I. Reading for the Plot?

Lacan's famous and witty epigram, “qu'on dise reste oublié derrière ce qui se dit dans ce qui s'entend,” possibly translatable as “that one is speaking remains forgotten behind what is said in what is understood [literally: hears itself],” may summarize a great deal of Jelinek reception, especially within the discourse of the university. Ignoring both the warning of psychoanalysis against the urge to understand too soon and modern aesthetics' suspicion of hermeneutic resolution, many readers have fallen for the bait of “what is said in what is understood,” namely, the surface appearance of traditional “critique,” and thereby missed the specificity of Jelinek's aesthetic form. Her reception of Barthes's Mythologies, dutifully noted by innumerable critics, has suggested to many an older model of ideology critique that grants the critic a privileged interpretative position at the cost of blocking off a more complex grasp of the author's writing. Jelinek herself has actively promoted this onesided reading with her own heroic-rhetorical posturing, yet it is not the whole truth when she says of herself “ich schlage sozusagen mit der Axt drein;” her writing technique is finer-grained than that.

The frequently repeated dissatisfaction of these same “critical” readers as to the lack of “agency” granted to Jelinek's characters (especially women) ought to have tipped them off that something else is going on here besides an older type of critique.