Eurydice Writes

Gitta Honegger

My poetry was lousy you said . . . Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust

y fortuitous coincidence (a simple twist of fate?), the news about Bob Dylan being awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature broke just at the time I Bprepared for this introduction to the 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s performance text, one week before Jelinek’s internationally honored seventieth birthday, four days after the second debate between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and not quite two weeks after the Berlin premiere of Shadows (Eurydice Says) at the distinguished Schaubühne, directed by the internationally acclaimed British director Katie Mitchell.

Subject: “Bob Dylan The times they are a-changin’ . . . maybe this is an omen,” I e-mailed Elfriede. Not missing a beat she responded, “Yes, unbelievable, I always hoped for it, but never believed in it. Would be nice if it were an omen and not an omelet.” (Meanwhile, in the continuing nastiness of the U.S. presidential campaign the breaking of the eggs is in full process. It would not be the first time that Jelinek proved herself a postmodern Cassandra.) In her next email she wrote, “I couldn’t be prouder that now I am standing in the same line as he with this prize. Now I finally have something to brag about.” The ennobled writer and singer are more akin than meets the eye. The intriguing parallels between the mythological singer and Dylan, the mythologized bard of our times, and between Jelinek and the ancient singer’s wife invite further explorations.

Both use their own experiences and transform them into unique voices that chal- lenged their respective artistic traditions and even the boundaries of literature in our times. Both have been shaped by the social and political turmoil of the sixties: Jelinek as a member of the first post–World-War II generation respond- ing to the silence in Germany and Austria about the Holocaust, and Dylan by the Civil Rights struggle and the Vietnam War against the smugness of post-war American society in the 1950s. The dramaturgy of Jelinek’s breakthrough play, What Happened to Nora after she had left her husband or Pillars of Society [Was geschah

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 mit Nora, nachdem sie ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Die Stützen der Gesellschaft] shows the influence of Brecht. Dylan’s first exposure to Brecht’s songs in the 1962 production of George Tabori’s Brecht on Brecht (at the Theatre de Lys, now Lucille Lortel Theatre) and especially Lotte Lenya’s by now legendary rendering of Jenny’s “Pirate Song” inspired his song “The Times They Are a-Changin.”

Both Dylan’s and Jelinek’s Nobel honors triggered heated arguments as to their legitimacy, the former as the first singer/poet to receive the award, Jelinek as the first perceived pornographic writer (in fact, she subverts male pornography). Jelinek received the award “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power,” which could also apply in part to Dylan though in a completely different genre and style. Both their responses to the award raised criticism. Dylan, at the time of this writing, has not yet responded to the Nobel committee. Jelinek, on account of her acute anxiety illness (still not taken seriously by her vociferous distractors at the time), could not travel to the award ceremony. Ironically, her current radical withdrawal from the outside world on account of her illness was ultimately triggered in the wake of the Nobel Prize which, ironically, forced her into the shadow, inside her own shadow like her Eurydice, as it were, shaded, protected by her home, stunned by the vicious, hate-filled personal attacks of her detractors. Her isolation is not voluntary. In our longstanding cor- respondence she frequently expressed frustration and anger at herself, but, most painfully, her deep sadness about her helplessness vis à vis her condition.

“I write, should anyone be interested,” says Jelinek’s Eurydice. Her Eurydice says, she does not speak as men do with such self-assured authority. They can do so because it has been granted to them, Jelinek insists speaking from her own experience, a “female writer” developing her craft, her critical vision at the same time her fellow Austrians, playwrights and novelists Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, burst onto the scene. Eurydice’s (unnamed) husband sings, another way of speaking out loud in contrast to having something to say, which can also be done quietly in writing. Traditionally, in the theatre, other people speak for the writer, they speak out loud what (predominantly still a) he has to say. Jelinek pointedly calls her writings for the theatre “texts for speaking” (as opposed to her novels as “texts for reading”). The theatre is a public event; reading, like writing, a solitary act.

