'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) Ingeborg 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.'-- John Taylor, Context #13
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Further
Ingeborg Bachmann @ The Institute of Modern Languages
'Reading Ingeborg Bachmann'
Ingeborg Bachmann Website
The Ingeborg Bachmann Forum
'EXSULSATE JUBILATE: READING "MALINA"'
'"Le Temps du coeur. Correspondance", d'Ingeborg Bachmann et Paul Celan : lettres d'amour en Poésie'
'Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann'
'Theirs was an unlikely friendship'
'Expressing the Dark'
'LA TRENTIÈME ANNÉE (EXTRAIT), PAR INGEBORG BACHANT'
'Ingeborg Bachmann and the Mad Men'
'The Use and Abuse of Feminist Criticism: Ingeborg Bachmann'
'INGEBORG BACHMANN & PAUL CELAN: HEART’S TIME, A CORRESPONDENCE'
Cafe Ingeborg Bachmann
'"If We Had the Word": Ingeborg Bachmann, Views and Reviews
'THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE', Marjorie Perloff on Ingeborg Bachmann
'Gender, the Cold War, and Ingeborg Bachmann'
'DARKNESS SPOKEN'
Buy 'Malina'
___
Extras
Eine Folge RÜCKBLENDE - DIE SCHRIFTSTELLERIN INGEBORG BACHMANN
Ingeborg Bachmann reads '(A Paean) To the Sun' (1961)
Ingeborg Bachmann reads 'Exile' (1961)
Ingeborg Bachmann 'Mein Vogel' (1961)
'Portrait von Ingeborg - Ähnlichkeiten mit Ingeborg Bachmann'
____________
Werner Schroeter Malina (1991)
'Malina is a 1991 German-Austrian drama film directed by Werner Schroeder and starring Isabelle Huppert. The screenplay was adapted by Elfriede Jelinek from Ingeborg Bachmann's 1971 novel Malina. Like Bachmann's novel, the film is an incredibly complex drama on the nature of insanity and to watch it, especially in the beginning, is quite a labour. A woman believes that she is a writer and all her men are fruits of her ill consciousness or personages of her unwritten book or alter egos of her split imagination. And episode after episode her consciousness keeps deteriorating more and more but the end breaks everything once again so all that was happening comes up in absolutely different light and changes its meaning. Malina is an anagram of ‘animal’ and it isn’t accidental but symbolic to the entire surrealistic content of the film. Malina is utterly unique, having many layers of narration and visualization.'-- collaged
the entire film
Interview with Elfriede Jelinek (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
___
Poems
The Drugs, The Words
Said it,
and the toad leapt
onto the table,
blew the match out
and the lightning
struck under the table,
lifted the glass,
and the drop
spilled into the sea,
meaning tears,
none of them dried,
which means a sea,
something quite other,
though there's only one,
suffering not being
the worst thing
to popes, to ideas,
to states, but rather
a torture for the sane.
The sick know
that a color, a breath of air,
a hard step, indeed a
whimper of grass in the world
turns the heart inside
the body, causing them to hope
for peace the more they sense
war, as the war goes on.
They love
the white uniforms
of the nurses.
They hope that
from the white
something good will come.
They are not
white at all.
Enigma
Nothing more will come.
Spring will no longer flourish.
Millennial calendars forecast it already.
And also summer and more, sweet words
such as “summer-like”–
nothing more will come.
You mustn’t cry,
says the music.
Otherwise
no one
says
anything.
The Bridges
Wind tightens the ribbon drawn across bridges.
The sky grinds on the crossbeams
with its darkest blue.
On this side and that our shadows
pass each other in the light.
Pont Mirabeau … Waterloo Bridge …
How can the names stand
to carry the nameless?
Stirred by the lost
that faith could not carry,
the river’s drumbeat awakens.
Lonely are all bridges,
and fame is as dangerous for them
as it is for us, yet we presume
to feel the tread of stars
upon our shoulders.
Still, over the slope of transience
no dream arches us.
It’s better to follow the riverbanks,
crossing from one to another,
and all day keep an eye out
for the official to cut the ribbon.
For when he does, he’ll seize the sun’s scissors
within the fog, and if the sun blinds him,
he’ll be swallowed by fog when he falls.
No Delicacies
Should I
dress up a metaphor
with an almond blossom?
Crucify syntax
on a trick of light?
