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Gender, Nature, Trauma: Reading Ingeborg Bachmann's "Ways of Dying"

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CHAPTER SIX
GENDER, NATURE, TRAUMA
READING INGEBORG BACHMANN’S
“WAYS OF DYING”
FATIMA FESTIĆ

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.

Trauma without Borders

In his consideration of the process of acting out in relation to the process
of working through and not in dichotomous, binary opposition to it,
Dominick LaCapra4 differs from most contemporary theorists of trauma.
He asks how to recognize and give “a responsive account of compulsive,
typically violent, destructive forces that have played such a notable role in
limit events and experiences in history?” (2009: 1). He maintains that
“intellectual history correlated with critical theory in an important sense
involves a qualified movement beyond the pleasure principle” (it does not
offer the reader a captivating narrative with pronounced entertainment
value.) (2009: 2) Thus, contending against conventional narrative and its
(in)ability as a form to guide us to an understanding of trauma and
violence and to render their often uncannily repetitive, at times distorted,
syncopated temporality, LaCapra intends to act in the interest of
generating a more responsive and self-critical interchange between past
and present with the implications of shaping the future. For him, a key
problem in such an interchange is:

how to come to terms—intellectually, psychically, and socio-politically—

with transferential implication in the problems one studies through various
combinations of compulsively repeating them, more or less (in)coherently
rendering them, working them over, and trying to work them through.
(2009: 5)

These concerns relate to one’s efforts to assume a subject position of an

inquirer. If I am an inquirer in the topic of trauma, which I am, my efforts
both hint at my own vulnerability to trauma and disclose my involvement
in it. As already introduced and placed in the continuing course of history,
which committed me, without my will or choice, to ask some questions, I
begin my inquiry in the sense of positioning myself toward that which I
attempt to attain some transformative perspective or critical hold.
Transferentially, that implies combining acting out with working through
as a possibility of enacting variations in repetition that may be significant
(or decisive) enough to bring about an effective change. The moment of
one’s (textual) beginning, of a positioning (to relate a narrative), as a key
critical concept, has been pointed to by various scholars in the modern
(also postmodern) era, and it can be described as a “modern moment”. The
ground for writing has to remain uncertain; something has to break away
from representation in order to proceed, yet keep the narrative unfolding
back, toward the (past) unrepresented which remains a beholder, and an
assurance, of a beginning moment. The conflicting narrative directions, in
which moving forward includes an effort to retain that which disappeared,
disclose the conflict between the linguistic, abolishing its referent, and the
continuing historical referent (that demands truthful “witnessing”). Their
interdependence, mutual inclusiveness, relates to what, in the context of
this study, I would associatively call “trauma without borders.” By that
expression I don’t assume a metonymy to an overgeneralizing view of a
much discussed “wound culture” (as covering all the “20th century
Western cultural phenomena”) from which criticism tends to depart in
order to put the concept of trauma into more productive use. I think of
“trauma without borders” in the sense of a progressive, both textual and
historical, dynamic, which is, I think, what is implied by LaCapra’s
insistence on the relatedness of acting out to working through, as two ways
of responding to trauma.
The traumatic is there where history is: it is not secluded from history, it is
a part of history and it goes along with history. It cannot be fully grasped,
yet it is incessantly looming and irrupting at the (present) limits of
conceptualization and speech. There, the traumatic is compulsively
relieved or re-enacted in whichever scenario, but through its link to
working through, including mourning and modes of critical thought and
practice, it can resist blurring of distinctions (which can occur in trauma or
in compulsively acting out post-traumatic conditions), as well as
distinctions between past and present, and indicate openings to the future.
As LaCapra writes,

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)

