s prose, which is ferocious and unpredictable, packed to bursting with puns and allusions and Austrianisms, unwaveringly sharp yet rarely totally coherent. Jelinek’s habitual term for her characters is Sprachflächen, linguistic surfaces, and this descriptor applies equally well to almost everything in her books: everything is as if scratched across a wide, barren surface, like the harsh lines of a Cy Twombly painting. These characters and landscapes could disappear any moment. “No, I don’t want to get to know you,” she writes in an essay on theater. “Goodbye.” If something exists, it is because Jelinek allows it to—because she wills it into language. And one always has the feeling that the high tension toward which she stretches her prose is unsustainable, that something, sooner or later, has to snap—which, in fact, it usually does.
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Jelinek’s books are all, in one way or another, attacks on conventionality—revolts against the habits and assumptions of “plain” realism, or against the arch complacency with which Austrian, capitalist society rolls along, spouting its clichés. The aesthetic values of nineteenth century realism, among them the imperative to careful plotting or sensitive description, are made irrelevant; the jeweler’s kits of Tolstoy or George Eliot are replaced with more muscular machinery. “[Reality] always has to be described wrongly, there’s no other way,” she wrote in her Nobel speech, “but so wrongly that anyone who reads or hears it notices the falseness immediately.” Her way of accomplishing this has shifted dramatically over the years—and yet this principle, this tactical, polemical anti-realism, has remained firm. In The Children of the Dead, no part of which could be mistaken for a portrait of reality, we encounter this principle in an advanced, almost decadent form. But even in the earlier works, many of which appear superficially to be lifelike and plausible, we find it just as clearly.
Her first public success came with the publication of her third novel, Women as Lovers (1975). The novel concerns two women, Brigitte and Paula, both lower-class, whose love stories play out in parallel, never touching. They are defined, body and soul, by their men. Brigitte loves Heinz, Paula loves Erich. Heinz, unfortunately, is more interested in bourgeoise Susi, who doesn’t give him the time of day; Erich just loves his moped. We learn little about these characters that would turn them into living people. In rhythm and structure, the book is like a fable. The prologue and epilogue set the tone: “do you know this BEAUTIFUL land with its hills and valleys?” The characters are barely alive. They are like shadow puppets, like the outlines of people. They are part of the landscape.
We learn, more than anything, what they want. Brigitte wants to marry Heinz, so that later, when he owns an electronics business, she can work in the shop, raise the kids, and be rich. This fantasy eclipses any love she feels for him: she soon hates Heinz, but still needs desperately to marry him. Paula, meanwhile, just wants to be loved. And indeed, both women eventually marry their men and have children. But Paula, to escape her poverty, begins turning tricks, hoping, perhaps, to save money for an apartment with Erich (whom she loves). One day, she is discovered. She loses both marriage and children. Brigitte, on the other hand, keeps her life, in which she hates Heinz and is rich. Brigitte wins, Paula loses.
It is almost surprising that The Children of the Dead and Women as Lovers were written by the same author. Women as Lovers has little of Children’s verbal flare, its glittering streams; it proceeds, instead, by rough strokes of a butcher’s knife. Jelinek conjures her two heroines in order to pin them to a corkboard and annihilate them. At times, the prose becomes so forceful as to resemble a kind of agitprop. Excerpts from Women as Lovers formed the text for a Jenny Holzer projection in 2006: “they sew. they sew foundations, brassieres, sometimes corsets and panties too. often these women marry or they are ruined some other way,” read the blocky letters on the wall. Or again, as we hear it expressed at the beginning of the novel: “if someone has a fate, then it’s a man, if someone gets a fate, then it’s a woman.”
The sexual politics on display in Women as Lovers, and in other of Jelinek’s works like Lust and Greed, are remarkably reminiscent of Andrea Dworkin’s. The two were of the same generation. Dworkin too thought of her writing in incendiary terms: she wanted to write “as if my books were complex explosives, mine fields set down in the culture to blow open the status quo.” The patriarchal culture, she wrote in her debut Woman Hating, published the year before Women as Lovers, “possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow of sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to natural desire.” That culture is the deep soil of Women as Lovers; its flowers are named Paula and Brigitte.
