The Piano Teacher
Sanna Helena Berger & Brit Barton
Still,
The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke (2001)
I just read through your essay on The Piano Teacher—an analysis of the 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek as well as the 2001 film by Michael Haneke. Thank you again for sharing it with me and, of course, for making yourself available to discuss it further. This conversation was initiated when everyone told me I had to talk to you. I didn’t know of your installation and performance at Kunsthalle Wien, but what lovely happenstance.
For context, this conversation hinges on the fact that this journal—Art and Order—as well as the forthcoming Relative Press, are named after a Jelinek quote from the novel: “Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.”
Amid all the choice lines, I was struck by the implications of dichotomy, relations, and collapse of desire within it. As if art and order could exist without one another, even if they tried! It's part of a monologue by the character of Walter Klemmer, who establishes only in this very one paragraph his class anxieties and probable future as a petit bourgeois Viennese businessman, rather than a grand and respectable artist.
I have to admit to the reader, as we did to one another earlier, that I’ve only read the novel twice (in English, no less) whereas I’ve seen the film seven or eight times in my life. And even then, the film is famously in French despite being based in Vienna, written by one of Austria’s most notable female authors. With so many levels of removal, or as you refer to it in your text, ‘adaptations’—I’m resigned to the idea that I’m not the most reliable narrator. Did you also visualize the film the whole time you were reading? I had to ask a friend what the Prater was like when I was reading that scene, which Haneke turns into a common drive-in theater.
Your essay encapsulates Jelinek’s stabbing, staccato syntax that reiterates itself over and over again, as if we’re meant to be hypnotized and horrified simultaneously. And you’re right, Haneke’s film turns us into easy voyeurs rather than an embodied reader who can inhabit Erika Kohut. Maybe that distance is what drives a more humane register—I could talk about Christian Berger’s cinematography for hours; it's near perfect. But, instead, I wanted to raise one point you hadn’t addressed as thoroughly.
There are multiple dimensions of time to The Piano Teacher as a thought-object. Jelinek published the novel Die Klavierspielerin in 1983 to much controversy. The backlash is swift. She’s ostracized but continues like Thomas Bernhard before her, carrying on against that current of the Viennese status-quo. After fits and starts elsewhere, Haneke finalized his screenplay and released La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) in 2001. Jelinek received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004. In all of this—a generational time span of the Cold War to the onset of the digital revolution—the transformation of modern Europe happened (again). The ‘modern’ European Union initiative was broadly born in the ‘90s with Austria as one its mid-size member states next to the big four of Germany, Italy, France, and the UK. By 2000, the FPÖ (Freedom Party, the furthest far-right populist party in Western Europe at the time) surged dramatically within the ranks of Austrian politics—the first time in the post-WWII period a far-right party came to power in a reliable democracy. The other EU member states worried, vocally, about the rise of fascist sympathies and imposed sanctions, only to lift them shortly thereafter, but left Austria politically isolated for some time.
All to say: we’re working within multiple parameters of time. As Jelinek was writing at the turn of the seventies to the eighties against the psychic oppression of the feminine, filial, or the institutional as she knew it, Haneke was filming against the backdrop of the literal upheaval of Austrian society. I think of The Piano Teacher as such a good metaphor for shifts in political pretenses of archaic, staid institutional ruin through the lens of masochism by way of artistic discipline(s). It’s also quite interesting that the term masochism is coined by and after two Austrian men, respectively. (...could one call it the Austrian condition?)
Otherwise, I leave you with another pressing thought. The relationship between student Walter Klemmer and Erika Kohut is tertiary to me, honestly. I can’t identify, let alone fathom putting any faith in a twenty-something year old dude. Mother is a whole thing. But, the mirroring of her student—known as Anna Schober in the film but unmentioned by name or narrative in the novel—is the richest and most driving point for me. She is the only person who Erika actually physically wounds in any durational sense, as if she is saving Anna from the same fate as herself.
