Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
Malina
By Ingeborg Bachmann
Translated by Philip Boehm
Originally published in 1971
This version published in 2019 by New Directions
What are we to make of things that are neither didactic nor mimetic? I guess that could be the question of all literature after 1970 or so, especially when it’s something, like this book, that hints at things both familiar and revelatory, so that you feel like there’s a big Truth here if only you could interpret the work in the correct way. Of course, there’s always fractals of truth, both big and small. It’s just about choosing a lens from which to view them.
Take, as example, the transcendent, meditative state that the narrator feels when putting on makeup, of becoming a new person not wholly intended for this world, set right next to passages like this: “All water shall run dry in the deserts, once again we will be able to enter the wilderness and witness revelations, savanna and stream will invite us in their purity, diamonds will remain embedded in stone and illuminate us all, the primeval forest will take us out of the nighttime jungle of our thoughts, we will cease to think and suffer, it shall be the Redemption.” (114) These things, so different, reveal a book of fragments, a display of various threads of different types, shapes, colors, that layer atop one another, rather than pull together, to form a picture, the image slowly becoming more concrete and actualized as the layers build (see the self-interview on pp. 73- 77), fragments of conversation on top of inner monologue, with specific examples and allusions, throwing us right into the mix as though we’ve known these people and their backgrounds for years, that we’ll easily pick up on and follow small threads despite knowing nothing about these characters, people who have barely been sketched into shape, and, yet, somehow it works. That’s kind of the miracle of Bachmann’s style: it throws you into the deep end, into specifics, and says “figure it out,” and somehow you do (there’s a distinct intertextuality that establishes itself if you can make it through the first 30 pages), at least enough to keep going.
It’s less a book about a central, driving narrative and more a book that works around the idea of placing the self in the world, of dealing with love and connection. There is a displaced, fractured sense of self, always looking for identity in others, in reflections, in letters and conversations, lashing out in every direction to find something to help process trauma and abuse — a compartmentalization of various selves and stages of life centered around terrible events. “Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don’t even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.” (184)
We learn how her (narrator) father’s abuse kills her childhood, splinters and isolates her inner self into fractured beings/manifestations that she must grapple with as an adult, trying to figure out relationships — the rejection of traditional form into subjective poetics suggests a feminine taking back of less patriarchally proscriptive forms of expression (“However, most men usually make women unhappy, and there’s no reciprocity, as our misfortune is natural, inevitable, stemming as it does from the disease of men…” (226)), channeling the imagination/unconscious. It is an empowerment of self over the destructive male force. “My father looks up in amazement, but still doesn’t understand. Now and then I lose my voice: I have permitted myself to live nevertheless. Sometimes my voice returns and can be heard by all: I am living, I will live, I claim my right to live.” (191) It’s powerful, even if only an attempt, where the exclamation doesn’t equate to life/living; “It’s getting so easy to talk about, already it’s a lot easier. But it’s so difficult to live with.” (192)
These thoughts exist as the (unspecified race/class) female rhythm, an exhalation of femininity, a breath of absolute freedom unseen in most modern literature outside of a small few (e.g., Lispector). It’s a further breaking apart of structure and literary norms, which is to say that it’s something original and unique, and, for me, worthwhile. We are left to ask what to make of all of this, what it means, and, maybe mostly, if the narrator can escape her inevitability of being an “unknown woman murdered by some unknown man.” (231)
Heavy Lit rating: Highly Recommended
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