“Erika, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” As a reader you may often feel tempted to yell this question at Erika Kohut, the protagonist of The Piano Teacher by Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek. As the title informs you, Erika is a music teacher, caught between two people representing different desires in her life. Her mother dominates her existence while the student, Walter Klemmer, is who she turns to for liberation from the trap of her home life. Erika’s behavior is violent, self-debasing, and masochistic; her desires and the things she does to herself are irrational on the surface, but when looked at carefully in the web of her life and personal psychology, a method to her madness is revealed.
Erika’s mother has dominated her for her entire life. The mother recognized her talent for music at an early age and, believing in the prodigality of her daughter, she restricted her social, psychological, and intellectual development so that she could grow in no other way except for her musical skills. But Erika’s musical talents make her less than ideal for being the genius concert pianist her mother believed she was destined to be, so she earns her living by teaching piano to young students at a musical academy in Vienna. At the age of 36, Erika still lives with her mother who controls most aspects of the daughter’s life. But the feeble old lady’s motherly love is not so innocent. Her primary interest in her daughter is motivated by capitalist exploitation; she depends on Erika for money and she hoards as much of the income as she can so they will eventually be able to move into a higher-class apartment. The two of them fight, sometimes physically, and there is one passage that suggests Erika has incestuous sexual desires for her own mother.
The other main character in Erika’s life is Walter Klemmer, a piano student a decade younger than her. Klemmer begins to take notice of Erika in a romantically suggestive way. His intentions are not so pure either. With his mind steeped in literary fantasies of masculine strength, lifted from the pages of Norman Mailer and Friedrich Nietzche, Klemmer spends his free time climbing mountains and whitewater rafting. In his naive mind, he sees himself as being a conqueror of nature as well as a conqueror of women. While Erika sees him as a potential lover, he sees her as an aging woman with few prospects for finding a husband before hitting menopause. He thinks of her as easy prey, an easily seduced plaything he can use and then abandon before moving on to more exciting triumphs.
Of course, in the middle of this is Erika. Her life is dedicated to the lofty melodies of classical music but she contains a contradiction in that her sexuality is base and sometimes filthy. Jelinek establishes early in the novel that Erika is emotionally stunted and one way in which she never develops into maturity regards her sexuality. Erika’s desires and indulgences are displaced. One way she displaces her sexuality is through self-harm. In one passage, she lifts her dress and sits in front of a mirror so she can see her vagina while she proceeds to cut herself with a razor. The language describing this act likens the blade, as it penetrates her flesh, to a phallus sexually penetrating a woman. The description of her bleeding also relates to both the flow of menstrual blood and the ejaculation of a penis.
The other way her sexuality is displaced is through voyeurism. Erika spends time visiting peep shows, porn theaters, and watching a prostitute having sex in a public park. Interestingly, the sequence of these events starts in enclosed spaces and ends in open spaces as if this progression signifies a movement of her sexuality from repression to fuller expression. Erika begins by watching peep shows in the privacy of an enclosed booth. From there she goes on to watch X-rated films as a member of an audience in a porn theater and from there spies on a naked couple getting it on behind some bushes outside an amusement park. In the first two instances, she does not feel any pleasure during her acts of voyeurism but in the last case, her orgasmic release is sublimated into the act of urination. The same thing happens in a later passage when an unfulfilled sexual encounter with Klemmer also results in her urinating in place of any other kind of sexual gratification. The displacement of her sexuality shows that while Erika can express herself sufficiently through music, she can not express herself in any other healthy way.
