Context
Reading Ingeborg Bachmann
John Taylor
When the Austrian writer and poet Ingeborg
Bachmann died tragically in 1973 at the age of forty-seven, she had
completed only one part of an ambitious novelistic series called Todesarten [Death Styles]. This finished part was Malina, which she had published in 1971 and which, despite a 1990 American
translation by Philip Boehm, has never received in English-speaking
countries the critical esteem that it enjoys in Europe. I daresay that
few novels are further removed in style, narrative structure and
philosophical scope from mainstream American fiction. Reading Malina is like wandering deeper and deeper into a dark, pathless forest. With
every step, the temptation is to turn back, yet something invisible and
magnetic draws one relentlessly forward at the risk of getting
hopelessly lost. And this is the point. As Bachmann explores the
origins, manifestations, and consequences of the artistic urge and
amorous attraction (in Malina, they are sometimes antagonistic,
sometimes intertwined), she depicts a labyrinthine sensibility at once
exalted and depressed, desperate and resolved. Yet all along, the
nameless "I" (as the narrator soberly designates herself) intends to
emerge reunified from what can be likened to a mapless journey through
an inferno, both inner and outer. As in Dante, the reader must
abandon all certitudes at the onset. No genuine first sentence opens
this elaborate novelistic collage (which German critics have compared
to an opera), but instead an intriguing list of characters ("The
Cast"), each of whom is briefly and tangentially de-scribed. The
narrator, in great part autobiographical, is a female writer working on
a book entitled none other than Death Styles. She lives with
one Malina, a man whom we come to know only late in the novel, and she
loves Ivan, an equally shadowy Hungarian who lives on the same side-
street (tellingly termed Ungargasse, or "Hungary Lane") in Vienna. The
time, we are told, is "today." After these unsettling stage
directions, the reader is immediately immersed, not in the midst of
action, but rather in the author’s penetrating yet self-paralyzing
doubts about the nature of "today." But I had to think long and hard
about the Time," commences Bachmann, This
symbolic triad of characters—I, Malina, Ivan—is central, not only to
the barely perceptible progress of the plot (which resembles more an
excavation of I’s conscious and unconscious turmoil), but also and
especially to Bachmann’s meticulous investigation of what it means to
be a person. The author explores the ever-shifting boundaries between a
human being’s inner and outer worlds, but even more so those that
separate and distinguish two human beings who are intimately linked. As
the narrator remarks in one of several cryptic passages, "Ivan and I:
the world converging. Malina and I, since we are one: the world
diverging." What is this strange "oneness"? In fact, Malina is
not always distinct from the narrator, who is a famous writer in the
story—as Bachmann herself was, her early poems, essays and radio plays
having rocketed her to fame. Yet by now, years, even a decade or so,
have passed. One of Bachmann’s tours de force is to describe what goes
on in a mature writer’s mind when he or she is not writing. In this
sense, Malina is a meta-novel describing how another novel—ostensibly belonging to the Todesarten project—is being written or, rather more frequently, not getting written because the narrator is so obsessed with her elusive,
busy lover. Perhaps that other novel is a more realistic,
chronologically ordered version of Malina, a sort of ur-text of the book we have in hand; or perhaps it is The Book of Franza or Requiem for Fanny Goldmann,
two unfinished novels that belonged to the same project and that were
published posthumously in 1979. Still, the distractions of
love—chiefly, as they torment the mind—do not always keep the narrator
from her oeuvre. She even exclaims that Ivan "has come to make
consonants constant once again and comprehensible, to unlock vowels to
their full resounding, to let words come over my lips once more." Be
this as it may, the most intriguing quandary for the reader remains
Malina’s ontological independence with respect to the narrator. In his
well-informed and in-sightful afterword to the American translation,
Mark Anderson reports critics’ speculations "that [Malina] forms an
anagram for ‘animal,’ and a partial anagram for ‘anima’ . . . while the narrator appropriately remains an unnamed persona, a mask and simple pronoun." Malina
surely seems to often represent, not a full-rounded character, but
rather the rational side of the narrator’s mind—what Jung termed, for
better or worse, the "male" side of a woman’s personality. "He never
forgets anything, I never have to ask," declares the narrator in one
telltale scene, when she is looking for money to pay her housekeeper
yet ultimately finds the envelope "very conspicuously stuck in the
Grosser Duden Dictionary, secretly marked by Malina." Yet who really
has put the envelope there, Malina or the narrator? "I am double," she
confesses at one point, "I am also Malina’s creation." Paradoxically,
the narrator also declares that she created Malina. "You came after
me," she reminds him in one of the many dialogues, "you can’t have
preceded me, you’re completely inconceivable before me." These
mutually contradictory remarks—reminiscent of the mystical relationship
between God and Christ as it is expounded by John in his
Gospel—represent just one of several Biblical allusions woven into Malina.
