Jelinek’s Nobel Address

Well,  Elfriede Jelinek  confounded her admirers and critics again last evening in her  speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.   First she refused to travel to Stockholm, since she suffers from agoraphobia (why doesn’t this affect her in Munich?), so she was beamed in via remote video, as she stood behind a lectern in her Vienna apartment reading her text for 45 minutes.  Then the speech itself was not the diatribe against  patriarchal oppression  that many had expected.  I cannot say too much about the address, since I am still trying to understand it all myself.  You can watch Jelinek’s video (RealPlayer required) here.  Read the address in German here and in English here .

The speech is about the impossibility of communicating through language and the irony of the writer,
who has to use language to convey the impossibility. Jelinek quotes Heidegger (his commentary on Georg Trakl), but she is actually following  a long tradition in Austrian literature that began with Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s Lord Chandos Letter. 

The audience in Stockholm politely applauded the ghostly apparition on the screens.  Others were not so  complimentary.  Writing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung  Thomas Steinfeld characterized the whole scene as "grotesque", it wasn’t a speech at all, since a speech acknowledges the ‘other’", in this case, the public.  Steinfeld calls Jelinek a ‘"claustrophobic hamster" spinning the monotone sentences on the wheel.  And Daniel Haas in Der Spiegel wishes the Nobel Committee had picked an American writer for the prize