Elfriede Jelinek ‘Greed’

-Who wouldn’t like to have at least one little house for themselves alone…..The son of the present country policeman…..In order to consolidate and shield his permanent job the son goes every week without fail to his bank on the main square as if his determination would bring in more than his securities justify….to the bank which gives him credit until he will have lost every security….to be rich depends on a precise knowledge of what one has and what one could still get.

In this book by Nobel prize winning author Elfriede Jelinek read for the German lit month VI, and more specifically and maybe tenuously (well there is a crime), Lizzy’s crime week. Jelinek studies both “sinnliche und weltliche Gier”, that is both material and sexual craving or greed. In this book her characters exist for what they are and not who they are, she uses them to paint a scathing vision of her country, Austria and continually digresses from the “story” to the subject of her book, Austrian society. So in revealing the story in this article the subject of the book remains. Although her characters have names, she chooses to avoid them, for example, Kurt Janisch, the male protagonist, is mostly referred to simply as the country policeman as illustrated in the opening quote.

The story as such is relatively simple, and centres on the mixed desires and greed of the country policeman, she describes him as tall, blond, blue eyes who, through his job has the opportunity to get to know and exploit lonely middle aged women who are drawn physically to him:

-he prefers to note where the supposedly, presumably lowered eyes of the women are wandering from the country policeman’s penetratingly blue irises down to his fly, direct connection these greedy grasping eyes of women.

Janisch’s interest in these women is in the property they own and that they may sign over to him in the event of their death. His real interest is not really with women at all:

-There he is, take a look at how as if by accident he rubs himself up against this younger colleague, stands as if unintentionally close behind him when they’re undressing, his colleague has his shirt halfway over his head and can’t see anything and can’t resist for a moment, which is over all too quickly, he is caught up in his clothes like a fish in a net, his arms are raised, his narrow hips are, Well they’re there and feature some red acne I call something like that flesh precisely in it’s imperfection. Such a pleasure to press the somewhat swollen cock as if unintentionally against the left hip of the younger man 

But I fear that I digress, back to the story, poor old Janisch doesn’t really know what he wants and exasperated by the demands of his current middle aged woman, Gerti, who oblivious to the spiralling violence of their sex, wants more from him than he is capable of, love and marriage. One day he brings back to her house a sixteen year old girl he has been seeing in his car, this is more for the sadistic relationship with the woman than for the girl herself:

-Now he has thrown the older woman in whom he places some hope out of her own living room just because of the girl, she had become quite unbearable with her constant demands for more without even knowing everything she’s got, she doesn’t even have all her wits about her, one is always missing she should go and rub her gusset herself with her own hand so that she sees what that’s like. But when she’s supposed to whack off in front of him then it only makes her all the greedier for him precisely because he wants to watch her, it is one of many variants of the heightening of pleasure all of which she would like to get to know later at her leisure.

Janisch then during sex appears to casually kill the girl and to dispose of her body in a sterile man made lake. Further along in the book Jelinek gives an insight into how this could have happened in today’s society:

-That one can buy dolls in a sex shop whose bodies look in a way unappetising, Well the head’s ok, that while masturbating one can pull a plastic bag over ones head and tighten it at the throat till one almost pops off and then one pops up again the bag abruptly suddenly open, please don’t forget that, and there’s our orgasm which we once had and have missed for some time now, there it is again stronger than ever before, stronger than with any woman, stronger than any arm, we had begun to believe that we won’t get one at all any more but the shelves are full. Every poor man wants to be rich that is just as natural a phenomenon as the fact that one can introduce all kinds of things into one’s ass hole both small and surprisingly large objects that however one has to do with the other hand, one hand is supposed to tighten the bag so one hand always knows what the other is doing

Finally the country policeman is then part of the search team looking for the murderer of the girl and then,he woman, without hope takes her own life.

This chilling examination of  modern society concerns of course more than just Austria, Jelinek presents a vision of the incompatibility of men and women, and the flame of the impersonal at the heart of this book has since been fanned by the Internet era.

First Published in German as “Gier” by Rowohlt Verlag in 2000
Translated into English by Martin Chalmers as ‘Greed’ and published by Serpent’s Tail in 2006