Things heat up when, figuratively speaking, Erika and Klemmer begin circling each other like a pair of ballet dancers. In a passage reminiscent of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Erika, just like Severin, writes a letter to her lover with detailed explanations of what she wants him to do to her. The reference to Sacher-Masoch is significant, not only because she expresses her wish for a sado-masochistic relationship with her partner, but also because both The Piano Teacher and Venus in Furs are explorations of power dynamics. Both novels turn concepts of domination and submission on their heads, making it difficult to say exactly who is ultimately in the position of power. Erika’s letter is loaded with fantastical descriptions of bondage, physical assault, humiliation, degradation, and rape. The language is lofty and liberating in the same way that Erika uses language to describe the ecstasies of music. As horrific as her letter is, her expressed desire to be urinated on and kicked in the stomach is strangely beautiful as if she poured every ounce of passionate desire she had into expressing these scenarios. But the letter is not just a BDSM dream, it is also a love letter in which she waxes rapturously about her willingness to be vulnerable and devoted. It is a plea for acceptance and the wish to be desired is at the heart of all that Erika says. In reality, the sado-masochism of her love letter is not the point of it all. She is saying what she thinks will entice Klemmer the most. She wants love, not abuse, but we need to remember that she never matured sexually because of her upbringing and Erika learned about eroticism entirely from pornography. Her inability to separate the performative act of contrived sexuality from the realism of authentic erotic expression is a fault line in her life.
But then again, Erika Kohut may not be as naive as she seems. Walter Klemmer is disgusted by the letter when he reads it and when she offers to perform oral sex on him in a restroom, the memories of her letter flood his mind and he is unable to get aroused. Her reaction is to be emotionally supportive; she tells him they have all the time they need to get comfortable with each other. Instead of making herself vulnerable through BDSM games, she makes herself vulnerable through a willingness to communicate. Her reaction to Klemmer’s impotence is one of maturity. Klemmer, on the other hand, reacts by becoming dangerous. He feels humiliated for his inability to get an erection and his anger begins to smolder. Instead of blaming himself for not feeling entirely comfortable in that situation, he blames Erika and her pornographic fantasies for his failure. Klemmer later shows up at Erika’s apartment. While any intelligent person would agree that it is sick to say that a rape victim asked for it, in Erika’s case, it literally is true when taking into consideration the contents of her letter. She literally did ask to be raped. How she feels about this at the end of the novel is ambiguous; remember that self-harm is one of the ways she relieves her sexual tensions.
In the end, the big question is, “What is Erika’s problem?” You have to wonder if she is mentally ill as long as you look only the surface appearance of her behavior. She certainly is eccentric but eccentricity is not necessarily synonymous with insanity. We see how her mother controls her life but on closer insepction it appears that Erika is complicit in her submission. Erika is physically strong enough to overpower her mother so she could easily escape the apartment. Erika is probably stable enough to survive on her own, albeit with a few quriks here and there. She is certainly financially well-off enough to live independently. If anything, it is her mother that is dependent on her. So why does she put up with her mother’s totalitarian control? This is why Klemmer is such an important character. He reveals how Erika feels about relationships. She has come to believe that submission to another person’s control is the way to gain their love and acceptance. As long as she submits to her mother, her mother’s love is guaranteed. By offering herself up in submission to Klemmer, she hopes to transfer this acceptance to him in the form of a sado-masochistic romantic relationship. But it can’t work because neither of them understand each other. People familiar with BDSM know that this lifestyle and its relationships require a high degree of trust, understanding, and communication and this is the element that is missing from Erika and Klemmer’s failed tryst. Furthermore, Erika intends to use sado-masochism as a lure and a trap to keep Klemmer close to her as a companion in her life. With that being the case, isn’t she the one who is attempting to exert her power over him? Does that also imply that by submitting to her mother’s control, Erika is actually the dominant one if their household?
So is Erika Kohut insane? Her mother certainly is and while Walter Klemmer may not be crazy, he is a dangerous criminal who will probably end up in prison. In contrast, most of Erika’s bizarre behavior is well-directed towards serving functional purposes. There is a method to her madness so I might be inclined to say “no”, she is not insane, or maybe I should revise that and say “maybe”; after all there is that passage where she puts broken glass in a girl’s coat pocket. I might even further say “maybe” because offering a clinical diagnosis for her craziness takes all the grotesque and horrific beauty out of this unique novel. One thing is for sure though, Erika Kohut is the most memorable literary character I have encountered in a long, long time.
Jelinek, Elfriede. The Piano Teacher, translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Serpent's Tail, New York: 1992.
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