Elfriede Jelinek: The Piano Teacher

Considering the overlap between Jelinek's personal history and that of her protagonist here, the urge to approach it as an autobiography is strong indeed.  If it is an autobiography, however, it is one of such brutal and explicit character that it is neither a wonder that it was censored as pornographic at the time of its publication, nor that Jelinek is on record discouraging such a reading.  It would, in fact, be the fulfillment of Muriel Rukeyser's prediction that if a woman told the truth about her life, the world would split open.  The book is so unforgivingly graphic that the word "obscene" seems to fall short.

Perhaps it is possible to read the book as autobiography without sacrificing the assumption of fictionality that alone preserves the world from splitting open, however.  Erika's story can be Elfriede's story, even if Erika and Elfriede are not the same person.  The book blends metaphor and narrative in a way that encourages such an approach, abruptly departing from the plot on flights of poetic fancy and returning as if nothing had happened.  Where Elfriede's life ends and Erika's begins is no clearer than the distinction between what is said, what is merely thought, and what is simply the author's opinion of the goings-on in the book.

What is real, what survives the ultimately irrelevant question of fictionality, is Jelinek's gruesome portrait of human desire: so incisive that it would be impossible for her to have entirely invented it.  And it is not only this desire that the author and protagonist presumably have in common; it is also the desire to capture and express it satisfactorily.  "When a student asks her what her goal is, she says, 'Humanity'," could easily be applied to either party (13).  But where Erika fails, Elfriede succeeds.  She gives form to "the wish to penetrate thoroughly and be penetrated thoroughly" that I know, she knows, and presumably all humanity knows at the core of our id (169).  Often for Jelinek, that form is a mouth that desires not to consume, but only to bite.  She saturates the book with the image, in literal actions, in figurative speech, and, as is her habit, often not bothering to indicate which is intended.

And the book itself holds true to the image.  It bites, tears, and chews the reader, but never swallows.  It is a work of desire, after all; not of satiety.  And if, when Erika/Jelinek end the narrative with a startling but meaningless gesture, the reader is left blueballed, begging for something more final, decisive, consuming.  No such release is forthcoming, and the reader must look elsewhere for satisfaction. "He pleads with [Elfriede], but she refuses. He touches himself in order to complete [Elfriede's] handiwork . . . now he will never experience what he could carry out with her, what judgement, what sentence, if she allowed it" (181-2).