Crisis and Form in the Later Writing of Ingeborg Bachmann by Áine McMurtry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crisis and Form in the Later Writing of Ingeborg Bachmann by Áine McMurtry Karl Ivan Solibakke Áine McMurtry, Crisis and Form in the Later Writing of Ingeborg Bachmann. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012. 250 pp. Incorporating multidimensional modes of perception that are superimposed onto the archaeology of Western culture, Ingeborg Bachmann’s later prose works resemble semiotic webs in which contradictory messages and conflicting meanings are allowed to circulate freely. As a result, her Todesarten narratives mirror the uncertainties of modern European existence and focus on shattered memories, ghosts, and traumas, which, in many instances, enter the collective order via the written or spoken word. Lamenting the state of the arts, fashion, politics, media, mass entertainment, and sexuality as well as the [End Page 129] injustices underlying commodification and industrialization, the celebrated Austrian author also succeeds in projecting the deficiencies of the postwar era onto a textual screen that is a montage of images originating from the collective unconscious. Located in a hybrid space between the past and the present, her prose can be compared to archives in which collective debris is accumulated and multi-faceted sign systems are folded into each other. In juxtaposition to post-Freudian reflections on the healing power of myths, Bachmann’s aesthetic strategies sharpen the crises besetting European societies in the 1960s and trace barbarism back to one of its most plausible origins: language. “Taking into account Bachmann’s heightening disillusion with her contemporary social order during the 1960s,” Áine McMurtry provides evidence of the author’s “radical project to develop a viable linguistic mode through which to express an inextricable condition of subjective and cultural crisis intimately bound up with the recent experience of historical atrocity” (31). The five chapters of McMurtry’s volume pay tribute to the areas of discourse that give Ingeborg Bachmann’s mature prose their cultural, intellectual, and theoretical momentum: the disintegration of collective ethics and mores, the effects of cultural disorientation on transmissibility, the enduring legacy of gender violence, and the fragility of creative expression. Examining poetic drafts that were released long after Bachmann’s premature death in 1973, Letzte, unveröffentlichte Gedichte (1998) and Ich weiß keine bessere Welt, unveröffentlichte Gedichte (2000), McMurtry analyzes to what extent Bachmann folded the lyric remnants and embryonic metaphors of her unfinished poems into the semantics of her Todesarten narratives. Her claim is that the “examination of the poetic drafts of the early 1960s permits new insights into the defining impact of subjective crisis on Bachmann’s aesthetic practice” (8), suggesting as well that the author’s generational and gender conflicts were embedded in increasingly complex layers of verbal, historical, and visual signifiers. McMurtry demonstrates in her final chapter, which is devoted to the musical motifs in Bachmann’s unpublished lyrics, that a comprehensive analysis of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten necessitates an interdisciplinary investigation into music as the basis for an intricate network of sociocultural discourses and as a compositional principle that helps amalgamate her complex stylistic range. Designated as the overture to the Todesarten complex, the novel Malina weaves a fabric of literary and musical references that harken back to philosophical and aesthetic roots in European literary traditions. Prevalent in German literature around 1800, musical discourse forms the basis on [End Page 130] which homologies between compositional and textual configurations can be verified. Deriving literary compositions from poetic drafts, in which music and random sounds play an increasingly important role, Bachmann opts for a fragmentation of aesthetic expression that deconstructs timbre and melody, signifier and meaning, subject and object. Likewise, emancipation from natural frames of perception is intimately related to a concept of “aisthesis” as a reflexive perception that suffers irreparable damage when mass communication threatens traditional forms of collective discourse. If the “I” in Malina becomes the personification of the female voice, at once a symbol for obsolete melodies and the primordial, then her aphasia at the end of the novel equates to a loss of the ideals motivating the musical myth in German literary traditions. By the same token, Bachmann’s narratives depict a semiotic order in which, among other influences, women as the “suffering female subject” capitulate to the irrationality of the operatic...