For example, as the narrator tries to increase her "patience" as she
awaits a message from the oft-silent Ivan, she observes: "It has
happened to my body against all reason, my body which now only moves in
one continuous, soft, painful crucifixion on him." The three at once
independent and mutually inter-blending characters evidently form a
sort of Trinity. In early passages, the exalted amorous atmosphere of Malina recalls Solomon’s Song. This is particularly telling in that the beloved Shulamith (which in Hebrew suggests "plenitude," "peace," pacification") of Solomon’s Song appears starkly in Celan’s most famous poem, "Deathfugue" (1945), with
its intersecting images of literary creation, the Shoah, and "writing,"
as Theodor Adorno phrased it, "after Auschwitz": at night we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your gold hair Margareta Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped. Despite the extremely precise details brought forth, which range
from minutely dissected feelings to acute perceptions of the outside
world and its "trivia," we never obtain clear pictures of the three
main characters. We observe each particle of an atom, as it were,
without being able to deduce what the atom looks like. This is a
literary and philosophical position—one that Bachmann takes great
narrative risks to maintain. The characters are not ultimately
definable in any psychoanalytical shorthand, although Bachmann alludes
often, if at times ironically, to Freud and other Viennese
psychoanalysts. Even the appealing Jungian anima-paradigm cannot
consistently obtain; Malina seems more individualized, that is,
ontologically separate from the narrator, in the third part (which is
entitled "Last Things," in probable homage to the Viennese
psychoanalyst Otto Weininger). We gradually observe Malina acting more
often in the world in ways that seem describable as distinct events,
not just symbolic projections of the narrator’s rational or social
capabilities. Nor are Malina and the narrator stable sexually.
"Am I a woman or something dimorphic," the narrator asks herself toward
the end of the novel, "what am I, anyway?" Almost the same degree of
sexual ambivalence defines Malina, whose name can, moreover, be a
family name or a first name. Requiem for Fanny Goldmann in fact
brings forth another Malina, who is a woman; in Slavic countries,
Malina or its cognates is a common female first name. As for Ivan,
equally elusive and ever on the brink of departure, he is nonetheless a
more solid human entity than either Malina or the narrator. "Are Ivan
and I a dark story?" she wonders at one point. "No, he isn’t, I alone
am a dark story." Ivan is an object of ardent love and is more or less
imaginable in this respect, but he represents above all the painful
presence of absence. He rarely has time for the narrator. They talk on
the telephone much more often than they meet. His mysterious,
mesmerizing aloofness suggests that all we yearn for, all that really
counts for us in the end, is hopelessly out of reach. In this
decidedly dark story, the side street, Hungary Lane, is the narrator’s
"only country"—"which I must keep secure, which I defend, for which I
tremble, for which I fight"—and provides an oblique vantage point from
which post-World War II Vienna can be evoked. Like other Austrian
writers (notably Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard), Bachmann must
struggle not only with Austria’s collaborationist, anti-Semitic past,
but also and especially with the corruption of the German language by
Nazism. Spatially, temporally, and linguistically, Bachmann is
estranged; and in Malina, she delves headlong into this estrangement. Her
answer to remnant Nazi linguistic perversions—a dilemma that likewise
engaged Celan—is above all her powerful, idiosyncratic style, partly
based on stream-of-consciousness techniques; but her ultimate response
can more simply be extolled as an obstinate labor with language. The
narrator’s rambling, exhausting, frenetic monologues ("a shower of
words starts in my head") are by no means gratuitous; they represent
much more than literary experiments. Language is used not only to tell
a story; the language used is that story. Malina illustrates more elaborately and graphically than the short stories of The Thirtieth Year (1961) and even those of Three Paths to the Lake (published in German as Simultan in 1972) Bachmann’s concept of a "utopia of language." She developed