Both Dworkin and Jelinek have often been smeared as termagants and man-haters, jealous freaks unable to overcome their own resentments. This kind of response is everywhere, as if there were no subtler way to respond to these writers’ provocations. But the point, of course, is to force a reaction—to detonate the bomb. When she was writing Lust, Jelinek told the press that she was working on a “feminine porno,” a counternarrative to Bataille’s Story of the Eye. When the book was finished, she admitted that she’d failed. The promised book had proven impossible to write, she said, because a feminine language of pornography does not, cannot exist. “Pornography,” as Dworkin wrote, “incarnates male supremacy… Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into.” And this was exactly what Jelinek had written into her novel. Lust is a brutal inventory of a rural factory director’s abuses of his wife. It became a bestseller.
It’s not hard to see what rankles people about Jelinek. Her books, practically by design, produce bad feelings. “To read Jelinek,” writes Rhian Sasseen, “is to find oneself confronted with the liberating realization that a book can be ugly—as ugly as the world it describes.” These books are not pleasant. And Jelinek is, in one respect, even more extreme than Dworkin: unlike Dworkin she sees no exit at all. “The cynicism,” Jelinek told an interviewer, “comes from despair at the fact that one can apprehend the conditions but not change them. One can’t intervene… My literature is likely too pessimistic and too decadent. This is why the left regards it with such mistrust. I simply don’t write optimistically, nor revolutionarily, as is perhaps expected of me.”
These are brash, domineering books; it is easy to assume that they issue from a pure, stone-hearted anger. And yet, as always, anger is only the external, active face of a deeper well of unhappiness. A great loneliness permeates this writing. That is, if Jelinek writes the false to expose falseness, the unreal to access the real, she writes also, implicitly, to lament that the world is not otherwise—to bewail the conspiracy by which everyone everywhere consents to the reproduction of reality. In such a world, the writer can only stand apart, as a solitary witness. “How can the writer know reality,” she wrote in her Nobel speech, “if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines. There is no place for him there. His place is always outside.”
This loneliness is most visible in Jelinek’s most famous, most conventional book, The Piano Teacher (1983). It is the only of her books that is explicitly autobiographical, and the only one that takes much interest in its characters’ psychologies. It, too, has a hard shell—it is as ruthless as any of her books—but it is also a document of incredible solitude.
The Piano Teacher draws heavily on the material of Jelinek’s childhood. She was born in 1946, to a Jewish father who had narrowly survived the war, and who spent much of her youth in an asylum; and to a domineering mother, bent on pushing her daughter into the cultural stratosphere. Music, in Vienna, was the great vector of social distinction; consequently, Elfriede’s childhood was dedicated to grueling practice on the piano, leading to her admission at age 13 to the Vienna Conservatory: she studied piano, organ, flute, violin, viola, guitar, and composition, all on top of her already quite ambitious coursework as a regular Gymnasium student. She had virtually no friends. As a teenager she began cutting herself, and developed the phobias that would intensify over the course of her life. Her composition teacher described her as “a victim of a failed upbringing.”
At 21 she had a breakdown, and for two years she never left the house. When she emerged, she had found a home for herself in language. She sent a few pieces to the contests for poetry and prose at the Innsbruck Youth Culture Week, where two independent juries awarded her first prize. And a year later she made her novelistic debut.
The Piano Teacher is about a Jelinek who never left music. Erika Kohut is a failed concert pianist, a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, with a sadomasochistic relationship to her mother and a drawerful of deviant habits and desires. She visits peep shows and spies on couples having sex in the park. We watch over her shoulder as she puts a razor blade through her flesh, as she tears out her mother’s hair, as she continually finds new ways to deepen her estrangement from herself. At the peep shows, “all Erika wants to do is watch. Here, in this booth, she becomes nothing.”
