At one Remove: The Paradoxes of Jelinek’s narrative Voice (original) (raw)

Literatur und Leben, 1996

Abstract

Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust is pornographic not because it graphically describes a woman’s sexual maltreatment, but because it violently abuses language, cutting it up and degrading it before the eyes of the reader. Such at least is the conclusion reached by Wolfram Schutte in the review which he writes of the novel when it first appears in 1989.2 His epigrammatic inversion is an extreme, if problematic formulation of issues central to any discussion of Jelinek’s writing. Not only does it shift our attention away from the content of the texts to their form. It implicitly raises questions as to the gender both of the subject who wrote the texts, and of the very language in which they are composed (in Schutte’s scenario, language features as the abused woman, with Jelinek taking the role of the abusing man).

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