ABSTRACT
Jonke studied music and German literature in Vienna, where he also had contact with the Film and Television Academy. He began with Geometrischer Heimatroman (1969), which challenges the sub-genre of the ‘homeland novel’ which had become a staple of commercially produced fiction in Austria, by underlining its artificiality and conformity to pre-established patterns. Parodistic ex-aggeration of both experimental literary techniques and bureaucratic jargon produces an uncanny amalgam of humour and social criticism. Jonke has since extended his experimental approach in the direction of an extreme dissolution of reality based on scepticism regarding the possibility of presenting it in words. The result in Schule der Geläufigkeit (the title of Czerny’s piano exercises) (1977) is an unsettling mixture of subjective fantasy indebted to the German Romantics and a strict logic which approaches a mathematical ideal and finds expression in musical forms. Der ferne Klang (1979) goes far beyond the experimentalism of Jonke’s Austrian colleagues, who maintain a relation to the reality they aim to subvert, if only by the unorthodox combination of linguistic tropes and formulae. Instead Jonke dismisses the effort to relate to any recognizable world, as the distant tone of the title swamps the categories-space, time, logic, individual identity-by which reality is perceived and conveyed in art. Other works include Glashausbesichtigung (1970), Die Vermehrung der Leuchttürme (1971), Die erste Reise zum unerforschten Grund des stillen Horizonts (1980) and Erwachen zum groβen Schlafkrieg (1982).