In her Frankfurt lectures, Ingeborg Bachmann states that twentieth-century

writers display “(hi)story within the I/psyche” (die Geschichte im Ich)
(1978, 4:230). In that sense, the “Ways of Dying” can be read as
Bachmann’s attempt at articulatory practice with the intention to
counteract both the repetition compulsion of the overwhelming historical
trauma of WWII, specifically in Austria, and identifications (with the wide
referent of the term “victims”), which in their preceding empathy were
abusively mistaken for it. Bachmann’s constructive, literary mourning (of
the victims) was an immense accomplishment; however, the compulsive
subversion appearing within the textual process indicates the complexity
of her project. “[T]he attempt to grasp the structure of which one is always
already part is what Bachmann is about”, writes Caitriona Leahy, “it
involves her, logically, in the vexed exercise of investigating the
conditions of, and reason for, her own aesthetic, historical and
biographical engenderment.” Leahy sees Bachmann’s (witnessing)
position from the beginning as “simultaneously and impossibly within the
text and outside of it, (…) that of the inventor and the invented of the
text.” (2007: 17). We can say, then, that the subject position of an author
who is both within and outside the text, both before and after her own
textual beginning (in a way, such a mode of being is of anyone who
writes), in Bachmann functions as to negotiate the move of the traumatic
(directly) into the text.
If we look at the design of the protagonists in the “Ways of Dying”, we
realize that it is the lineage of the ways of their destruction. Their thorough
physical and textual derivation from each other and further dependence on
each other’s bodies and narratives (attentive to current and past
circumstances, historical, literary and mythic figures and situations)
indicate (for interpretation) a point of coinciding of some courses of
“nature” and “culture” where gender unfolds as a subverted constituent of
both. That it is an intriguing point in Bachmann’s writing is emphasized
by the fact that Bachmann was repeatedly and meticulously working
through the same themes in at least three drafted, and one completed,
novels. In a 1969 interview, she described the project as her own focus on
contemporary history: “It’s a single large study of all the possible ways of
dying, a compendium”, she said. “I imagine that I could provide an
illustration of the last twenty years, always with Vienna and Austria as the
setting.” (1983: 66) Franza Ranner Jordan (not incidentally chosen name),
or Fanny Goldmann, then (even less incidentally) nameless female marvel
of Malina, the “acrobat” Eka Rottwitz, all conceived of as “representative”
women, gradually get to hover as scripted out by men’s experiments, then
as the debris, finally the ghosts of the time-frozen traumas in which their
womanliness, blocked, deformed, devastated, takes a path of death. The
war didn’t end, it’s only shifted inside—that might be a self-defeating
declaration of those women, as it was of their author. Still (given the
intertextually woven plenitude of Habsburg Viennese, or specifically
Austrian, intellectual tradition in Bachmann’s work, her interrelating
critical theory with literature, philosophy with fiction, as well as
Bachmann’s authorial reliance on her readers, and our own reading
positioning), we may ask: which war indeed, fought by whom, for what?
The terrifying masculine industry of WWII might have not been
developed if Franza’s senior countryman had not been murdered half of
century before her in Sarajevo by a romantic-ized terrorist, which is the
episode Bachmann repetitively refers to in her novels (1999: 60, 110). The
Great War (WWI) generated WWII. Bachmann didn’t live to see the
1990s’ horrors of the physical mass destruction of the very city and its
human ecology where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated—which many
decades after could have easily led to WWIII in the arms of the same
phallusoid terrorism that in 1914 pulled the trigger of many XX century
catastrophes, later transferred to the XXI century. While some of the
descendants of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust (a part of the trauma of
Bachmann’s memory and narratives), are, as of today, in a reverse manner,
murdering another people, the “natives” on the real (and mythic) territory
of Gaza. “So you’ll never again say: War and Peace,” the man Malina
suggests to his female interlocutor (pulling up Tolstoy’s humanism), after
he weakened her resisting, more positive outlook. “Never again,” the
female “I” figure answers. “It’s always war. Here there is always violence.
Here there is always struggle. It is the eternal war.” (1999: 155)
Comparisons within war and sexual paradigms, and generic connecting
and conflating of victims, have been interpreted differently in Bachmann’s
scholarship and as a habitual motive elsewhere by differently oriented
critical theorists. In my opinion, in Bachmann’s oeuvre, the carefully
constructed victims-conflation (of murdered daughters, abused women,
Jews under Nazism, Papuans, the queen Hatshepsut, butchered animals,
Gulag’s deportees, the live buried beneath the rubble…) has a specific
function of indicating vulnerable (dis)position as that which is obliterating
all difference, also the nature/culture one. Bachmann was certainly aware
of the differentia specifica of each of the victimized groups (or
individuals), so in making the women protagonists seemingly inhabit a
total-victim-identity she was exposing them to the readers’ scrutiny. Like
in her satirizing the prevailing post-WWII Austrians’ tendency for
presenting themselves as victims of the discourse of the Nazi regime so
that they can “balance the fact” that Jews were “much bigger victims”
there, and in displaying the passivity of woman’s self-subsuming to the
masculine dominance as determined by (“rational”) phallic potency,
Bachmann was taking an advanced critical stance. Her structural flattening
of differences works as a tool which attempts to seize the hold of
repression (showing the multiplying referent of the term fascism).
Strikingly resembling Theodor Adorno’s view on the post-WWII survival
of the National Socialism, she looks at the models of (the fascist-like)
domination in her own everyday setting, and inquires into the ways in
which women then (“cannot but”) accommodate themselves to the
patriarchal power structures, getting (“naturally”) complicit in their own
destruction. What is thus brought to light is the en-gendering of the self-
victimizing tendencies and practices to perpetuate, conflictingly, the
victim’s status.
While her protagonists tend to get to the underneath of their hardship
through identification with array of victims (“I have to know where the
evil originates,” says the “I” figure in Malina, forcing herself to look at her
“father’s” face, yet unrecognizable, 1999:135), through such (partially
liberating) analogy (abstraction, generalization, reification), they also
come to the point of the re-marginalization of each specific suffering, and
of absolving themselves of the accountability for their silence or passivity.
What is peculiar though, and what makes Bachmann’s stance both
engaged and emotionally sovereign-distant, is that the point of the
depicted women’s turning against themselves is presented as the point of
their reenactment as related to trauma. They (re)submerge in eradication of
all which is distinct, including a sense of, and the psychic and social space
for, their own identity and subjectivity. As Franza contemplates about her
“husband’s” relation to her:
What does a Jordan have to hate and be disgusted with inside a person? I
think that’s it! One paralyzes someone, cripples him, strips him of his
unique characteristics, his thoughts, then his feelings, then deprives him of
his instinct of self-preservation, then kicks him when he is down. No beast
does that. (1999a: 69, emphasis mine)

