Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973)

La obra de Ingeborg Bachmann no sólo representa el compromiso político de su autora sino también una búsqueda incesante de un nuevo lenguaje para encontrar la verdad.
Un grito a quien no quiere condenar el pasado nazi de su país, Austria y un aviso sobre la permanencia en el poder de aquellos que habían provocado esta tragedia.
Y un verso premonitorio que pone la carne de gallina: "Con la mano chamuscada sigo escribiendo sobre la naturaleza del fuego"

Das dreißigste Jahr is a collection of seven short prose pieces all written in the late 1950s. There are two "key themes" that run through all the pieces, in various ways: the unequal relations between men and women, and the moral problem of living in a post-war world. As you would expect (in hindsight) there's a strong feminist sensibility everywhere, but oddly enough Bachmann chose to write four of the seven from an explicitly masculine point of view, and one from a point of view that show more does not bring the narrator's gender into play. Only "Undine goes" and "A step to Gomorrah" have explicitly feminine narrative viewpoints.

All the pieces seem to deal with people who are facing a crucial choice in their lives, but who ultimately don't quite have the courage to take it.

The title story is a miniature version of the classic German form, the Bildungsroman, describing a year in the life of a young man who suddenly realises that he's going to be thirty, and that all the endless possibilities there used to be in his life are condensing into the choices he has already made. It's the most ambitious in the collection in terms of form, switching between third and first person, prose and poetry, bringing in a character "Moll" who turns out to be a composite of all the hero's mediocre friends, and generally hitting us with the full armoury of modernist writing. And it works.

But I think the pieces that will stick in my mind most are the shorter opening and closing stories. The first is a beautiful, but jagged and painful, account of how the terrible experience of war has made it impossible to reconnect with memories of childhood and the comfortable isolation of small-town life; the last is Undine's delightfully lyrical, angry, sad and ultimately affectionate farewell rant directed at humans in general and men named Hans in particular. Definitely something you should have on hand for the Hans in your life... show less

Why "Malina" Has no Message for Feminists

The English translation of "Malina" ends with an academic essay, intended to explain the book's cultural and historical references, and also to help readers who may be confused by the book's experimental form and content. The first purpose is reasonable for North American readers; the second is ridiculous. The book is hermetic, desperately unhappy, remorseless, disconsolate, dissociative, and ambiguously realistic, mythic, and allegorical. Those show more should all be signs that a brief explanation won't be helpful.

This is how Anderson summarizes the book's reception:

"To those familiar with her poetry, 'Malina' seems the continuation in narrative of the problems and images informing the lyrical work of the 1950s. To a new generation of feminist readers (who had little patience with what they saw as her hermetic, aestheticist poetry) 'Malina' and the other unfinished novels of the 'Death Styles' cycle have come to stand for a radically 'other Bachmann,' the critic of patriarchal capitalist society where women are systematically denied a voice and language of their own. To historians familiar with the art and philosophy of Hapsburg Vienna, the novel represents a masterly synthesis of a distinctly Austrian tradition, one that reached it apogee at the turn of the century in the work of Freud, Musil, Roth, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal and Kraus. Finally, to contemporary German writers as diverse as Christa Wolf, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke ot stands as an inspirational example for their own work." (pp. 239-40)

Note that only one of these three, the one attributed to "feminist readers," is an interpretation of the text itself. Many of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are similarly concerned with gender roles. The translation seems to be read as a memoir, autobiography, or trauma narrative. One reviewer on Goodreads puts it this way:

"The generation Bachmann describes has made female victimhood an art form. It grated on my nerves because I have been fighting my whole life both against the male attitude of condescension and property and the female passive voice of pleasurable suffering. 'Look at me, I am killed by male dominance! Don't I look pretty in all my indignation?'" ("Lisa" on Goodreads, 2018)

But Bachmann was much stranger than the pugilist advocate of women's rights imagined by online reviewers. Readings like these are misguided because they project later desires for empowerment onto a text that is determinedly closed to meliorist narratives. The novel continues to be taken as a prelude to some feminism, but "Malina" does not imply any such future or hope. It isn't about "disempowerment," "gender roles," or "the lasting impact of child abuse in adult life" (Sarah Porter on Amazon). Those are things the novel can only be about when it is read for use-value by a 21st century audience accustomed to trauma narratives and self-help books. "Malina" itself does not want to be saved: its narrator knows that the air we all breathe is poison. Chapter 2 is full of scenes of violence, incest, rape, and murder, mostly centered on a father figure, but as Peter Filkins wrote in the "New York Times," the narrator

"...realizes that the menace of her dreams is 'not my father. It's my murderer.' The distinction is important. For though Bachmann is clearly concerned with patriarchal power and the ravages of family violence inflicted upon women, she also sees such issues as inextricably bound up with the violence done to both genders in the flawed, if not fatal, workings of society and history, as well as the violence we do to and by words because we find it impossible to give full expression to such outrage."

