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ANNA LENZ The question of “who speaks”"* is thus difficult enough when merely looking 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 +