Unlike her husband of many myths the mythological Eurydice has been given consideration only inasmuch as her unexpected death has provided the opportu- nity throughout the ages to sing the mourning of Orpheus over her loss. Jelinek gives her Eurydice fifty-five typed pages to say what she has to say. Who that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 “she” is, or how many “shes” are interwoven in the writer as staged speaker is up to the theatre artists—whom Jelinek considers her co-authors—to explore. In most of her performance texts she has also inserted herself—the author’s voice in counterpoint to her chorus of speakers—cynical, angry, comical, often self-mocking, sometimes coyly flirtatious. Some of Germany’s leading directors have tackled the staging of the absent author’s presentness in various ways. Infamously, Frank Castorf at the end of his production of Raststätte introduced her as a life-sized naked mannequin with blinking nipples and vagina. Einar Schleef in his legendary eight-hour marathon staging of Sports Play appeared on stage as himself, the director, speaking the lines of the author’s stand-in figure Elfi-Elektra, an embodiment of her figure of speech, so to speak.

Nicolas Stemann was the first to introduce a wig with Jelinek’s signature hairdo as an iconic prop, tossed about, trampled on, stroked and argued with. In the meantime the wig has become a standard cliché used by other directors of Jelinek’s plays, a branding of sorts. By contrast, Stemann treated her much gen- tler and with great sensitivity in his own occasional impersonations of Jelinek in his productions, sans wig, simply reading her lines with her soft, melancholy Viennese lilt which was further accentuated (“estranged” in a quasi Brechtian sense) by the undertow of his native Northern German inflections. A musician himself, Stemann’s reading of her lines highlighted the musicality of Jelinek’s language compositions, as well as her (real life) gracious demeanor, which might take some by surprise in the context of the aggressiveness of her texts. Following Stemann’s lead, most subsequent Jelinek productions feature one actor or actress suggesting the author, either by her hairdo or a drawled-out Viennese accent, mostly for comical effect.

While Stemann’s vocal portrayal revealed the well-bred Viennese lady she is in person, a young puppeteer, Nikolaus Habjan’s inspired interaction with Jelinek’s mask most touchingly brought out her tenderness and vulnerability in an other- wise self-consciously strained, fashionably “inventive” production of Shadows, directed by Matthias Hartmann, at the Viennese Burgtheater. If Stemann’s performances still suggested (however unintentionally) a man giving voice to a woman, the puppeteer and the superbly animated mask-in-action slightly to the side and in front of him, both wrapped in one black cloth, embodied the merg- ing and ultimately transcending of gender boundaries. Seated throughout the performance on the side at the edge of the stage, script in hand, they followed the performance together, Jelinek and her shadow; or the other way around, the unmasked face in the shadow of the mask, watching the performance, exchang- ing glances, reading out sotto voce the author’s responses. Sharing one body and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 one voice following the textbook in their shared lap—one text for reading and speaking and seeing—s/he conjured the ancient wonder of theatre.

The resonant image was true both to Jelinek’s unique appropriations of Greek myths and to the dramaturgy. Her texts, massive blocks of speech (“planes of language” as she calls them) without assigned individual speakers leave it open to the director and dramaturg to orchestrate the voices. On paper Schatten begins as a first-person narrative without mention of a speaker. The title sug- gests a clue, albeit bracketed, but it could also simply stand for the beginning of a story, a myth retold, or rather, rewritten. The text has been staged both as a solo-performance and an ensemble piece alternating between individual and choral scenes. The Burgtheater featured seven Eurydices, sometimes masked as an anonymous chorus—myth after all, in a loose take on Roland Barthes, is just a frozen sign—sometimes barefaced, both in the literal and the common colloquial sense when applied to the (shamelessly) over the top individual performances.

Another, more psychological approach to the text, directed by Jan Philipp Gloger at the Badische Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, features five Eurydices of different ages with a show-stopping rant by the aging woman against the singer’s teenage fans’hysterically budding sexuality. Though the actress (Annette Büschelberger) performed without the usual Jelinek accessories, the connection to the author was not lost on those in the know, while hilarious for all. Framed by an off-stage reading from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Ovid most accessible for mainstream American audiences and later romantic tableaux of the myth, it would probably be the most easily understood production for American mainstream audiences.