Language itself, for Bachmann, is a form of violence, a "disease," an "expression of insanity." (The first quotation is Filkins's; the second is Bachmann's.) Nor will it do to say that the two men in the narrator's life, Ivan and Malina, are absent or manipulative. Ivan, one of the two male characters, cannot love anyone but his children, even though the unnamed narrator declares her love for him; but it is not at all clear that their miscommunication is a picture of conventional gender roles; and the third character, Malina, is too strange, and too nearly allegorical, to be counted as an independent character at all. (Anderson thinks Malina is part of the narrator, and that he's modeled on the Jungian anima. There is some support for this in an interview with Bachmann.)

The narrator herself does sometimes fit the model of trauma narratives: she is in continuous crisis; she cries, she shakes, she smokes, drinks, takes painkillers, can't sleep or write. And yet she doesn't communicate any better than the male characters. This isn't feminist advocacy; this is a world in which people try as best they can to remain minimally human.

In Bachmann's mind, the poisons of language are personal in a way they aren't for Paul Celan. There is an extended allegory of language and writing on pp. 156-61, where the narrator tells the story of Otto Kranetizer, a postal worker accused of hoarding unopened letters in his apartment.

"...in every profession [i.e., including writing] there must be at least one man who lives in deep doubt and comes into a conflict. Mail delivery [the profession of a writer] in particular would seem to require a latent angest, a seismographic recording of emotional tremors which is otherwise accepted only in the higher and highest professions [later described as professors of philosophy and science], as if the mail couldn't have its own crisis, no Thinking-Wanting-Being for it [Denken-Wollen-Sein]" (p. 159, 253 in the original; see also Surika Simon, "Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Writing in Postmodern Culture")

This is as close to Kafka as anyone in postwar fiction: it's an extended allegory of artistic work, as in "Josephine the Singer" or "The Hunger Artist," and it is infused with anxiety, anger, and fear. What poisons the narrator in "Malina" is a different from what poisons words in Celan.

Readings of "Malina" that take their bearing from contemporary diary-novels, trauma narratives, memoirs, self-help books, or feminist theories, draw on a simplified and domesticated sense of the book. This novel is a tremendous achievement: it is deeply experimental, to the point of continuously undermining its supposedly secure three-act form (blithely announced at the beginning and elaborated by optimistic critics); it is unsure of the relation between allegory, dream, and history; and its story (involving the narrator's death, while living, and her transformation into her spectral alter-ego) is darker than anything that a realist, political, or historical reading could use or comprehend.

Postscript 1 -- on metafiction
I'll just close with two smaller points. First, "Malina" is a forerunner of the current interest in minimally fictional novels, made popular by Ben Lerner. At one point Ivan discovers notes for a manuscript the narrator intends to write called "Todesarten" ("Arts of Death" or 'Death Styles"), which is the name of the trilogy of books Bachmann contemplated ("Malina" is the only one she finished before she burned to death in her apartment in Rome) on the ways people die while living -- through relationships, by institutions and politics, by language itself. Ivan counsels the narrator to write a happy book instead. "Malina" is not that book, but the coincidence of the name of the book occurring in the book is parallel to Lerner's "10:04" and other novels. Writing the thinnest possible veneer of fiction on an experimental, non-linear narrative is one of several things Bachmann was experimenting with in the late 1960's. It would be interesting if the contemporary moment could acknowledge its belatedness.

Postscript 2 -- on humor
And last, I'd also like to register that "Malina" has some very funny pages. I cringe when reviewers say this sort of thing. But Bachmann's humor comes from a desperate fear and hatred of people in general, a kind of acidic combination of Kafka and Bernhard. Here is her suggestion for how to write back to someone who blithely wishes you a happy birthday (as so many social media sites do these days):

"Dear...
You wish me... best wishes for my birthday. Permit me to tell you how shocked I was precisely today. To be sure I have no doubt as to your tact, since I had the honor of meeting you some years ago... However you are alluding to a day, perhaps even a specific hour and an irrevocable moment, which must have been a most private matter for my mother, my father too, as we may assume for the sake of propriety. Naturally nothing in particular was shared with me about this day, I just had to memorize a date which I have to write down on every registration form in every city, in every country, even if I'm only passing through. But I stopped passing through countries a long time ago..." (p. 90). show less

[2017]
Das Buch ist unglaublich intensiv, gerade das düstere zweite Kapitel bedrückend und verschlingend - nein, nicht ich habe das Buch verschlungen, sondern das Buch mich.
Außerdem ist Bachmanns Umgang mit Sprache (zumindest in diesem Werk, sonst kenne ich noch nichts) unglaublich gut, weil sie es schafft Handlung und Sprache zu verweben - besonders schön kommt das zum Beispiel in der Szene bei den Mandls zum Ausdruck, in der möglichst albern englische Begriffe in den normalen Text show more verwebt werden. Mir ist unklar, wie man dieses Buch übersetzen kann, ohne es seines Charakters zu berauben - was schade ist, aber eben auch für die unglaubliche Qualität spricht.

Ich musste mir seitenweise Zitate rausschreiben müssen - so wunderbare Gedanken und Ausdrücke spicken das Werk!

Vermutlich ist das nichts, was viele Leute anspricht. Aber jedem und jeder Weltfremdeten, gerade denen, die ihre Zuflucht in Büchern finden, und denen, die zwischen Askese und Ekstase schwanken, sei dieses Buch ans Herz gelegt! show less