“Obscene Fantasies”: Elfriede Jelinek's Generic Perversions
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2009 “Obscene Fantasies”: Elfriede Jelinek’s Generic Perversions Brenda L. Bethman University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Bethman, Brenda L., "“Obscene Fantasies”: Elfriede Jelinek’s Generic Perversions" (2009). Open Access Dissertations. 86. https://doi.org/10.7275/11fn-mx46 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/86 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “OBSCENE FANTASIES”: ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S GENERIC PERVERSIONS A Dissertation Presented by BRENDA L. BETHMAN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2009 German and Scandinavian Studies Languages, Literatures, and Cultures © Copyright by Brenda L. Bethman 2009 All Rights Reserved “OBSCENE FANTASIES”: ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S GENERIC PERVERSIONS A Dissertation Presented by BRENDA L. BETHMAN Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________ Sara Lennox, Chair ____________________________________ Susan Cocalis, Member ____________________________________ Ann Ferguson, Member ____________________________________ Edwin Gentzler, Member __________________________________________ Sara Lennox, Director German and Scandinavian Studies Program __________________________________________ Julie Candler Hayes, Chair Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures ACKNOWLEDGMENTS They say it takes a village to raise a child. In my case, it took a village to write a dissertation. First, I would like to thank Sara Lennox for her unflagging support of this dissertation even as the topic evolved into something completely different from what I had originally proposed – and also for constantly challenging me to improve the clarity and organization of my work. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee – Susan Cocalis, Ann Ferguson, and Edwin Gentzler – for their support and helpful feedback. The Austrian-American Fulbright Commission generously supported my research in Vienna, for which I am enormously grateful. I am also indebted to the following individuals for their personal and professional support during my time in Vienna: Elfriede Jelinek, Lonnie Johnson, Helga Hofmann-Weinberger, Werner Hofmann, Michael Yonan, Leo Riegert, Robert Pichl (University of Vienna) and the late Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler (University of Vienna). I have also benefitted tremendously from the support of a far-flung network of friends, colleagues, and mentors at the institutions at which I studied and worked while completing this project: Skyler Arndt-Briggs, Barton Byg, James Cathey, Nancy Patteson, Robert Sullivan, Maria Stehle, Muzafar Qazilbash, Alexandra Merley-Hill, Kyle Frackman, Beret Norman, Dagmar iv Jaeger, Betheny Moore Roberts, and Jana Evans-Braziel at UMass Amherst; William Perry, James Anderson, Stephanie Attia, Sara Bendoraitis, Harris Berger, Giovanna Del Negro, and Patrick Paschall at Texas A&M University; and Mel Tyler, Jennifer DeHaemers, Paul Shang, Kristen Abell, Michelle Kroner, and my Women’s Center students and Advisory Board members at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. My work on this project also profited from the feedback received while presenting earlier versions of various chapters. I thank my colleagues at the Radical Philosophy Association, Women in German, the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M University, and the Summer Institute sponsored by the Institute for Teaching and Research on Women at Towson University, in collaboration with the Middle East Technical University, for their invitations and feedback. An earlier version of chapter one was published in Radical Philosophy Today (volume 3, © Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006), a shorter version of chapter 3, co-authored with Larson Powell, appeared under the title “ ‘One must have tradition in oneself to hate it properly’: Elfriede Jelinek’s Musicality” in the Journal of Modern Literature (volume 32.1, © Indiana University Press, 2008), and an excerpt from chapter 2 was published in the New v Dictionary of the History of Ideas (“Jouissance,” volume 3 © Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005). I am grateful for permission to republish here. I also thank my parents, sister, in-laws, and extended family for their support. Last but definitely not least, I thank Larson Powell for his endless patience in reading, re-reading, discussing, and proofreading every word of this dissertation multiple times, and for encouraging me when I wanted to give up. Without his unwavering support, cooking, and good-natured willingness to pick up household slack as I made the final push to completion, this project would not have been finished. vi ABSTRACT “OBSCENE FANTASIES”: ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S GENERIC PERVERSIONS SEPTEMBER 2009 BRENDA L. BETHMAN, B.A., DICKINSON COLLEGE M.A., TEMPLE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Sara Lennox This dissertation examines Elfriede Jelinek’s investigation of Austria’s and Western Europe’s “obscene fantasies” through her “perversion” of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). It also investigates how these texts, at first glance less overtly political than Jelinek’s later work, can be seen as laying the groundwork for her later, more political, analysis of Austrian fascism and racism. The dissertation is composed of three chapters; each investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the “obscene fantasies” that lie at its heart. Chapter One examines how Jelinek depicts alienation (in the Marxist, socialist feminist, and Lacanian senses) in her 1975 novel Die Liebhaberinnen, and explores how Jelinek’s depiction of alienation functions to make Die vii Liebhaberinnen an anti-romance. Chapter Two addresses whether Jelinek’s novel Lust (1989) is a pornographic or anti-pornographic text. I investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and pornography, arguing that many other Jelinek scholars collapse the distinction between mass-cultural forms of pornography and the high-cultural pornography of Bataille and Sade, and thus fail to understand how her text is simultaneously pornographic and anti- pornographic. Chapter Three focuses on Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983), examining the development of its protagonist as a (perverse) sexual subject, and her ultimate failure to achieve a stable sexual position and how Jelinek’s text perverts the genre of the Künstlerroman. It also discusses Erika’s training as a pianist as a possible causal factor of her perversions and lack of sexual identity, concluding that her inability to sublimate demonstrates the similarities (and differences) between the artist and the pervert, illustrating how Jelinek’s novel deviates from the traditional Künstlerroman. The dissertation argues that the disruption of genres is one of Jelinek’s most significant literary contributions, her works functioning to create a “negative aesthetics” as opposed to a positive reworking of generic forms. Jelinek rejects an identificatory mode of writing and refuses to create “positive” subjects, preferring instead to produce art that is a “critique of praxis as the rule viii of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 12). ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................1 1. HOUSEWIFE OR SHOP GIRL? ALIENATION AND (ANTI-) ROMANCE IN DIE LIEBHABERINNEN.................................................................................................18 Introduction .........................................................................................................18 “Sexuality is to Feminism What Work is to Marxism”: Alienated Sexuality and/as Labor in Die Liebhaberinnen .......................................................22 Problems with the Marxist/Socialist Feminist Analysis of Jelinek ..............48 Lacanian Alienation and Metonymy in Die Liebhaberinnen ..........................52 “Reading the (Anti-)Romance”: Die Liebhaberinnen and the Romance Novel .......................................................................................63 2. A JOUISSANCE BEYOND THE PHALLUS? LUST AND PORNOGRAPHY ...77 Introduction: An Artistic (Anti-) Pornography? ............................................77 The Misfortunes of Justine and Gerti: Reading Jelinek with Sade ...............89 Female Sexuality and Jouissances ..................................................................114 Conclusion: A Pessimistic Pornography Without Pleasure ........................128