Th eChapter on Ingeborg Bachmann
Th eChapter on Ingeborg Bachmann
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When thinking about gender, the category that has been increasingly
dominant in variously oriented approaches to human and social reality,
and in applying it to variously structured personal and collective entities,
we may come to a stumbling point that the notion of nature, often
devalued or moved aside to facilitate the conceptualization of gender as
the cultural production and performance of roles in one’s individual or
collective development, invokes. So, we can ask: is gender, as such,
assessed as a constant in our critical activity, is the notion of gender
always so clear and self-explicatory, and does its institution somehow get
challenged?
This essay explores the intersection of two domains, gender and trauma,
with a double intention. It aims 1. to point to a still persevering ambiguity
of conceptualization of gender as fully opposite to nature (or opposite to
the binary, or “essentialist” understanding of sexual difference as rooted in
the body, with clear boundaries), and in the context of trauma that
challenges that, and 2. to discern the features of gender that can
nevertheless work through traumatic sites and dead-alleys and thus expose
its advantage over, but also its dialectic with, what is widely thought as
nature. I will argue that as much as the domain of trauma can expose
preconceptions about gender and the natural, it can also hint at their
oversimplified distinctions. To develop and support my argument, I will
look into some intricate features of gender and nature as they are displayed
in the uncompleted prose cycle “Ways of Dying”1 (Todesarten), by
Ingeborg Bachmann. The discussion of gender, nature, and trauma will
unfold through the analysis of the novels.
In severely traumatic or post-traumatic situations, or dispositions, that
Bachmann writes about, in traumatized bodies that assimilate the horrors
of insidious historical contexts and pit them against themselves
(obstructing their own possibilities of performance toward the productive
of the symbolic), the distinction between gender and nature, as well as
their functioning, range from clear to blurred. Hence, both gender and
nature appear not only as layered, but also as subverted in the body, and
clinging to the binary of abjection/idealization. It is even more so in the
author’s, narrators’ and protagonists’ attempts to inhabit some other
cultural or spatial coordinates or voice positioning. However, the subtexts2
of Bachmann’s writing which almost naturalize (thus conceal) her
pervasive irony into the fabric of consistent themes of women’s suffering
and of the (curse of) historical (and/or historicized) situatedness, as well as
the complexity and ambiguity3 of Bachmann’s narrative perspectives and
techniques, assisted by her linguistic ingenuity and (inter)textual collages,
ask for a multifaceted, shifting, and self-questioning reading. So we can
come to understand that the author’s rendering of the sites of traumatic
numbness and subvertedness of the body of her cast might also imply her
deliberate request for revision of the points of regression to biology in the
figuring of the body—socially, politically, and aesthetically.
Following the above specified aims, the essay offers a reading of the
“Ways of Dying” also as a way of interacting with some of the concerns of
the beginning of the 21.century, and in the context of recent American
studies in gender and trauma.
Perhaps the best way to understand the complex, never finalized process of
working through is as the attempt to work and play out the counterforces to
acting-out, the repetition compulsion, and denial—an attempt that must
combine a psychic “work” on the self with larger socio-political and
cultural processes. (2009: 55)
If I stay bound to Ivan in this way, I can no longer expel it, for it has
happened to my body against all reason, my body which now only moves
in one continuous, soft, painful, crucifixion on him. It will be this way for
my whole life.” (1999: 112, emphasis mine)
After she managed to break away from Ivan, after her attempts to get to
know herself and the other, present and past, through the (analyses of) the
deadly dream-work of the second chapter, and toward the end of the third
chapter “The Last Things”, she converses with her male Doppelgänger:
Probably [this day] will never come since people have always destroyed it,
and have been destroying it for so many thousands of years. It won’t come,
and yet I believe in it. For if I couldn’t believe in it, I also couldn’t write
any more. (1999: 232, emphasis mine)
Within this aporia of belief, Bachmann’s intention was to bring forth the
unspoken, to over-bridge “the wasteland” (1999: 112) of inarticulateness,
the ostracized, cut-off, disconnected power of woman’s imaginativeness.
The distress of her female protagonists, subjugated to the men and
(repetitive) history, to a large extent denotes the hurtful consequences of
inhabiting a social framework that stifles the correlation between
individual trauma and a specific collective history, but also, wider,
between “woman’s suffering and the mass murders of modern history”
(1999: 235). Bachmann portrays woman’s trauma through portraying
repression and dissociation, in the matrix of the unfolding asynchronicity
between, on one side, the dictated national and historical narratives and,
on the other side, the surviving individual manifestations of the shuttering
war and postwar trauma, the women’s bodies living testimonies, often
invaded by an insidious trauma9 or “irrational” feeling of guilt (The
Malina’s female “I shatter against every memory.” 1999: 172).