this notion in five important lectures given at the University of
Frankfurt in 1959-60. In her fifth lecture, she notably observes that
literature "cannot itself say what it is." Then, appealing implicitly
to the Heideggerean analysis of the anonymous "one" (the German word man), she adds that literature "presents itself as a thousand-fold, many-thousand-year-old affront to ‘bad language’ (schlechte Sprache)," by which she means badly made, mediocre, ordinary, daily language. In her view, "life possesses only this schlechte Sprache,"
against which writers must oppose a "utopia of language," even when the
language they forge ultimately depends closely on the present and its
mediocre speech. Even though the failure to achieve this ideal is
inevitable, literature should "be praised for its desperate march
toward this Language . . . [which] offers humanity a reason to hope." Having
written her doctoral dissertation on Heidegger’s existential
philosophy, Bachmann was also fully cognizant of his idea of a genuine
writer’s or poet’s getting unterwegs zur Sprache ("on the way to Language"). And it is as a description of how a writer "heads toward Lan-guage" that Malina, as a meta-novel, must also be read. Yet
herein lies another paradox. This principal, most significant activity
of the narrator’s life cannot be observed; the novel can only attempt
to help us see what cannot be seen. In her acceptance speech for the
Anton-Wildgans-Preis, received in 1972, Bachmann pointedly commented:
"I exist only when I am writing. I am nothing when I am not writing. I
am fully a stranger to myself, when I am not writing. Yet when I am
writing, you cannot see me. No one can see me. You can watch a director
directing, a singer singing, an actor acting, but no one can see what
writing is." In this sense, the narrator and perhaps also Malina are
"nothing," "no one," in the novel. At best, they are apparitions or
strangers. They exist authentically only in what is unstated, in what
cannot be told. Bachmann leaves us with the redoubtable task of
grasping their essence "behind the novel," as vital sources that can be
intuited yet not named. Heading toward language thereby
implies pushing words to their limits, nearing them to the ineffable;
analogously, of driving the self to its frontiers and perhaps beyond.
And in this regard, the ominous pronouncements ("the boundaries of my
language mean the boundaries of my world"; "of that which one cannot
speak, one must remain silent") of another salient Viennese personality
likewise underlie the very conception and narrative processes of Malina. In her essay on Wittgenstein, Bachmann notably praises the philosopher’s "despairing pains with the inexpressible (das Unaussprechliche), [pains] which charge the Tractatus with tension." This same tantalizing tension characterizes Malina from beginning to end. Bachmann’s
deep struggle with the German language was, appropriately enough, waged
while she was in voluntary exile from her native Austria. Her poem
"Exile" bears witness to both her status as a "woman without a country"
(even as the narrator’s passport, in Malina, has the addresses
crossed out three times) and to her taking shelter, though a polyglot,
in her unique possession: "the German language / this cloud about me /
that I keep as a house / drive through all languages." Much of her
career was spent in Rome, a city in which she had to live in order to
write about Vienna and its Hungary Lane. She once flatly quipped: "I
feel better in Vienna because I live in Rome." This Roman
retreat enabled Bachmann to compose the preeminent modern Viennese
novel. The city is obliquely present even in the almost unbearably long
second chapter—otherwise set "Everywhere and Nowhere"—because it is
entitled "The Third Man," in homage to Carol Reed’s 1949 film. In Malina, distant parallels with the film are drawn often. In The Third Man,
an American writer seeks to track down his friend Harry Lime (whom
Orson Welles memorably played) in postwar Vienna. He eventually learns
that his friend has become a black-market dealer in penicillin. Rather
similarly, Ivan’s profession is never clear. "He pursues his neatly
ordered affairs in a building on the Kärtnerring," writes Bachmann, "an
Institute for Extremely Urgent Affairs, since it deals with money." The
film is, moreover, accompanied by Anton Karas’s haunting zither melody,
even as music plays an essential role throughout Malina (and
especially in the third section, where the author adds Italian musical