Desire is a kind of natural death trap. Erika begins an affair with Walter Klemmer, a charming student of hers, but holds him at a distance. In the bathroom of a school, she masturbates him, but only at arm’s length. Finally, at the climax of the novel, she attempts to close the gap by an act of writing. She writes him a letter in which she details her extremest desires (though she secretly hopes he will ignore them out of love). When he doesn’t open the letter on his own, she forces him to read it in her apartment. He should “hogtie her, bind her up as thoroughly as he can, solidly, intensely, artfully, cruelly, tormentingly, cunningly… Erika’s letter says she wants to be dimmed out under him, snuffed out.” He leaves in disgust. A few days later he returns, locks Erika’s mother into the bedroom, and brutalizes Erika just outside.
This is the solitude to be found in Jelinek’s work: the solitude of the destroyed and disillusioned. It is possible to read The Piano Teacher as a kind of extended self-deprecating joke—a joke that is funny the way Kafka stories, seen the right way, are pretty funny. Jelinek was frank in interviews about the book’s autobiographical basis. So: if I am brought low, almost extinguished, left irrevocably alone, and if I write about it—if I portray myself as an obsessive and a voyeur who wants to be tied up and raped, in a book that I know will become famous—have I come out ahead? Well, obviously not; but maybe, also, yes: ha ha.
Or maybe the joke is on the critic, whose instinct is to pry, to ask how much Erika Kohut resembles her creator. If the book is autobiographical, then how much of this really happened? But the question is meaningless, even when asked of tamer books. Ironically, the alternately frigid and hysterical reception with which her books are greeted reproduces the dynamic at work in the scene with the letter. The critic (Walter Klemmer) wants to love this woman, wants to possess her: she should please us, she should offer herself up. As long as she doesn’t take it too far! In that case she will have to be punished.
Perhaps it’s best to read The Piano Teacher, and indeed all of Jelinek’s novels, as horror stories. The Children of the Dead is unusual among her novels in that the horror takes a form that is literally supernatural. In the others, the sense of horror derives from the weight of social reality, which presses in until there’s no longer space to breathe, and the people get crushed.
Jelinek is continually drawn to the victims of this process, those flattened by the descending sky. There’s Paula, who was the subject of several short texts before her appearance in Women as Lovers. Likewise, Greed concerns the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl by a policeman, who uses her for sex and dumps her body in a lake.
Among the most interesting of these victims in Jelinek’s work is Ulrike Meinhof, co-leader of the Red Army Faction (RAF), herself a fascinating historical figure, and a perfect avatar for Jelinek’s political sensibility: militant, hyperverbal, ultimately doomed. The terror campaigns of the RAF were, for many Germans and Austrians of Jelinek’s generation, the defining political experience of their youths. Ulrike Meinhof worked as a journalist for the left-wing magazine konkret until 1969, and then joined with the RAF, with whom she took part in a string of bank robberies and bombings. At the end of a two-year manhunt, she was arrested, set to stand trial, and ultimately found hanged by a rope in her cell. (Incredibly, there was a moment in 1970 when Meinhof, actively on the run, crashed in Berlin with Jelinek’s future boyfriend Gert Loschütz, who for a few days, as he later wrote, played “bread-buyer and coffee-maker for the revolution.”)
Meinhof haunts Jelinek’s oeuvre like a familiar spirit. Jelinek’s play Wolken.Heim. (1988) is saturated with the language of the RAF, spliced with the language of German idealism. In 2008, Jelinek wrote an introduction to a collection of Meinhof’s writings. And in 2006 she made Meinhof the subject of a play, Ulrike Maria Stuart (still untranslated), in which Meinhof and her RAF co-leader Gudrun Ensslin are recast as the battling queens, Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, from Schiller’s play Maria Stuart.
The play is explosive. It is written in the associative, kaleidoscopic style Jelinek had already perfected in works like Sports Play and The Children of the Dead. Meinhof, Ensslin, and a handful of unnamed figures, speak in ghostly tones, as if already long decayed, and simply returned to split any remaining hairs and talk themselves into a second death. “I would like,” Jelinek wrote in the author’s note at the start of the published text, “that the beauty or loftiness of ideals gradually leave us, until even irony, in the end, disappears (which it does anyway).” She ends her preface on a high note: “They should waltz around in their own shit! So then.”
