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Elfriede Jelinek: Writings
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In other ways, Ms. Jelinek fits a more familiar pattern. She is the seventh European literature laureate in the past decade. The academy has ... again shown a preference for literature with a political echo. As with several recent winners, including last year's, J. M. Coetzee, a critic of South Africa's apartheid government, Ms. Jelinek has used her literary work as a form of political engagement.
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Jelinek was a member of Austria's Communist Party from 1974 to 1991. Jelinek became a household name during the 1990s due to her vociferous clash with Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom Party. Following the 1999 National Council elections and the subsequent formation of a coalition cabinet consisting of the Freedom Party and the Austrian People's Party, Jelinek became one of the new cabinet's most vocal critics. Citing the Freedom Party's alleged nationalism and authoritarianism, many European and overseas administrations swiftly decided openly to ostracize Austria's administration. The cabinet construed the sanctions against it as directed against Austria as such and attempted to prod the nation into a national rallying (Nationaler Schulterschluss) behind the coalition parties. This provoked a temporary heating of the political climate severe enough for dissidents such as Jelinek to be accused of treason by coalition supporters.
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With her fellow-countrymen Karl Kraus and Thomas Bernhard as satirical and polemical models, Jelinek is a peculiarly inconvenient and sharp critic of Austrian society and its Catholic and authoritarian background. Jelinek perceives herself as a combatant feminist with clear left-wing sympathies. Remorselessly, she exposes the hypocracies, the façades and the hollowness of social conventions, rituals and patriarchal traditions which lead to the oppression of women and the abuse of power. According to Jelinek herself, everything she writes is "a paradigm of the division of power in society". Her task is to show how economics, sexuality, discrimination and racism are all intertwined with each other.
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Throughout her career, Lamb-Faffelberger has presented numerous papers and published extensively on Jelinek, including the book Valie Export und Elfriede Jelinek im Spiegel der Presse. Zur Rezeption der feministischen Avantgarde Österreichs for Peter Lang Publishing's Austrian Culture Series, of which she is general editor. She conducted a videotaped interview of the reclusive Jelinek in 1990.
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Jelinek, 57, made her literary debut with the collection "Lisas Schatten" in 1967. Her writing took a critical turn after her involvement with the student movements that were prevalent throughout Europe in the 1970s, coming out with her satirical novel "We Are Decoys, Baby!"
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In her 1989 novel "Lust," Jelinek writes of a mother and wife: "Lovingly she flings herself on her son, but even as a torrent she simply flows away, to be heard somewhere far beneath him, in the depths. And she has only this one child. Her husband comes in from the office and instantly she hugs her body in tight so that the Man's senses will not scent a bit of what they fancy."
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