The protagonist’s feminine psyche is gradually constructed by (the

discourses of) her culture, which drives her into conformity, and she
simultaneously accepts and rejects that (“Him”). What (Dr.) Jordan hates
in her is gender and sexual difference, the distinctiveness of women,
which evades parameters of his control. However, it is notable that, while
insisting on seeing fascism as stemming from relations between people, as
the primary element in the “everyday relationship between a man and a
woman” (1983: 144) in society as “the biggest murder scene of all” (1999:
182), Bachmann nevertheless purposefully strived to expose as subverted
the rigid binary of nature/gender, implicitly the binary of female/male, and
of the victim/perpetrator, even that of the human/animal, in order to show
both of the constituents in an incessant, at times violent, dialectical
process, although, certainly, of unequal sides (and as producing
ambivalent effects).
The frame of trauma, collective and personal, presented as it is in the
“Ways of Dying”, at the level of both content and form, emphasizes it all
the more. It is not that the “I” figure cannot imagine the possibility of
Peace, but it is that she is diverted from it, and prevented in articulating it,
overloaded by the recent past, the clichés of the prevailing masculine
discourse and the critical controlling voice that she gradually internalizes
(calling off her imagery). She becomes aware of it,—“Reading is a vice”
(1999: 57), she says,—as well as aware of Bachmann’s inquiry in the
matter. The words of the “I’s” initial mythopoetic fantasy of a past and
possibly future love (with which she hoped to handle “the discursive limits
of ‘sex’”5), lingering as traumatic residues in the narrative to the very end,
along with (her lover) Ivan’s name, witness to her (peace-making)
attempts which in her last moments, however, come no longer in italic
type, as distinct, but as weak, meaningless, flesh-backs of it. And her
“beloved” Ungargassenland—a (protective) combination of the nostalgic
reminiscences of the Austro-Hungarian, pre-traumatic, “unifying”,
“untainted” past and her efforts to revive it with a “stable” man plus his
(Slavic) androgynous “intellectual” replica plus an “ancient” Jew as her
literary motive (windows decorated with Turk’s-cap lilies opposite to the
house in which Beethoven completed his “Ode to Joy” 6 on the Ivan’s side
of the street)—gets “no larger than the hot plate” on her stove. “I have to
watch out that I don’t fall face first onto the hot plate, that I don’t disfigure
myself, burn myself,” she says, “then Malina would have to call the police
and the ambulance, he would have to confess his carelessness at having let
a woman burn halfway to death.” (1999: 223, emphasis mine)
The compulsive repetition making a skeleton for Malina, and for other
novels, assigns (the death) drive, the beyond the pleasure principle, also a
critical dimension. Therefore, I would read the final scene of the “I”s’
disappearing in the crack of the wall with the man Malina remaining as her
murderer (“There is no woman here. I am tell[ephon]ing you…”, 1999:
224), not only as a woman’s defeat representing women’s defeat in
modern Western patriarchal structures, but also as a critical challenge of
the (self-)displayed inadequacy of the used strategies of working through
in counteracting the apparent supremacy of acting out of women’s
destruction. Was Bachmann really so pessimistic about women’s
symbolic, performative, cultural possibilities in contesting drives? Readers
of her work are stunned by Bachmann’s own erudition, her textual
composing and orchestrating skills, her critical practice as her social
activism in her time, in Vienna of the 1960s, where both the body and its
representation in art were highly problematic, so she had at least herself
(situated as a woman producer) on her side as a positive argument.
However, as Judith Butler puts it, the body is a social phenomenon,
vulnerable per definition, it must rely on what is outside itself, it is
invariably coming up against the outside world, and as social survives and
suffers—“one’s very survival depends on recognizing how one is bound
up with others.” (2009: 52) That might be what Bachmann is saying, and
what the female “I”s’ life-long struggle, then disappearance in the wall,
might suggest, that, in Butler’s words, “(T)he norms of gender through
which I come to understand myself or my survivability are not only my
own.” (2009: 53)
In her interviews, Bachmann says that she presented the story of Malina in
the only way she found it possible7—with the predominance of a
(surviving) male, lending the space, and the point of view, for narrating to
a female, while Bachmann maintained both her and her potential readers’
critical sympathy for the female. However, the critical momentum of
Bachmann’s work is sustained, primarily, in her own difference, hence,
deflection, textual and feminist, from the women she writes about, her
own sexual difference in the differential movement, act of, practice of,
both reading and writing of what surrounds her. Her continual striving to
maintain her female writer’s identity, fully conscious of the wall of
discourse, sex and gender that is trapping women within itself, while
recognizing and figuring herself, and her own body, also as bound to other
women, makes her working and playing through the very limits the wall
sets.
Then, isn’t it the issue of misrecognition of oneself and of the other as
implicated in the (compulsive) ways of dying that Bachmann wants to
expose in her female protagonists? Women’s cognitive attempts’ failure,
their misrecognition of the ways of their being bound up with others (men,
and women), and the reasons for the misrecognition? At the end of the
first chapter “Happy with Ivan”, the narrator “I” says:

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:

Me: I don’t pity myself any longer.

Malina: I expected at least that, you were bound to come to that
conclusion. Who wants to cry over you, to cry over the likes of us.
Me: But why do people cry over others at all?
Malina: That should too stop. (…) You won’t change a thing. (1999: 205)

Writing, Reading, Transmission, Intervention

The concerned compendium of the ways of dying comes as a complex
inquiry in the effects of the modes of responses to severely traumatic
historical experience and in how those modes of responding influence
definitions of gender. Bachmann formulates her own primary trauma 8 as
her witnessing the arrival of the German troops in Klagenfurt. Although
she suffered no immediate loss of family members or physical harm, her
early girlhood years, her outer and inner world, were invaded in 1938,
which gives her personal core to all the novels as she writes her way back
to that historic, autobiographical beginning. The war, the National
Socialism, the subsequent political and social modalities filled with the
ghosts of the committed horrors, the devastated Vienna, divided between
and occupied by Allies and Soviets, the Cold War, Germany’s industrial
“recovery”, murky currents of capitalism, Bachmann’s coming of age in a
memory-repressive world, all that extended her early experience of
trauma, further interweaving the issues of personal and historical through
the alienation from the recent past imposed on all, the silence about it
merging with the heavily freighted present. Nevertheless, Bachmann
managed to extend and channel her own response to that fused trauma into
a qualified, repetitive working through what she identified and formulated
as the intrusive phenomena of fascism, or the remaining fascistic
ideology’s effects on everyday language and human psychology, and on
the relationship between men and women. “A day will come,” (1999: 76)
she was repeating as her personal, literary credo to the very end of her life
(along with and after her doubting or denying it in her protagonists: “No
day will come, poetry will never and they will never,” the “I” says; 1999:
201), in reality aware as she was that:

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.

