Spotlight on … Ingeborg Bachmann Malina (1971) *

* (restored)

 

‘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

 

____
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 ‘Her Gun’ (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

Lengthy excerpt

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 –

 

________
Interview with Françoise Rétif
Bachmann biographer & translator

 

Ingeborg Bachmann seems to have had critical recognition and even a certain social notoriety in the years 50-73, the date of her death. Is she still popular and still read in the Germanic world?

Ingeborg Bachmann’s popularity is immense throughout the world and still relevant today. She was praised very young, in German-speaking countries, in 1953, with the Groupe 47 prize and at the time of the publication of her first collection of poems, Le Temps en sussis. It was therefore as a poet that she became famous, although she had previously published prose texts. In August 1954, the German weekly Der Spiegel made its front page with a photo of her by Herbert List. A remarkable photo which captured the great sensuality as well as the enigmatic gaze of the young poet. This popularity was confirmed by the publication of the second collection, three years later. However, after 1956, she no longer published collections of poems, but only prose, The Thirtieth Year, a collection of short stories, in 1961, the novel Malina, in 1971, two years before her death, and finally the second collection short stories, Simultan (translated into French under the title of Three Paths to the Lake), in 1972. It is undoubtedly this chronological order which explains why we often hear or read that after 1956 Ingeborg Bachmann did not wrote more poems. It’s absolutely false. She continued to write poems, just as she had written prose before the resounding publication of her lyrical collections. However, these later poems were only published one by one or in small groups, in magazines, or posthumously. Because Ingeborg Bachmann died young, at 47, of an accident, and she left behind a considerable body of work, largely fragmentary. A bit like Kafka…

German-speaking critics, enthusiastic about her poetry, received the prose work rather poorly. It was only after her death that tribute was paid to her, emphasizing in particular his historical and political dimension – a dimension which initially displeased in Germany, in the Germany of the 1960s, at that time more devoted to reconstruction rather than denazification. Moreover, one of the explanations for the author’s desire to publish more prose than poetry from the 1960s undoubtedly lies in the fact that this historical dimension – although already present in a large number of poems, in particularly those of the first collection — had escaped criticism.

It is perhaps in France that Ingeborg Bachmann is least known. Italy considers her a national writer, like us Paul Celan. Why this failing recognition in France? The reasons are multiple, complex and partly irrational. Bachmann tried several times to settle in Paris, but never felt welcomed there, never at home. After the Second World War, France welcomed refugees, like Paul Celan, or persecuted Jews, more willingly than the children of executioners… Because Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann, was raised and educated in a National Socialist family (her father had joined Hitler’s party very early on, from 1932) and in an ultranationalist region, Carinthia, particularly receptive to racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic theories, to everything advocated by the National Socialist party – undoubtedly one of the most radically fascist regions in Austria. The teachers, a body which included Matthias Bachmann, the father, being the most ardent defenders and propagators of this thought.

War and philosophy play a critical role in her work, but her love life also has an impact on what she writes, right?

We have suspected since at least the publication of the novel Malina that sexual trauma had ravaged the life of the child or young girl. The letters to Hans Weigel document the after-effects of this trauma and show how it continues to haunt the young woman’s life – how much, therefore, at a very young age, she is already affected in her physical and psychological health. When Weigel went to the United States for a few months in 1948, she wrote to him very often and confided in him a lot, without restriction or restraint, as she would never do again in her life. Scientists previously believed that Ingeborg Bachmann’s illness, the crises that affected her, the ailments that led her to have to visit psychologists, psychiatrists and hospitals in the early sixties were due to the break with her Swiss lover, the famous novelist and playwright Max Frisch. My study proves that the problems did not appear suddenly after the breakup with the writer. And that the young woman living in Vienna between 1947 and 1953 was already seeking to understand the illness that tormented her and suffered from not being able to explain it. Because the trauma haunts the psyche all the more because it is unspeakable, because it escapes the subject’s memory. Sexual violence indeed generates a traumatic memory. This traumatic memory is at the center of Bachmann’s life and his work. To put it another way, the work is placed under the sign of the problematic unveiling of an unspeakable truth.

However, we should not believe that the trauma suffered and its after-effects are only treated at the individual, biographical level. What is remarkable is that, on the contrary, Bachmann gives it a historical and political dimension. It becomes emblematic of the “fascism” which governs human and social relations, emblematic of the abusive power of one or more people over others, in all the forms it can take, in the different institutions that the Father embodies. in the novel Malina: political, religious, cultural power, and of course also at the family, private level. The second chapter of the novel published two years before his death, if it is inspired by biographical dreams, already mentioned in youthful letters to Hans Weigel, gives them a political and historical dimension which goes far beyond the psychological and personal dimension elsewhere. also present. The ego, mistreated, tortured, raped, locked in a gas chamber, appears as the personification of the victim, of all the victims of the different forms of totalitarian power that the Father represents in his various disguises. Dreams and personal life take on a socio-historical, ethical and universal dimension.