By contrast, Katie Mitchell—as a British director working regularly in Germany, an outsider unencumbered by Jelinek’s iconic public image—does not mine the text for moments of the author’s self-performance. Neither does she engage in a critical, or outraged, or comically frustrated dialogue with it in her recent production of Shadows at Berlin’s Schaubühne. She did, however, cut most of the text (the lines used can almost be counted on one hand, according to one critic) and translated it into cinematic images in her signature mise-en-scène of intersecting stage action and the making of a film. Mitchell split her Eurydice in two: Jule Böwe, one of the outstanding actresses of her generation in contemporary German theatre, here—to the critics’ and fans’ chagrin—mostly silent, her performance filmed on stage and projected on screen, and the woman (Stefanie Eidt), seated on stage in a sort of sound-booth speaking the sparse text. My initial impres- sion of the director’s approach during an early rehearsal of the first two scenes (though already on stage with full tech four weeks before the opening!) was a dramaturgically correct, very sensitive representation of Jelinek’s essentially dark, media-driven world view (as embodied by the pop/rock idol “Singer”) and of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 female writer’s outwardly silent struggle to free herself from the singer and his world, where a flash of his smart phone signals yet another simple twist of fate, replacing the mythological hero’s simple twist of his neck. The silent images on screen and the soundtrack of this contemporary Eurydice’s thoughts suggested an in-depth psychological study (certainly justified by the text’s frequent references to Freud, albeit without the sarcastic undertone that Mitchell ignored). The relent- lessly slow speed of Eurydice’s filmed descent, framed by the frenzy of the film crew on stage, evoked the aesthetic of Chantal Ackerman and Michael Haneke. Most opening night critics took issue with the omission of the text’s farcical lay- ers, its deliberate contradictions and abrupt transitions between darkness and its mockery, including self-mockery. As I came to know Jelinek in the course of our collaborations I perceive those as her safety zones.

“If it’s a choice between the tragic and the comical, go with the comical,” Jelinek responded to one of my translator questions. She frequently emphasized this in our conversations about her work. In a brief exchange with Mitchell during the rehearsal Mitchell mentioned, almost surprised, how dark her staging is evolving and wondered whether Jelinek would like it. I suggested, ever so tentatively, that in her mostly visual exploration of a writer with no hints at autobiographical parallels, Mitchell might have touched upon Jelinek’s most vulnerable spots of the darkness within caused by her illness. As I was finishing this article Jelinek sent me a few pictures of her and the mask made by the puppeteer at her home in Vienna. He had sent them to her for her birthday. The images were as sensitive and revealing as his performance with it (herself?). Carefully, gingerly holding the mask, looking at it in wonder, her own face without any make up, they cap- tured the young girl within, utterly un-self conscious in all the vulnerability of a child. I mentioned this when I asked her if I could use them for this article. She wrote back: “Yes, you are right, I also see something vulnerable in these photos, it’s almost too intimate for me. I don’t really want people being able to look into me so deeply but, of course I have nothing against it if you and Bonnie want to use it.”* It turned out that none of the pictures’ resolution was high enough for publication. Just another twist . . . .

In conclusion, a 1966 Playboy interview with Dylan’s response when asked what his songs are about:

. . . I do know what my songs are about. Playboy: And what’s that? Dylan: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve. Playboy: Can’t you be a bit more informative? Dylan: Nope.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 Change the numbers and it could be Jelinek talking about her performance texts: “Oh, some are about 10 pages; some are about 50, and some, believe it or not are about 220 pages.”

*The photo of Jelinek and the mask appears only in the online version of PAJ.

GITTA HONEGGER is a Guggenheim-and Fulbright/IFK fellow. She is the authorized translator of Elfriede Jelinek and also translated the plays of Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke and Elias Canetti among others. Her cultural biography of Thomas Bernhard, The Making of An Austrian, was published in the U.S. and in Germany, in her own translation into German.

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