The Body, Running for/against Itself

Such is the symbolic inception for Bachmann’s female protagonists. Their
bodies undergo violation, apparently in their self-submission to it. Their
mind and linguistic abilities get embattled, then weakened and blocked by
the threatening forces which are constantly (re-)generated but not really
recognizable as either outer or inner, “social” or “biological”—the clear
distinction between the two becomes untenable, even the drives (which too
are socially induced) withdrawing into mere bodily pulsations. “The
whites are coming” (1999a: 92,112,117), sobers terrified Franza
throughout the narrative (Bachmann quoting a verse by Arthur Rimbaud
indeed), and at its end, in her last moments, crashed, after she banged her
head against the pyramid wall: “The whites. My head. The whites should.
They should be damned. He should. (…) The whites.” (1999a: 141-2). She
subsumes to that denotation whatever can be related to force and power,
but, knowingly or not, also herself as a white woman in Africa, and the
“ideal-ized” figure of the “first man” in her life. Also, the whiteness of her
girlhood (ignorance) to which the liberation (of Carinthia) from the
Germans came as the re-occupation (by the English) and coincided with
the unknown to her English word “rape”19,—so within the subverted
binary of liberation/occupation she was later led to experience the horror
of rape both in the privacy of her Viennese home library and at the foot of
Giza’s Great Pyramid, in both cases by “a white”.
As the only discourse offering a theory of the unconscious (from which
ground, however the unconscious is theorized, sexual difference can be
challenged and transformed), psychoanalysis still seems indispensable in
providing for a reading of the progressing from the unknown to the known
of gender, from the traumatized to the cognized. Michel Eng very
pertinently points out that the “competing” titles of two versions of the
novel, The Franza Case (Der Fall Franza) and The Book of Franza (Das
Buch Franza), both frame the novel’s text within the fact of textuality
itself, or as such, and both name an immanent, necessary relation to
reading—to legibility—as a result:

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)

Franza tells about various readings, not only of Bachmann’s writing of

her, or of her husband’s psychiatric monstrousness’ writing of her, but also
of her own writing out of herself. And that, on one side, self-submissively
to the existing threatening masculine discourse and, on the other side, self-
therapeutically trying to free herself from it to get to the core of her life-
problem, while compulsively drawing into her perception things/persons
which do not matter for her situation, and herself into the perspectives of
others. Similar women’s performing is displayed throughout the other
three novels. Hence, the manifoldness of the writings and readings of the
exposed performances discloses complex ways of “gendering” “nature”
along with the prevention of it, or of producing the trauma of subverted or
lacking gender. In the “Ways of Dying”, the traumatized of gender renders
problematic any strict definition of gender (identity), and gender is lived,
or performed, also as trauma. While on the route of the text’s unconscious
progressing toward the text’s conscious, Bachmann herself is practicing a
manifold nomadic literariness, also sometimes speaking at odds with
herself as an author, in an “other’s voice”, or “others’ voices”,—a
subversive potential of gender finding its way as well.
That is particularly evident in Bachman’s depicting of rape, besides
murders the most material form of violence and brutality against women
throughout the “The Ways of Dying”. The contesting “voices” or “voice
positionings” are most telling when, at some points, Bachmann introduces
in her depiction a sardonic tone, because that associates to the physical act
of rape yet another, textual form of rape. What is shown is the range
within which forms of violence, physical and textual, alternate and mix to
the point of indissolubility, particularly in their effects, material in both
cases. After many decades of studying Bachmann’s texts, Lennox has
recently said that she realized that Bachmann’s “narrative stance in the
‘Ways of Dying’ was almost always ironic.” (2007: 23). However,
concerning violence and rape, irony in representation leads to an even
more comprehensive reading, hence accusation of the evil force which
commits it (evil being Bachmann’s own term, “natural” or “cultural”?, but
certainly axiological), and of the discursive contexts that determine the
representation of it. Not only Franza (“The poor devils”, she says, “they
need to do it, to frighten someone.” 1999a: 139), but Eka Rottwitz too is
subject to a rape (by an African in Europe). The episode, for example,
turns to be problematic for some postcolonial critics, for an “aristocrat”,
countess Eka was seemingly “awakened” by a “black student’s” potency
(“unable to transcend the racist discourses which structure her white
woman identity”; see Bird, 2003), and Bachmann is attacked for
stereotyping racial and class divisions. I would suggest a different reading
though, noticing 1. the enforced, and only then theatralized suicidalness of
(a successful journalist) Eka which does not specifically generate from her
race/class nexus, as it is not the case also with her throwing herself
through the window because of her (white) partner’s deception (to get
confined to the wheelchair). 2. The extent to which Bachmann, within the
constraints of her epoch and her own “situatedness” in it as its product,
attempted to learn to inhabit, live out, write out different geographical,
class, race, and cultural contexts, and to think against the grain of each of
them. 3. Bachmann’s remarkable readiness to give up years of her work
(and life), if she realized that she came to a motif or thematic cluster that
was not known enough to her to deal with it in her texts. Therefore, I
would rather place emphasis on Bachmann’s introducing irony in
“calculating” of a “white”-or-“black”-race and “lower”-or-“higher”-class
perpetrator (and context) of rape or its representation, the irony only more
proving that rape per se is ultimately a violent act, while an exclusively
race-and/or-class oriented criticism (including that of the second-wave
feminism) in its concerns sometimes can elide or ignore the fact that rape
per se is ultimately a violent act (the critical overstress on one’s race/class
context can also lead to its perpetuating) “I, I, I am from a lower race,”
there runs a further quote of Arthur Rimbaud within (Bachmann’s)
Franza’s trying to understand her exposure to gender and sexual violence,
“or perhaps it’s a class…” (1999a: 79).
In Malina, after the second chapter’s nightmares’ multiple incestuous rape
scenes in most horrific scenarios (arranged in cemeteries, gas chambers,
the hell/ice/flood), in the third chapter, while discussing women’s
unhappiness and self-damaging, suicidal behavior in their succumbing to
men, in order “to entertain and amuse” his male counterpoint, the female
narrator adds that “no normal man with normal drives has the obvious idea
that a normal woman would like to be quite normally raped.” (1999: 180)
Obviously, the narrator is parodying (the text of) male dreams, then
interpreting the postwar Vienna (occupied by Allies and Soviets) as “the
city made for universal prostitution”, where “everyone slept with everyone
else,” spreading “the epidemic.” (1999: 181) In reality, that was the very
(Vienna) ground(s) for Freud’s (“racial other”’s?) post-WWI
(revolutionary) discovery and establishment of psychoanalysis, and within
that his essentialist notions regarding gender and associating women with
“death and wild sexual drive”, which was, in turn, considerably rewritten
by feminist theories of the later second part of the 20th century, rescuing
Freudian “Dora-like” “cases” into quite independent women subjects. A
few decades earlier than those female colleagues, Bachmann was
undertaking a formal linguistic subversion of the patriarchal symbolic
order (see Achberger, 2004) through a language supposedly mimetic and
semiotic, yet also reaching to the domains of emptiness or erasure or
eradication—or trauma—where neither symbolic nor semiotic could really
function. Bachmann’s description of the Viennese gentiles would go on:

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)

Although a more disguised form of (material) violence, the whole story of

Fanny (Wischnewski) Goldmann—“an engrained performance” of a
(naïve-beauty narcissus-acting) “higher” race or class Austrian woman,
involved with two “lower” race or class men, Jewish and Slavic (all three
are European though, while she isn’t for certain the “daughter of an
Austrian patriot-suicide” but of a collaborator too), from the first page
narrative framing, to the last page pronouncement that hers is “such a long
and dark and untellable story (untellable as all stories are)” (1999a: 219)—
is enveloped in a metaphoric, masculine discourse “rape-coffin”. The
cultured crimes of spirit, which Bachmann then opens up to a wider
exchange of writing and reading that can try to mend the disastrous (ironic
or not) gloominess of the depicted world of the violated women.
Considering gender violence, which in rape is sexual violence committed
against both the body and psychology in most cases of women, and with
the biological (also psychological) consequences more disastrous for raped
women then for raped men, it becomes easier to understand that the
difference sex/gender, like the difference nature/culture does not always
hold. For, if sexuality is observed as a social construction, that does not
make rape less real. If there is a division between the organism and the
subject that does not mean that there is no continuity between the bodily
and the psychic, or that the (division’s) “ removal” of the need to depend
on the biological determination of gender does no longer assume
masculinity and femininity as related to a real body in some way). One of
the pioneers in the studies of technologies of gender, Teresa De Lauretis
nowadays again brings to our attention the Freud’s drive as a frontier
concept. She describes

a queer, non-binary place—a dis-place—in which the categorical

oppositions between the psychic and the biological, the order of the
signifier and the materiality of the body, or between the organic and the
inorganic no longer hold. This is the figural space inhabited by Freud’s
drive, a non-homogenous, heterotopic space of passage, of transit and
transformation between “the mental and the somatic”, where “between”
does not stand for the binary logic of exclusion but figures the movement
of a passing. (2008: 15)

De Lauretis sees the drive itself as a figure of paradox: as sexual drive it is

upstream of its object cathexes, of gender identification and other
categories of identity; as death drive it carries the intimation of a corpse
implicit or latent in the living organism. Her explanation further supports
our claim that also the grounds for defining gender exclusively in terms of
cultural roles/performances can be traumatized. It might also be said that if
it gets to a truism that anatomy alone does not determine one’s sexual
identity any more than sexual difference can be reduced to the cultural,
that male/female sexualities are not essential categories and
masculine/feminine not merely historical constructs, then (the grounds for
determining) sexual difference is not self-explicable (is it in the body,
psyche, or the field of language?), and (the sexual difference) always
exceeds gender difference. Traumatic situations and (dis)positions, in
particular, highlight and feature the nature/culture, or nature/gender,
intermingling, blur their distinction. For that reason, too, in our critical
activity, in order to discern and avoid various points of yielding to
(perpetuation of) destructive conformity (and of the eradication of the
present tense as it occurs in trauma—the “I” allotting heute to suicides,
1999: 2, “the time no longer exists” 1999: 113), we should be aware that
“[T]he time of theory is always now” (De Lauretis’ formulation). Hence,
that (our) thinking, however abstract or whatever its form of expression,
originates in “an embodied subjectivity at once overdetermined and
permeable to contingent events”. (2008: 5)
It seems that it is the way how Bachmann thinks (about) her time, and how
we may think (about) Bachmann’s “Ways of Dying”, along with/in our
time. Furthermore, reflexive connecting of theory, fiction, and the real life
elicits, and alerts, that there are contexts in which “liberation” of the body
of a subject is to take an entire other meaning, and another form from what
it usually implies (in the “progressive” “Western” thought), to be
functional at all. Even if that asks for the liberation of the body of any
“occupation”, if to such extent a body is assaulted, invaded by the Other
(or “totally imprinted by history”, in Foucault, 1977: 148). Franza’s “Sire,
this village is yours” (1999a: 41, at the outset informing her dreadful
fortune), confirms that A Room of One’s Own can still read as the most
“prestigious” challenge to many decades of feminist thinking subsequent
to Virginia Woolf. It seems that Bachmann reflects precisely upon that. (If
the ground for cultural development is traumatized, then the regression to
biology follows—but in no way the ground should be “liberated” through
violence in yet another occupation.) In Malina, the “I” figure withdraws in
the crack in the wall as, in Jane Markus’ interpretation21, an allegory of the
female genitalia and bodily organization, woman’s physical body, after her
recognition of the difficulty, or impossibility of further existence in the
masculine-dominated symbolic order (her refusal to further support “the-
Law-of-the-Father”), exemplified in her residential and intellectual flat-
mating with a man (there is an indication that she wished to move out just
before—1999: 208). While Franza’s brother Martin (same-race-and-class;
“among-a-hundred-brothers” of Musil’s poem Isis and Osiris22, 1999a: 19)
thinks that he could indeed sleep with his sister to get rid of her husband
Fossil and his diabolic imprints since in her condition she cannot stand any
other man, “she was mortally ill” (1999a: 108). Then the rape-of-her-into-
death interferes blatantly, confirming the diabolic face of the “democratic”
(cure by) sex. Or, the issue of Fanny’s (post-fragmentation/post-
dismemberment) stigmatization by the name of (little, mischievous
chancer) Marek, physically appearing in spots on her skin (“twitching as if
someone were applying electric shocks on her” 1999a: 202)—as
confirmed by a real (Viennese) physician,—reads as Bachmann’s mastery
in exposing the ridicule of perimeters of biological and social and of the
modern trust in “science”, and also of women’s dependant or addict
“unwitting re-enactment” (in Cathy Caruth, 1995:2) of their
“predicament”.

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.

