That one guy who sticks around too long after a dinner, even though you’re dog tired: Charlotte just can’t get rid of Mara. She has to get up early tomorrow, because her husband Franz is coming home from a business trip. What does Mara want from her? Reluctantly she gives in to the flattery of the somewhat run-down young woman, she doesn’t want to be rude, well, they go dancing in a cafe for a while. But enough is enough when Mara tries to seduce her. Charlotte rejects her.
After Mara kicks a scene, smashes things and howls, and falls asleep on Charlotte’s bed, she looks around the house where Franz had sorted out all the furniture. Franz determined for her what she wanted; as with all the men she had lived with, the arrangement was governed by “an order not hers.” Franz was a sweet man, but she knew ‘that he was not created to grant her a right to her own misfortune, another loneliness’.
If only she could live with Mara, with a woman, she would finally find what she longed for: ‘the long-haired, weak creature to lean on, who always offered her shoulders when you felt desolate and exhausted or at ease. felt’. So a helper, someone who supports and admires her instead of the other way around.
Daydream of dominance
In ‘A step to Gomorrah’ from the Collected stories by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), Charlotte loses herself for a while in this lesbian daydream of domination. The story first appeared in Bachmann’s collection of short stories the thirtieth year from 1961, the book that marked her transition from poetry to prose, has now been collected along with her other stories and translated into Dutch by Paul Beers, and published in a thick volume.
I had to laugh at that expression ‘the long-haired, weak creature’. Before we dismiss Bachmann as an accomplice of the patriarchy, the passage may require some context. In most stories in the thirtieth year a male character takes center stage, always on the verge of crisis. They long for a new language and a new world, which is ontologically connected with Bachmann – an admirer of Wittgenstein: ‘No new world without a new language.’ The war is not often explicitly mentioned, but the desire to get rid of the past shows that all live with deep wounds. Fascistoid structures were never really eradicated, as Bachmann most poignantly shows in the story ‘Among killers and madmen’ about a group of men in a cafe: ‘the night a battlefield, a front line, a stage, a state of alarm, and they frolicked in that night’, ‘they tossed in memory, in many a dark place which neither of them completely relinquished, until it came to the point where their forms changed and wore uniforms again’.
Paul Beers (1935) can now call himself Bachmann’s advocate; almost everything published by the author in Dutch has been translated by him. Kudos for the precision with which he has unlocked her lyrical, difficult language, sometimes on the edge of the comprehensible! But I do not follow him when he states in the preface that Bachmann could not be ‘claimed by the radical feminist movement in literature, […] because Bachmann is too intelligent to attribute all the misfortunes that women suffer to men alone.’ Besides being a rather superficial representation of the ideas of radical feminists, I read in almost every story how suffocating Bachmann experienced the prevailing relations between man and woman. Although the post-war woman gains more and more freedom – she travels and works, has several lovers at the same time and more options in life than motherhood – the woman remains emotionally dominated by men, who ‘half virgin‘ in ‘frigid‘ in ‘a little female‘ to mention. The men suffer enough themselves, not because of that, they are on the verge of despair. But the woman is denied her own subjectivity, she has freedom only as long as she empties herself for the projection of others (men). ‘I don’t belong to any statue, thought Charlotte. That’s why I long for destruction.’ In the closing story of the collection, ‘Undine goes’, a river goddess even literally denounces the men’s world.
Male Privileges
In the thirtieth year are the most interesting perspectives for male characters. The narrator in the title story is the most ambitious: he had ‘thought all things to an end and then experienced that he was alive’. The father in ‘Everything’ also hopes for a new world, but does not seek redemption in philosophy, but in the yet to be demonstrated genius of his son Fipp, in which the toddler obviously fails. Bachmann takes you on a journey with her possessed, delirious, poetic prose and capricious formal language, in which poetry, direct speech and omniscient narrative form are freely mixed. The seriousness of the characters is compelling, but there is also something tragicomic in the crisis that follows from the realization that the world is still the same world. What would you have thought, men – that you could do things differently for once, without losing your privileges?
Also read: This writer was a frontrunner in a time when women couldn’t be funny
A year after the publication of her only (brilliant, feverish) novel Raspberry, the collection of short stories is published in 1972 Simultaneously, which is also integrally included in this collection. The differences with the thirtieth year are big. In Simultaneously only female protagonists, Viennese women, whom Bachmann used to dislike, as she described in a letter to her publishing house; in recent decades she has been too busy with ‘the controversies, the ideas, in other words the men they have’. The form structure of these stories is more conventional, the characters undergo a classic development. The tone is more light-hearted, and some characters are apparently more petit-bourgeois, such as Beatrix in ‘Problems, Troubles’, who wants nothing more than to sleep and go to the beauty salon, or Franziska in ‘The Bark’, who meekly takes care of her mother-in-law because her husband refuses. . But that judgment is too hasty, because if these women are superficial at all, it’s because they don’t get any other space in the world of men. And every woman in the collection has found a strategy to escape from it. Bachmann exchanges the fatalism of the men in her earlier work for a softer view, focused on recovery, in which the women nevertheless find some relief and acceptance within themselves.
Report on abortion
Here too the problem of language is central, only this time it is always the language of others. The interpreter Nadja in the title story, who speaks so many different languages, is unable to translate a quote from the Bible from Italian, even though she knows what it means. Elisabeth, the journalist, records the words of others, as in her award-winning “objective” report on abortion, and becomes enraged at herself for keeping so obedient journalistic distance, rather than speaking from her own lived experience.
The stories in Simultaneously are solid, the characters complex; the excellent quality is beyond dispute. Yet I missed the obsessiveness of this the thirtieth year, the individuality of the language, so brooding and daring. The Vienna girls are more practical, more focused on the outside world than inside. But where Bachmann has tamed her stylistic fire, her feminism is unmistakable here. In the final scene of the collection, Elisabeth is asked by her employer to travel to Saigon to cover the Vietnam War. Her lover is upset and wants to forbid her, he is afraid that something will happen to her. Let them send a man, he also says. But Elisabeth does not listen to that. She pushes him out of her house, a little pityingly. She decides her own fate, she is open to the world: ‘Something can happen to me, but nothing has to happen to me.’ It’s her own right to misfortune.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 21 January 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 21, 2022
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