Best,
Brit Barton
The original eponymous sentence from which you’ve extracted ‘Art and Order,’ reads “Kunst und Ordnung, die Verwandten, die sich weigern, miteinander verwandt zu sein …” The direct English translation, the brutal translation, we could say, reads “Art and order, the relatives who refuse to be related to each other.” But in Neugroschel’s translation this sentence is turned into a maxim, a postcard proverb, refining Jelinek’s a-poetic clinical mockery where I read her commas as a full stop, as if read aloud off a telegram:
Kunst und Ordnung STOP
die Verwandten STOP
die sich weigern STOP
miteinander verwandt zu sein STOP
And considering our conversation earlier about the inherent masochism endured when reading Jelinek, this perfectly demonstrates that reading Jelinek in her mother tongue is far more agonising than in Neugroschel’s translation. A translation, I think we need to call a version, since it aestheticises, through its adaptation, the lack of style; as style, into a more writerly form, which spares us a degree of oppression. Both the oppression we read about, but also from the oppression we experience as we’re reading it. I sometimes think Jelinek positions commas in her text, in order for us to feel them as small cuts on our skin. Translating it into a rhythm takes Jelinek’s brutal report and makes her syntactical stabbing detestation a little more moot; a turn-of-phrase. So it is interesting to me that you’ve named your journal after Jelinek’s sarcasm; a sentence which rhetorically condenses ideology and repression, but more importantly opens it up as synecdoche. Then perhaps this further reduction is the synecdoche of Jelinek’s synecdoche, in which case you and I are doing the same (dis-, depending on how you look at it) service Neugroschel does Jelinek, now, by contextualising your choice of title.
Yes, it is interesting that we both feel shame admitting to one another, and doubly, knowing that this will be read by others, that we enjoy Haneke’s film more than we enjoy Jelinek’s novel, but I think we should allow ourselves this confession without flagellation. Because speaking of implications of dichotomies, relations, and the collapse of desires within them… Jelinek’s writing is not writerly, but Haneke’s film is purely cinematic; she’s a pain to read, whereas Haneke’s film, although it has moments which make you wince, is still a pleasure to watch (all puns intended).
I forced myself to read the novel again before writing Schmutztitel which is the name of the essay you reference, where I attempt a comparative analysis (of sorts) of text and image, but it is exhausting to read a book whilst simultaneously screening the film in one's head. I incessantly compare and contrast the image with the text, which is why I also claim in this essay that the image eats the text. I think there is no unadulterated way to read Die Klavierspielerin after having watched The Piano Teacher, such is the power of the image to which the text must submit, thus it perfectly lends itself to echo a dom/sub-meta-analogy.
I thankfully did read the novel before I watched the film and I visited the Prater before that also, but, and even so, there is a myriad of Viennese puns and stabs and deride’s, we, not being Austrian, and as you mention socio-political circumstances; not living in the time when the novel was written, cannot access other than as objective mnemonics, clinging onto translations, both literally and figuratively. I think, in order to “faithfully” read this book, one has to be Viennese, conditioned by the Viennese tradition and austerity. We can do anything but play catch up, with Jelinek’s exactitude through which she describes this, as you say, Austrian condition, because she doesn’t only narrate it, she writes it into her writing or rather; she writes with it. I suspect she epitomizes her own conditioning so precisely that it is what led to her ousting; the reflexive mirror held up to the national bourgeoisie ego reflected its persona too clearly and retorted; raus! Vienna is after all a city rejoicing in riches, a cliché that keeps on giving, the land of Freud and Sisi and cream on top of everything. Personally I don’t see what’s not to love, but indulging and thus consuming Vienna also makes me feel like I’ve metaphorically overeaten after a while.
Interesting, I think the parable that Haneke plays out between Anna and Erika in the film is the most violent authorly, or interpretative, well; analytical agency Haneke claims. Both in his choice to focus on the student-teacher relationship, but also in doing so, drawing attention away from the mother-daughter relationship, which becomes at times, all but a comical footnote. Albeit sometimes tinged with some of the despair and humour we experience from Jelinek’s writing. It is troubling how amusingly she chronicles this nauseating cruelty her mother inflicts, but certainly, derangement is often both tragic and comedic. When I was writing Schumtztitel I felt compelled to write a whole other essay on the mother-daughter subjugation – a psychoanalytical trope, but also a well of exciting material, which I think Haneke castrates with his depiction. Equally neutered is Jelinek’s critique, via his refusal to grant scope to the second most suffocating gestalt in Jelinek’s novel: (Viennese bourgeoisie) society. I question Haneke’s male gaze, focusing, and magnifying in on Schober. I find that it sometimes insinuates the kind of basic jealousy and envy which is a staple in any kind of banal drama, but maybe it is as simple as: I am a mother, more than I am a student. Not to say I feel any affinity with Jelinek’s/Erika’s tyrant, but far more curiosity of the genesis of Erika’s “desires” and “perversions” as they seem born out of the mother’s despotism, leading to her own inability to desire anything but.
