Elfriede Jelinek’s Gier, published in 2000, is not her most famous work – thanks to Michael Haneke’s 2001 film, her earlier Klavierspielerin (The Piano Player, 1988) is probably more internationally renowned, and indeed the author has several times said that she considers Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead, 1995) to be her magnum opus. Nor is it her most controversial work. Although Gier found as little favour with her critics in the more conservative sections of the Austrian press as any of her other works, Jelinek’s reputation as a ‘befouler of the national nest’ was established long before the novel’s appearance. Moreover, her most dramatic public interventions have been in other media, such as her much publicised boycott of Austrian theatres around the time of Gier’s publication, political theatre such as Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006), or the searing commentaries directed from her website, www.jelinek.com. However, Gier has a unique significance in that it was her most recent novel to be published prior to her Nobel Prize award in 2004. In this sense, it can be seen as her Nobel novel. A further, not insignificant, consideration is that Gier has been available in English translation since 2007, and is thus the only representative of Jelinek’s novelistic oeuvre since 1994 available in the English-speaking world. Finally, Gier was the first novel that Jelinek completed after the entry of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) into the Austrian government and therefore has a political significance as a direct response to an episode that, albeit briefly, was considered a major disruption to the European consensus following the Cold War.

This chapter addresses the following questions. First, is Gier just more of the same from Jelinek? It is certainly the case that the concerns that have informed Jelinek’s work throughout her career reappear once more in Gier: sexual violence against women, ecological pessimism, virulent satire of the twee outward appearance of rural Austria and its underlying fascist history, and an endless pulling-apart of language through punning, allusion and repetition, to undermine any idea of its direct referentiality, and to expose its inherent gendered violence. If Jelinek has explored these matters ad nauseam in earlier novels such as Lust (Lust, 1992) and Krankheit oder moderne Frauen (Illness or Modern Women, 1994), and plays from In den Alpen (In the Alps, 2002) to Bambiland (2004), does Gier add anything new? Second, is Gier in any way representative of the German-language novel since 1990? Does it contribute to literary and political discourses at play in Europe since the end of the Cold War? Or are Jelinek’s copious references to contemporary political events simply an excuse for her to repeat her decades-long critique of Austria, language and patriarchy? This was certainly the perspective of newspaper critic Matthias Matussek, who described Jelinek’s aesthetic as a ‘worn-out feminism front’, or of the Nobel Prize committee member Kurt Ahnlund, who sensationally resigned on 11 October 2005 over Jelinek’s appointment, calling her work ‘a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure’. Both of these critiques suggest that Jelinek’s work is an undifferentiated corpus, lacking those normative ‘masculine’ qualities of discreteness and aesthetic autonomy that characterise authoritative works of art in the canonical German Romantic and Adornian traditions. Jelinek, in her turn, resists any such norms of authority, portraying hers as a non-authoritative voice at the mercy both of a recalcitrant reality and an inadequate language in her Nobel prizewinning speech ‘Im Abseits’ (‘Sidelined’, 2004). Thus her work consciously subverts the masculine aesthetic norms assumed by Matussek or Ahnlund. Rather, her poetics mirror her repeated portrayals of the female body as indiscrete, non-self-identical, perforated, pornographically dismembered and liable to seepage. I therefore address a third question; namely, how the poetics of Gier are interlinked with Jelinek’s controversial decision not to attend the Nobel prize-giving ceremony on 10 December 2004, and instead to give her speech via video link. At face value, ‘Im Abseits’ states that Jelinek feels her authority to be irrelevant in the face of the power of her language. This suggests Jelinek’s non-referential language is an uncontrollable unity, one that defies any authorial division into discrete texts, genres and modes. But Jelinek’s video lecture at the prize-giving ceremony, a presence-in-absence, was a performance far more striking and memorable than the conventional presence of other Nobel Prize winners. As she gave the speech, far from being ‘sidelined’ by language, Jelinek’s face, hair, clothes, voice and manner were made inescapable on giant video screens. Paradoxically, as Alexandra Tacke has noted, this performance became in its own turn theatre, a text in itself. I argue that Gier has an equally ambiguous status as an individual and authoritative text.