Ulrike, in the play, ends in resignation and dissolution: “I only want to sleep, sleep sleep sleep…” She dissolves in repetition, a shell of a person, resigned to being laid down in a tomb that will be “made of concrete, like everything, like these walls, this sky, this hell.” No doubt Jelinek had read the poem the historical Meinhof wrote during her final days in prison: “The feeling your head is exploding…/ The feeling your spinal column is pressing into your brain— /…/ The feeling of being in a room of distorting mirrors— / staggering— / … / The feeling of being flayed.”
Meinhof’s writings have a disconcerting immediacy about them, a kind of impatience, as if every moment wasted were a blow to the revolution. They bear witness to a historical experience that is practically unique—a militant revolt in the post-war metropole, a style of radicalism that all but died out after the mid-’70s, when groups like the RAF and the Weather Underground flared up like dry kindling, and were just as quickly doused. “The way Meinhof was destroyed,” Jelinek wrote in her introduction to Meinhof’s writing, “within and by the group she had joined and that had become her life, in a situation that seemed to offer no route but suicide by hanging—this remains incomprehensible to me, as does any suicide. Terrifying and tragic, but also a missed opportunity for society to learn from this woman when she still had something to say that we could understand if only we wanted to.”
Ulrike Maria Stuart reflects on its subject with equal parts admiration and scorn. She is a figure both for the glamor of resistance and for its melancholy, its ultimate futility. It is perhaps representative of Jelinek’s own stance toward politics: active but hopeless. For seventeen years, Jelinek was a member of and de facto spokesperson for the Austrian communist party, an organization already then essentially defunct. Until her retreat from public life after the Nobel Prize, she had made herself a well-known figure in Austrian politics, though never, of course, with Meinhof’s radicalism. Her play Burgtheater caused an uproar in Austria for its critique of Paula Wessely, then a beloved screen actress, who had made her living during the war by appearing in Nazi propaganda films. In retaliation for her campaigning against Jörg Haider, the leader of the far-right FPÖ, she was made the subject of a political advertisement: “Do you love Jelinek… or do you love art and culture?”
All the same, in the face of the genocide in Gaza, Jelinek has placed herself, dismayingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, on the side of Israel. One might have hoped that this political outsider, usually so perspicacious, would have found the means to see through the fog of consensus covering most of the German-speaking world, according to which the only crimes visible in the region are those of Hamas, the only story the one told by the Israeli state. Isn’t it strange that a writer who has written so long and so well about her country’s unwillingness to face its genocide is unable to recognize when that country, in lockstep with Germany and the US, is abetting another? “This Germany is a death land indeed,” she wrote in Rein GOLD. But perhaps it ought to be unsurprising: perhaps she is simply too much of her own place and time. “Thus,” as she wrote in her eulogy of the older Austrian giant Thomas Bernhard, expressing a judgment which might just as well be applied to her, “Bernhard affirms society exactly in that he criticizes it…that society which has long since become the content of his life.”
Jelinek’s works are, politically speaking, more compelling than their author. It is hard to think of another novel that expresses the sadism and sexual brutality of the Holocaust, the interweaving of public and private violence, as starkly as The Children of the Dead. “If the root is sacred, why not also the branches?” Jelinek writes. “Or the raised arms of a people raving that it grew, like a tree, over the other peoples?” Countless times, throughout the novel, our protagonists are murdered, dismembered, disemboweled, raped. How different, really, is such writing from the reality we see every day on our screens? When we see the videos of children’s disembodied heads, or read the reports of mass graves and of Palestinian prisoners being anally raped with heated rods, can we help wondering where such brutality comes from, and how it can be represented? Can we help thinking that there must be some thread between Auschwitz and Sde Teiman?
We are witnessing Jelinek’s “repetition compulsion” in real time. In November of 2023, Jelinek published an essay that, were it not sprinkled with lines confirming her allegiance (she equates the Hamas attack with the Nazi invasion of Poland) might be read as a moving reflection on the genocide of the Palestinians, on the spectacle of horror to which all the world has borne witness: “Basically, all one can do is write around this blank of the unspeakable… Ash, scattered over all of us, until the wind blows it apart. Blowing away above our heads. We only see the black smoke getting blown away and horror is all that is left.”