It seems to me that the insight in, the discerning of, the alternation of
repression and dissociation, as two different responses10 to (both
collective and personal) trauma in the “I” narrator might well provide the
ground for a more positive interpretation of Malina, reflective of
Bachmann’s above quoted credo, and of playing out ambiguity as her vital
critical tool. For, what was repressed of the past in the “I”, and pushed into
her unconscious, produced an ellipsis in her narrative, and the “I” labors
on recovering of the omitted elements, particularly in the second chapter.
But, also, in the “I”’s more immediate dissociation from the outside world
(depicted in her inter-textual/inter-medial relating to it and distancing from
it, and various situations), the “I” doubles the strand of the narrative series
of events by splitting off a sideline, that is, paralepsis, the material which
cannot then be reincorporated into the main narrative as “not
remembered”. So its “memory” is contained in the “I”’s alternate stream
of consciousness, also surfacing during traumatic reenactments, her acting
out of it. Such dissociation of the female narrator’s “I” from the outside
figures as her self-made aura-existence (“because the princess was a true
princess” 1999: 37), as, by her, assumed precondition for her more
independent mind/intellectual activity, recalling, narrating, her own
structure of signification, and ethics. While, given the bodily fact of
sociality, simultaneously and ambiguously, the “I”’s dissociation from the
outside has also to turn into the “I’s” dissociation from herself, hence her,
to a large part, yielding her femaleness to male voice, like it would result
also from her more externalized existence. As the fact in “culture”, her
self-alienation is necessary for the production of meaning.
Repression and dissociation, therefore, makes the “I” need and bring into
play two men (“My Ivanlife and my Malinafield,” 1999: 188), as standing
for two ways and two lines of her story that is to be told, and for “the third
man”11 to get cognized by her, to re-liberate, although only tentatively, at
rare moments, her female voice, and subvert the masculine order from
within. This leads us to understand a possibility that in one’s reading the
narrator’s “I” figure, and Ivan, and Malina, might indeed be (three facets
of) only one protagonist, at least in the cognitive aspect. Unlike the
women in the drafted novels whom the violent inscriptions in their bodies
disable for a stronger response to their experience (they eventually try to
flee or just stagnate), the female “I” in Malina is striving. Herself moving
within the discourses language makes available to her, risking their
perpetuation in her reacting to them, she nevertheless takes on the
authority of narrating, indeed (capable of) speaking in several voices at
once. A respected professional writer, initially sketching a project on three
murderers and ways of dying, then “asked” to make it “jubilant and
exultant” (1990: 30)—which she found possible only in the form of
fairytale,—she is subsuming her sideline partners, exemplifying the
possibility of (the three-in-)one protagonist-narrator supposedly in service
of a more thorough female cognition. Neither Ivan nor Malina learn in the
novel, they function as a cognitive medium for the female “I” (“I learn my
way, therefore I am”, would the paraphrase make sense for a gendered
being?). In reading that way, the fixed female/male dichotomy gets
contested, what Bachmann did intend to show, although, ultimately, “the
woman” is murdered (so the writer Bachmann’s “signature”-tension
between critical impetus and conformity is retained).
It is important to comprehend that Bachmann’s response to the war was
avant-garde, in three points, at least. She drew upon the question of the
majority who were guilty by their silence during the war (and later lacked
the political will to accept the guilt), which was debated only many
decades after WWII, and she remodeled the complicity-knot into women’s
stories12 (“why is my father also my mother?” the “I” asks, 1999: 152;
“only the witnesses feel fear, a maddening fear, for what they could bring
to light is even large than the sun,” Franza states, 1999a: 87). Even more
avant-garde was Bachmann’s rendering the complex and elusive issues of
trauma which were formulated only in the 1990s’ rise of Trauma Studies
(although she uses different vocabulary, with the accent on vulnerability,
only in The Book of Franza she puts it in trauma wording). Yet most
avant-garde was Bachmann’s literary coming to a subversive potential of
gender via the traumatic subvertedness of gender itself, to the ambiguity of
tying up gender with trauma. In exposing traumas, and using irony, she
also exposed processes involved in the constructing of distorted gender
identities and then embarked on reviewing the constructions critically,
with the emphasis on (also ambiguous) performative aspects of gender and
memory.
To communicate her “counter-memory” to the sanctioned memory, to
liberate her own, woman’s kind of Walter Benjamin’s “insightful
remembering”13 within her fictional world, to play out, in today’s terms,
the potential of her creolization of memory, Bachmann yet “demanded
something beyond historicity”, “her own grounding” (1995: 173 ), and
found it in language, which sheltered, housed her sensitivity to gender.
