Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas

Author(s): Allyson Fiddler and Karen Jürs-Munby

Source: Austrian Studies, Vol. 22, Elfriede Jelinek in the Arena: Sport, Cultural
Understanding and Translation to Page and Stage (2014), pp. 1-7
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/austrianstudies.22.2014.0001
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 Introduction:
Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas
ALLYSON FIDDLER and k aren jürs-mu nby

Lancaster University

With the 30th Olympiad due to be ‘staged’ in London in the summer of

2012, it seemed logical to choose sport as one of the focal points of our then
forthcoming conference on Elfriede Jelinek at Lancaster University (11–13 July
2012) — the first dedicated to the author in the United Kingdom. Not only had
the Austrian Cultural Forum (London) commissioned a translation of Jelinek’s
Ein Sportstück from Penny Black, but the Croatian-born director and producer
team Vanda Butkovic and Berislav Juraic from Just a Must theatre company
had been tasked with realizing the English-language premiere of Jelinek’s 1998
play for a UK audience.1 After one amateur production by the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama in 1996 of What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband
and one professional but negatively reviewed production of Services (also in
1996), British theatre-goers have had to wait a long time to see this Nobel Prize
winner’s work on the stage.2 After its premiere on 11 July 2012, the Just a Must
production toured to three other regional theatres and ended with a run in
London to coincide with the Olympics.3 Combining academic reflection with
the physical experience of watching a live interpretation of a major Jelinek play
in translation provided the ideal seedbed for developing new understandings
and readings of the work of an author whose profile in the United Kingdom
lags significantly behind her status and recognition both in German-speaking
countries and on the continent more broadly.

1
Elfriede Jelinek, Ein Sportstück (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1998). Elfriede Jelinek, Sports
Play, trans. by Penny Black, with translation assistance and a foreword by Karen Jürs-
Munby (London, 2012); premiere Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, 11 July 2012.
2
Elfriede Jelinek, What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband, or Pillars of Society, trans.
by Tinch Minter, in Plays by Women: Ten, ed. by Annie Castledine (London, 1994), pp.
23–63. The production was directed by Annie Castledine at the Guildhall School. Elfriede
Jelinek, Services, or They All Do It, trans. by Nick Grindell, in Cat and Mouse (Sheep) and
Services, ed. by Gate Biennale (London, 1996), pp. 65–132 (staged at the Gate Theatre, 19
February 1996).
3
In 2013 Just a Must’s Sports Play was reprised briefly in London and enjoyed further
acclaim at festivals in Algeria and Macedonia. Reviews of the production are available
on the company’s website at <http://www.justamust.com/index.php/just-a-must-press>
[accessed 25 July 2014].
Austrian Studies 22 (2014), 1–7
© Modern Humanities Research Association 2014

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2 Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas
Offering a brief time-out from the London games, our academic conference
looked at the work of Austria’s foremost contemporary writer and Nobel laureate
in the light of three interrelated thematic areas: sport, translation and cultural
understanding. The metaphor of the ‘arena’ with its multiple connotations
suggested itself as a way of addressing these areas individually and in relation
to each other: not only is an arena a place where mass audiences come to
watch sports, entertainments and other public events; the term also denotes a
scene of intense public activity and, indeed, of activism, debate and conflict.
In our call for papers we suggested that Elfriede Jelinek’s body of work could
be read as a model ‘cultural Olympics’ all of its own. Jelinek’s intersections
with a multiplicity of different artistic forms are legend. Not only has she
penned novels, plays, poetry, screenplays, and essays, but she can also point to
libretti, to numerous of her own translations of other writers, and to innovative
collaborations with a wide variety of artists, composers and intellectuals.
Furthermore, her efforts to speak to both highly specialized audiences and to
ordinary individuals provide us with a model for understanding how ‘elite’
performances are valued by multiple audiences and evolve in collaboration with
them. At the same time, sport and the mass public consumption of cultural and
political events, especially in a mass-mediatized form, have been a recurrent
point of criticism and a frequent theme within Jelinek’s work to date.
As the contributions to this volume show, the vast range of political topics
dealt with in Jelinek’s works resonate increasingly strongly in international
arenas. These range from home-grown Austrian topics to global topics,
although even seemingly ‘local’, Austria-specific material in Jelinek’s treatment
is never just about Austria, for as the author states: ‘Österreich ist eine kleine
Welt, in der die große ihre Probe hält’ [Austria is a small world in which the big
one holds its rehearsal].4 Political topics in Jelinek’s work include, for example,
her ongoing engagement with feminist topics of gender mythologies, sexism
and misogyny in novels such as Die Liebehaberinnen [1975; Women as Lovers,
1994] and Lust (1989) and plays such as Krankheit oder moderne Frauen [1987;
Illness or Modern Women], the so-called Princess Dramas, Der Tod und das
Mädchen I-V [Death and the Maiden, premiered between 2000–2002], or Über
Tiere [About Animals, premiered 2007]; Austria’s collusion with the Nazis, its
ongoing partial denial of the Holocaust, and contemporary attitudes to Nazi war
crimes in plays such as Burgtheater (1985), Steckn, Stab und Stangl [1996; Rod,
Staff and Crook] and Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) (2008); the Iraq war and its
representation in the media in Bambiland (2003) and Babel (2005); the financial
crisis in Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns [2009, The Merchant’s Contracts] to
technological megalomania and the resulting man-made humanitarian and
ecological catastrophes in plays such as Das Werk [The Works, 2003], about
the huge sacrifice of forced labourers in the construction of the Kaprun power
4
Elfriede Jelinek ‘Im Verlassenen’ [The forsaken place], <http://www.a-e-m-gmbh.com/ej/
famstet.htm> [accessed 30 September 2014]. Our translation.

