"You must think I won’t find out where you’ve been, Erika. A child should own up to her mother without being asked. But mother never believes her because Erika tends to lie. Mother is waiting. She starts counting to three."
Nothing about these lines is sinister till the time we learn that the ‘child’ is in her thirties and the mother is old enough to be her grandmother. It is then that one feels the Pinteresque eeriness of the scene. Jelinek minces no words and wastes no time. The reader lands straight into the thick soup of Erika’s muddled life as a hair-tearing bawl between the mother and her child opens the chapter.
Jelinek’s work has evoked extreme reactions from critics. While she was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2005 for "her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in her novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power" on the other hand many consider her work as public pornography.
Erika Kohut, the Piano Teacher, is caught in the power structure created by her mother. She has been framed and molded by the mother who now owns her child. While she is unable to break off the maternal chords, her desires begin to rot, inching towards perversion. She visits sex houses with peep-holes where she ‘looks’ at women feigning excitement and she spies on couples having sex.
Erka’s character slowly emerges through all the burden that it carries. Jelinek delineates how Erika is unusual, not for her musical talent but the role she desires in a sexual equation. Jelinek has herself described Erika as a phallic woman who appropriates the male right to watch and who therefore pays for it with her life. Perhaps she is the Eve who has decided to eat the forbidden fruit on her own terms. From peepholes she moves to a real lover, a young student who lusts for her. But while she attempts to impose her masochist order in their sexual life the young man is not to be tamed and strikes back.
Erika charts her own degradation. While sex in the novel is depraved, raw and sadomasochist, it is not an end in itself but a tool to bring out how sexual relations are established as power structures. Similarly, a feminist perspective is not the only one that Jelinek is trying to address. She targets the broader issue. The silent manipulation and power struggle behind idealized personal relations are brought out. For this, she also draws from portrayals of common sex relations.
Jelinek wields absolute power over her words. She unleashes their full strength as she paints the mother-child relationship and successfully makes that depiction much more powerful than the perversion that runs through the novel. It shields her thus, from the charge of pornography.
“Mother worries a lot, for the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.”
The Piano Teacher is considered an autobiographical novel, though the writer herself has shown disinclination for the book to be interpreted in that manner. However, certain parallels are obvious. Jelinek's parents were already in their forties when she was born. She lived with her mother even as an adult and had a troubled relationship with her. Her mother had planned a musical career for her, quite like the Mother in the book. Her father also died at a mental hospital.
Her symbols evoke the fear and bondage felt by her characters. The corpses in the wardrobe, the bed shared by the Kohut women, no private room for Erika and no latch knob are some examples. Her words have a razor edge, especially when she deals with the maternal strings which she paints in distinct impressionistic strokes. It is admirable how convincingly she consigns an old woman so much power and command over her strong-willed daughter.
“Mother, without prior notice, uscrews the top of HER head, sticks her hand inside, self-assured, and then grubs and rummages about. Mother messes up everything and puts nothing back where it belongs."
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