Since it was also “disgraceful” German language, it only further enabled
her to explore the tie between gender and trauma within it. (And, also,
probably, within her life, which was filled with professional successes and
private oscillations of emotional bliss and mishaps, and within the utterly
uneasy political and “industrial” developments in the surroundings.)
Unearthing women’s personal traumas, she tended to bring to light the
Real14 of the “devastation of the world”. She epitomized it in her female
protagonists as eradication, surfacing as “natural”. “How could she make
clear to him that she wanted to be eradicated? Yes, eradicated, that was
it.”(1999a: 134)—Franza is reflecting (on) her life-situation. She is sliding
from the first person to the third person, from the grammatical subject to
object, in that one sentence within her dialogue with a former Nazi
concentration-camp euthanasia specialist, unlicensed-in-Cairo (Viennese)
doctor, whom Franza asks to kill her there (after she recognized him from
his husband’s book). She is symptomatically acting out the violence she
was subjected to in her married life as being turned into a homicidal,
private-living-abject-case-study of her husband’s work on the post-
traumatic disorders of the “experimented-on” concentration-camp female
patients, along with his eradication of her name in his not formally
acknowledging her assistance-work on his book, and his eradication of
their (forced upon) child in the forced upon abortion (while she wanted to
can the fetus and eat-preserve its heart).
Critics often find Franza’s restaging of the “eradication scene” in Cairo
melodramatic, or tragicomic. However, it is very difficult, particularly in
severely traumatic situations, to say what a woman herself is and what
should be queried as (male) “clichés” in her (performing) and in whose
production it’s all set. Any attempt to see, determine, a woman as an
essence, positive or negative, brings us back to what she is performing
(what she is “for the other”, in her “masquerade”, with her features “put
on”), so in that she can also (re)appear as a subject (more than a man).
Franza manages to scare the particular Cairo-“doctor” away (like earlier
she baffled the “eradicating surgeon” with her wants). Therefore, I would
rather place emphasis on the reasons for Franza’s ultimate inability to
produce some other reaction, after significant shifts she made earlier in her
life. Not enough counter-forces to the postwar horrors though, and no
women’s alliance.
Herself not allying organized movements15, in the lack of women’s
alliance in her work, Bachmann plays out the aporia of the needed but not
reachable or easily foreseeable, in her opinion, probably also because of
the traumatized ground for such kind of resistance. She also claimed that
she “didn’t believe in the whole idea of emancipation” (1983: 109), aware
that colliding processes and automatons within the problematic of gender
are much deeper than the disputes of feminism of her time (could have)
grasped, or depicted. Although such a position was observed also as telling
of her own “blind spot in her analysis of gender conflicts” (see Albrecht,
2004), and criticized, for example, by Christa Wolf, already in the 1960s,
to me it seems that, in that regard, Bachmann was closer to what today is
considered postfeminism (her primary concerns or methods somewhat
differing from the then existing movements’). Her fictional criticism
comes through her depiction of an enfolding negative essentialism as the
reversal of male narcissism and sexual appropriation of women (reversed
essentialism often guiding or permeating various organized movements,
also those with valuable collective aims). She problematizes positive and
stable identity precisely in showing the insufficient (even impossible)
resistance to it on the side of women, from within it (in Malina’s “I”’s
nightmares barely sketched female-appearances of the mother, sister, one-
night girl-lover cannot help as they are weak, endangered, while the
“father’s mistress”-monster swallows all on her way), and then in textually
making dialogic even the readers’ points of (narrative) identification. That
makes Bachmann only more avant-garde, and more telling of the
intertwining of the modern and postmodern, and of the gender category
(grasped) as both functioning and not functioning.
Making Franza travel “overseas” to confront her trauma, Bachmann still
makes Franza’s acting out blast all of her working through, her memories
reenactment implacable. “The strategy was put together by the field
marshal in charge of my immortal soul, which itself had begun to seep
away”, she recalls her spouse-murderer. “He said as we walked along the
Salzach, I’ll cut your ear and throw it in the river.” (1999a: 68) And
further, “I am a prime example of post-traumatic stress, for there is no
record of memory that I can play that doesn’t release its contents with a
scratchy needle” (1999a: 70), concluding: “Fear. (…) It’s in the body,
nothing otherworldly, and it’s not an idea, it is terror. It is terror. The
sickness of our time. Oh, don’t make me laugh.” (1999a: 71-72)
Consequently, Franza keeps on clinging to the verge of “the natural” and
her abjection of herself.
