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Catastrophe? Choked by US values? 
What Were They Thinking? Nobel Goes to Porn-Writing Phobic
Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- ``Who?'' In the English-speaking world, the Swedish Academy's announcement last week that Elfriede Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in literature produced widespread incredulity.
Actually, the announcement produced two sorts of incredulity. The first, more widespread and benign, was among those who had never heard of the 57-year-old Austrian novelist and playwright. Despite the fact that her 1983 novel ``The Piano Teacher'' was made into a repellent 2001 movie starring Isabelle Huppert, Jelinek is barely known in the U.S. (Unscientific confirmation: five large bookstores in the towns of Boston; Westport and Norwalk in Connecticut; and New Paltz, New York, turned up only one copy of a Jelinek title.)
The incredulity among those who didn't know Jelinek's work was nothing compared with the incredulity, heavily seasoned by outrage, among those who did. Jelinek's particular brand of kinkiness tends to the sadomasochistic.
The official Nobel ``bio-bibliography'' ( http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2004/jelinek - bibl.html) says that in her novel ``Lust'' (1989), Jelinek ``lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilization by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture.'' That is just lit-crit-speak for an exhibition of pornographic violence.
In ``The Piano Teacher,'' for example, an apparently prim Erika Kohut teaches at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her emotionally suffocating mother.
Life of Fantasies
Erika has an active and unpleasant fantasy life, which she finally gets to share with Walter Klemmer, a nasty piece of work, who reads her deranged letters and becomes a willing collaborator in Erika's degradation. Pleads Erika: ``draw the belt in at least two or three notches, the tighter the better. There'll be old nylons lying around. Just stuff them into my mouth as deep as you can and gag me so cunningly that I can't emit the slightest peep.''
Klemmer unleashes a self-destructive passion in Erika and terrible prose upon the reader. Klemmer ``gnaws on her lips, his tongue plumbs her depths. He burrows around in Erika's innards as if he wanted to take them out, prepare them in a new way.'' Most of ``The Piano Teacher'' cannot be quoted in a mainstream news service, but you get the picture.
Ad Nauseum
Brutalizing sex would not be enough to attract the attention of the judges in Stockholm. A certain artiness is helpful -- the judges spoke in their official citation of Jelinek's ``musical flow of voices and counter-voices'' and ``extraordinary linguistic zeal.'' What the reader actually finds is an irritating literariness: the Marquis de Sade on a prolix day.
Jelinek's indispensable appeal is her politics. Her Web site notes she was a member of the Communist Party from 1974 to 1991. As the political commentator Stephen Schwartz pointed out in a piece on Jelinek in the Weekly Standard: ``After Soviet troops were withdrawn from the occupation zone of Austria in 1955, the Austrian Communist Party was little more than a KGB network.'' Jelinek left the party only when Moscow, reeling from the breakup of its empire, withdrew financial support.
If members of the Swedish Academy applauded works like ``The Piano Teacher,'' it was surely ``Bambiland'' (2003) that captured their hearts. One member of the Nobel committee enthusiastically praised the play as an exploration of ``how patriotic enthusiasm turns into insanity.'' What it really reveals is how reliably extreme left-wing sentiment turns into a simpleminded anti-U.S. diatribe.
Staying Home
Jelinek is given to preening gestures. In 2000, when the right-wing Freedom Party came to power in Austria, Jelinek prohibited the performance of her plays there, explaining that ``My words will have an effect in that they won't be heard anymore.'' She also has announced that because of a ``social phobia'' she won't travel to Stockholm to receive her award, though unlike Jean-Paul Sartre she has not gone so far as to refuse it.
There have been some worthy recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature in recent years: J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky to name a few.
Far too often, though, the prize has been lavished on literary mediocrities who happen to fulfill some geographical, ethnic or other non-artistic criterion, from Pearl S. Buck in 1938 to Camilo Jose Cela (1989) and Nadine Gordimer (1991). (There was much speculation that Philip Roth might win it this year; why didn't he?)
Even more troubling are those Nobels that are essentially politically correct badges of honor. Elfriede Jelinek joins left- wing fringe figures like Jose Saramago (1998) and Dario Fo (1997): writers whose works are political sermons masquerading as literature. Jelinek's innovation is to introduce a vicious sexual obsession into the infatuation with Communism. It is an unedifying amalgam.
Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- ``Who?'' In the English-speaking world, the Swedish Academy's announcement last week that Elfriede Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in literature produced widespread incredulity.
Actually, the announcement produced two sorts of incredulity. The first, more widespread and benign, was among those who had never heard of the 57-year-old Austrian novelist and playwright. Despite the fact that her 1983 novel ``The Piano Teacher'' was made into a repellent 2001 movie starring Isabelle Huppert, Jelinek is barely known in the U.S. (Unscientific confirmation: five large bookstores in the towns of Boston; Westport and Norwalk in Connecticut; and New Paltz, New York, turned up only one copy of a Jelinek title.)
The incredulity among those who didn't know Jelinek's work was nothing compared with the incredulity, heavily seasoned by outrage, among those who did. Jelinek's particular brand of kinkiness tends to the sadomasochistic.
The official Nobel ``bio-bibliography'' ( http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2004/jelinek - bibl.html) says that in her novel ``Lust'' (1989), Jelinek ``lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilization by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture.'' That is just lit-crit-speak for an exhibition of pornographic violence.
In ``The Piano Teacher,'' for example, an apparently prim Erika Kohut teaches at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her emotionally suffocating mother.
Life of Fantasies
Erika has an active and unpleasant fantasy life, which she finally gets to share with Walter Klemmer, a nasty piece of work, who reads her deranged letters and becomes a willing collaborator in Erika's degradation. Pleads Erika: ``draw the belt in at least two or three notches, the tighter the better. There'll be old nylons lying around. Just stuff them into my mouth as deep as you can and gag me so cunningly that I can't emit the slightest peep.''
Klemmer unleashes a self-destructive passion in Erika and terrible prose upon the reader. Klemmer ``gnaws on her lips, his tongue plumbs her depths. He burrows around in Erika's innards as if he wanted to take them out, prepare them in a new way.'' Most of ``The Piano Teacher'' cannot be quoted in a mainstream news service, but you get the picture.
Ad Nauseum
Brutalizing sex would not be enough to attract the attention of the judges in Stockholm. A certain artiness is helpful -- the judges spoke in their official citation of Jelinek's ``musical flow of voices and counter-voices'' and ``extraordinary linguistic zeal.'' What the reader actually finds is an irritating literariness: the Marquis de Sade on a prolix day.
Jelinek's indispensable appeal is her politics. Her Web site notes she was a member of the Communist Party from 1974 to 1991. As the political commentator Stephen Schwartz pointed out in a piece on Jelinek in the Weekly Standard: ``After Soviet troops were withdrawn from the occupation zone of Austria in 1955, the Austrian Communist Party was little more than a KGB network.'' Jelinek left the party only when Moscow, reeling from the breakup of its empire, withdrew financial support.
If members of the Swedish Academy applauded works like ``The Piano Teacher,'' it was surely ``Bambiland'' (2003) that captured their hearts. One member of the Nobel committee enthusiastically praised the play as an exploration of ``how patriotic enthusiasm turns into insanity.'' What it really reveals is how reliably extreme left-wing sentiment turns into a simpleminded anti-U.S. diatribe.
Staying Home
Jelinek is given to preening gestures. In 2000, when the right-wing Freedom Party came to power in Austria, Jelinek prohibited the performance of her plays there, explaining that ``My words will have an effect in that they won't be heard anymore.'' She also has announced that because of a ``social phobia'' she won't travel to Stockholm to receive her award, though unlike Jean-Paul Sartre she has not gone so far as to refuse it.
There have been some worthy recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature in recent years: J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky to name a few.
Far too often, though, the prize has been lavished on literary mediocrities who happen to fulfill some geographical, ethnic or other non-artistic criterion, from Pearl S. Buck in 1938 to Camilo Jose Cela (1989) and Nadine Gordimer (1991). (There was much speculation that Philip Roth might win it this year; why didn't he?)
Even more troubling are those Nobels that are essentially politically correct badges of honor. Elfriede Jelinek joins left- wing fringe figures like Jose Saramago (1998) and Dario Fo (1997): writers whose works are political sermons masquerading as literature. Jelinek's innovation is to introduce a vicious sexual obsession into the infatuation with Communism. It is an unedifying amalgam.
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