Malina – Ingeborg Bachmann

It’s always hard to write about a book which you finish with a feeling that you have not understood anything. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s one and only novel Malina is not only awesome and exhilarating, but also pretty hard to make sense of. Taking as its subject the disintegration of a certain female artist’s mind, I spent most of the novel trying to determine what was real and what was not. I have now finished the novel and I am none the wiser. I have tried looking at the secondary criticism and am even less wise than before. It appears the main topic for the critics to discuss is whether half the characters even exist outside of the heroine’s head. You see what kind of fish we are dealing with here.

Malina is a weird book. It is probably the story of a woman whose attention is divided between two men, a Hungarian named Ivan and the eponymous Malina. My edition’s back cover calls it “part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study”. Just that alone ought to grab our attention – we are not dealing with a novel that fits into the standard genres we might be used to. The narrator spends the first half of the book mostly with Ivan, then she has a breakdown and spends most of the second half of the book with Malina. Or we might say, in his power. One of Bachmann’s most famous utterances is that “fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman”.

Fascism, fascism, fascism. Can we ever escape it, except by retreating cowardly into a past where it hasn’t been born yet? In Malina it lurks throughout the first act, only coming out into the open in the second. Malina is post-war German literature, but relatively subtle in its treatments of the past when compared to authors like Günter Grass. In fact, it reminded me a little bit of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters. I later discovered that Bachmann had been a kind of mentor to Bernhard. He, in turn, had given her some of his distinctly offensive praise: “I loved Bachmann a great deal. She was a very intelligent woman. A strange combination, no? Most women are stupid but bearable, possibly even agreeable; intelligent too, but rarely.”

But we must get to the novel, there’s no hiding from it. What there is, is hiding from is our narrator’s past. “I don’t want to talk, it all upsets me, in my remembering.” From the moment Malina begins our narrator is three things – creative, intelligent, and mentally unwell. Unlike with Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, which Malina has plenty in common with, here we don’t even start with a narrator we can trust. The opening section gives us “the cast” and descriptions of the narrator, Malina, and Ivan. But already we get a nudge that identity is a bit more complicated (a mess) than what we can easily write down. In the case of our narrator, “Official Austrian I.D. Eyes—br., Hair—blond; born in Klagenfurt”, is really not enough for us to go on.  We then hear that “the experts” have deemed her “still functional”, which the rest of our novel will test our credulity of.

And so, and so. The first section of the novel is entitled “Happy with Ivan”, which I believe to be a joke. For our narrator, Ivan appears a kind of saviour: “Against the decay and order, against life and against death, against accident, constant threats from the radio, the newspaper headlines all spreading the plague, against perfidy seeping down from upstairs or up from downstairs,”, she has Ivan. Ivan “is beginning to cure me”. But does Ivan care about our narrator? “How sad I am, and why doesn’t Ivan do anything about it?” Probably not. We are treated over the course of the novel to examples of “sentences”, shared between the two characters, as if they are reading off limited scripts. But our narrator notes that “we don’t have a single sentence about feelings.”

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan.

The narrator’s mood swings between joy and terrible sadness, from paragraphed section to paragraphed section. At one point she gets excited about “infecting” the world with positive feelings – it always comes back to disease – but soon she is depressed again. Such mood swings do not make for fun reading. Nor does the disorientation that comes from these and other abrupt changes. The first time the narrator meets Ivan’s two young children, she is cold to them and they to her. The second time we hear that they meet, the situation is much changed, and they are more talkative. What are we missing? We ask in vain for some signposting, some sense even of time. It is not forthcoming.   

Malina is made up of short sections, often only a page or two long. Dialogue is hard to differentiate. Sometimes we get phone calls, which are jumbled up and with the ends of sentences missing. Our narrator spends a lot of time waiting for Ivan, and less time with him. In the first section, we have a fairy tale, we have snippets of stories or else reworkings of them, we have letters written and unwritten, we have an interview. All of this is inventive, and every new approach throws new light on the problem we are facing in Malina, of making sense of things and working out what’s what.