I believe that Bachmann was envisioning this kind of female protagonists
not simply to confirm (hyperbolic innocence turning) hyperbolic
conformity as women’s reaction to their “predicament” (akin to their
“nature”). She also tended to expose it as (being kept) unresolved in order
to invite readers to embark on revising it, as well as the points of the
eventual regression from the “gendered-cultural” to the “natural” in the
functioning of the body (manifested as the “terror” of drive, bodily
pulsation, biology), and to embark on revising of the blurred distinction
between gender and nature. It is obvious that Franza’s repetitive self-
subversion is taking place at the points of her traumatic numbness—where
there are almost no linguistic, psychic, or physical grounds, or material,
left for individual and creative working through it, or a deliberate
opposition to it. Her imagery gradually turns into a reenacting emanation
of the terrorizing bodily fear, as she is divided between, on one side, an
imaginary absolute she is after (her “heavenly” sister-brother relationship,
her husband-as-the-father-replacement, “the immense inescapable Saharan
purgatory”), and, on another side, the Real of the dreadful abjection.
It seems that precisely in the potential of an act of reading for both
recognizing of, and making up for, the unresolved women’s collaborating
in their destruction, the critical thrust of Bachmann’s texts and of
(post)feminist inquiry is supported. What is lacking in Bachmann’s
protagonists, apparently on purpose, is a persistent feminine (reading)
resistance within the particular men’s “texts” which violently scripted
them out, feminine resistance to (sexual) appropriation. Then, may we say
that the reader-writer Bachmann is educating us as women (and) readers?
That she configures herself as a woman writer also in relation to the
women’s readings of her texts? That she en-genders her own readers, who
resonate at once to the content and to the process of her writing and to
their own conditions of reading? For, “the bond of reading constitutes a
renewed relation to one’s gender” (1993: 8), as Shoshana Felman puts it,
some decades after Bachmann. That is a new way of reading as concrete
event (unique encounter with another’s story) and as pragmatic act or
intervention in the process of rethinking and of remodifying (personal and
social) prospects.
Such reading might exemplify what I have termed “trauma without
borders”, meaning not only infiniteness of trauma (a counterpoint to a
poignant resonance of the “Médecins Sans Frontières”), or the relatedness
of acting out to working through, but also the possibility of transference,
transmission of it, empathic critical approach and attending to it—with the
inside of the text unfolding as the outside of the text (the interior presence
of the exterior16) and vice versa. The fact that the medical field, psychiatry
in particular, takes an extensive space and, in its results, grotesque and/or
lethal role in Bachmann’s novels, increases the readers’ concern with
trauma, with failures in dealing with it, with insufficiency of the invested
endeavors, and with the means that might conduce to a change. Making
circumstantiality17 and engaging emphatic transferability characterize her
novels simultaneously, Bachmann induces her readers to reflect on trauma
also as if at stake are both ends of its seemingly rooted or unchangeable
binary of subject and object, the traumatized and the one who listens
to/receives the narrating, even the one who might (have) inflict(ed)
trauma. Such a perspective might shift the understanding of trauma toward
a kind of an ongoing in-betweenness, concerning all involved parties,
although in different ways.
The recent attention brought to Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic reading
of Sigmund Freud by women theorists (Butler 2005, De Lauretis 2008)
emphasizes “an-arhic traumatism of responsibility, “an affection by the
Other”, (2005: 87) “the address”, “the enigma of the now”, “the societal
trauma”, “implantation” (2008: 4, 11), which would then relate to
traumatism of causality, as it is usually depicted in the history of the
concept, rendering a specific material and/or psychological cause for a
partial or full breach, rupture, disintegration of one’s body and mind. Such
networking in comprehension, throwing light to various stances, textures,
and temporal elements of a traumatizing event, nachträglich, might
contribute to contesting its elusiveness and bringing closer to each other
the fields of ethical and medical in interpretation of trauma, fields that
otherwise often diverge.