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In a private rehearsal video, write Verena Mayer and Roland Koberg in their biography of Jelinek, her most prized collaborator, the director Einar Schleef, can be heard telling his actors that Jelinek’s ideological statements can be thrown into the trash, but that nevertheless she is “a prophet.” As much as this statement appears to describe a paradox (what good is a prophet who’s wrong?), it nevertheless captures something important about Jelinek’s power. We ask of our prophets not that we agree with them, but that they startle us—that they shake us out of our complacency. They are people, as Susan Sontag wrote of Simone Weil, “who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity.”
Jelinek’s books are, clearly, extreme. And yet the force of her writing comes at least as much from the volatility of the language as it is from the extremity of the content. “Only what [the writer] says from the outside can be taken up inside, and that because he speaks ambiguities,” she wrote in her Nobel speech. These ambiguities grow more pronounced as her work matures. More than a few critics have found her later novels and plays completely inscrutable. She is like a fortune teller who reads only a riddle from the tea leaves. One is reminded of the oracle at Delphi, whose visions were said to issue from a quirk of the geology: the oracle breathed vapors from a crack in the cavern rocks, which sent her into an ecstatic frenzy; the priests of the temple translated the resulting glossolalia into well-formed, highly ambiguous hexameters.
In the early ‘70s, at the beginning of her career, Kathy Acker experimented with a method that might have produced text like Jelinek’s. Between performances of her sex show, relates Chris Kraus, Acker spent nearly all her time writing and sleeping: “I can sleep 16 hours a day after a while the distinction between waking and sleeping consciousness disappeared a semi-controlled continuum in which animals and men resembled each other.” The language of The Children of the Dead is like this: a language of the unconscious, or the semi-conscious. Often a single pun becomes an occasion for a complete change of subject, a hinge that turns the whole narration in a different direction. The one time Ulrike Meinhof appears by name in The Children of the Dead, it is as a pun: “The vanished and those wasted by sports (Ulrike M.!) won’t be missing when we gaze cheery-eyed into the TV screen’s bright glow.” It is a pun on a proper noun: the person “wasted by sports” could be another Ulrike entirely, Ulrike Maier, a champion skier who was killed in a crash on live TV.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to keep one’s attention trained on all these branching streams of prose. Often the ambiguity swells and produces a thick haze of dense language, in which the only thing to do is press forward. Formally, this kind of writing looks back to the experiments of the French surrealists. Certain lines from Breton and Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields (1920), often considered the founding text of surrealism, could be placed almost verbatim into the stream of Jelinek’s prose: “History goes back into the manual… This dish would make an impressive appearance on tables of every description. It’s a pity that we are no longer hungry.”
But Jelinek, in contrast to her predecessors, knows exactly where she wants to go, what she wants her prose to do. Breton and Soupault worked through a loosely controlled randomness, writing The Magnetic Fields in the span of a single euphoric week, without revisions. The innovation of Jelinek’s approach is that it fills the surrealist style with a specific, targeted matter, however polyvalent. For example:
Smug mugs head into the night, where they suck at the black milk of a poet and then spit it into our glasses because one sip of it is already too much for us – a milk that seems to frighten even our curly-haired child Truth, even though this milk is our purest national product when we, on our knees, wish to present something to the European Union.
This text is absurd, associative, dreamlike—true. But this is quite a cutting dream, one that turns Paul Celan (the poet of the “black milk”) into a lactating cow, producing bitter remembrances of the Holocaust for the gratification of EU regulators. The form, in other words, has found a content.
Nearly the whole book is written like this. Only the prologue and the epilogue are written in a marginally more straightforward idiom, presumably with the aim of setting down some hard facts: a tour bus crashes off the road in the Styrian mountains; a hotel and its inhabitants are crushed in a deluge of mud. Between these poles, the language swirls and seethes.