Fe-male Landscapes of Thought

Bachmann’s travelling through Europe, Northeast America, North and
East Africa, contributed to her inclusion of enormously composite social,
cultural, and mythic areas in her gender-trauma saga, which spans over
several millennia and is so prismatic as per observing (variations in) the
contexts of the victims of the past recent and distant to her and of her
present and possible future. Her observing Austrians, Germans, other
Europeans, Americans, Jews, Egyptians, Arabs (within a stunning
dialectics of particular situations and particular subject-positioning and
gender-formations within them) does not strike as colonial. Her poem
“Exile”, which she also incorporated in the novel Malina, tells something
about a non-colonial po-ethics. There, Bachmann’s famous “I am a dead
man who wanders registered nowhere,” gets into the letter of the
(unknown) woman’s “I”’s refusal to accept the (Academy President’s)
birthday wishes, for the “I” didn’t memorize a date which the “I” has to
write down on every registration form “in every city, in every country,
even if I am passing through. But I stopped passing through countries a
long time ago…” (1999: 90) The refusal of the-Law-of-the-Father, from
within.
The ambiguity of such existence and inexistence, illuminative of the
traumatic and the traumatizing per se as the (gender) borderless-ness
absorptive of “countries”, stretches throughout Malina (a working through
the Franza draft). As the novel develops, we follow the elaboration of the
protagonist Malina, who from a learned, rather benevolent, shadowy man
turns to violent and murderous only at the very end—(unsuccessfully)
urging the female “I” to kill Ivan, then eliminating her. While, in fact,
Bachmann sketched Malina’s violent profile already on the first pages.
For, the soothing thoughts of the Austro 23-Hungarian “unified,
multinational, equal-ethnicities” past, and Malina’s “benevolence”, get
undermined already when the narrator’s “I” says that she projected onto
him her childhood image of the “Prince Eugene, the Noble Knight”,
supposedly coming from “Belgerad”, but “it turned out that Malina was
only from the Yugoslav border like herself; sometimes they still speak to
each other in Slovenian or Windish” (1999: 7). Since, in reality, it was a
Serb who murdered the Empire’s last Archduke in Bosnia (the country
magnificently built by the Empire), the murder ordered by the Serbian
“underground” from Belgrade (Yugoslavia was formed only subsequently,
as the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians”, other nations were
eradicated “naturally” in the re-occupation), the narrative vignette works
like a reversal of the narrator’s alleged, “invested expectations and
imagination” with which Bachmann ironically toyed to expose the course
of, and acters in, the real historical events. As a citation, the vignette ties
Bachmann’s fundamental(ly) historical critique of murders with the
postmodernist style. (Much like the way the Lord Glyde, indeed the
citation of the villain Percival Glyde from Willkie Collins’ Victorian novel
The Woman in White, works as incorporated in Franza’s “liberating-
occupying” “Sire” of her “nicest of all springs” 1999a: 39, teleologically
to frame her destruction.) Hence, the not-Prince Malina from the
beginning has a negative dimension with the facet of the (real Prince Franz
Ferdinand’s) real murderer Princip, standing for a “(P)rinciple of violence
in human relations.” (1999: 235) To my knowledge, though, so far no
critic has pointed out the obvious citation of the particular Serbian
murderer in the man Malina in the same-titled novel.
“It was murder” (1999: 225), Ingeborg Bachmann clearly said in the last
sentence of the novel (not suicide, like Christa Wolf24, and some others
commented). That is the very man Malina, presumably the intended
narrator of the whole cycle “Ways of Dying”, who at the beginning of
Requiem for Fanny Goldmann decides to eliminate also Franza Ranner in
writing the text of his own novel. His textual murder would heal his
masculine narcissism through a palimpsest narrative-revenge on
someone’s sister (his character Martin Ranner’s “anima” 25) after Malina
suffered his own sibling loss (the actress Maria Malina devoured by a
shark, her empty coffin escorted in the “most magnificent voluntarily
celebrated ceremony in Vienna ever“ 1999: 6). If we take in account these
readings of the man Malina, then the whole novel Malina gets a more
straight address. Malina would not be only a historian, writer, flat-mate,
nurse or analyst, facilitator in the nameless woman’s coming to the “root”
of her gendered trauma which then regressively (and over-too simply)
indicates “an-archetypal-Father” as her violator, tormentor, rapist,
murderer. Malina would then be a very particular man who designs for her
and forces on her such “coming to her trauma” as her “way of dying”—
which she might have avoided otherwise. If she could recognized the way
how herself was both distinct from and bound to the other (him, and other
men, and women), and to the other’s narrative, so that she could have
found a way not to have to die to make her narrative, or art, live—the final
scene is also a literary staging of Todesarten of an embodied, living artist.
For, the “ways of dying” imply also the ways of living, the survival of not
only the aesthetic product (of the “I” the writer), but also of the “I” the
writer-producer herself. At the end of the performance, we are left with the
(advanced trope of an intellectual) Princess scripted by a woman writer
and the dead (Austrian) Prince, both surpassing all others forte, at least by
the capacity of this reverse utopia. We are to ask then: was the narrative
stance of the murdered (“Archduke”) somehow “passed on” to Bachmann
and then she took it over too, and spoke, experimentally (in a
“masquerade”), as a survived “she” of him? (Same person different sex, as
Wolf puts it in Orlando.)
At the time of the publishing of the sealed, long awaited correspondence
between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan (2008), two restless
wanderers in the landscapes of thought and heart (both kept on writing
poetry in German after WWII, as if counteracting Adorno 26), it seems,
Bachmann is claiming same as with “long live the Artist!” (or, “Murder Is
No Art”, 1999: 105), also about the relationship between men and women.
Any performance at all, be it art or life, has to partake of the real. The
forceful imposition of the frame of representation, violence, or war on the
structures of perception and thought, and the subsequent infiltration of
their experience with such “war-peace games”, leave women little space of
their own in the symbolic reality. Hence they easily give way to self-
destructive self-idealization and search for absolute (or for internalizing
and on themselves practicing the “principle of violence”). The real gets
caught up in the compulsive repetitions, directed as they are in the Other’s
(Great) “Expectations” (“My head rolls onto the plate in the restaurant of
the Sacher Hotel,” the “I” recounts; 1999: 200,—next door to the Wiener
Staatsoper, we might add). If women are foreclosed from other kinds of
the symbolic, they act out, bodily “naturally”, what incurs damage on
them socially, thus complementing stories of their silencing and death.
Whilst acting out as repetitive symptomatic behavior (Freud, 1989), can
also turn into the act of the possibility of transforming the political field of
the subject and allowing a new modality of social and discursive to arise
(Lacan, 1998), which can well count for women’s subjectivity and
symbolic modality, if they come to recognize it, or “read it” as such.
Again, the question arises, what then is the woman, or feminine, how to
define her in herself? All of the answers, even of the most instructive post-
structuralist feminists, from Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray (who started
writing roughly when Bachmann has already produced most of her work),
can still be seen as parts of, or related to, “male clichés” (“the male mind
has been implanted in us,” educated women; see Felman, 1993: 13). Are
feminine virtues entirely imposed by patriarchy, then? That is what
Bachmann wonders; and instead of defining a woman as some essence “in
herself”, she shows what she is performing “for the other” yet still
(tentatively) as a subject, even if injurious to herself (Butler, 1993), in the
face of a constitutively deceitful Other. Bachmann well understands that
the “deception of the Other” in the symbolic (as Lacan formulates it, 1992)
is what usually, and disastrously, goes unrecognized, but, as she shows,
the deception is not solely of patriarchal domination, it can also consist of
a (forced or not) miming of it on the side of women, so then it should get
subverted from within, if there is a ground for it.
That is why Malina’s triadic cast (triadic as in other novels) can be read as
one character, the “I” of the woman’s self-reflection in her attempt at
rescuing herself from “herself”, from her “self-subversion”. For, self-
subversion is what a woman, ultimately, often performs when her position
in relation to any other, real or imaginary, pushes her to the brink not only
of her enunciative and psychological identity but of her physical end. Yet,
if it fully retreats into the mind, or “reason”, which has been shaped as
predominantly masculine for several millenia, her body disappears in the
paths of the mind’s wandering labyrinth. It is the body, then, which has to
keep getting rescued, as if Bachmann is saying. Its gender, and its nature,
which, still, heute, are not easily separable, and require other significant
changes in context(s) to make the distinction discernable.
At this point we can recall Barbara Johnson’s criticism of aesthetics of
silence, which, as she said, turns out to involve a male appropriation of
female muteness as aesthetic trophy accompanied by an elision of sexual
violence. Johnson specifies two things women are silent about, their
pleasure and their violation, and “[T]he work performed by the
idealization of this silence” as what “helps culture not to be able to tell the
difference between the two.” She asks: what happens when women attempt
to break that silence?—and answers that “overdetermined by the aesthetic
tradition of women’s silence, any speech at all appears as guilty speech.”
(1998: 137)
These words echo the motives of Bachmann’s life and writing. Her
interest is to show the ways in which women are silenced, murdered,
because “the whole approach of men toward women is diseased” (1999:
177). However, her wider interest is to show the ways in which the field of
the symbolic itself fails, because, “[A]lways, in all ages, those without a
language reign,”—as the female “I” figure from Malina is led to realize,—