Since Bachmann’s project was supposed to expand, and since in each
novel the victimized women are murdered by guided acts (missile, not
suicide attacks), interpretation might make a crux, a nodal-point of the
project. For, although permeating all Bachmann’s fiction, trauma is
narratively fully rendered and it fully resonates only when the reading
transference opens back to it. In its “repeated occurrence”: when a
response to Bachmann’s presentations or even a potential for the post-
factum interference into the course of the events and the roles in them
pertains, as “emphatic unsettlement”. Thus, the very reading practice
becomes the site of (dealing with) trauma as its Nachträglichkeit. The
original meaning of the Freud’s expression is “memory as reprinted” in
accordance with later experience, a mode of belated understanding or
retroactive attribution of (sexual or traumatic) meaning to earlier events. I
think that in Bachmann’s work (and life), this qualification relates most
thoroughly, and consequently (not abusively), the real of the Nazi war
mass-abjection of “undesirable” humans to the real of the postwar
(fascistic) abjection of women, and exposes Bachmann’s unique way of
working through the immanence of fascism. The same qualification of
nachträglich can also be seen as functioning at the level of the aesthetic,
the literary, the narrative technique which Bachmann practiced, in her
relation to the aesthetic tradition and thus (in her continuous re-writing of
the tradition and of her drafts) she achieved the complex, self-reflexive
narrative masterpiece of Malina. Moreover, the novel itself seems to imply
Laplanche’s (1992, 2006) later discernment of Nachträglichkeit, or après-
coup, as the act of psychic translation of the “enigmatic message” of the
other, the return of the repressed of the “I” figure, set in a line of
(dialogic) transmission between past and future—which would further
support the supposition of the novel’s (three-in-)one protagonist-narrator.
Accordingly, in rendering women’s “self-subversions” and resulting
deaths, Bachmann addresses readers’ capacities for responding to it—
affectively, but also in the way that we would recognize her address by
ourselves, and include in it the acts of retranslating, reordering,
resignification. For example, Franza’s father’s missing from the unknown
of “El Alamein” well relates to the air-shark of “El Al” (in the region),
also taking away “for good” from Fanny her Jewish husband Goldmann in
Requiem who is a disguised “Gold” of the female utopia-poesis in Malina.
While the textual process of each of Bachmann’s novels is also subject to
subversion, within, and along, her extremely painstaking constructing of
the narratives and narrative perspectives, as it was her entire work on the
project, subject to subversion. She put aside the drafts for three novels (in
1966 she wrote to her editor that probably she “would never return” to The
Book of Franza, because the manuscript seemed to her like “a helpless
allusion to something that still needs to be written.” 1995, 2:397). For that
reason too, I think that the interpretative transmission of Bachmann’s work
into various subsequent socio-historical and political situations and
frameworks, as well as geographical and cultural, can supplement both the
rendered situations and the work of the textuality itself. Sara Lennox’s
accent on scholarly, reading “positionality”, on historicized “situatedness”
as an ever changing position within time, and on epistemological
implications of change over time, prompts (feminist) readings of
Bachmann’s texts that address the needs of successive generations of her
feminist readers, taking the concept of “woman” as a relational term
identifiable within a (constantly moving) context (2006: 7). Hence, a
reading through Bachmann’s texts on our part can also be seen as a
contemporary interacting with Bachmann’s critical endeavors.
The tension between Bachmann’s own working through and acting out of
the past as the present of the text, and the compulsive acting out of the text
itself, reenacts both the trauma of subverted genderedness and (the urge to)
re-reading it. In the collection Re-acting to Ingeborg Bachmann,
Bernadette Cronin describes the central crisis of the “I” figure in Malina,
as “the failed individuation process in the linguistic order, the state of
imprisonment in repetition and immanence and the crisis of recall and
narration” (2006: 161). I don’t read the novel negatively to that extent
though, and see the “I” as both living on the borders (territorial, discursive,
linguistic) and crossing them, the boundaries between outside and inside
as rather fluid. Hence, I would say that if the “I” is (seen) through such
crisis, it could come out as Bachmann’s recognition in her time of what in
a different context (American) and of some other (Western imperialist)
wars and post-wars, Butler is striving to express today. That “[T]he
boundary of who I am is the boundary of the body, the boundary which
never fully belongs to me”, so that “survival rather depends on the
constitutive sociality of the body”, whose “obtrusive alterity animates its
responsiveness.” (2009: 54). At that point the issue of gender, and of
unequal sides of women and men (also in unequal “contact zones” 18),
comes to the fore, exposing as questionable any of its rigid definitions.
That is so because nature and culture meet in the body, gender a
constituent of both, we can add. (Or, as Virginia Wolf suggests, the reality
of sexual difference is inextricably tied up with the strife of the tongue and
the confusion of the body; 2000.) That understanding illuminates how
trauma displaces gender—embedding itself in the referents of the
categories both of “nature” and “culture”, repressing and preventing the
development, or shift, from the “natural” to a cultural “superstructure”.
Trauma becomes the traumatized and the traumatism of gender, the
gender-traumatic, with “naturally given” and “socially constructed” as not
easily discernible.
