The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher (1983)

Elfriede Jelinek

A child has no secrets from her mother.

           

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a better and more effective horror movie than something like Paranormal Activity 17 for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is completely plausible: somewhere out in the darkest corners of the world someone is locking shut a freezer door in their basement charnel house. It’s certainly happened in the past. It’s probably happening right now. The Piano Teacher is also a horror story, but of a different sort. It’s not a gory slasher flick; instead it is a twisted, uncomfortable sort of psychological abuse porn. Unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, however, The Piano Teacher is not very good. But it’s plausible! To be honest comparing the two is insulting to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher. She’s in her late thirties and she lives with her mother. “Lives” is perhaps the wrong term: Erika is the victim of extreme psychosexual abuse and emotional manipulation. Erika wouldn’t leave even if she could; she’s been abused and controlled for so long that she can’t imagine change and believes her situation to be normal, natural. She’ll always be with her mother. They even share a bed. The two lead a very insulated, enclosed life. I can’t recall if the mother is ever named. She’s just Mother: less a person than an entity, a force. Erika’s mother has forced upon Erika her ambitions and her extremely burdensome expectations, which, of course, Erika is unable to live up to; she grinds Erika down, leads her by the neck and makes Erika believe that her own hands guide the leash.

The piano teacher is both repulsed by and fascinated with her own body. She’s probably a virgin. At night she sneaks out and visits peep shows and porno shops and watches this sort of revolving contraption where a drug-addict sits on a lazy susan and jams dildo after dildo into her butt while a panorama of men (and Erika) watch and jerk off. Erika picks up a discarded tissue, crusted with semen, and sniffs it. She goes to a park and watches a couple have sex and is so aroused that she urinates. Erika develops a mutual obsession with one of her students, the driven and dedicated Walter Klemmer (the sort of healthy and athletic popular type who has probably never heard “no” in his life) and the two begin a weird, sick courtship. Erika touches his penis in a bathroom. She writes him a letter, which Jelinek will not under any circumstances let you forget about, in which Erika lays out to Walter her sexual desires and the boundaries of their relationship. This revolts Walter for two reasons: one, Erika wants to be abused, degraded, struck, demeaned, captured, controlled, dominated, enslaved, insulted and urinated upon; and two, Walter Klemmer seems like the sort who is quite unfamiliar with being told what he can and can’t do. Erika attempts to perform fellatio on Wally, in a broom closet, but he can’t get an erection (WHO COULD) and Erika throws up. Erika later has a sado-incestuous encounter with her mother. Walter stews upon his erectile dysfunction for a few days and the decides actually, yeah, you know what, he does want to dominate and degrade Erika (and everyone else, for that matter) so he forces his way into her apartment where he assaults and rapes her. The next morning Erika goes to confront him at school, with a knife in her purse, and when she sees him laughing with other students she stabs herself in the shoulder instead, and then walks back home. END OF FUCKING BOOK.

This book is, I guess, all about power and control. Some people have it and some don’t, and the powerful torturously abuse the powerless. Like chopping an earthworm in two with a shovel and watching the two halves writhing in the dirt. Not only do people abuse power but power also generates abuse. The other theme of this novel could probably be reduced to “shit rolls downhill”. Erika’s mother abuses her, so Erika takes it out on her body (history of self harm) and on her students. A guy beats his wife who passes it on to their children. At home the factory owner is emotionally mutilated by his castrating wife and confused and disappointed by his shallow, drug addict sons, so he takes it out on his managers, who can’t get laid, who pass it along to the Turkish guest workers, who hate women generally. A stepfather molests his stepson who in turn molests his younger brother. I’m sure you get the picture; it’s a familiar enough story. Everyone who has ever worked a job knows about fecal gravity.

Elfriede Jelinek, for reasons I can’t possibly imagine, is a Nobel laureate, and knowing that she was awarded the Nobel Prize was just about the only thing that kept me reading until the end. What I like most about literature is that even the smallest and simplest books (at least the ones that I would consider “literature”, which to me denotes a certain level of quality, sort of like how KRS-One is an MC but Rick Ross is just a rapper) can leave one with a little insight but I don’t feel like I gained anything from The Piano Teacher. It was mostly tiresome and exhausting. Apparently there was big controversy when she won, and a bunch of folks on the committee resigned in protest. Well, I have to say, if this is the kind of nonsense that can win the Nobel Prize then heck, I’ve got a lot of hope. Anyone can win that thing! Jelinek was also involved in a campaign to get a murderer released from prison who, similarly to Jack Henry Abbot, used his freedom to murder nine people. Nine!

The book isn’t all bad, though. Jelinek can occasionally spin off an interesting metaphor, and her tone is unique, if not excellent or really even that competent. The book alternates between being really distant regarding action (no one is directly quoted, for example) and really microscopic regarding a character’s psychology and emotions. However, Jelinek is given to naïve and amateurish affectations and flourishes. Like using exclamation points to underscore insignificant banalities! Not the worst book I’ve ever read, just one of the most pretentious and obnoxious. I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book that, while reading it you say to yourself “man, you are so goddamn European it’s not even funny” but that’s how I felt for a good portion of this enervating read. I don’t get the same feeling from other, better authors, but I got it from this book. The Piano Teacher is a lot like some really Euroshlocky exploitation film, say The Night Porter or a Pasolini film or something like that. In fact, the book was adapted to film by Michael Haneke. I tried to watch it once, several years ago, but I turned it off when Isabelle Huppert started slashing up her labia with a razorblade. Nope! Not going to get much out of that. I don’t have much use for Haneke as a filmmaker (same with Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat and Lars Van Trier) so I don’t even know why I tried to watch the movie. I’m not sure why I read the book either. I guess The White Ribbon was a pretty good movie, and Amour is supposed to be great, but Funny Games was pornographic and useless.

One thing that really grated on me while I was reading this book is that, in her position as a piano teacher (very clearly at something like an extension school) Erika is tasked with training students to play the classical piano. They hammer keys in an attempt to master songs a hundred years old, and they endlessly refer to their keyboard poundings as capital-A Art. Now, I’m not a musician, but to me, faultlessly learning the masters isn’t art. Art is something much more than that. It’s about creation, not repetition. They are learning a skill but all the skill in the world doesn’t make one an artist. The atmosphere of the music school is sort of like the world’s worst and least fun cover band, where you are required to learn “Smoke on the Water” flawlessly and if you do not you will have failed your parents and ruined your life forever you sniveling little invertebrate, and then after practice you aren’t allowed to smoke weed and jam out some easy chords just for kicks. Perhaps that’s part of the book’s point but it really bugged me. To be honest a lot about this book bugged me so I’m probably just looking for things to bitch about. The characters go on and on about two composers in particular: Schubert and Schumann. Now, I don’t listen to any classical whatsoever so I’m not familiar but I made a point to sample these two, just for knowledge’s sake and I’ve got to say they were both some of the most tepid, bland, gossamer, easy listening bullshit that I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s all gloss and superficial surface ephemerality. Not my cup of tea.

Ugh, I’m done writing about this book. It was insipid and pointlessly pornographic. You can completely skip it. It certainly wasn’t worth my time, and I would suggest you don’t waste your time either. We only have a limited amount of time on this planet, stick with things that don’t involve weird sadistic incest porn, that’s my rule.