Strange Contracts: Elfriede Jelinek and Michael Haneke VICKY LEBEAU
Strange Contracts: Elfriede Jelinek and Michael Haneke VICKY LEBEAU Abstract: This essay explores the representation of sexuality and vision in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin [The Piano Teacher] (1983) and Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001). In its focus on the relation between Mother and Erika, Die Klavierspielerin brings right to the fore the grounding of both sexuality and visuality in the ongoing ties between mother and child. Displac- ing that novel onto the screen, Haneke redoubles its focus on vision. It is in the convergence between the two that we can begin to explore what may be described as the maternal dimension of the various technologies of vision that have come to pervade the everyday experience of looking—their effect on our ways of understanding the relations between visuality and selfhood, visuality and mind. Keywords: feminism, Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, pornography, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic film theory, sadomasochism, The Seventh Continent, sexuality, spectatorship, vision, visual culture, voyeur- ism, D. W. Winnicott Why would a woman welcome her own murder? Not her own death, simply, not even her suicide, but her murder, the loss of her life at the hands of another? To read Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin [The Piano Teacher], first published in 1983, is to be caught up in that question, its wayward implication in a woman’s pursuit of pleasure, of a “life of her own,” which for much of the book, appears to be possible only in, and through, her eyes. “All Erika wants to do is watch”; “[S] he simply wants to sit there and look.
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