I know full well, saying this, that it would probably be a worse film-experience for it, and I understand the desire to insert the student-teacher parallel. It is indeed fascinating that Haneke makes her, Anna, real, whereas in the novel she is left as an unnamed figment. Although I see her as a gestalt standing in for Erika’s pathology, rather than as Haneke has her becoming; a deuteragonist, which by simple maths makes Erika the protagonist, Klemmer the antagonist and leaves The Mother hanging.
But the scene where Erika’s destructive desire swells quietly, but palpably, seen only as a long shot of the back of her neck, before sliding down the seat to crush the glass, with which, she also crushes Anna’s desires, and in doing so knowingly flashes her own to Klemmer, is indeed disturbingly delectable as a scene. The slowness of this scene seems to leave us, the viewer, who is always inclined to keep trying to empathise with the protagonist, with the decision whether Erika is experiencing a dilemma or not; is she questioning whether to quash her “competition” or not? Alas, I instead think of the slowness of this mise en scene as intentional, to show the pleasure one can only experience in the anticipation of the act, in this moment in-between fantasy and reality, when the object sits undisturbed, whereas as soon as the injury occurs, the potent desire in the potential of injuring is over and the jouissance dies. Haneke is nothing but not effective as insinuator. But also don’t forget that Anna is not the only person who Erika wounds; she does ultimately stab herself, cementing the fact that only through sabotage does she experience emancipation.
Warmly,
Sanna
I agree to some extent that one must be culturally tied in to totally get it… but in a way isn’t that how it always is with an art object? Viennese culture kind of reminds me of how annoying New York can be, how it is always obsessed with chasing the mythos of itself—the “you just had to be there” to get it. But any good work of art should be a living breathing thing that responds to and withstands the test of time, which is what gives The Piano Teacher (English version and French film) such poignant relevance. There are so many multifaceted points to enter but also, crucially, to ignore. For instance, do I need to have experienced the Prater to interpret the scene? I wouldn’t say so. It’s simply a park. You bring up motherhood as a separate perspective for instance, but naturally we are both daughters. I guess we can all understand infatuation. The painful process of being a student or the lonesome alienation of being put on a pedestal for fear of proximity. Certainly we can align with masochistic impulses, or how we invariably become reluctant sadists. I’ll never forget my undergraduate professor, the head of the photo department, asked me privately to stop admonishing him. I was nineteen at the time, I think. While I learned very little from him, I’ll always be grateful to have learned the word admonish.
I was rereading the Deleuze text, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Have you read it? I made light of it as an Austrian condition but one of the points that struck me was how he suggests—far away from the dimension of sexuality—that the Sadist relies on the apparatus of the institution for being, but the Masochist can exist entirely within the oppression of the sustaining self, so to speak. Jelinek, in an interview, discusses how she’d prefer the novel not be read as autobiographical, but conceded to how women are always the ones being watched rather than being the watchers.
I always think of a text from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride:
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
With that in mind—and considering the ending—you’re right, of course, Erika assaults not just Anna in the film but herself in all versions—would Erika have been drawn to the pathology of masochism with or without her mother? Through simply the role of teaching, of being a fledging/failed concert pianist training her replacements, of waiting for the next big performance, or of just as a woman in the world?
bb
Kudos for attempting a side-by-side reading, I’ve never even thought of doing such a thing; maybe you’re the bigger masochist out of the two of us. But now that I think of it, the book might benefit from a dual language edition, even though the thought of it seems a bit perverse.