This becomes the real effect (the effect of the Real?) in Franza’s
experience, a suffering, in the Lacanian sense, of the signifier that is
unconscious not because it denotes an inner experience proper to her, but
because it indicates an entrance into language that always precedes her
(knowledge), that is always to come, “to arrive”.20 (2004: 275)
The seeds of the most incredible crimes are sown in the subtlest manner,
crimes which remain forever unknown to the courts of this world. (…) I
was living immoderately, I felt the full effect of these peace games—that’s
how they’re passed off, as if they weren’t really war games—in all their
monstrousness. (…) There are words, looks that can kill, no one notices,
everybody is clinging to a façade, an engrained performance. (1999: 182)
A doctor said to her that she was stigmatized, (…) each time something
upset her the condition would reappear. But she found that he was wrong,
because she didn’t even become upset again. Nonetheless, the spells
returned, along with the shocks and the writing, and she knew that she had
fallen for Toni, in fact more so. (1999a: 203)
It’s striking how in her critical reviewing of such women’s performing (all
women go too far in not really realizing that it is not just a performance),
and in considering the oppositional structures male/female as not of a fully
fixed difference, Bachmann nevertheless keeps up with her own ethical
dictum that no one should appeal to the victims, it is an abuse, no one
should appeal to the dead. One does not defend oneself in the
concentration-camp. Textually and theoretically, Bachmann challenges
binary polarities; also her “narrative stance insists upon irresolution” (see
Bird, 2003). However, in rendering the effects of (the responses to) the
committed violence, she catches the Real of the (effects of the) damage
incurred on women—ultimately that is what cannot get deconstructed (for
death cannot be lived instead of somebody else). From the position of the
fact of the materiality of such real, the attempts of abstract theorizing of
concrete evil become banal rather than evil itself.
How to recognize situations in which the vulnerable boundary of the body
“which never fully belongs to the body’s ‘I’”, is fully dissolved (in one’s
being traumatized to death or “mortally ill”), fusing the body with what
the body comes against and that is the outside world? What of the body in
(the “theatre” of) the body has to be closed or fortified from inside (if there
is such a wall?) in order not to assimilate additional outside violence
against which there is no weapon, is it possible to do so? In what ways the
body’s “obtrusive alterity” can be stopped in animating the body’s suicidal
“responsiveness”, or compulsive receptivity? Those are some of the real
life questions, presented in Bachmann’s texts, to the studies of gender ,
pondering about limit theory along with limit events.
References
Achberger, Karen. 1995. Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann. Columbia,
S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.
Albrecht, Monika. 2004. “‘A man, a woman…’: Narrative Perspective and
Gender Discourse in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina.” In: Brinker-
Gabler, Gisela and Zisselsberger, Markus, eds. If we had the word:
Ingeborg Bachmann, views and reviews. Riverside, California: Ariadne
Press.
Bachmann, Ingeborg. 1971. Malina. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
—. 1978 Werke in 4 Bänden. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum,
Clemens Münster, eds. München: Piper.
—. 1983. Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden: Gespräche und Interviews.
Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, eds. München: Piper.
—. 1989. Three Paths to the Lake: Stories. Translated by Mary Fran
Gilbert. New York: Holmes & Meier.
—. 1995. “Todesarten”-Projekt. Dirk Göttsche, Monika Albrecht, eds.
4vols. München: Piper.
—. 1999. Malina: a novel. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York,
London; Holmes & Meier.
—. 1999a. The Book of Franza. Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Translated
by Peter Filkins. Hydra Books. Northwestern University Press.
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Notes
1 I use the translation of Todesarten as “Ways of Dying”, which retains the
reference to Berthold Brecht’s discussion of a similar topic. See Brecht, Me-Ti,
Buch der Wendungen (in B.B., Gesammelte werke, 20vols, Ed Suhrkamp &
Elisabeth Hauptmann, Frankfurt am Main 1967.) Todesarten and Arten zu töten
bears a closer similarity than their English counterparts ways of death and ways to
kill. The allusion in Bachmann’s title to Brecht is seen only if it is translated as
ways of dying. Brecht claimed that: “There are many ways to kill. You can stick a
knife into one’s belly, take away one’s bread, not heal one from a disease, (…)
work one to death, drive one to commit suicide, send one off to war, etc. Only a
few of these things are forbidden in our country.” Bachmann’s Todesarten relates
to these words. Both Brecht and Bachmann aimed to render some of the crimes
that in contemporary society(-ies) are legal and routine.
Bachmann started writing the novel Malina in 1967 and published it in 1971,
which was to be followed by Requiem für Fanny Goldmann as the second in the
cycle (the draft written in 1966, published in 1978), and Das Buch Franza, 1966,
as the third. They are published in German as part of Todesarten-Projekt. Eka
Rottwitz, although more fragmentary, is also part of the posthumous papers.
