Art, Repression, and Violence: A Study of Erika Kohut

Elfriede Jelinek’s writings can perhaps best be exposited as a relentless critique, a profound exploration, and a sustained commentary on the presence and temperament of “violence” in post-war Austria.  Akin to her Bachmann essay, War by Other Means, some of her major novelistic, dramatic, and prosaic works slice up the covert but insidious persistence of fascist ideology and its belligerent potential in post-war gender relations. Novels such as The Piano Teacher (1983) or Lust (1989) quite fervently place the thrust of the analysis on body politics and the pornographic exploitation of women’s bodies to uncover their underlying war-like economy (Hanssen, 2). Beatrice Hanssen in her percipient analysis of Jelinek’s works opines that gender inequity can be regarded as the “covert perpetuation of fascism” and its victim-perpetrator dialectic is, to be certain, a presumption that triggers much of first-wave German feminism and women’s literature which precipitated in post World War II years. Its theoretical rationalization has been offered by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein they foreground a correlation between the violence of instrumental reason, the biopolitics of fascism, anti-Semitism, and the historical objectification of women as ‘Phusis[1].’ One can trace the lineage of this tradition in the New German Feminism of the 1970s.  Within the purview of Austrian and German feminism during the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps no one else has tackled the intersections between fascism, gender, culture, and sexual violence with the resolve and polemical acerbity that differentiates Jelinek’s prosaic works. Concurrently, her works appear to be directed by apparently conflicting intentions. Jelinek’s writing encompasses a primal sense of contradiction; while it relentlessly scrutinizes violence perpetrated against women, particularly sexual violence, and thereby continues to further the concerns of first-wave German feminism, they commission a language saturated with violence to do so. Often criticized for utilizing pornographic language and adopting the register of sexual violence, her work has instigated reactions of outrage, bewilderment, and indignation, stimulated by the graphic portrayal of voyeurism, sadomasochism, anthropophagy, and other perversions on which her writings are primordially anchored. Her work solicits one form of violence to contest another; the mimetic re-performance of sexual violence, which risks subjugating women’s agency, and the return of the Ungeist of German history in the form of the very irrationalism and violence that her writings seek to ward off. The Piano Teacher actively embodies this conflict in its depiction of the dynamics between violence, art, gender, and fascism. The proposed paper, therefore, intends to excavate Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, The Piano Teacher as a site of contradiction that actively uncovers the benign propaganda which art holds under the veneer of erudition and sophistication. This paper focuses on how the novel resonates with a much more abstruse allusion to the historical forces that have reshaped late twentieth-century Viennese culture. Concurrently, this paper attempts to discover the complex dynamics between violence, art, gender, and fascist ideology which Jelinek offers.

Within the context of a traditional liberal humanist framework – music, art, and literature are conceived as the highly revered realms of aesthetic beauty, personal conscience, or justice. These domains are essential to preserve as they offer a fuller expression of one’s humanity and civility. Since, the advent of the twentieth century, this ideal, perpetuated by liberal humanism, has been repeatedly questioned by postmodern and post-structuralist sensibilities. In The Piano Teacher, primarily through the faculty of her protagonist Erika Kohut, Jelinek attacks this conventional understanding as a stereotype that leads to a tapered yet comforting vision of art. Jelinek remarks sarcastically on the liberal humanist position that asserts Vienna’s significance as a cultural capital of high art and music; “Vienna, the city of music! Only the things that have proven their worth will continue to do so in this city. Its buttons are bursting from the fat white paunch of culture, which, like any drowned corpse that is not fished from the water, bloats up more and more” (Jelinek, 13). This image of Vienna procreates a vision of the deterioration of Western civilization and bears testimony to the devastating repercussions of the two World Wars and Nazism, all encased in the paramount technological and cultural accomplishments of Europe. Instead of revitalizing post-war Vienna, the city’s cultural supremacy endows a ghastly afterlife on its lifeless body (Kostov, 398). Reminiscent of the Holocaust, “music comes in, spreading like poison gas [Giftgas] into every nook and cranny” of people’s lives, pursuing them everywhere and leaving them with a yearning for peace and quiet (Jelinek, trans. Neugroschel 1988, 26; original: 1990a, 27). Jelinek, thus creates her Protagonist Erika in the image of the city and the culture that becomes the greatest recipient of her criticism. The anatomy of Vienna with its concealed grotesqueness and violent inclinations draped in the fabric of cultural, intellectual, and political stability mirrors Erika and her ‘art’.