I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. It must encompass

all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the
degree of guilt. (1999: 60).

It is as if the victims are supposed to speak only in the language of their

victimization, perpetuating such linguistic function as what is “constant”
of them. While the symbolic is a deception, by which humans refer to the
being they have and that they experience, partaking thus in the real as the
very possibility of holding the symbolic in place, yet also of changing it
through what is repeated. That real is a missed encounter, because the
encounter, the underlying being of experience, is unrecognized so it
triggers repetitions. Therefore, transparency of language is what
Bachmann is contesting (a totalizing linguistic, and aesthetic, paradigm as
a “curse”, corruption, infection, performing stigmas on the bodies, a
murderous instrument). She puts in practice the heterogeneity of language
(Wittgenstein’s games), her discursive art: poliglossia, morphologic,
sintactic, semantic slippages… Thus corroborating trauma and language
as not always excluding each other, she considers their possible
coexistence a potential of subverting horrors/paralysis/guilt from within.
Only the castrated come into language, says Lacan. “Forgive me” (for
crying), Franza repeats to the Dachau-euthanasia-man in Cairo, recalling
the words of a (crying) “castrated, badly burned” witness from “the
Nürnberg trial report” and Jordan’s book, the words with which she had
also signed “the last page she had left behind” for him in Vienna, “not
even her name followed.” (1999a: 130) An actress twisted by pain on the
stage of the perceptual and textual repetitiveness, she seems to require of
the reader—from the body of the text—to receive it with an utmost
cognitive and empathic attending. While the reader’s (witnessing)
response can get disintegrated easily, in fact. As it was stated earlier,
health and ethics coincide with difficulties, on the side of the receiver of
trauma-narratives, too.
That is another reason, it seems, why Bachmann relentlessly deploys
subversiveness of language and collages and irony, partially implanting
that also in her traumatized female protagonists’ writing out of themselves,
so that it can at least tend to search for its cathartic way out of them, and
provide readers’ response also with an (elusive yet crucial) point of (self-
)distancing. Seeing the scenes of the crime of scratching out all of “the
preceding Queen’s portraits” in the Hatshepsut temple, Franza said (to
Martin): “But the pharaoh forgot that though he had eradicated her, she
was still there. He was not able to destroy her.” (1999a: 109) Hence, the
aesthetic can overlap with our cognizance of the social and political
activism. An illustration of deconstruction through parody, turning
phallusoid potency impotent, is splendidly read in the scene with the
image of an “object” on the Red Sea beach, taking the features of Martin,
no, of Franza’s Father, no, of God, no (“she fell on her knees and there He
lay”, a black stump “washed up on shore, a shriveled-up monstrosity”),
finally revealing itself as a sea cucumber, not even a foot long, and barely
alive. “She was still crying and grabbed hold of the creature and shoved it
back in the water, letting it drift in the sea. I have seen an image.” (1999a:
119) A dialectical image: the castration residue of the cross-eyed Uranus,
as if proceeds Franza’s eye’s montage, and linguistic editing (of the
“human, animal”, in LaCapra’s phrasing).
Speaking on guilt as related to trauma, Butler makes recourse to Freud;
like him, she considers such guilt a form of “negative narcissism”,
insistence upon un-resolved grief and staunching vulnerability (2003: 99).
The denotation may be quite applicable, or referable, also to the discussed
protagonists. While in the context of Bachmann’s post-war writing of
trauma, and in our relating it to preceding and subsequent wars, gender
wars implicated in all—guilt interpreted as negative narcissism only more
emphasizes the subjects’ subjectedness to their “preontological” (pre-
subject formation) destruction, as they being held, by some force, in the
realm of the “ideal-ized”, gender/nature distinction annulled by the force,
the symbolic beyond anything desirable. That is what Bachmann
recognizes as problematic (within the impasse of forgetting/remembering),
and exposes the reasons of the “insistence on grief and vulnerability”
(given such “symbolic”), yet also exposing its subversive potential, for a
further working through it.
The milieu of Bachmann’s life, in spite of her incontestably nomadic 27 and
cosmopolitan disposition, both intellectual and physical, paradoxically
takes her to a similar fortune she is minutely talking about. Still, the
difference in the (repetitive) similarity is what matters. Although no one of
her protagonists is really a suicide (neither by psychological constitution
nor by a fully conscious choice), they play out a difficulty to overcome the
structures of oppression that induce eventual self-injurious acting, the
“virus of murder” spread around (1999a: 3). Bachmann herself resisted it,
or worked through it, to a considerable degree, yet she also passed away
early, burned (witness) in an accident, the “anti-archive”28 in the “room of
her own”, in Rome, leaving to us to claim that it was not suicide. It was
the Real of a female writer’s fairytale; the missed encounter, occurring as
if by chance, at the historical limits of a possibility of change.

