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In 2004, the Swedish Academy awarded an Austrian writer known for her painfully explicit prose the Nobel Prize for Literature. Amid a flurry of controversy, Elfriede Jelinek was given the coveted prize, prompting at least one member of the academy, Knut Ahnlund, to step down. He described Jelinek’s work as “whining, unenjoyable, public pornography” and said that the decision to award her the prize had “confused the general view of literature as art.”
Many of the 20th century’s most celebrated novels were brought out amid shock and scandal. Though public debates about pornography today are more muted, issues of sex and art continue to provoke, resonate and perplex.
Jelinek’s 1989 novel “Lust” is perhaps the author’s most explicit and controversial text. I turn to a comment the author made clarifying her intent (from the German magazine Stern 37) “The distancing, critical function of aesthetic mediation is to replace direct consumption of lust that typifies pulp pornography: Lust should not be consumed like commercial pornography. Through aesthetic mediation, it should, as it were, be thrown back into the face of the reader. What I aim to achieve is that the reader no longer can roll around in lust, like a pig in its sty, but instead grows pale in the process of reading.”
Many of the issues Jelinek raises are relevant for discussions about Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Réage, or Bataille, et al, authors who, along with Jelinek, blur the boundaries between literature and pornography. “Lust,” enables the reader to explore this fragile (possible shifting) boundary between art and pornography. These boundaries may in part be fixed by notions of imagination, collusion, pleasure, embarrassment and fear. All these are relevant to a discussion of Jelinek’s work.
Through their transgressiveness, cruelty and obscenity, Jelinek’s books also often offer social critique. (In this sense, her work falls under Deleuze’s category– along with Sade and Sacher-Masoch – of the pornological.) It is interesting to note that she straddled both sides of the pornography debate in the 1980s, which may hint to her desire to be viewed both as a pornographer and an anti-pornographer. We can see this tension clearly in her work, which present her bleak view of human sexuality in ways both graphically pornographic and artistically subtle.
Whereas the work of pornography (WOP) appeals directly to desire, erotic art stimulates both our desire and our intellect. The promise of pleasure, therefore, that pornography offers is that of instant gratification. The fantasy arrives pre-constructed, completely manufactured and the ways in which the imagination can engage with the material are rather limited. On the other hand, when one contemplates a work of erotic art (WOEA), the burden on the imagination to fill in is so much the greater. The fragmentary and distancing style of Jelinek’s prose requires great input on the reader’s behalf. Thus, we become conspirators in an anguished vision that makes our blood run cold.
Nor is it essential to maintain critical distance when engaging with a WOEA. I am convinced that WOEA can and should engage with the reader corporally, breathlessly. And while the promise of pleasure may be latent in the WOEA, it is concerned with more than pre-manufactured orgasms. Jelinek’s work takes this notion several steps further. She offers us an erotic vision with no promise of pleasure: rather with an inherent promise of pain.
The act of reading a WOEA can be akin to living out an author’s sexual fantasies. The less in control the spectator is, the more uncomfortable he is made and the greater the achievement of the writer. Control can either mean that the reader is being guided too much or not enough at all. As we journey through Jelinek’s sexual nightmares, we frequently grow frustrated with our guide.
Sade placed enormous demands on the imagination and asked the reader to surrender to the extremity of his vision. Sade created his lurid tomes as stages on which to enact his darkest and most tortured desires. Jelinek resembles Sade in her grotesquerie and the encyclopedic cataloging of cruelty. But rather than titillate, the explicitness of a Jelinek text is meant to provoke reasoned analysis by eliciting disgust.
Whereas the WOP services the client, the WOEA seduces him. Thus a communion between author and reader is created. The fantasy is created midway between the book and the reader. The motives are different by way of Jelinek through the techniques are similar. Jelinek seduces us to her vision of non-redemptive, pleasureless sex, which springs up midway between the page and our eyes.
We fear of engaging with the WOEA as normal, healthy art. By stirring our erotic fantasies and at the same time giving us an aesthetic sensation, the WOEA threatens to break down the barrier between the public and private sector. Jelinek’s savage and relentless view of sexuality promises to tear down this barrier.
There is something potentially embarrassing in the act of reading a WOEA. This embarrassment stems from the fact that the author asks us to exercise these private desires and feelings in the public sphere of literature. Jelinek’s brutality is meant to humiliate the reader. Hers is a cruel, sadistic literature.
Whereas the pornographer will vulgarly flash the audience, the skilled eroticist will engage the spellbound crowd in a suave seduction. Jelinek, the consummate anti-eroticist, often co-opts strategies and techniques from pornography to fuel her anguished and powerful writing.
There is sometimes the impulse to defend a WOEA by focusing on the non-erotic content. This is both defensive and dishonest. Furthermore, it threatens the possibility of adequately exploring the role of the erotic in art. I consider these ruminations as a standing invitation to to such a discussion.
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