Do I say that? Everything I’ve written in the past few days has, thematically on point for our conversation, has been in a state of acute pain…a pain which came to its cataclysmic event yesterday when I had to have a second course of root canal on a tooth which, only a week ago, underwent the same treatment. My dentist looking at me curiously, rather than pityingly, wondering why I had endured this pain for a week before seeking his help. Why, only at the very cusp of anguish, had I come? I didn’t know what to say, crying soundless feverish tears at the relief of the extra large dose of numbing coming into effect, feeling more like sedation as I nearly blacked out with relief from the pain subsiding, half my head only feeling attached to its other again by this morning.
What I think I have been saying, or at least trying to say, when I say that “reading Jelinek in her mother tongue is far more agonizing than in Neugroschel’s adaptation…” “…translated into a more writerly form” is the opposite. I consider Neugroschel’s translation of Jelinek’s capricious form, one which, if anything, is not merely brutal enough. That his choices, at times, turns stylistic stabbing into patting. I would not go so far as to say reductive but I certainly agree with the fact that translation is always a compromise. Of course, all our most celebrated translators are superlative at turning something, into not that very same something, but into a version of itself. I asked a translator-friend Lian about ‘Kunst und Ordnung…’ and he chose “Art and order: kin in denial of their kinship”, which echoes my greatest admiration for good translators. I started naming writers in my head whose work I could never have accessed without their skill, but listing them seems hyperbolic.
Speaking of Lacan and hyperbole I started to translate an English translation of his French lecture Anxiety the other day, because I suspected it fell short in adequately allowing for puns, the translator seemed to apply a pathos-laden sobriety to every turn of phrase. In truth, a third of Lacan’s lectures seem to me to be puns and linguistic silliness, maybe because I too am a huge fan of puns and linguistic silliness, but it quickly grew tired. I severely lack translators' ambitions.
Authenticity? Interesting. Authenticity was not something I considered as a quality I was trying to convey. Maybe because I live in Berlin and I am, at this point, so used to the fact that half the room speaks an “ein bisschen” level of German and because I, myself, am entirely out of my depth speaking and writing in German, incomparable to my confidence with English, whilst my Swedish mother tongue lays perhaps the limpest of them all. And so, whilst I do read and write in German at times, I mostly utilise German, much as any material, to construct myself a position or condition from/with which, I basically fake it.
However I left several interludes of staccato repetition in German, accompanied by Schubert, which…
Schmutztitel is a good representation of how a word, as metaphor, loses all potency in its translation (half-title); the title really only works, for this work, because of its schmutz.
Ja, and certainly I don’t speak of all works of art, but I don’t agree that all “good” works of art should withstand the test of time. I think a lot of art, which came to be or existed in a time, stays of that time and is only “good” in retrospect…its urgency untranslatable within the contemporary, responding to nothing current at all. Except, of course, everything can be contextualised within the now, with a push, but I don’t consider work which has not withstood the test of time any less good or meaningful. In fact, I think some extremely great works have aged extremely badly and I don’t mind. Then again, what is bad? In any case, I love “bad” art just as much as the “good”. So much of Die Klavierspielerin for example, is bad, the humour is terrible, just as so many of Jelineks’ works are humorously “bad.” They absolutely have not withstood the test of time, as with many of its adaptations. I had a very vivid dinner table discussion about Malina not too long ago, which sees Huppert as the protagonist in a screenplay adapted by Jelinek, from Bachmann’s eponymous novel. It is only as good as it is because it is so bad! (One guest in particular though, stood their firm ground that this is an objectively good film, yes you, Albin.)
Yes, I’ve read it. It informed, not in some small part, the Lacanian analysis of, in my humble opinion, Haneke’s Freudian gaze of Erika. But in relation to its redefinition of Erika, I always think of what Jelinek said about Haneke’s adaptation and it saddens me; “this film gives this character Erika Kohut, who really is undignified and ridiculous, her dignity back”, but then I have to concede that maybe Jelinek’s character, which is certainly herself, can only be freed by Haneke’s bondage.
