The Piano Teacher
- Author
- Elfriede Jelinek
- Publisher
- Munhakdongne | Published 2009-12-15
- Category
- Novel
- Synopsis
- The representative work of Elfriede Jelinek, the 2004 Nobel laureate in literature, 『Pi...
In all my life, this is the first novel with such a narrative method. It's not that it's good, nor that it's bad, but, hmm.... if I must say, the part I favored was about 30 percent, and the part I disliked was about 70 percent. After finishing this book, one sentence written in Milan Kundera's essay 'The Curtain' came to mind: his words, 'If Laurence Sterne had not written a novel that excluded story, no one would have written such a thing.' The reason is that Laurence Sterne's work 'Tristram Shandy' was an unprecedented and 'strange' work. It must be because, had Laurence Sterne not written it, it would truly have been a work not worth writing. I just want to say that the evaluations differ because the aesthetic and philosophical viewpoints differ. 'The Piano Teacher' was a no-less-strange work. The biggest problem is that no dialogue part appears separately distinguished as dialogue. The narrator narrates, and when the protagonist's 'speech' appears, quotation marks appear, and after that it seems as if the protagonist is speaking, then it switches back to the perspective shown from the narrator. Everything is narrated from beginning to end by the 'narrator.' The description of scenes, the felt sensations, the feelings of the protagonists Erika and Klemmer, and even the surrounding situations are shown through the narrator's perspective and narrated through the narrator's thoughts. I doubt I'll see a work like this again, but I read it thinking I'd experience it once or twice.
Early on, the narrator calls Erika a 'whirlwind,' defining the Erika the narrator sees as an 'image.' From the phrase 'cute whirlwind,' I felt she was a very hard woman to handle. It's not that I'm trying to see a woman as a 'being to be handled' (I say this because there could be misunderstanding from a feminist viewpoint, but since I view both women and men as subjects with the same selfhood, the 'whirlwind' here I want to say is limited to her parents). That is because Erika's mother holds Erika in her grip throughout the novel. Erika's mother tried to raise Erika into a 'pianist' through Spartan education in childhood. But Erika's talent and its results did not meet the mother's expectations, and this contributes to Erika having the occupation of 'piano teacher' at an age close to 40. This lets us see that the protagonist has the autobiographical character of the author Elfriede Jelinek, who also grew up in childhood under a very strong mother. And Erika's father dies early, which forces Erika and her mother to fill the empty place of a man for each other. When the mother's narcissism is projected onto the daughter, the daughter must satisfy the mother's expectations, and here the mother's narcissism appears in two forms. One appears as what she demands of her daughter (enormous practice for piano playing, not buying clothes, not dressing up, behaving demurely, becoming a person different from others), and the other appears as the role of filling the husband's empty place. The mother setting out dinner and waiting with eyes ablaze until the daughter arrives on time resembles the figure of a wife waiting for a husband to come home on time without meeting another woman. To such a mother, Erika feels a 'sense of subordination.' She feels that she must always belong to her mother and that decisions must be made by her mother.
Erika, having to play the role of replacing the phallus for her husband-less mother, gradually comes to observe other people's sexual acts. This becomes the reason Erika becomes a kind of voyeur; to play a male role, Erika enters the entertainment district like a man and watches women masturbate. What she watches there is a peep show, a place where, beyond a glass window in a booth, women take provocative poses or touch their own genitals while making suggestive expressions. Erika goes to that place, which is used as a spot where men masturbate while paying some amount per hour. But Erika has no phallus, and because of this Erika cannot identify with the other men. In the end she feels a sense of estrangement and can be said to be gradually cut off from others. At the same time, she comes to feel that she can never become a man.
Erika often cannot have the things she envied, and this is because of her mother. Because of this she begins to destroy the things others have but she does not, and through this her sadistic tendency grows stronger. Her sadism appears toward the students who come to learn piano from her. At even the smallest mistake, she crushes the student with enormous musical and artistic knowledge. The ironic thing is that the mother's excessive restraint and domination increase Erika's masochistic tendency, which can be seen through Erika's act of cutting parts of her own body with a razor and enjoying the blood that comes out. In the end, as she forces this complex sadomasochism onto Klemmer, Klemmer falls into a 'state of mental breakdown,' and because of this, in the situation where Erika forces the acts she demanded of Klemmer (tying her with rope, hitting her head with his hand, and so on-acts that torment and inflict pain on her), Klemmer realizes he cannot lead the relationship with Erika and falls into frustration. This is ultimately knotted up in Klemmer assaulting Erika later.
As for the author's narrative method, the answer can be found in her interview. In her interview she says her narrative method is one that appeared as music was put into language, and that unless one was someone who did music, one is highly likely to understand this narrative method as a very strange one. But I find it hard to agree with the author's words, as I didn't understand it well either. Why she wrote in this way. My doubt about that itself was quite large. I only read it because, while reading Milan Kundera's book 'The Curtain,' I learned this book is a work with another value that no one has attempted until now. Besides, isn't a book something that, once you start reading to some degree, reads on by itself? Her narrative method can be said to be like a reaction that occurred because, with the mother's education carried out very coercively, she did not want to unfold her artistic sense through music alone, so this part can be understood as something one ought to overcome if one wants to read Jelinek's novels.
Though I wasn't utterly absorbed in Elfriede Jelinek's rare novel 'The Piano Teacher,' I'm glad it remained impressive. I should wrap up this reading by looking at a few papers on this author and this novel. Oh, by the way, looking it up, there's a film called 'The Piano Teacher' by director Michael Haneke, and they say this film was made with 'The Piano Teacher' as its original novel, so those who are curious can look it up. As it happens, this film also has a record of sweeping the Cannes Film Festival.
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