Jelinek called The Children of the Dead “the book I always wanted to write, even needed to.” A look at her later work gives this statement additional weight. All of it is written, in one way or another, using the prose techniques she brought to perfection in The Children of the Dead (and which she had begun developing two years earlier in Oh Wildnis, oh Schutz vor ihr). But the earlier texts are just as illuminating, since they all contain the mutant seeds that finally sprout in Children.
For three years in the 1970s, Jelinek worked on a translation of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The undertaking was “a fiasco,” the rights to the translation were returned, and her work was passed to another translator, Thomas Piltz, for completion (though the final product retained her punning title, Die Enden der Parabel—“the ends of the parabola/parable”). But her collision with Pynchon left its mark on her work. “For three years I really worked eight hours a day translating this fat book of his, Gravity’s Rainbow. It is, in my opinion, one of the best books that has ever been written.” She praised him as “the author of paranoid global conspiracy,” who, “with a precision like few others before him, spoke of the naturalness of great commercial ventures (everything is connected, any one thing is connected with any other…).”
It is this consciousness of universal interconnection that gives The Children of the Dead its immense, horrible force. This is one way to understand the novel’s formal conceit: that the whole weight of death can come crashing in through the smallest, least significant opening, even a little hotel in the mountains; that in the end nothing, no matter how innocent, escapes this reckoning; that nothing escapes the civilizational rot that produced both the Holocaust and its repression in memory; that we will all one day sink under a deluge of mud. The everyday and the historical are forever bound together, no matter how much we might like to forget it.
“Language,” Jelinek once told an interviewer, “pulls me along behind it, like a dog pulling its owner along on a leash, sniffing at every corner.” In Women as Lovers and Lust and The Piano Teacher and Ulrike Maria Stuart, the dog sniffs here and there, explores a street or a park or a patch of forest: these works are each, principally, about one thing, or a handful of things. But The Children of the Dead, difficult and incoherent as it may be, goes everywhere—it is a book about everything.
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Now, after thirty years, we have it in English. And how does it look? There’s a good case to be made that this is the least translatable German book of the last century. (Perhaps it loses out to Bottom’s Dream by Arno Schmidt, the “German Finnegan’s Wake,” which finally appeared in English in 2016, 46 years after it was published.) By necessity, Gitta Honegger’s translation is not particularly literal. There are countless sharp moments in the original that might have been better rendered in English. And often, perhaps unavoidably, the English differs significantly from the German in tone. To take an example at random: “Geschlechtszipfel”—literally “sexual tips,” mischievous but stately—arrives in English as “weenies.”
Honegger’s influence is visible throughout the text: she changes proper nouns and cultural references, invents new puns to replace the ones that don’t carry, and introduces her own little asides, as if poking her head in through the window. “After the exploration of his behind, which gets fucktified by big brother in ways that defy translation, the little one, when it’s his turn, may also let go and scatter himself onto the barn floor as fodder for eternity” (italics mine).
Sometimes this kind of thing can get annoying, but it’s probably fine that Honegger had a little fun. After all, it’s something of a tradition, among interpreters of Jelinek’s work, to confront and repudiate the author: one of the most successful stagings of her plays, the 1995 production of Raststätte oder Sie Machens Alle by Einar Schleef, featured a massive sex doll with the head of Elfriede Jelinek, that was slowly undressed on stage. (Jelinek was thrilled.)
Ultimately, the important thing about this translation is that it, unlike the “disastrous” Chalmers translation of Greed, has legs—it works as a piece of literature. The pleasures it produces are different, perhaps, from the German, but they are real nevertheless.
In 1984, talking of her obsession with Pynchon, Jelinek told an interviewer that she thought “the most significant contemporary literature [was] being produced in the US.” The grass, I suppose, is always greener. W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, two other postwar Germanophone literary giants, have already exerted a huge influence on American letters. Hopefully Jelinek, sooner or later, will join them. The Children of the Dead will never reach very many readers, but maybe it will reach the right ones. It seems about time that we became, as readers and writers, more combative: hot like an explosion, like a mushroom cloud, like napalm.
Carl Denton
Carl Denton is a writer based in Boston.