2 In Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann, 1995, Karen Achberger offers a detailed
gender and sex in Malina. E.g. for the “I” narrator, also the physical opposition to
Beethoven is crucial (he really lived and worked at that address). Beethoven is
standing for the tradition of tonal music and the German idealism that finds its
greatest expression in the finale of the Ninth and is interpreted as standing as a
metaphor for female absence from patriarchal culture where the “I” is nameless—
which all is challenged by Schönberg (“O, ancient scent…”, which she introduces
into the text). The “I” has “to survive as a woman, to make it to that ‘other shore’
to break away from the security and familiarity of his side of the street, where she
does not belong.” (1999: 44). Achberger (1995) underlines an “anachronism of her
desired union with Ivan” (Austro-Hungarian). Yet “longing for the old is fused
with the formal rejection of the old through the forging of a new musical language
(and in the wall she still cries out: ‘Ivan!’” Her separateness behind the Wall
reflects Austria’s situation “that stepped out of history” but “longs for its past”. I
would say though that Austria was not out of history, like no other national or state
formation is out of history, but it is always a part of history in some way.
7 I deliberately use the expression “the female ‘I’” narrator throughout the text, yet
aware that even that is problematized in the studies on the narrative perspective
and the narrator in Malina. E.g. see Albrecht, “A Man, a Woman” (2004). See
Bachmann’s interview on her narrative perspective in Malina in GuI (“…That I
knew: it will be male. That I can only narrate from a male position. But I often
wondered: why so? I did not understand, not in my narratives, why I had to use
male ‘I’ so often. It was for me now like the discovery of my own person, not to
deny this female ‘I’ and yet to put emphasis on the male ‘I’.” 1983: 99f). In 1971
interviews she denies categorically that Malina is autobiographical novel: “I would
not say so, no,” and explains the “confusing variety of reality levels and
references” in her novel only by saying that “it cannot be presented in any other
way.” “One cannot want the perspective, one has it.” She could “only narrate from
the male point of view.” Albrecht discusses a constellation of male-female
Doppelgänger and remarks that critics were either using the author’s gender for
claiming female perspective, or aligned with poststructuralism, sought for starting
points of écriture feminine, and, in this sense, for a new language in Malina. Some
claim that it is the perspective of female “I” who occupies the Other of reason. The
thesis of many is that Bachmann’s narrative style can lead out of the dualistic
thinking of gender hierarchy, i.e. that the author developed a specific feminine
narrative perspective. (2004: 134-139)
8 I use the expression “primary trauma” in the sense Butler retakes/cites it from
psychic trauma of soul and spirit) in the context of a feminist (philosophy of)
therapy, and the PTSD also as related to “events” which are “Not Outside The
Range” of ordinary human and women’s experience. In Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1995.
Trauma. Explorations in Memory. Pp. 100-112.
10 See Van der Kolk, Bessel A., Onno van der Hart. 1995. “The Instrusive Past:
The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Pp. 158-182. In:
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth. Baltimore, John
Hopkins University Press. Related to narrative theory, repression and dissociation
are described there as products of two differently layered, vertically and
horizontally, models of the mind.
11 “The Third Man”, Carol Reed’s spy movie set in postwar Vienna, intertwining
deeply personal and political evil. Also the criminal brutality of the man Malina is
sounded in the subtext. The word mal means evil.
12 This note refers to women’s inability to resist male and patriarchal frameworks
(“If one person is everything for another, then that person can be many people in
one.” Malina: 152). It can also connote e.g. the more recent work of Claudia
Koonz who criticizes the wartime German “feminists’” opposing the men’s
mistreatment of women, but not of Jews.
This note also refers to Bachmann’s reflection on the class formations and national
formations. Her Princess of Chagre is the Princess of (the “later lineage” of)
Kagran, which is the working-class suburb of Vienna. Certainly supporting the
rights of (all) the working class people, Bachmann is also aware of the ambiguous
and/or detrimental means in which the leftist, socialist, communist, national-ist, or
democratic movements, like all movements, achieve (and/or often lose) their aims.
While the “Stranger” from the fairytale, modeled after Paul Celan, is a
“representative” of “an old people” who, after their attempted “eradication” by the
Nazis, turns also to the nationalist institutional formation, harmful to some other
peoples.
13 Walter Benjamin’s expression Eingedenken, insightful remembering, means a
binary differences. It’s not the “reality” of everyday objects and persons, but rather
that which lies outside these familial identifications. For the subject it is that which
within and without unconsciously resists the imposed definitions, and leaves
him/her without a troubling excess of jouissance.
