Elfriede Jelinek – Language Unleashed

Acclaimed Austrian novelist, poet and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, is the subject of documentarian Claudia Müller’s Elfriede Jelinek — Language Unleashed which, as the title suggests, it is a film about words and much more. For a general audience, all that is probably needed to grasp the brutality of the author’s writing is contained in the last few minutes of The Piano Teacher. A woman watches a group of people and a young man in particular ascend a staircase. Her eyes turn glassy and she stabs the flesh around her clavicle. The film ends as she hurries out of the building. The Piano Teacher, directed by Jelinek’s compatriot Michael Haneke, was an adaptation of a Jelinek novel. It may have come across as a rather frank dissection of masochism but her readers know that much more graphically unadorned scenes of violence can be found across her novels.

If the question is why, the answer isn’t exactly provided in the new documentary premiering at the Munich Film Festival. But the film does provide some context for an artist whose work has puzzled, angered, and confused readers for decades. Perhaps the two most important things that might aid readers who see this film—and it surely wasn’t created for a mentally passive audience—are the author’s music training and her difficult relationship with her mother. Both explain key parts of her writing. The latter clarifies her exploration of the mother-daughter relationship, an exploration that doesn’t deconstruct motherhood so much as devastates it; the former explains the oft-complex texture of the Jelinek text, although that’s not the entire story. Yes, she attended the Vienna Conservatory (now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) but she was also interested in “post-Dadaist language games”.

Of course, any documentary using that phrase without the cinematic equivalent of a footnote already has declared war on the incurious viewer, so the potential audience for this documentary will be found in universities the world over and in festivals unconcerned with crowd-pleasing material. This is further complicated by the film’s layering of voices and texts (mostly from the author herself). The idea, it seems, is to reproduce the strangeness and polyvocality of Jelinek’s work. After all, when the Swedish Academy handed Jelinek a Nobel prize, it did mention her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays…with extraordinary linguistic zeal…” That idea works but it does place a significant burden on the viewer.

Away from language, but not entirely, the other preoccupation here is politics. “I consider it my task to elevate all those everyday things, also politics, to put them on a literary pedestal,” says Jelinek. Being concerned with politics is hardly new for writers but, probably because of her subject, it armed her critics. Speaking about one of her works, commentators in one archival clip wonder how she could go to her desk for hours and hours to describe “filth”.

It is not entirely clear (at least in the English subtitles) which book they refer to, but it’s likely Lust, her 1989 bestseller that appeared in English in 1992. (To read this unrelentingly angry book with frank passages depicting violent sexual abuse is to be dazed by the Jelinek male’s capacity for sexual cruelty and the author’s strong stomach.) As the discussion goes on, a female commentator gets to what seems an important point: “You criticise her [Jelinek] because she doesn’t write about sexuality as a turn on.” It’s an interesting point and may benefit from a bit more unpacking, but Claudia Müller’s documentary is not the explanatory type. The focus is held tightly on politics and language, which is at the centre of Jelinek’s life, even if initially she was headed to medical school.

She found immediate success, winning in one contest both the poetry and prose awards. But her success never quite enamoured the Austrian populace, many of whom consider her too critical of her country. Some of the unflattering comments from fellow Austrians heard towards the end of this film recall an early comment made about Philip Roth, another writer accused of attacking his own people: “What is being done to silence this man?”

Roth did manage to find some peace with his people before his death. But it’s unclear if that will happen for Jelinek. She withdrew from public life after her Nobel win shot her into massive prominence—and national criticism, as though, she complains, she was responsible for giving herself the prize. But she keeps writing—the film lists more than two dozen works post-Nobel. Clearly, public intellectualism is not the only way a famous person can live a vigorous writer’s life.