Who will beat their brains
over such superfluities -
___
Book
Portico Paperbacks
'First published in Austria in 1971, this work gained quick acceptance into the canon of modern Austrian and women's literature. It concerns a triangle consisting of the narrator (an unnamed woman writer in Vienna), her lover (Ivan), and her alter-ego and male roommate (Malina) and culminates in her murder. Experimental in form and lyrical in style, this sometimes difficult novel explores the limits of language and the enigma of time--major themes in Austrian literature at least since the turn of the century. The role of gender in identity and personality is also considered. Malina was originally conceived as the "overture" to a trilogy entitled Ways of Dying, which remained incomplete at the time of the author's death in 1973.'-- Library Journal
______
Excerpts
1 Hello. Hello?
2 I, who else then
3 Yes, of course, excuse
4 How am I? And you?
5 I don't know. Tonight?
6 I hear you so poorly
7 Poorly? What? You can then
8 I can't hear you well, can you
9 What? Is something?
10 No, nothing, you can even later
11 Of course, I'd better call you later
12 I, I should actually with friends
13 Yes, if you can't, then
14 That's not what I said, only if you can't
15 In any case we'll talk on the phone later
16 Yes, but around six o'clock, because
17 But even that is too late for me
18 Yes, for me too actually, but
19 Maybe today doesn't make any sense
20 Did someone come in?
21 No, only now Frau Jellinek is
22 I see, you're not alone any more
23 But later please, definitely please!
*
It was on the Glan bridge. It was not the Sea promenade.
It was not on the Glan bridge, not on the Sea promenade, it was also not on the Atlantic in the night. I only travelled through this night, drunk, toward the worst night.
*
While we talk I can never allow myself to think that in an hour we will be lying on the bed or toward evening or very late at night, because otherwise the walls could suddenly be glass, the roof could suddenly be removed. Extreme self-control lets me accept Ivan’s sitting opposite me at first, silently smoking and talking. Not one word, not one gesture of mine betrays what is now possible and what will continue to be possible. One moment it’s Ivan and myself. Another moment: we. Then right away: you and I. Two beings devoid of all intentions toward each other, who do not want coexistence… I propagate myself with words and also propagate Ivan. I beget a new lineage, my union with Ivan brings that which is willed by God into the world. Firebirds Azurite Immersible flames Drops of jade.
*
A-North in the county jail was the suicide watch ward. The lights never went off. I was up there for the duration of my 10 ½ months because I had never been locked up before and had a history of depression and anxiety—the State didn’t want me to die on their watch; they wanted to beef up their resumes by sentencing me to Life Without Parole.
There was a rumor that if you attempted suicide, you got to go to the state hospital in Kalamazoo where the inmate could smoke and have his own space while being evaluated. It was a seductive dream, one that apparently got the best of a little motor-mouthed meth cook whose name I don’t remember, but who reminded me of a troll.
One afternoon he strung himself up on the bars with a bed-sheet. But he was facing outward, toward the hall. I had never tried to hang myself, but I didn’t think he was doing it right. If he was facing out, didn’t that put the pressure on the back of his neck? The deputies cut him down and he was back in the cell an hour or so later. No state hospital, no cigarettes. I said something smart-alecky about his attempt, something like, “Maybe if you hadn’t done it backwards, they would have believed you, you fucking idiot.” I knew I was looking at life and had little compassion for someone who was going to do 3-5 at maximum. He said, “Alright, let’s go,” so I jumped off my top bunk, raised my fists (I had taken boxing at the Y for a year or so) and began jabbing him between the eyes with quick lefts. I contend that I would have whipped him good, except he grabbed a hold of me and switched the fight to a wrestling match mixed with punching.
I had a black eye for awhile. My kids saw my black eye when they next visited and they worried. I promised them I would never get into another fight. And I haven’t. Which is almost certainly for the best because it hurts to get hit and you have to go around explaining to everyone why your face is all marked up. The talking you have to do is not worth the trouble. It’s not worth anything.
*
It seems to me then, that his quietness is due to the fact that I am for him too unimportant and familiar a person, as if he had ruled me out, a waste, a superfluous incarnation, as if I were only made out of his rib and always dispensable to him, but also an unavoidable dark history, which his history wants to accompany and complement, but which he delimits and separates from his own clear history.