15 In a 1966 interview Christa Wolf explains why Bachmann was not always able
to overcome “the limitations of her own white European standpoint”: because “she
has never been in a position to search for affiliation with a progressive historical
movement. She tends rather to step out of society, to track down in despairing
isolation the conditions which her society dictates to an individual.” The solution
to the problems Bachmann addresses cannot, to Wolf, be solved by an author or
texts alone, but depends instead on “changes in society that would give his
profession a new foundation and himself a new responsibility” (1977: 94). Also,
see Wolf’s third Cassandra lecture (1984: 225, “The literature of the West is the
white man’s reflection on himself. So should it be supplemented by the white
woman’s reflection on herself?”)
In Lennox (2006: 295), virtually alone among postwar German writers, Bachmann
moved in the direction of the “something more” that Wolf was seeking, raising
questions about the “racialization” of the white psyche.
See Albrecht (2004), who thinks that Bachmann’s rejection of the emerging
emancipation movement cannot solely be explained with her greater vision, nor
with the fact that she generally tended to resist “the repeating phrases of her time”.
In my opinion, though, Bachmann’s writing itself sounds and functions very much
like a social engagement, also in the field of gender.
16 This is implied by Lacan’s term extimacy (1992).
17 Edward Said’s expression (see The World, The Text, And The Critic, Vintage.).
“All the ostensive indicators of language serve to anchor discourse in the
circumstantial reality which surrounds the instance of discourse. Thus, in living
speech, the ideal meaning of what one says bends towards a real reference, namely
to that ‘about which’ one speaks,” writes Said. (1983: 34)
18 See Pratt, Mary Louise, “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In: Profession 91 (1991).
33-40. Pratt uses the expression “the contact zone” referring to areas which allow
the intermingling of two or more cultures. She develops the term in her book
Imperial Eyes. Routledge, New York, 1992.
19 “‘Occupation.’ That was a word that Franza pinned her hopes on and which she
carried around inside of her. (…) And ‘rape,’ that was another word that caused
Franza to imagine things capable of taking away the spring, and since there was no
one she could speak to, rape and armies turned into longed-for heroes and troops
who were on the march, since nothing ever happened in Galicien, only the village
dying out and the place belonging to her alone as she waited for a miracle and for
something miraculous to occur” (1999a: 38). Reference to Wilkie Collin’s
Victorian novel The Woman in White, 1860, with an anti-hero, the sadist, a cruel
impostor Percival Glyde, so the Lord Glyde is not “Lord”, or a transitional “ideal
father figure”, yet he functions as a nostalgic fantasy for Franza.
20 Shipplicke correctly emphasizes that several times Franza also comes close to
the point that she feels as self-liberation from experienced sadism and repeats
“Sire, I will come”, with the erotic meaning “to come, to arrive” (2010: 54).
Although the intertextual Glyde irrupts ironically (a complete stranger to her in
London), and displaces the fantasy of escape: he embodies the ideal of paternal
benevolence only to reveal its constructedness. The same fantasy—“Sire, I will
come”, she had also of the spiritual renewal in the desert sanatorium.
21 See Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey, “Mistery Stories: The Speaking Subject in Exile”
in “Women’s Writing in Exile, ed.: Mary Lynn Broe, Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press1989, p. 388, 392.
22 Franza is a war-orphaned girl with a younger brother whose life she saved from
local brats who pushed him in the wild brook, so fifteen years later he (an
archeologist) feels that he should save hers from her husband Fossil, and takes her
with him to Egypt, after she enviably found her way out to him. Bachmann draws a
parallel with the Egyptian royal brother-sister couple, Isis and Osiris. Then she
subverts that “love”-paradigm with a murderous connotation to another Egyptian
royal “relationship”, Queen Hatshepsut preceding on the throne pharaoh Thutmose
who then had all her images eradicated, hating (or fearing?) her so much.
23 Bachmann: “[Austria] is different from all other little countries today because it
was an empire and it’s possible to learn something from its history. And because of
the lack of activity into which one is forced there enormously sharpens one’s view
of the big situation and of today’s empires.” (1983: 106, emphasis mine)
24 Christa Wolf’s comment on the “I”’s death and Ingeborg Bachmann’s death: “It
was also suicide.” See: IV lecture, Cassandra, 1984: 299. The same is “showed”
in Werner Schroeter’s directing interpretation in the filmic version of Malina: the
female “I” is a “self-destructive hysteric,” aestheticizing pain and violence in the
horror-images of fire and burning. He misinterpreted Bachmann and the widely
paradigmatic (citation of) Flaubert’s “With my burned hand, I write about the
nature of fire”, which in fact stands for a (non-abusive way of) deconstruction of
the binary witness/victim.
25 Anima is soul, spirit in Latin. Anima is also Jung’s term for the inner component