"My rage," admitted the great and very sadly late Austrian novelist Gert Jonke, "is great, though it is not usually directed at any given object." And so it was. Eschewing the faddishness of political polemic, Jonke, who died of pancreatic cancer in Vienna aged 62 last Sunday, chose instead to channel his rage through some of the most uncompromisingly experimental novels to have emerged in Europe in the past four decades.
At its height, his reputation was grounded principally on the widespread misapprehension about the severe difficulty of his writing. Despite winning the first ever Ingeborg Bachmann prize in 1977, and later the Franz Kafka and Berlin Literature prizes, among numerous others, people tended to respect rather than read Jonke.
Which makes it all the more ironic that, just as his reputation was once again on the up – a resurgence based this time on a real and growing readership – he has died. Then again, whenever Jonke found a current, he would swim against it. Indeed, as he put it in his masterpiece, the Geometric Regional Novel:
For the most part one goes much more with the times by going against the times.
In recent times it has become common practice to go against the times so that in the end the going-against-the-times has again become a going-with-the-times. That is why recently some are going with the times in the original sense of the idea only to actually go against the times in their very own way and thereby above all in the end to more easily go with the times again.
An accomplished musician as well as a writer, Jonke was referred to as a Textkomponist (text-composer) reflecting his commitment to a literary style in which the sound and rhythm of the words were taken to be at least equally significant in formal terms as their meaning, continuing a musical tradition in German-language literature that runs from romantics such as Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin to Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann, the giants of Austrian late modernism.
In this spirit, Jonke's writing doesn't so much represent a reality as show the way infinitely pliable realities are forged and reforged through the act of literary composition itself. He often used musical forms as the model for literary experimentation, for example in the Schule der Geläufigkeit, recently published in English translation (as Homage to Czerny) by the Dalkey Archive, where modes of representation peculiar to each character are pursued with all the rigour of a pianist working relentlessly on perfecting technique.
At the same time, his works were acutely satirical. The numbed world of the Geometric Regional Novel was loosely based on Jonke's native Klagenfurt, where the right-wing politician Jörg Haider and many of his cronies were nurtured. He despised the over-administered nature of contemporary European societies, finding in music and literature a freedom that was the only means of resistance. As he put it in an interview in 1990 with Harald Friedl: "Earlier they denied people schooling; today what they teach them in school is to act with as little imagination as possible."
Sufficient grounds for Jonke's inclusion on next year's syllabus, perhaps?
