The Hesitation & The Evocation: Bachmann's Todesarten

The Hesitation & The Evocation: Bachmann's Todesarten

The Bachmann Todesarten Cycle Project.

I've been since long meaning to write about this. There are a lot of reasons for my hesitations.
To start simple: it did cost me back then a month's rent, but i needed to have it of course and saved up for it and lugged it home one beautiful day. It became the latest addition to the metre or so of Bachmann literature that I had already accumulated. They are carefully edited orange 4 volumes, weighty, it is twice as big as and dwarfing what counts as the normal standard edition, the white one: 4 volumes of her work, containing her poetry, prose (malina etc), and shorter miscellaneous writings. Todesartencycle contains the later prose, Franza, the Simultan stories, Malina, Requiem for Fanny Goldmann and all other writings, notes that belong to it. That is, factually, the textual scope and extent of the Todesartencycle.

I have been also, since long, staying away from her stuff, more or less, and sort of traded it in for the sanity and balance of christa wolf. I've written about this before.

It's this aspect of living in a different country where people read familiar authors in a similar yet different way that once more made me revisit old preferences. more importantly i've got to teach her and i need to think of how to approach this...

Then there is this aspect of having read an author thoroughly, to have read everything and sort of lived in that mental atmosphere for a while.

Noticeably, there is not a lot of discussion of content when it comes to Bachmann, it's all rather cryptic, only the initiated can understand etc. the way she is Maria in Bernhard's Extinction and so on...

For instance, one could remain on the level of anecdotal evidence and talk about how Bachmann bought parmesancheese for Peter Szondi so he could give it to Gershom Sholem. or the like.

For instance also, just to continue this:

A shoddy translation, mine, of a letter by Bachmann to Szondi:

20.6.1961
Gladly I'd like to say to you that your 'Essay on the Tragic' has affected me much and continued to occupy me. My interest in such studies is otherwise rather lame and tepid and i am so immodest to believe that this has less to do with me than with the studies; especially because the best and most beautiful [studies] that were a consequence of literature - and that have become a part of literature - made me more sensitive, not just for the literature and what often transparently lies in it, but also what we evocate/see in that literature/works. Your study is a beautiful and precise study, foremost a very inspired one, for which it is worth again to make the effort of precision.
Moreover I am very much delighted by one detail - that you have in your examples 'The Schroffenstein Family', which - when I had reread it half a year ago - had staggered me, because of its genial conception.
It is so hot in Rome that one can hold the pen only with effort and therefore I only say that I congratulate you on your book and wish good readers for it.

The original can be found in Sigrid Weigel's seminal study of Bachmann. Weigel used it in order to illustrate how Bachmann emphasises that what we evocate/see out/in that literature/works. [was von uns in  ihnen aufgerufen wird] - what is already in the works, but what is evocated in those works by us. Weigel reads this in the sense that this evocation is a hint that reading can be quoting, not the quoting of another text, but the quoting of the own text in another text.

One could probably go round and show a lot of those examples in her writing, in the writing of others she knew.

The hesitation is not gone away.

Todesarten means in a way, her intention, she made that clear in prefaces, is to show the crimes that takes place within legality, within everything that's allowed. Intelligent. subtle crimes. To show the mechanisms of those crimes was one intention. A panorama like Balzac novels, but - different, she said.

What evokes the hesitation, or: is not the hesitation a result of what her writing evokes?

A precise awareness for those crimes. Detailed, clear, acute.

That every reading of Bachmann would make one aware of one's participating in those crimes or suffering under them. Which is one reason for my shying away from her writing. An incapacity that is mine and not hers. The too close to home effect.

Which is maybe another reason why people don't talk so much about the content of her writing, especially the prose and rather focus on the poetry.

Bachmann always said people should be made to face the truth.

I should say only because I am not reading her anymore a lot this doesn't mean her writing doesn't mean anything to me anymore.

I leave it at that, for now.

Acknowledgement :  http://fortlaufen.blogspot.co.uk/