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MyTH, INTERCULTURALITY, AND RELIGION IN ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S AND FALK RICHTER’S WORK... Her plays struggle with concepts of meaning, interpretation, and originality: a struggle she has maintained but varied in her forty-year career as a playwright. It is a struggle that she also continues in Am Kénigsweg and concludes in a borrowing of biblical speech. But before, we shall see how the arguments established on the previous pages accumulate here, in the last pages of the play. Should we make sacrifice to the King, since God is no longer interested? [...] All resentments, all hate, all that should be equally distributed amongst you all, all that is directed toward one individual, the King, says this man, who, unfortunately I cannot bring here, the King, who could be anyone, but is not, you did not know that, did you? He is the King, that’s just the way it is, and now he should be the one everything leads into, hopes first, they will soon be forgotten, but the feelings of hate, the resentment, what about those? The King all hope might have led to, the one who, emphatically speaking, has “killed” the hopes of “a better world” should, as the text argues, become the one who accumulates the resentments that previously originated in him: it is incumbent upon us, it seems, to turn the tables. Anyone could be king, could be sacrificed therefore, but not anyone is. No need to discuss it. “The man”, i.e., Trump, is King. Trump, who famously defies his own resentments and instead continuously complains of the hate he himself claims to have experienced, from “the left-wing media” for example. He thus is to — or in his view even might already have — become the “sacrifice” that could reconcile the people. But beware of the word “reconcile”, the speaker says. It was not the word that had been used earlier by her, in a passage excluded from this analysis. There, it was an undefined word, that slipped out of the poet’s grasp, but then she was able to take it away.°* A word it was, that could be mastered, be formed [Wortführen], that does, however, not have a secondary meaning attached to it. By now differentiating it from the word “reconcile”, of course, this meaning is attached to the “empty word”: if you tell someone not to think of a pink elephant, he will most definitely think of a pink elephant. Is this poet’s pink elephant reconciliation? Is that the aim of this play? So far, the text seems to suggest this rather simple, one-dimensional political appeal: People, reconcile! At the very least, “reconciliation” is the next best word, since the ambitious, mysterious one from before has “torn itself away” from the poet: the poet’s idea of being able to “form” or “master” was illusive. She is left merely with “reconciliation.” But the speaker longs for this lost ambiguity. Barthes’ “utopian” thought that art could reunite society by “destroying” the myths (he emphasizes literature in this way), by “reaching the meaning 54 Tbid., 141. 55 Ibid. * 207 +
