E. Jelinek and the Immersion Drive

Today I am thinking about Elfriede Jelinek and how she has been positioning herself in the past 15 years as an author, both in her writing and in her public persona.  What I find in Jelinek’s collaborations with Christoph Schlingensief in the first decade of the 21^st century is the desire to have her own authorial voice immersed in a performance and by immersed I mean subsumed – to watch herself disappear.  I have a modest collection of evidence of this “immersive drive” in Jelinek’s recent writing and public appearances.  I admit it is difficult for me to imagine how a public writer or intellectual can maintain a persona that eschews the stable subjectivity that is required for the authorial voice, for authorship, and for critique with an expressed desire for the absorption of her own artistic work.  Perhaps it is for this reason, as Matthias Konzett pointed out (2007), Jelinek has never really possessed the status of other public intellectual/writers. It was not never her desire to be the “conscience of the nation,” during a period of national transformation, like Heinrich Böll or Günther Grass for Germany. In 2000, during Austria’s “quarantine years,” Jelinek was also quite removed from other Austrian Jewish intellectuals, such as Doron Rabinovici and Robert Menasse, both who were very visible in front of the camera and at the journalist’s table in comparison with Jelinek.  In contrast, Jelinek has sought invisibility, not only out of anxiety but also as a conscious desire to step out of her own role.  She was able to accomplish this in her collaborative work with Schlingensief on the Ausländer im Container project in 2000.  Can I call her recent author-intellectual performance a new type of role for a public intellectual?

What I am calling Jelinek’s desire for “immersion” has a fundamentally different function than, for example, taking on the outsider status as a Jewish writer or a Jewish female writer in Austria.  This is the category under which Jelinek has been filed by many scholars, and I think wrongly so. And “outsider” is a somewhat more stable and external identity than what I am describing. An outsider writes from a distance in order to diagnose the symptom of Austrian society and this has a long history in Austrian letters, of course.  At times in the past, Jelinek too seems to have taken on these categories in her public statements to the press inside and outside of Austria, and she has been judged in turn for them as a figure in the Austrian Cultural Wars, as one recent book put it. In the late 20^th century, when Haider’s FPÖ began to use Jelinek’s name in campaign posters from 1995-1997, identifying her derisively as a “state-sponsored critic” (a label transferred to Schlingensief repeatedly during the 2000 Container action), I believe, Jelinek changed tactics and ceased to play the part of the pariah in the Arendtian sense, as she sought a way out of being the public intellectual counterfoil to Haider’s and the Austrian Conservatives’ political narrative.  Her usual response (let us say, her 20^th century response) to neo-liberal backlash was to berate Austria for not overcoming its fascist sickness and to affirm that Austria should “never again” allow atrocities to happen within its borders.  But by the last turn of the century, her typical routine of “national dissent” as Matthias Konzett called it, had to be reexamined.  In an essay about Austria’s 2000 quarantine from the EU, Jelinek wrote of the bind of the public writer intellectual in this political climate of neoliberal clichés that one tries in vain to vigilantly protest. (102) As Haider and the FPÖ continued to construct the narrative of being tanned and sporty, successful “winners” (Jelinek’s words) – “wir aber, wir Künstler, wir Lächerlichen, was sollen wir noch hier?”[1]  For Jelinek in 1999-2000, the picture had triumphed over all other modes. She says that the picture has replaced civilization – though she does not name what she means by civilization, per se, one can assume she includes in that definition of civilization her own business of literature.  The great break of civilization, the Shoah, is similarly thrown out the window to be replaced by mediated image, according to Jelinek.

