robyn reads books

I spent a good portion of The Piano Teacher feeling like Jelinek had taken me by the throat and dragged me somewhere I hadn’t agreed to go.

I agreed fucking quickly. 

I understood Erika almost immediately. I could see what was happening inside her.

I could see the repression. The desire. The control. The shame. The watching. The violence. I could recognize the machinery. The problem was that I couldn’t quite figure out where I was supposed to stand while watching it happen.

And I didn’t want to just watch. 

That was the strange pleasure of this book for me. I loved not knowing what it was “about.”

I loved being subjected to an assault on interiority.

An extremely audacious one.

Somewhere in all that claustrophobia, I started noticing my own body. So I took. I took pleasure in her pleasure, I took pleasure in her pain, I took pleasure in her cravings… fantasy… shame. I took. 

The prose is so compressed it barely feels like third person. It is almost third-person consciousness. It’s goddamn psychic surveillance. Jelinek kept me technically outside Erika, but shoved me so deeply into the machinery of her mind that the distinction started to feel pointless. Thought, observation, memory, illusion, desire. All there, arriving at the same time, pressed against each other, pressing me against a wall.

I felt Erika so much. 

When I finished the book, my first reaction was: what an astonishing, fucked-up piece of work.

The next morning, I felt sad for her.

Not pity. I don’t pity Erika.

I feel her.

And that is much worse.

Because feeling her doesn’t mean I can explain her. Jelinek keeps refusing to let me stabilize my judgment. Every time I think I’ve found a category for Erika, she seems to slip sideways out of it. I want to call her repressed, and then she wants something. I want to call her cruel, and then I see the hunger underneath it. I want to understand her desire, and then the desire itself becomes almost impossible to separate from shame, control, fear, fantasy.

I understand her. I just can’t contain her.

There is nowhere for all of it to go.

Let’s cut straight to the letter.

Jesus fuck, the letter.

Erika’s fantasy of what she wants from her student Klemmer stopped me cold. I recognized it.

I think it was the architecture of the fantasy.

Surrender. Punishment. Explicitness. Pain. Being overwhelmed. Having the feral thing inside you finally given somewhere to go.

I know that fantasy.

I know unfulfilled passion; I know the weight of blocked desire.

And there was something shocking about encountering it here, written so plainly, and realizing that I didn’t have the luxury of standing safely outside Erika and thinking, How strange she is.

No.

I was in it.

This is when Nabokov flashed through my body.

And yes, it’s time to project. 

Because what happens when desire has nowhere to go?

I don’t mean Erika’s particular desire. I mean desire itself. What happens when something physical and insistent exists inside you with no outlet to become real?

Does it disappear?

Obviously not.

It gets managed. It gets watched. It gets turned into fantasy. It gets made private enough to survive.

Her entire relationship with her body feels like a negotiation she has been conducting for years, and she never quite gets the terms right.

She wants to feel.

She also wants to control what feeling means.

She wants to be touched and cannot tolerate being truly known. She wants to surrender and needs to script the conditions of surrender. She wants to be seen and spends so much of her life watching from a distance.

I kept thinking about how exhausting that must be. Well, I know how exhausting that is. 

To be a the person who has to contain yourself.

What the actual fuck is happening between Erika and her mother?

I don’t even know what to call it. 

It’s almost horror, maybe horror-adjacent. Love, possession, dependence, resentment, surveillance. These have become so entangled there is almost no clean distinction between caring for someone and controlling them. And so much need has accumulated that it all becomes physical and sexual; it even moves into identity.

Because Erika cannot get outside her mother’s gaze. And yet she can’t seem to exist without it either.

That scene made me feel physically uncomfortable in a way that had very little to do with the obvious transgression. It was the density of it. The feeling of two people who have been living inside the same emotional space for so long that neither of them seems to know where one person ends.

And then I came back to the body.

“Her body is one big refrigerator,
where Art is well stored.”

Because that is what I let Jelinek keep doing to me. 

Even when Erika is thinking, she is bodily.

Even when she is watching someone else, she is bodily.

Even when she is fantasizing, she is bodily.

Even when she is numb, she is bodily.

I couldn’t get away from it.

And I started thinking about pain.

Pain as punishment. But also pain as evidence.

There is something terrifying about feeling so far away from yourself that sensation becomes evidence you’re still there.

I don’t know. I just can’t leave pain and the body alone these days.

Maybe because pain is so immediate. So physical. So difficult to intellectualize.

Then Jelinek gives Erika the thing she has imagined.

And it doesn’t work.

Klemmer beats her.

He rapes her.

And Erika feels nothing.

Nothing.

Because the fantasy was never simply about violence. It contained agency. She had imagined the conditions. She had written the language. She had decided what would happen to her.

She creates a language for what she wants. Then reality takes that language and weaponizes it against her.

So her fantasy is not fulfilled.

It is annihilated.

And afterward there is no catharsis. No sexual awakening.

Nothing.

A body that was supposed to finally feel something goes numb.

I lost my footing.

Was her fantasy about pain?

Was it about surrender?

Was it about being wanted badly enough to be overwhelmed?

Was it simply about feeling something?

I don’t know.

Who fucking knows. 

I don’t really want to try to answer those questions. If I do, I feel like I’ve made Erika manageable.

And she isn’t.

That is one of the things Jelinek does so viciously. Again, she won’t let me put Erika somewhere comfortable.

I think about my own body a lot. About desire. About what it’s like to have things inside that don’t have anywhere to go. About managing myself into being acceptable, even worthy, intelligible, contained.

And about that feral part that doesn’t agree. Ever. 

Okay. Sorry.

We’ve gone somewhere weird again.

But this is exactly why this digression doesn’t feel like a digression to me.

The book made the body impossible to leave.

Then comes the ending.

Goddamn the ending.

Erika stabs herself. And then she walks away.

That’s it.

No grand meaning imposed on the act. No beautiful literary redemption. No sudden psychological revelation.

She hurts herself. And walks away.

Brutal. A woman who spent the entire book trying, in one way or another, to get closer to sensation and release, reaches the end, injures herself, and simply keeps moving.

This book left a disturbance in me.

A horrible, pleasurable one.

I took it willingly. Freely.

Should I do something about that?