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 Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas 3
station in the Austrian Alps, or Kein Licht (2011; No Light) about the nuclear
catastrophe in Fukushima.
Readers familiar with Jelinek’s work will know that her recognition at home
is itself highly problematic. Jelinek’s early public reception in the 1970s and
1980s as a ‘Marxist-feminist’ writer then largely became secondary, at least in
Austria, as a stronger tendency arose to see her as a denigrator of her own home
country, a ‘Nestbeschmutzer’.5 Scandals such as those generated by Burgtheater
(1985) played a key part in establishing this epithet. Of course, an early novel
such as Die Liebhaberinnen is, in part at least, a kind of anti-Heimatroman, but
by specifically attacking the darlings of the Austrian acting scene, the families
of the Wesselys and Hörbigers, and by pointing a finger at their likely wartime
knowledge and tacit complicity with Nazi propaganda in Burgtheater, Jelinek
very firmly rolled up her sleeves and entered the political arena in Austria.6
Jelinek herself became the object of a concerted political attack in the mid
1990s when she and other socialist or liberal intellectuals and public figures
were pilloried in the campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs [Freedom
Party of Austria] as state-sponsored artists (‘Staatskünstler’). A decade later
Jelinek’s apparent recuperation by the state seemed complete with the Republic
of Austria congratulating ‘their’ author Elfriede Jelinek on her receipt of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. But the relationship between Jelinek and
her fellow citizens remains complex and polarized, not least because one
of her major preoccupations is with the process of Austrian historiography
and, in particular, with the crimes and atrocities of the Nazi era. In Rechnitz
(premiered in 2008), Jelinek joined in with the political campaigns to track
down the graves of 200 murdered Jews and added fuel to the fire of the public
controversy surrounding British journalist David Litchfield’s investigation
of the Thyssen family fortunes (in art and capital) by taking as her point
of departure the frenzied execution of these forced labourers at the castle
of Rechnitz in the Burgenland province of Austria. The concluding article
in our volume by Allyson Fiddler reads Rechnitz as a paradigm for cultural
reproduction, analysing this play in terms of its ‘reproduction’ of a number of
intertexts and interrogating it for its potential to transfer to another language
and cultural setting.
Co-editor Karen Jürs-Munby’s investigation of the Sportstück material opens
our celebration of Jelinek’s work in the present volume by way of reading
its wider significance through the ancient Greek concept of the agon and a
revival of ‘agonistics’ (Chantal Mouffe) as a practice of political dissent. Her
contribution looks at both the seminal choric production of the play in 1998 by

5
Die Nestbeschmutzerin: Jelinek und Österreich, ed. by Pia Janke (Salzburg. 2002) charts
this phenomenon.
6
See Allyson Fiddler, ‘Demythologising the Austrian “Heimat”: Elfriede Jelinek as “Nest­
beschmutzer” ’, in From High Priests to Desecrators: Contemporary Austrian Literature, ed.
by Moray McGowan and Ricarda Schmidt (Sheffield, 1993), pp. 25–44.

