Laureates like Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, and José Saramago cheapen the Nobel Prize. But this year’s laureate, the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946), marks a new low. It is likely that you hadn’t heard of Jelinek before—or, if you had, it was probably only because her sadomasochistic fantasy The Piano Teacher (1983) was made into a movie with Isabelle Huppert in 2001. Other titles by Jelinek have been translated into English—Lust (1989), for example, an unrelieved carnival of sexual and physical brutality culminating in a woman’s murder of her son. Jelinek is a radical left-wing fantasist. She was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991—a period when, as Stephen Schwartz pointed out in The Weekly Standard, the organization “was little more than a KGB network.” With the fall of the Soviet Empire, support for its satellites dried up, so Jelinek left the party. But she didn’t abandon her left-wing animus. Her most recent work is Bambiland (2003), a stream-of-consciousness anti-American effusion masquerading as a play. Most of her work is a species of arty pornography. The Nobel judges rhapsodized about Jelinek’s “musical flow of voices and counter-voices … that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” But what the reader actually finds is not the revelation of but a shameless wallowing in clichés. The Swedish Academy has made plenty of mistakes. In choosing to honor Elfriede Jelinek it has made itself a laughingstock.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:18 AM  |