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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

analysis of the subtexts in Todesarten. Bachmann’s key scholars consider her

subtexts her most vital critical tool, i.e. Lennox, 2006 (“only by way of a somber
subtext that disrupts the realistic surface” Bachmann ironically reveals her figures’
destruction, by their male dominant society and particular male lovers, thereby to
tell her readers something about her characters that themselves they do not know);
or Schipplicke, 2010 (intertextuality as Bachmann’s way of avoiding regression
that leads to forgetting while preserving the historical emotion of nostalgia).
3 In Women Writers and National Identity, 2003, Stephanie Bird offers a detailed

discussion on ambiguity as fundamental to the formation and understanding of

identities in Bachmann, and as an integral part of her texts’ response to their epoch.
4 See Dominick LaCapra. History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998); Writing

History, Writing Trauma (2001); History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical

Theory (2004); History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009).
5 See Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”, Judith Butler, 1993.
6 The musical subtexts and intertexts have a specific relevance for the issues of

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

Laplanche, as trauma that emerges through an initial impingement by the Other

(2003: 86) About Bachmann’s experience of the German invasion see Bachmann’s
1971 interview in GuI, 1983: 111-115.
9 See Laura Brown’s discussion of Mary Root’s expression “insidious trauma” (the

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

process of remembrance in which past is seen as a part of the present (opposite to

Andenken, commemoration), goes against historiography that marginalizes
subjective experience and instead calls for a materialist historiography. The
meaning of the past reveals itself in a flesh, a subjective form of memory,
questioning the content of official history (of the victor). Such forms of memory do
not recall the past as a unified completed event but, as the recurrence of the trauma
and a possibility for redemption, bring the past and the present into a dialectical
image. Eingedenken is not so much a cognitive or historical memory, as a memory
of recognition, brought to perception through a presence of mind for the
overlooked remnants of the past in the present. Thus the past is not “dead time”,
but living memory.
14 In Lacan, the Real is that which symbolic is never able to capture by means of its

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

of an inherently bisexual psyche, anima referring to the female component, animus

to the male; Bachmann names the II chapter nightmare-father-incest-born-“I”’s-
child Animus. The male/female opposition (within the “bisexual” nature of human
identity) is also used by Otto Weininger, Viennese psychologist.
26 This refers to Adorno’s claim that any mediation or modification of what is

utterly unacceptable and catastrophic is indicative for collaboration with the

dominant system (like “poetry after Auschwitz”).
27 See Braidotti, 1994. The expression “nomadic subjects” refers to a theoretical

figuration for contemporary subjectivity, a style of thought that evokes or

expresses ways out of the phallocentric vision of the subject, a politically informed
account of an alternate subjectivity. Inventing new frameworks, images, modes of
thought (against monological mental habits of phallocentrism). Nomadic condition
is an epistemological and political imperative for critical thought today, while
nomadic existence translates into a style of thinking. Braidotti develops and evokes
a vision of female feminist subjectivity in a nomadic mode, which refers to a
figurative style of thinking, occasionally autobiographic, which may at times strike
the readers as an epistemological stream-of consciousness. All that well describes
Bachmann’s own modus of thinking, writing, and living.
28 See Michael Eng, “Bachmann’s Anti-Archive” (2004). Eng claims that by

attending to the problem of the formation of the question of history in Bachmann’s

work, it would be possible to imagine a different organization of her writing. Not
representations as mirror-reflections of history and its “causes” (class, gender,
disaster...) from without, but provoking the text to pass into its social and historical
ground. Such a process opens the questions of overdetermination and repression,
asks what the text does, in what ways it “acts on” the question of history (historical
praxis) and therefore acts on our understanding of what Foucault calls the archive:
the production of those statements within the social imaginary that determine what
can be said.
This note also refers to a different understanding of witness offered by Marianne
Hirsch and Leo Spitzer (see 2009. Memory Studies, Vol.2. No.2 May). In their
“Witness in the Archive”, they criticize the excessive accent on the numbness of
the witnesses of horrors at the cost of others who are “able to bear witness
verbally”.
Bachmann does manage both the archive and the anti-archive though.

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