Notice: Your host was given a press copy of this novel earlier this year courtesy of Yale University Press.
Elfriede Jelinek: The Children of the Dead, translated by Gitta Honegger. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2024 [1995].
Elfriede Jelinek came out of the postwar avant-garde circles of Vienna, prolifically publishing novels since the 60s, and plays since the 80s. It's crazy how little remarked she seems to be over here in western countries. She won the Nobel Prize in 2004, and her most famous book The Piano Teacher was adapted into a famous movie.
She was also a member of the Austrian Communist Party up till the early 90s. You can get a sense of that from her fiction, not that she writes political narratives, but her prose carries a peculiar acerbic tone associated with polemics.
Extending modernist aesthetics into the late 20th century, and also being some kind of a leftist, means your host was as intrigued as everyone else in our small book circle was with the release of Gitta Honegger's translation of Jelinek's magnum opus Die Kinder Der Toten. It's like a new 'postmodern' doorstop made newly accessible for us English readers.
One more fun fact: Jelinek translated Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow into German. Need we say more?
If The Children of the Dead were a tableau, the setting would be a luscious green meadow with a gentle slope going up to the magnificent alps, a lake nestled in the background. But shambling across this scene in the foreground is a mass of zombies!
This is Styria in southern Austria, and the dead have come back, specifically the masses of people victimized and destroyed by Nazism in World War 2. Like the return of the repressed, they have burst into this idyllic scene, jealously craving a second chance at life. So in practice, these are exceptionally horny zombies.
Among the undead masses, the central characters are Gudrun Bichler, Edgar Gstranz, and Karin Frenzel, all of them dead and decomposing, and moving through the spaces of an alpine resort and its surroundings, as well as a other locales in Vienna. And there is a great deal of gory, necrotic sex, particularly between Gudrun and Edgar, and it takes on a ritual character, as if they could "birth" the victims of the Holocaust back into life.
But on the surface of the text, at the level of style and form, you see right away that Jelinek has made a highly experimental splatter horror.
Incuntescent the inky black wire-hair wherein the man burrows his lips, then his face, a recusant toy car, it seems to have started up just now, into Gudrun's doppelganger, and this Gundrun Two pounds and pants and palpitates with all she's got. This hit is not a miss, no stray steel ball hurled itself out of the flipper and into the temple, the throat, the neck.
The weaving of disparate images, the smirking punning, as well as the high level of intellectualizing: these are constant elements of the third person narration as it ironically gazes upon the central characters. ("Frau Franzel is beyond menses and therefore beyond history".) Who exactly is speaking here? Like in classical theater, it seems to be a chorus narrative, expressing the "consciousness" of the undead themselves, and they are reaching through the cruft of pop culture in order to express themselves.
It's hard to go far in the text without finding these odd and corny neologisms and wordplays, like "hyster[i]a" for “history," “Reich 'n' riches...wretchedness," "Iraquois women [Iraq + Iroquois]," and so on. Gitta Honegger has done an extremely impressive job (re)constructing this linguistic performance into a readable English.
The effect this narration had on me was overwhelmingly distancing. It put a damper on any sensory aversion that could have been provoked by these highly illustrated zombie orgies. These scenes become heavily mediated by these frothy block paragraphs. They introduce a blitheness towards the carnage on display. But that seems to reflect the indifference toward the history of fascism on our part. The novel's prologue centers on a catastrophic bus accident, with tourists flung out of the windows.
Lying here are four persons who spurted out of it, not wearing seatbelts, of course, now they lie here, colorful splashes of Miracle Whip and cream dotting the steep grassy incline that merges, together with the debris of the road, into the creek that still carries the floodwaters. One, two uprooted trees in between. But those are left over from the flood. ...Torsos bent out of shape, arms tossed up high, as if a deep joy had overwhelmed these poor souls. Cool mountain air wafts across it all.
Nature is indifferent, of course. But so is the cleanup crew, who are simply doing their jobs, but their scraping up of the bodies resembles those who stowed away the victims of the Nazis' genocidal project.
I call the narrator a chorus because they often employ the legion "we" pronoun:
Like us, history must reach for the sky but hits the ceiling when it realizes that it also consists of corpses.
And Jelinek is not above giving this chorus more didactic passages. This is most explicit in the remarks made about the concept of Heimat, “the common image of the Austrian fatherland,” according to the scholar Allyson Fiddler. Heimat is everything Jelinek hates on a politico-aesthetic level: kitschy, cozy hominess. It’s a mask for the shit of the 20th century that is Europe’s true substrate.
...: Thinking of your homeland gives you such a snuggly feeling. But this Heimat is a fake mother, a woman whose skin has turned already cold and whose blood is immovable, solidified (even today this land is so die-hardened it defies admitted its mistakes). This nice, homey-cozy, woodsy-cutesy land with the round pompoms on many of it churches, a playful animal, it rolled onto its back just to be able to feel the steel drive into it the terror in the raw.
And a bit later on:
From high above Edgar now looks down on his valley, which has something biological about it, the way it twists and turns from the hips. This is exactly what Heimat is all about: it has grown below us until it laid down again in the bullet hail of our guns. So then we pull ourselves up the mountain on our safety ropes, a T-bar between our thighs, a board under the ass, sunglasses over this strong sucking and blowing from which our values seek shelter in vain inside their snazzy little thinking caps, and so we go, full speed ahead!
I may have to read Children of the Dead again soon, in order to get my bearings on actually comprehending what’s going on through the foregrounded language. Space and time shift freely, and zombies find themselves in the Nazi times, while ghosts patter about the contemporary world.
The style also means it’s too weird to be “scary,” which is certainly a choice. For example: “Sharply, the two nipple lancets force their way into the old man and suck the last blood out of him. It is getting light, it's the same light as every day, which we may, by act of grace, let get used to our bodies.” It also went on a bit too long.
But Jelinek’s work is definitely singular — it truly just has to be read by anyone curious about the dense, referential, equal parts pulpy and academic piece of literature on offer here.
Check out the film adaptation from 2019. In an anti-capitalist spirit Jelinek apparently gave this theater company the license for free.