After a trip out of Vienna to see friends the narrator collapses, and the first section ends. Malina’s second part is one of the most horrific sequences I have ever read. In it, our narrator falls into her own mind, and we with her. Where the first part of the book kept her past hidden, with only the odd veiled references (she was put up against a wall and almost shot as a child), the second part introduces “my father”. A family, the thing we had missed before. But this is not her real family, or at least not necessarily so. The second part is a nightmarish hellscape of torture scenes and mental anguish, interspersed with dialogue (now clearly signposted, as in a play), between the narrator and Malina. The closest thing I imagine it compares to is being waterboarded. We go under the water and feel like we are drowning, and then our head is dragged out again for a brief gasp of air, only for the cycle to repeat.

Gas chambers, barbed wire, Siberian prison camps, incest, murder, child rape. I, not one for squeamishness, thought that this is one of the few books that could have done with a content warning. The narrator possibly has a real sister, Eleonore. She has possibly betrayed her father. She has possibly been raped by her father. She dies repeatedly, horribly. In the nightmares a constant feeling is one of exposure – she is filmed without her consent, or forced to stand on stage, or forced to strip naked. Her powerlessness is the overwhelming impression. At the same time, her powerlessness is also reflected in Malina’s growing influence over her “waking” life. These dialogue sections, which feel just as unhelpful as the dream sequences (Malina: What happened to her? Me: She died in a foreign land”), convey a transferring of agency. “Leave it to me”, Malina says. And what he means is – control over her whole life.

In the third section, we might think that things are back to normal. At least the dream sequences have ended. But my initial impression of the narrator, who says of herself that she’s always in a “state of disintegration or recomposition”, is that she has been lobotomised. Something is missing. Even less than before do we have a grasp on what time it is. She is interested in mailmen (as a concept). Her relationship with Ivan begins to crumble, and the snatches of phone conversations become still less informative. The narrator notices that signs of Ivan’s presence in her life are also disappearing, such as the pack of cigarettes he would leave on the table. Everything is falling apart; only Malina remains.

In “the theatre of my thoughts”, which may or may not be the outside world, the narrator tries to live. At a restaurant with Malina, she is decapitated. Malina goes from a slightly concerning controlling presence to an outright evil one when he begins urging the narrator to murder Ivan. “Kill him! Kill him!” But is this real? (“But am I really saying something?”). It is impossible to say. As the narrator’s mind continues its final losses of everything that allowed it to make sense of things, we are treated to no additional clarity.

And yet, the lack of clarity is itself a reality. If we say that the narrator simply went mad, then where does that leave Malina, who early on we learn “was destined to be my doom?” Madness can be aided and abetted by dark agents, and perhaps Malina’s suggestion that our narrator murders Ivan is not a figment of her imagination, but in fact him pushing her further and further into passivity and his control. All through the novel, our narrator is a passive being. She is desperate to control Ivan, but she has no power over him. Her dream sequences, like Kafka’s, show her being submissive to an entirely dominant father. The final sections have Malina be ascendent. Violence is a thread running through the novel. Whether it is the slap given to her as a schoolgirl by a boy as a prank, her father’s dream violence, to Malina’s real violence, our narrator is the victim of physical force.

Malina might be read as an attempt, a doomed one, to break out of this domination by others. And it is an attempt made using language. The fairy tale we are treated to early on in Malina is one of woman’s emancipation. Our narrator, who is an author like Bachmann, also reads in a way that leads her to a kind of freedom, or hope of it. She twice quotes Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “He who has a Why to live for will bear almost any How”. The constructed-ness of Malina itself is a kind of scattergun attempt at finding a way of self-expression that works. We have letters, we have telephone calls, we have dialogues.

But with each of these, we have difficulties. The phone calls don’t go anywhere. The letters, whose recipients (yet again) may not actually exist, are not posted. Perhaps most intriguing is an interview with a journalist, where the narrator begins to express her thoughts on language.

“I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it, all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt”.

This is an important statement. Germanists will be thinking about Arendt and Adorno and Celan and all the other thinkers and artists who struggled with what to do with German after the Second World War and who made similar pronouncements. And yet, “(signs of exhaustion in Herr Mühlbauer. Signs of my own exhaustion.)”. There is no engagement, the man shuts her down. The truth, which is a victim’s and a woman’s truth, has no place here. As is the case elsewhere in the novel, our narrator (ironically, good at writing), cannot express herself externally because the men do not allow her to.