In Jelinek’s 2003 Bambiland, we see her vision of this cultural shift to mediated image in full force.  In 2004, Jelinek explicitly chose Schlingensief to stage Bambiland, which she wrote as a critique of the medial representation of the war in Iraq and based the title on the story Bambi, by the Viennese Jewish writer, Felix Salten, which is widely regarded by scholars as an allegory of the condition of Jews in early-20^th century Europe.   Bambiland is a text so disorientingly full of disjointed quotes and images from television news coverage that Jelinek’s own authorial voice is nearly completely subsumed into the media jungle she represents. The narrator of Bambiland spells out the conditions of televised war: as viewers, we are like deer in the headlights in a cluttered landscape of simulacra.   The text of Jelinek’s Bambiland already foretells the act of immersion and subsumption: the reader has the sense that it is impossible to find a point outside the matrix of medial representation of the war from which to stand and view the situation. At the end of the story, when the narrator describes emerging from a trash heap of words and images in order to see the view from above – and she uses a Heideggerian distinction between sein and schein to undermine the truth of the vision: Wir stehen auf dem Gipfel der Betrachtung, schauen um uns, sehen, daß das, was ist, Schein ist,[..]. The reader’s hope for an Archimedean point of reference is further destroyed when Jelinek inserts a line making the desire for clarity almost pornographic, as if one is on the receiving end of sexual penetration: Wir wissen nichts, wir erfahren nichts, wir irren uns, wir fangen von vorn an, wir täuschen uns, wir täuschen andre, wir sind enttäuscht, daß wir noch nicht gewonnen haben.  […] Na endlich spritzt der ab. Ich hab schon geglaubt, er kommt überhaupt nicht mehr. So. Jetzt ist auch das erledigt.

Schlingensief’s adaptation of Bambiland removed Jelinek as an author even farther away by using almost nothing of her text in the production. The only direct quote from Jelinek came from a computerized voice reciting Bambiland on repeat.  Schlingensief’s chaotic production, which staged every conceivable sensory association related to Jelinek’s Bambiland, also failed to produce an analytical standpoint from which to critique the Iraq war, its media representation, and even Jelinek’s text itself.  And it would seem Jelinek chose this path for her text.  Asked why she chose Schlingensief, Jelinek told Die Bühne in 2003 that Schlingensief was the only director who was both political and subversive enough “so dass man über das Eigene etwas Neues erfährt” (Bühne 12/2003, p. 17).

And in Schlingensief’s production, Jelinek the person played the voyeur to her own literary irrelevance while her text was subsumed in the imagery of Schlingensief’s “splatter film” type performance.  In 2004, Morgan Koerner recounts how he sat in the audience of the Schlingensief adaptation of Bambiland and writes that, shortly before the start of the performance, he witnessed Jelinek sit in one of the ground floor box seats before the start time.  Schlingensief, onstage setting up props before the show, smiled and waved to her and continued to set up his show.  Subsequently, very little of Jelinek’s text was used in the production, while images of her and the symbology of her work were occasionally thrown up on the screen in a chaotic sequence devoid of obvious meaning.

When Jelinek gives over a piece of text to Schlingensief, she notes on her website, she becomes the “main character in her own disappearance” and she credits him for having done her the great favor of  (I paraphrase here): “transporting me out of myself by transposing what I wrote into another dimension where it can no longer represent anything … and be made to disappear.”  The collaboration Jelinek describe with Schlingensief here is not a comparison of approaches or an interaction of media forms, it is a fantasy of intersubjectivity that leans toward self-annihilation.  She wants something else to be made of her texts so that (Jelinek’s words): “I can break out OF MYSELF at last!”  She claims it is not a misunderstanding that produces this negation of her in Schlingensief’s text, but rather “we understand each other by me having to disappear – something I already knew before and wanted.”  If she were to disappear totally, Jelinek claims it would be “a wonderful feeling I cannot describe.”   On a formal level, Jelinek is describing the desire to exist as a writer only in someone else’s own artistic cosmology.  This means then, for Jelinek, that “I am because someone else said: I.” This line says a great deal about Jelinek’s relationship to the word and to the world. It is as if she forbids herself the ability to be a subject and prefers instead to remain a catalyst or an enzyme in life’s processes.

When Schlingensief died, Jelinek was quoted as saying that it was to her as if “das Leben selbst gestorben wäre.” I don’t believe this is because she thinks Schlingensief was the GREAT MAN figure who had a life bigger and greater than ours, or hers, but because for Jelinek, a form of her own subjectivity, the one she handed over to him in 2004, clearly died as well when Schlingensief was no more.