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4 Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas
the late director Einar Schleef as well as the highly praised English-language
staging by Vanda Butkovic. As Jürs-Munby notes, the no-longer-dramatic
form of Jelinek’s theatre texts and stage directions such as ‘Machen Sie was Sie
wollen’ [‘do what you like’]7 invite the active co-creation of theatre directors
in the ‘translation’ of her plays into performance and have led to an unusually
broad array of directorial approaches. This translation to the stage is given
further focus in relation to questions of cultural transfer in contributions by
André Bastian and Inge Arteel. As a theatre director engaged in practice and
research, Bastian discusses the aesthetic and political strategies that were put
into practice in his own staging of Princess Dramas (‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping
Beauty’ and ‘Jackie’) at Red Stitch Actors Theatre (Melbourne, 2011), the first
Jelinek production in Australia. He reflects on his theatre-making process from
the position of an ‘arriving artist’, drawing on the figure of the palimpsest as
a theoretical tool for explaining the ways in which the Melbourne production
used Jelinek’s linguistic surfaces for scrutinizing ‘the manifold provincialisms
reigning not only in Austria, but all over the world’. The ‘international
connectivity’ of Jelinek’s work that Bastian argues for is also borne out by Arteel’s
exploration of Jelinek’s theatrical reception in Dutch-speaking countries, which
charts a development from fledgling beginnings to dramaturgical successes
by established companies and theatres from 2008 onwards. While the Nobel
Prize in 2004 is acknowledged as an engine for growth of the international
reception, Arteel nevertheless argues that the process of cultural transfer has
to be understood not as a wholesale unilateral adoption of plays and associated
dramaturgies but as a two-way process of ‘relational interaction’ in which
institutional contexts, theatrical innovations in the target theatre culture and
the resonance with current political events have to be taken into account.
Several contributions position Jelinek’s work in relation to certain genres,
aesthetics and textual strategies in order to gain new insights into her highly
political forms of writing. Thus Jessica Rizzo attests a ‘melodramatic imagination’
(Peter Brooks) to Jelinek and to the playwright’s penchant for appropriating
and subverting popular ‘lowbrow’ and even ‘trashy’ forms of literature and
entertainment. Her affinity for ‘hot’ genres such as classic melodrama, fairy
tales and pornography, as well as charged forms of entertainment such as
mass sports events, Rizzo asserts, furnish Jelinek with the ‘dramaturgy of
reduction and (over)simplification’ that fuel the angry political energy of her
work. Like Rizzo, who notes similarities between Jelinek’s project and those
of Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry and Bertolt Brecht, Lara Stevens positions
Jelinek as inheritor of the modernist tradition, specifically of Brecht’s epic
theatre. Stevens regards Jelinek as developing this tradition in line with post-
structuralist theories such as Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. With
reference to Jelinek’s Bambiland, Stevens argues that Jelinek’s textual strategy
of quoting texts and images from literature, philosophy and the media can be
7
Jelinek, Ein Sportstück, p. 7; Jelinek, Sports Play, p. 39.

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 Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas 5
fruitfully theorized as an extension of Brecht’s concept of gestus, namely as
‘gestic intertextuality’.
Many of the articles presented here take up the topic of sport in Jelinek’s work,
either as a thematic pursuit or as a metaphorical platform by which the author
develops her cultural and political analysis. Martin Brady, Karl Solibakke, and
Rebecca Braun choose to explore the intersections and implications of sport in
different ways. The intertextual fabric of Jelinek’s writing, or ‘Intertextizität’
[intertexticity], is a kind of competitive quoting, the implications of which
Brady explores in Jelinek’s autobiographically inspired play, Winterreise [2011;
A Winter’s Journey]. Solibakke probes the cultural fields of sport and music for
their common structures and argues that the embedding of these discourses into
the literary text (here Winterreise as well as the 1985 novel, Die Klavierspielerin
[The Piano Teacher, 1983]) produces challenges for the contemporary body
politic. Braun probes the competitiveness inherent in the industry of the
literary prize, examining ways in which both Elfriede Jelinek and compatriot
Thomas Bernhard try in their writings to mitigate the undermining effects
of the neo-capitalist society on the value of literature per se. Bernhard and
Jelinek have engaged with these ideas in their various public thematizations of
authorship, discussed here with regard to Bernhard’s posthumous essay on the
1971 Grillparzer Prize speech (2009) and ‘the sustained comparison of literary
and sporting activities that underly Elfriede Jelinek’s Sportstück’.
Beyond the narrower confines of Western Europe, Sarah Neelsen and Arnhilt
Hoefle consider linguistic translation and the recent reception of published
works in Mexico, Russia, and Poland (Neelsen) and in China (Hoefle). Jelinek’s
essay-writing forms a considerable corpus of texts and should be seen as a
body of primary material in its own right, rather than as secondary literature
commenting on the author’s other writings, Neelsen argues. The constitution
and origins of the Spanish-, Russian- and Polish-language collections of
Jelinek’s essays offer up perspectives on the ephemeral as well as the contextual
nature of the essays. The post-Nobel prize reception of Jelinek’s oeuvre in
China is charted by Hoefle, who explains the highly ambivalent reaction to
Jelinek whilst noting the contextual complexities imposed by censorship of
various kinds in China. Jelinek’s meteoric rise is further contextualized against
the backdrop of China’s ‘Nobel complex’, its eagerness to consolidate its own
international literary recognition.
Ben Morgan, Sruti Bala and Allyson Fiddler deal with theatre texts that have
in part been prompted by particular political developments or events. Morgan’s
consideration of Jelinek’s earliest postdramatic piece, Wolken.Heim. [Clouds.
Home., 1988] does not retrace its interaction with the impending German
reunification of 1989 and its many discourses, but seeks rather to read anew the
intertextual references to Hölderlin’s poetry and to try to reconcile the utopian
moments with the bleakness of Jelinek’s portrayal of German nationalism. In
tracing the development from page to stage, Morgan situates Jelinek’s writing