Warmly,
Sanna
Wait, speaking of, isn’t it more than a little weird how many times we see Erika pee? I really only remember this novel scene in the Prater where she gets caught, but in the film there’s as least three vivid moments where Erika pees: the drive-in scene, the restroom at the school scene, and that fucking vile bathroom/bathtub scene. A premier example of how, as you say, Haneke instilled a heavy Freudian hand. It seems to come on at the worst moments (for us) but maybe the most gratifying of times (for her). As if her body has to function on something other than restraint.
There’s something to be said—or at least speculated on—about Jelinek’s Erika being much less sympathetic than Hanekes; Jelinek admitting that she gets “her dignity back” has an odd register to me, but maybe it’s that Huppert is so alluring that even in her shame we forgive her severity and/or her distorted reality. I think I agree with that, mostly. But honestly, however many years ago, I remember feeling that the Klemmer character carried a lot more of the initial pathos in the film; he’s just so pathetic, following her around, annoying as he is but admiring her, trying to get her attention until he gets what he wanted (crystal. clear. clarity.) and it isn’t as he romanticized. In the novel, though, he is the absolute worst.
I thought on my walk about my inherent apprehension to discuss him—that maybe it was because I identified with him more than her. How horrifying. On my last watch, opting to ignore just how feckless he was entirely, I focused on her (Huppert) and was much more attracted to what perfect precision she had until she didn’t. I felt like an adult. Obviously, they’re both insane and just character manifestations of Jelinek; probably work more so as mirrored allegories of modernity. The art and the order and the all embedded maintenance that can’t withstand or contain itself so cleanly.
On that note: I think I feel done now, or nearly so. Do you have any lasting thoughts or favorite scenes?
Mine is this close-up long take of her face while Klemmer is auditioning. There are three sequential shots over three minutes where she is sitting in a kind of paralysis but her eyes are enacting all the subdued panic. She tries desperately to avoid him, argues with her colleagues against him but despite knowing full well how much he’ll undue her, accepts the outcome anyway. I used a detail of the still as the last and closing image in a recent publication.
bb
P.S. On the subject of art and timelessness and such. One of my absolute favorite exhibitions of all time was the three-fold ambiguous retrospective, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form. Alles im Kontext, Schatzi.
Thank you. My profoundly entrenched Scandinavian Protestantism means that something only truly feels amiss when I am not suffering. I used to go through great lengths to feel existent through anguish, the attraction to Erika Kohut; unsurprising. A friend told me yesterday that I have a very high pain threshold. I told her: no, no, I feel it all, I just don’t do anything about it. Which is hard to admit, because in doing so, I make my own blood boil. It is a maddeningly irritating trait that I go out of my way to suffer through my own suffering.
I see it as an impossibility for Jelinek to afford Erika the, as she says, dignity, I might say integrity, that Haneke does through his depiction. Jelinek is Erika. The notion that she would, herself, portray herself as an astute, composed, reticent character would mean that Jelinek’s amour propre would have had to remain intact through her own mother’s life long abuse and oppression. I often wonder what kind of books, if any, Jelinek would have written without her injury by way of her mother. I assume that part of Erika’s characteristics is a self-punitive reflexive smite, which incidentally as a verb means a heavy blow, but as a noun can mean a strong attraction.
Interesting, your abhorrence at having ever identified with Klemmer. I’ve been thinking, what an entirely, really entirely, other book, other film, it would be if the gender roles were reversed. If Klemmer was Erika and Erika, Klemmer. It's an interesting premise to consider how this would shift the transference of our identification of protagonist and antagonist. I have a hard time, saying as you do, that he is annoying. I think he’s quite compulsive, but I also don’t think I can separate the written character from Haneke’s Klemmer. I think Haneke made such a brilliant choice in his casting of Magimel (just as brilliant as with Huppert). He is such an utter epitome of a ponce, displaying this infuriating self-erudition by which he outshines those who have laboured endlessly, his flourishing social ability; his savoir faire, which makes Erika in contrast appear much more severe and grim than she could have without his counterpart. And then his unlikely obsession, his absolute persistence which begins with metaphorical apples for the teacher and ends in revolting violence. I find it fascinating, this fine-tuned coupling of charm and disgust, which of course, is what Haneke does so well.
I don’t do well with summing up or goodbyes, I much prefer French exits,
Sanna