“Obscene Fantasies”: Elfriede Jelinek’s Generic Perversions by Brenda Bethman (review)

With its title that derives in part from Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Austria’s “obscene fantasies,” Brenda Bethman’s study aims to examine Nobel Prize winner Jelinek’s take on Austria’s and consequently Western Europe’s hidden attitudes toward violence, sexuality, and women’s complicity in their own victimization. Bethman argues that Jelinek disrupts literary genres and thus creates a negative aesthetics. Without question, this is one of the strongest aspects of her study. Contrary to most Jelinek specialists, who typically define Jelinek as a Marxist-feminist or postmodern author, Bethman adds another critical approach. She sets out to “expand [the] discussion beyond the ‘either/or’ dichotomy that categorizes much of the scholarship regarding Jelinek’s politics” (2). While Bethman does agree with earlier readings of Jelinek’s work, she also emphasizes two complementary aspects, thus underscoring Jelinek’s complexity as an author and her exceptional erudition.

Based on the analysis of three novels (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin), Bethman elucidates Jelinek’s intense involvement with psychoanalysis and her linguistic playfulness. Lacan’s jouissance, defined as perverse pleasure, reveals the intricate interwovenness of pleasure and perversion as a concealed basis of society. Moreover, in employing Theodor Adorno’s negative aesthetics, Bethman calls attention to Jelinek’s parodying or constant perverting of different genres and to her “negative reworking of generic forms” (5). Thus the Austrian writer unmasks the mendacity of Austrian and ultimately Western culture. By doing so, according to Bethman, Jelinek denies her readers identification with her protagonists and as a result forces them to critically engage with socio-cultural norms and traditions.

With Die Liebhaberinnen, Jelinek undermines the style and the language of the romance novel, less on the level of plot than by situating her “textual politics” on the narrative level (39). The characters in the novel are, in Lacanian terms, not undivided selves and lack unified characters. A superb close reader, Bethman shows how Jelinek subverts the style of the romance novel and satirizes female and male (sexual) behavior within the boundaries of patriarchy. For instance, by paralleling two passages—one from a romance novel, the other from Die Liebhaberinnen—Bethman elucidates Jelinek’s satirical take on that particular genre, aptly demonstrating how the author both imitates and disrupts the style and language of the romance novel as a means of unmasking patriarchal ideology.

Similarly, in her analysis of Lust, she points to Jelinek’s art of perverting genres. Here, Jelinek parodies pornography. However, while some critics have defined Lust as an antipornographic text, Bethman highlights the intertextuality with de Sade, the inventor of literary Western porn. While Bethman considers both texts to be pornographic, she nonetheless argues that they are also “pornologic” in that they disrupt erotic transfer (48). In other words, Bethman convincingly contends that both de Sade and Jelinek use pornography to scrutinize sexual relations and unmask unequal power between the sexes. Although pornographic, Lust also contains what Bethman labels “pessimistic pornography”: Women as sexual objects but, unlike in traditional porn, without pleasure (71). Here again she offers an astute close analysis of several passages by “reading Jelinek with Sade” and through a Lacanian lens (49).

The study of the third novel again invites the reader on a comparable journey to Jelinek’s “generic perversions.” Concurring with a good number of critics that Die Klavierspielerin is an anti-Künstlerroman and that Erika Kohut, the protagonist, is unable to “develop a stable sexual identity,” Bethman sets out to offer a discussion on the similarities between perversion and sublimation (Lacan) as well as “a sustained reading of the text in generic terms” (75, 76). Erika’s predicament is the dilemma of the female artist who is caught between bourgeois domestic femininity and public performance. Added to that is the (über-)mother who does not play the game of rendering her daughter marriageable but instead de-sexes her daughter’s body to keep her for herself. This complex narrative’s point of departure creates difficulties for Bethman’s analysis and...