terms to illustrate how the dialogues should be read). Like the death
at the end of The Third Man, Malina abruptly concludes in a murder. Yet is this murder a real or a psychological one? In contrast to the timeless "today" and the explicit Viennese setting of the first and third sections, in the second part of Malina "Time no longer exists at all." "It could have been yesterday," the
narrator explains, "it could have been long ago, it could be again, it
could continually be, some things will have never been. There is no
measure for this Time, which interlocks other times, and there is no
measure for the non-times in which things play that were never in
Time." This non-time is that of dreaming, when "the basic elements of
the world are still there, but more gruesomely assembled than anyone
has ever seen." The narrator recounts chilling nightmares involving her
father, Nazism, death camps, electric-shock therapy, and much more. At
one point, she shouts: "A book about Hell!" This dire avowal surely
designates, alas not the intensely desired Exult, Be Jubilant,
but rather the book that "I" must ultimately come to terms with and
write. The dark book, which cannot promise facile redemption but which
tries to align "true sentences." In other words, Malina—which Ingeborg Bachmann did write. SELECTED WORKS BY INGEBORG BACHMANN IN TRANSLATION The
Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Trans. Peter Filkins.
Northwestern University Press, $30.00.since ‘today’ is an impossible word for me. . . . This
Today sends me flying into an anxious haste, so that I can only write
about it, or at best report whatever’s going on. Actually, anything
written about Today should be destroyed immediately, just like all real
letters are crumpled up or torn up, unfinished and unmailed, all
because they were written, but cannot arrive, Today. Whoever has
composed an intensely fervent letter only to tear it to shreds and
throw it away knows exactly what it meant by ‘today.’
After this nearly self-destructive incipit, Malina unveils the narrator’s burning infatuation for Ivan, a character who
may be modeled partly on the German-writing Jewish poet Paul Celan,
with whom Bachmann had an impassioned affair and who also seems to be
the "stranger" of the fairy tale, The Mysteries of the Princess of Kagran. The writer-narrator is working on this fairy tale, cited in italics in Malina as are other short passages reflecting texts-in-progress that she
produces and revises in troubling ways. In the tale, the princess meets
up with a stranger who "kept his face hidden in the night." "She knew
that it was he who had lamented her plight and had sung for her so full
of hope," adds the narrator, "in a voice never heard before, and now he
had come to set her free. . . . She had fallen in love . . . she obeyed
him, because she had to obey him. . . . Then he turned and disappeared
into the night." Elsewhere, the narrator superimposes her and Ivan’s
"identical, high-pitched first initials," an alphabetic coincidence
that could of course not involve Paul (Celan), but which is true of ich ("I"), Ingeborg and Ivan.
Black milk of daybreak we drink you
This interplay between Christianity and Judaism grips
the reader whenever Bachmann alludes to the Shoah ("before I can
scream, I’m already inhaling the gas, more and more gas"), especially
in the second, "dream-journal" part of the novel. All the while, the
narrator contemplates the possibilities both of "redemption" and of
composing, not a work called Death Styles, but rather a
"beautiful book," in accordance with Ivan’s wishes. This affirming,
healing work is to be given the title of Mozart’s motet for soprano, Exsultate, Jubilate.
But this wish, like her love, will remain unfulfilled. The dialectics
of negativity and affirmation, so typical of modern European literature
and certainly one of its outstanding achievements, foster no easy,
comfortable solutions.
Letters to Felician. Trans. Damion Searls. Out of Print.
Malina. Trans. Philip Boehm. Holmes & Meier,
$15.95.
Selected Prose and Drama. Trans. Michael Bullock et al.
Continuum, $24.95.
Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Trans. Peter Filkins. Marsilio, $19.95.
Three Paths to the Lake. Trans. Mark Anderson and Mary Fran Gilbert. Holmes & Meier, $14.00.
Three Radio Plays: A Deal in Dreams; The Cicadas; The Good God of Manhattan. Trans. Lilian Friedberg. Ariadne Press, $21.50.
The Thirtieth Year. Trans. Michael Bullock. Holmes & Meier, $12.95.