*
My father wears the blood-stained white butcher's apron in front of a slaughterhouse at dawn, he wears the red executioner's cloak and climbs the steps, he wears silver and black with black boots in front of an electric barbed-wire fence, in front of a loading ramp, in a watch tower, he wears his costume for the riding whips, for the shoulder rifles, for the shot-in-the-neck pistols, in the worst night the costumes are worn, blood-stained and horrible.
And?
My father, who does not have the voice of my father, asks from afar:
And?
And I say over a long distance, because we come ever farther apart and farther apart and farther:
I know who you are.
I have understood everything.
*
Steps, Malina's incessant steps, quieter steps, the most quiet steps. A standing still. No alarm, no sirens. No on comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can be heard again.
It was murder.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. I didn't know of '45 Years' until you mentioned it. I just searched around for info, and it looks very interesting. I'll try to find it. ** Tomkendall, Hey, Tom. Oh, I meant every word. Thank you for saying that. Hugs from France-central. ** Sypha, Hi. I was probably too old to go gaga over the 'Star Wars' movies. They were just okay (1st one) to pretty good (2nd one) to bad (3rd one) blockbusters to me. I remember that you said your mom liked Greg Lake, or I think I remember that. Well, I guess at least she can be happy that she didn't groupie-up to him and end up marrying him in his heyday, I guess. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, I managed to make a Mohsin Makhmalbaf Day. Coming up at the first of the year. See what you think. Well, then I'll definitely get 'Hell Hath No Fury'. Huh, cool. Thank you! Curious what you'll think of Ligotti. I've still only read a very little of his fiction. And, bizarrely, I have never read any Bolaño. I suppose it's high time. ** _Black_Acrylic, You sure could get a lot of work done while riding that Hell coaster. Well, writing, I guess I mean. Sucks about the starving to death part. Enjoy Leeds! Any sirenic Xmas attractions, failed or otherwise, in your hood or nearish by? ** Liquoredgoat, Mm, boysenberry tea. Boysenberry anything. Knotts's boysenberry pie is insane. Six Flags is where you need to go, I'll say. Coaster-wise. It has 'Full Throttle', my pick for the best roller coaster in the world. And other gems. That scene in 'Guide' about the guys on acid doing that re: the reef is absolutely true and lifted straight from my own life. It was very, very strange. ** Misanthrope, I thought you didn't like Troye Sivan. Or maybe it was his song? Or maybe that was Sypha? I forget what he looks like. Hold on. Jeez, man, he looks he's about 12 years old. Is he, or is he not and is it that you're just into his illusion of underage-ness? Oh, that's funny that I just wrote that and the next thing in your comment is about friends icking-out re: your taste in young guys. Ha ha. I don't remember any friends having said something like that to me, no. They could have thought it, I guess. When I was in high school, George Miles's parents were ongoingly freaked out about our closeness 'cos he was three years younger than me. That's the only case that springs to mind. ** MANCY, Hey! The Quietus list was pretty good. The Wire one is very good, no surprise. I'll look for the Locrian one. I'm FB friends with Terrence, so I can probably find it in his feed. Happy Tuesday! ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron. I saw the link, but I wasn't very awake yet when I saw it, but I am now, so I'll click it shortly. Thank you! I have never seen Degrassi. I hardly even know what it is. Well, I know generally what it is. I would be ultra-receptive if someone wants to do a Degrassi post. That would be instructive among other things. ** Rewritedept, Hi. Oh, okay, then I guess that, if they come here, he'll be in tow. I'll watch the listings. I haven't seen YLT live in, gosh, forever. I don't even have a hardcover of 'The Sluts'. I think I only glimpsed one from a distance once. Being mum about new projects can work. It can be the right kind of fuel. Stuff on my end is good, just ongoing busyness. This really big French TV channel, from which top level people saw and loved 'The Ventriloquists Convention' and expressed great interest in considering the 'spin-off' TV series that Zac and I are writing for Gisele, just got the script of Episode 1 and some notes on the subsequent two episodes, so I/we are crossing our fingers tightly that they'll buy the TV series based on that or will at least like Episode 1 enough to want to see the full script, which Zac and I will be spending our Xmases working on. That's one of the occupiers of my end. ** H, Hi. Glad you're enjoying Proust. Everyone in the world with any brains seems to. My head cold is still in threatening-to-attack mode. It's annoying, but t's better than it having launched a full attack on me. So far. That mobile sounds nice! ** Okay. Today I'm again doing my best to interest you in a book that you might possibly not already know. See you tomorrow.