Heidi Schlipphacke, Old Dominion University

Transcending Austria: Haneke’s La Pianiste as Post-National Eurofilm

"Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories?" (Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text. 1975: 47). Barthes locates the end of modernism—that is, the end of the cohesive story—at the moment when the father disappears from the narrative. This is the point of fragmentation, the end of narrative, of family and nation. Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983) seems to stage this moment, as Erika Kohut’s father is escorted away from the family home and placed in an insane asylum. In its brutally deconstructive style, Jelinek’s text simultaneously kills the father and preserves the social structure represented by the father. In Jelinek’s novel, the critique of gender oppression, of “the gender politics of ‘high culture’” (Interview with Jelinek for Haneke’s film), can never be divorced from the residual structures of fascism that pervade Austrian culture. In this sense, despite Jelinek’s sophisticated deconstructive strategies and postmodern stylistic turns, her work is thoroughly Austrian, pointing to the constraint of national borders while remaining firmly within them.

Michael Haneke’s film adaptation of Jelinek’s novel almost twenty years after its publication (La Pianiste, 2001) retains the focus on power dynamics that structures Jelinek’s text but seems to transcend the national and historical concerns of the novel. If the displaced father can be seen as the invisible structuring force who stands in for the residues of the Nazi past, then Haneke’s film might be seen to transcend this model. In La Pianiste Erika’s father is mentioned only once as Erika flirts with her student Walter Klemmer. She fashions herself a tragic figure by mentioning that her father has died. And, in many ways, the film seems to transcend the hold of the father. In its translation into French, the petit bourgeois post-war Austrian milieu is camouflaged, and, in the process of cultural translation, the burdens of history seem to fall away. By relying on image, music, and the sonoric French language to replace Jelinek’s biting prose (“die Zahnärztin der Sprache”), Haneke’s remake of the text erases almost entirely the traces of Austria. The dialectical nature of the sadism/masochism dichotomy at the heart of Jelinek’s novel seems to break open in Haneke’s film. Divorced from the background of fascism, the relationship between Erika and Klemmer is rather non-dialectical in the sense articulated by Deleuze (Coldness and Cruelty), since their desires are not clearly framed in a social context. This distinction is illustrated in the crucial final scene of the film in which Erika stabs herself in the shoulder. As in the novel, her self-mutilation is a reaction to Klemmer’s rejection of her. However, Jelinek’s heroine returns home following this act, while Haneke’s Erika leaves her mother and Klemmer behind in the carefully framed space of the Vienna Conservatory, as she walks out of the doors and into the space of the unknown. Through the very beauty of its form, Haneke’s film opens Jelinek’s narrative to the possibility of affect, and through this final gesture of stepping outside the doors, the film transcends its Austrian roots. Haneke’s La Pianiste, as suggested by reviews of the film, is rather a product of a post-fascist, united Europe, a Europe whose cinema might engage in a kind of post-national, postmodern aesthetic more attuned to affect than history.