“She bangs into people’s backs and fronts with her stringed instruments and wind instruments and her heavy musical scores (15)” Herein, Erika deploys her musical instruments as vehicles for inflicting violence upon other people instead of using it as a carrier of the high artistic sensibilities that she affixes with herself. Erika becomes a human manifestation of the schizophrenia that European civilization has experienced post-world wars. It is interesting to note that Jelinek with “her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power” (“The Nobel Prize” 2014). As the narrative begins, the readers are acquainted with the fact that Erika’s mother has cultivated a sense of traumatic and toxic superiority within her daughter. The artistic excellence and sense of superiority fracture Erika’s psyche, and her coercive relationship with her mother inflicts that sense of primal schizophrenia within her. Her sense of superiority is contingent upon two primary aspects; ‘violence’ and ‘art.’ Violence becomes the catalyst that allows her to reclaim a sense of selfhood that she lacks. Erika’s sense of ‘lack’ is a ramification of myriad forms of social, parental, psychological, and individual expectations and coercions. This sense of “lack” manifests itself as a form of corporeal numbness and repression which frequently torments Erika. In Erika’s case, Sexual perversity becomes symptomatic of this schism which this lack instigates. Lacan apostles that a sexual position as “male” or “female” is distinct from biology rather, it is the  “relationship with the phallus which determines sexual position” (Evans 178). Moreover, “the subject’s sexual identity is always a rather precarious matter,” (Evans 179) principally for women, since, as Lacan puts it: “The metaphysics of the woman’s position is the detour imposed upon her subjective realization. Her position is essentially problematic, and up to a certain point it’s unassimilable” (S3, 178). For Lacan and what Jelinek suggests, the schism which Erika embodies is a symptom of her gender. However, the question of “gender trouble” originates from her mother’s almost pathological sense of possession over her daughter. The novel begins with the proclamation “Erika entered, her father exited (3)” almost suggesting that Erika substitutes her father in her mother’s life. From the beginning of the narrative escape, Jelinek offers a glimpse of the obfuscated gender roles, expectations, and dynamics in the Kohut household wherein Erika becomes the spouse and daughter of her mother. Erika’s mother acquires the role of her spouse and actively isolates Erika from the opposite gender; “Mother threatens to kill the child if she ever so much as sees her with a man (81).” The question of sexual attraction, contact, and experience resides in a deep pool of constriction for Erika which consequentially aggravates that sense of primal “lack”. Jelinek quite subtly seeps in the gender dynamics which is evident in the way readers perceive Erika in comparison to other male characters.

“The woman was then lied to, cheated on, tormented, and often not called (75),” Jelinek intersperses these subtle details about Erika’s past experiences with men as a semantic instrument of demonstrating the gender bias which does not allow the reader to question the perversity of men with the same lens that accuses Erika of perverseness. This questioning structure in no way attempts to infuse any degree of sympathy within the readers for the protagonist, as Jelinek quite systemically attempts to position Erika as an embodiment of the primal conflict between gender, violence, and art. The conundrum of fascism, art, gender, and violence which Jelinek poses, strips art of all its conventional connotations. Erika, the pianist lacks passion and fervor “Erika felt nothing, she always felt nothing. She is as unfeeling as a piece of tar paper in the rain (75),” through the faculty of Erika, the hollowness of art and its disastrous potential is exposed. Erika’s sexual perversity and her inclinations towards extreme forms of corporeal violence threaten the conventional associations which are made with “art” and the “artist figure.”

Jelinek lampoons the social sensibilities which entrust art with the connotations of passion, civilization, and cohesion. Art is reclaimed as a domain infested with violence, fascisr agenda, and gender inequity and can be conceived as a mechanism that conceals the entrails of a violent past and its repercussion on the present. ‘Comfort’ and ‘leisure’ as states which are often ascribed to art are strongly criticized by Jelinek as the aftermaths of silenced and “euphemized violence and coercion.” This can be recounted as one of the reasons why she wants the readers to experience the novel as a highly uncomfortable and disconcerting exercise.

Chandra, S. 2026

Works Cited

1. Hanssen, Beatrice. “Elfriede Jelinek’s Language of Violence.” New German Critique, no. 68, 1996, pp. 79–112. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3108665.
2. Jelinek, Elfriede. “The Piano Teacher.” Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Grove Press, 1988
3. Kostova R. “Jelinek’s Vienna: Cultural Elitism and Neo-Nazism.” De Gruyter, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110642018-039
4. Powell, Larson, and Brenda Bethman. “‘One Must Have Tradition in Oneself, to Hate It Properly’: Elfriede Jelinek’s Musicality.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, 2008, pp. 163–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25511797.
5. van Dyke, James A. “On the Challenge of Nazi Art.” The German Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 3, 2017, pp. 366–73. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44968562.

[1] In the concept of “Phusis,” the topos of the sexes merge with the biopolitics of fascism, this reduces the feminine to “pure nature, related to blood and soil.