 

___
Book

Ingeborg Bachmann Malina
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. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, we’re finally finishing the film. We’re in the studio working on the color and sound from 9 am to 7 pm every day except Sunday and will be for at least two weeks. It’s pretty intense, but exciting. This very respected French film producer saw a cut of the film and loved it and has come onboard as co-Executive Producer, and he’s the one who’s helping us finish, and that’s been a complete lifesaver since useless Fuckhead is now pushed off to the side to some degree. Anyway, the French producer wants to show the film to distributors in early March, so that’s our deadline to get it as complete as possible by then. On the ghost, basically we’re giving up for moment and just letting the ghost pass-throughs look pretty basic because nothing tech-y really works. Yes, we have quick lunch breaks, basically to pop out to grab sandwiches and bring them back to the studio because we’re in too much of a rush to take time away. And Krispy Kreme is just a little too far of a walk, sadly. I know, about those great videos. Sadly I think the wild kids who made them grow up and get embarrassed of them, which is the opposite of how they should feel. Happy b’day to your grandma! And I guess I’ll let love wish you a Happy Valentines Day since I guess today is love’s big annual day, G. ** Charalampos, Hi. Oh, Gérard Blain, right. I’m blanking on the filmmaker with the Robbe-Grillet actresses. I haven’t found anything by Vecchiali that I can use to build a post around. But I will try again. I like pop, I just don’t like Lady Gaga’s brand of it. Except for ‘Poker Face’. I do like that one song. Overdrive is definitely the mode du jour, and thank you. Vibes with considerable eye strain to you. ** Misanthrope, I figured that you, and to some degree I, were going to occasion a rare Sypha visit to defend his goddess, and sure enough! Weird: the vanishing mailbox. I wake up at 6 am every day, bright and spunky and ready to go. Well, actually not until coffee is added. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Jeez, man, you have just been beset lately. Holy fuck, what’s going on over there. I ‘pray’ that the troublesome mechanics have been fixed by now. You’re seriously due a glorious windfall. ** Barkley, Hi, Barkley! Always a true pleasure. Thank you for letting me know I’m not missing anything. I kind of figured. Mushrooms are so nice. I think I would do them again given the right circumstances. But, yes, total stability, or, well, since that’s impossible, mostly, is kind of a must-have for LSD in-putting, I think. What it does or can do is pretty major. More like brain surgery than a local anaesthetic. Luck with the new doable job! France is trundling along in its winter garb. Although it’s not much of a winter really. Obviously I hope you get to see GbV. They just won’t come over here. Pollard says he hated being in Europe when they did once, so it’s a no-go. It’s very sad. Thank you, thank you for that AC stream! That sounds super fun. I’ll use it to wake up again after my endless hours working on the film today. I did not know airtime.world, and that looks incredible. Bookmarked. Wow, thank you so much!!! You have the best week yourself! Lovely to get to talk with you! ** Steve Erickson, Me too, obviously, about Moullet’s writings. Hard to describe the color grading look we’re after. It’s being pretty intuitive. Big goal is to not use saturation and filters and all that smothering stuff that’s in 99% of films. The grader we’re working with described the look we want as ‘charismatic but soft’, but I’m not sure what that means. Sad your snowstorm was an instant-melt, or, well, wait, congrats, actually. ** Sypha, Hi, James. I knew that would lure you in here. Thank you on behalf of whatever fans of hers might be viewing this for defending her even though I don’t know that she defending exactly? Anyway, you’re a good fan. ** Justin, Aw, thanks, pal. Happy Valentines Day to you. You gonna eat anything especially red and sugary today. I’ll try. ** Uday, Yes, Moullet is in serious need of Criterion Collection boxset or something. When I was in school we were given the choice of learning French, Spanish, or Latin. I chose Spanish because I lived in LA, and that was the sensible choice. but, oh, I wish I’d learned French way back when my brain was fresh and probably even more absorbent. Epistolary formatted as non-epistolary sounds exciting. Makes me want to try that. Maybe try to remember that names are just words and that characters are just configurations of the prose? That helps me. Shame is evil, I think. But he does very annoying. Fell? Ouch. I did that a few weeks ago, and I’m okay now, so your future is bright. Bugs … it’s winter here, so there aren’t a ton of bugs around, and Paris is much less inhabited by insects than LA is, but there’s a nice little spider in my bathroom that I check in on once in a while. You? ** Darby🚀🪂, Great about your great. Yesterday was extremely work-filled and exhausting, but it will seem great in the future. Three boxes, whoop. I like grits. Grits and biscuits, yum. Writing-wise, I want to see of I can finish a collection of short, kind of weird, experimental, fiction things that I’ve been working on fitfully. I’ll start writing Zac’s and my next film as soon as we figure out what we want it to be about. I don’t have any ideas for a new novel, but I’m hoping one will burst through. Thank you for asking, my friend. ** Michael Morland, Hello, Michael! Thank you for gracing this blog’s interior. My obvious pleasure about Mr. Kinkel. He’s unsurprisingly a big fave of mine too. That does sound trying, all that browning and shlop hammering. I can’t even imagine. Big up to you. Come back anytime that here comes onto you sufficiently. ** Pork Scratching, Oh, gosh, you’re too kind. It takes one to know one. ** Right. Someone recently asked me if I would restore the blog’s spotlight on Ingeborg Bachmann’s incredible novel ‘Malina’, and today’s the day. If you don’t know that novel, maybe it’s time? See you tomorrow.