Page 196 [196]
ANNA LENZ
The question of “who speaks”"* is thus difficult enough when merely look¬
ing at the text, but even more so when seeing it performed on stage: speech is
attributed rather ambiguously and the question of who it is that aims to speak
and how to make sense of current and historical events in speech is never let
go of: this is a consistent technique throughout Jelinek’s oeuvre and is probably
what she is most famous for as a postdramatic playwright. That said, I would
like to circle back to the main focus of this article: the discussion of religious
performance and construction of meaning within Jelinek’s play and to the
quote that led into the discussion:
The man speaks, he is his own religion, you may throw away the one you have. God
is here. Don’t underestimate him. You will need him and when you do, he’d better be
powerful. Otherwise, you're lost. Consider the entire capital [assets], no, don’t, you
cannot imagine it and not think of it either, better consider the piled-up potential
of hate, of the piled-up mistrust, and if people draw from it, there derives a new
creature, derives a king, who is always prepared for the violence of his neighbors
and thus sends his neighbors back to the neighbors.’
Speaking, in Jelinek’s play, is performing, since nothing beyond speech exists
— at least within the printed text. The only notion that summons the text to
the stage happens when the viewers are addressed as a collective: “Sagen Sies
schon”! [Say it]: the speaker herself — a collective choir in one moment, a
singular “seer” [Seherin]’’ in another — commands the audience to enter the
discussion. They do not speak, of course, since they cannot do so within the
text, as they merely exist as an imagined readership,’* and also since they will
not do so within the set conventions of Mid-European theater.’ It is also never
clear what they’re asked to say. There is no collective, practiced, even ritual
speech that would include the audience within the performance as something
Michel Foucault: What Is an Author?, in D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, New York, Cornell University Press, 1977, 113-38.
Translation Anna Lenz.
16 Jelinek: Ibid., 13.
7 Tbid., 9.
Wolfgang Iser: Der implizite Leser, Paderborn, Fink, 1972. A detailed insight on the discussion
that has followed Iser into the present day among renowned researchers such as Wolf Schmid,
Carlos Spoerhase, and Sabine Kuhangel, among others, can be found in Marcus Willand:
Lesermodelle und Lesertheorien. Historische und systematische Perspektiven, Berlin/Boston,
De Gruyter, 2014.
Even though there are puppets on stage, that would open the play up to being perceived as
a Punch and Judy show, the dignified, freshly renovated neo-baroque halls of the Hamburg
Schauspielhaus surely limit the aspirations to align oneself within any other conventions than
that ofthe classicist German Theater.
«194 +