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6 Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas
in an international context, by comparison with contemporaneous material in
Great Britain in the form of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good,
also premiered in 1988. Jelinek’s 2011 theatre piece, Kein Licht is a response to
the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan. Deriving a process of translation
she terms ‘reparative translation’ from Gayatri Spivak’s and Jacqueline Rose’s
readings of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, Bala shows that ‘the idea of a repar­
ative translation takes the form of acts of truth-telling, unearthing lies and
mourning the loss of lives’. In Rechnitz, Jelinek’s life-long concern to keep the
memory of Nazi atrocities alive and to probe the mechanisms of the continued
silence and mythology surrounding them is traceable to events in Austria in 1945.
Fiddler’s conclusion emphasizes the gains to be derived rather than the
deficits to be lamented in the process of linguistic translation. Jelinek might
have dubbed herself ‘untranslatable’ in a somewhat self-deprecating appraisal
of her work.8 She is right to point out the inherent difficulties of linguistic
translation, but as the articles here testify, there is a huge wealth of insight to be
gained from considering Jelinek’s writing as it translates to other languages and
cultures as well as to other performance practices and traditions.

* * * * *
In accordance with our policy of making contributions accessible to readers
with limited German, an English translation of quotations from primary
literature is provided, usually in square brackets after the original text, with
titles of works and organizations translated on their first appearance only. Most
such translations are by the authors of the articles, unless otherwise indicated.
Published translations of Elfriede Jelinek’s work have been used by individual
authors.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to express their thanks to the Austrian Cultural Forum,
London, and in particular to its then director Peter Mikl, whose ideas and vision
led to the commissioning of the Sports Play translation, its touring production
by professional theatre company Just a Must, and to the decision to organize at
Lancaster University the first UK conference on Elfriede Jelinek’s work in July
2012. We are grateful to the ACF for its financial support of the project and to
the Austrian Studies general editorship for welcoming this first ever issue to
be devoted to the study of a single author, and in particular to Florian Krobb
for his support. Thank you, too, to Gail Ferguson, for some much appreciated
assistance.
It is gratifying that Elfriede Jelinek, an author who has not enjoyed great
public acclaim or popularity in the UK, should nevertheless attract such a
8
Elfriede Jelinek in Joanna Kavenna, ‘The Untranslatables’, in The Telegraph, 30 Nov­
ember 2004, <www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3632510/The-untranslatables.html> [accessed
30 September 2014].

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 Introduction: Elfriede Jelinek in Multiple Arenas 7
wealth of international research and thus further cement the considerable track
record of anglophone scholarship on this important author. We should like to
thank also our colleague Rebecca Braun, who was one of the co-organizers of
the 2012 conference, and our respective departments, European Languages
and Cultures and the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts for their
support. Translators Gitta Honegger and Penny Black were both able to attend
the 2012 conference and deliver valuable insights into the translation process,
as were Ryan Kiggell and Elisa Terren from aya theatre company. Our thanks
are reiterated to them here, too. Various photographs have been provided
free of charge, and we are immensely grateful to be able to reproduce them
here. Acknowledgements are given in the relevant articles. Some of the papers
collected here originated in the conference, others resulted from the broader call
for papers. All papers were subject to blind peer review. Last, but by no means
least, the editors would like to thank Elfriede Jelinek, first of all for providing
the stimulus for so much critical interpretation and audience enjoyment, and
secondly for sending us an audio recording of her reading of the start of Ein
Sportstück. This was used by Just a Must for the beginning of their production
and can still be enjoyed at: <http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/jelinek/
sportsplay-recording.htm>.

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