The Piano Teacher and War and Peace
Oh hello
I’m trying, now, very deliberately to be, with head contrapposto, bottom lip carefully bitten, maybe squinting, eyebrows of course tilting inwards, lost in thought, focussed on myself. It’s a posture performed because it is a new year and logically, before I can fill out my resolutions and get excited about where my life is going, I need to develop a more stable “I” from which to spring from. I have to become more solid.
But today I’m distracted because, as part of the quid pro quo for staying in my aunt’s house, I am teaching Austrian-German to her daughter. The language choice is, I know, obtuse, but my niece has shown an ephemeral interest in issues that at some level could be described as philosophical and her mum, who is sharp to entertain her daughter’s wonder, decided that she should learn Austrian-German so that she can then of course (of course) read Wittgenstein in the original. Until my residency at my aunt’s began I did not speak a word of Austrian-German. But we have a book that has answers in the back, a dictionary, an obsolete CD, and we are learning together. It is a new year indeed.
The Piano Teacher (1988) by Elfriede Jelinek
Before the movie—directed by Michael Haneke and starring Isabelle Huppert—came the novel. Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, who sleeps in the same bed as her mother, falls in love with a student, Walter Klemmer who is handsome, tall, strapping. The Piano Teacher grapples with what Erika wants from love and her life. She smells sperm filled tissues at peep shows, hides in bushes to watch strangers have sex, self harms and, publicly, maintains a demure modesty in her appearance (scorning girls who hem their skirts too short), chiding her students for playing with too much passion and ignoring technique. “Drama is always easier!” she says. “Feelings and passions are always merely a substitute, a surrogate for spirituality.” She hates her body (“hates that porous, rancid fruit that marks the bottom of her abdomen”) and hates that she is ageing. It makes for grim reading.
Erika loves Walter and Walter loves Erika, but, in life, scarcely is that enough. The Piano Teacher explores the interaction between desire and communication. In the novel’s central scene, Walter, standing in front of Erika, reads a letter she has written to him in which she sets out what she wants him to do to her (e.g. “Use a rubber hose—I’ll show you how—to stuff the gag so tightly into my mouth that I can’t stick out my tongue. The hose is ready! Please use a blouse to increase my pleasure.”) But Erika does not want Walter to do these things. She “now hopes that love will prevent anything from occurring”. She “waits for Klemmer to abjure violence for the sake of love”.
Erika, through a list of detailed stipulations, offers herself to Walter but what she does not express is that she wants Walter’s desire to care for her to motivate him to refuse her demands. It is, yes, a gory, extreme example but it reminded me of what Jenny Fran Davis wrote about desire in her iconic essay High Femme Camp Antics. She articulates that part of the insatiability of seeking desire from another is that “there’s always something unsatisfying about getting what you want by asking for it”. Erika craves nothing more than Walter’s desire for her in order to “make her body desirable”. But she will not ask for it. She can’t ask for it. Tragically, it has to just be there.
War and Peace (1966-1967) by Sergei Bondarchuk
No one makes things like they used to and that is particularly apparent when you sit down finally after a long dismal day and watch Sergei Bondarchuk’s four part film adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The Soviet Army provided soldiers as extras (there were something like 13 000 soldiers used in the battle scenes). 40 museums contributed historical objects. The Moscow Orchestra performed the soundtrack. The grandeur of the ball scenes, shot with cameramen moving around the room on roller skates, will make you gasp. Bondarchuk, who also plays Pierre Bezukhov, suffered two heart attacks while making the film (his son, in an interview for Criterion, with comic seriousness, said that his father died making War and Peace). Like when Herzog dragged a boat over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo, here, the film bristles with the physicality of its making.
If you are looking for a story about living through and living on during the collapse of your world, War and Peace is perfect. It follows the lives of bumbling Pierre Bezukhov and charming Natasha Rostova during the French invasion of Russia. Everyone wants to be Natasha and I do too. She is asked whether she can believe in eternity and she says of course: I believe in today and I believe in yesterday so I can believe in eternity. Natasha is driven by love. She follows it unabashedly, while painfully seeking something more for her life. You too will clutch your chest when you see her arriving at her first grand ball and then standing, shimmering, alone and wondering, like we all do, whether anyone, anyone at all, will notice her.
Pierre, who is not getting younger, and has a charm that comes from modesty and philosophical airs, does not know what to do with his “incomprehensible and infinite life”. The men around him are going to war but, at least for large chunks of the story, he does not believe in that. He does not need to work. So how can he find meaning? Pierre finds it by mucking in, staying in Moscow to help fellow Russians when Napoleon invades. He focuses on the small scape of his life, rather than getting lost in abstract questions about what is most valuable, most honourable, most meaningful. And he falls in love.
Love
Anne