Austria during the sixties was a bit of a mess with regards to its Nazi past. Bernhard’s Woodcutters deals with it obliquely, and Elfriede Jelinek’s horrid (but also impressive) Wonderful, Wonderful Times does so a little more directly. The interview is one example of an unwillingness to think about the past among certain members of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Another example comes at the end of the first part where the narrator goes on holiday to the Tyrol with some friends, where we have some Bernhard-esque social satire (albeit less funny). Here we have no “discussions,” “talking,” or “get-togethers,” but conversation, a dying species of weightless speaking at cross purposes, which permits proper digestion and maintains the good spirits of all.” Language itself, as in a Chekhov story, is manipulated by the controllers of discourse into being a tool for preventing discourse, leaving our narrator poised for her breakdown.

Malina is one of those novels that rewards reading carefully. It also frustrates, with its lack of clarity. Does Ivan exist, does Malina exist, or are they merely alter egos, facets of the narrator’s imagination let loose upon the world? We have to wean ourselves off the plot to enjoy the book. Instead, carried by Bachmann’s command of language, we need to focus on the ideas here instead. Why is it that our narrator cannot speak? Why are her relationships with the outside world always characterised by domination and submission?

Once we start asking these questions, the novel provides plenty of answers. It is the tortured and at times torturous account of the breakdown of a psyche, but that breakdown is not without its external factors. To go away thinking that this is just another novel about a psychotic woman is offensive and misses the point. This woman is trapped within a world that destroys her ability to speak and define herself and deprives her of any kind of authentic expression except her writing. Given all of that, how could she do anything other than go insane?

I really enjoyed Malina’s intelligence and inventiveness. It is not an easy book to read, and I can’t pretend I liked getting to the end not knowing what I had just read. But at the same time, here is a book that still has mysteries to unravel, and that demands I one day return to it. That can only be a good thing.

On Reflection

Here’s a question for you. When you reflect, where do you put the mirror?

This seems a silly question, and that’s because it is. But there’s also something here too, because having thought about reflection recently it occurred to me that reflecting on reflection itself isn’t without its value. And luckily, unlike when we put mirrors against mirrors in real life, creating a headache-inducing cascade of images (which I recently experienced at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern), we can stop our reflecting on reflection after only one reflective layer. But still, with its own repetitions, this paragraph shows how dangerous and disorientating such mirroring can be if we are not careful about it.

So. When we see our reflections in real life, we stand in front of a mirror. Alternatively, we turn on the camera on our phones, but I am too old for that already. Facing the mirror, our goal is to examine our physical appearance. Up close, in the mirror of a washroom or via our phone’s selfie camera, we get to investigate the blemishes, the little blotches and patches of colour, the wrinkles and the hairs. From further away, we check out our figure, or how the clothes sit on us. We might be taking advantage of a mirror on the inside of a cupboard to help us select an outfit.

In both cases, from close up or far away, we are seeing ourselves as an object in others’ eyes. We want to look good because when we look good we feel confident and happier. Even if we turn our backs on beauty products and fancy clothes, we certainly don’t want to look bad. This isn’t complicated. We use mirrors and physical reflection – the fake image of ourselves – to improve the real image of ourselves. Mirrors make the world more beautiful, if a little more narcissistic too.

This isn’t too interesting. What is, is when we reflect in a different way. Now, when you try and answer the ridiculous question I set at the beginning of the post, what did you come up with? I’ll tell you what I got. You place the mirrors right in front of your eyes. You look immediately back into yourself, without worrying about such silliness as what you are wearing. Here you are trying to descry the state of your soul.

Reflection in this sense is a matter of personal diagnostics. We are trying to work out our own selves. It’s connected to things like mindfulness. When we reflect, we try to understand our feelings and why we feel that way. We are trying to follow the wires and circuitry of our inner being, such that we might, with any luck, prevent ourselves from falling into bad moral and spiritual habits.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Father Zosima, in the Brothers Karamazov.

Reflection is designed to stop just this. By understanding ourselves, we can uproot the lies that have gained purchase within us and prevent hypocrisy, that most fatal and inevitable of human weaknesses. The more we understand ourselves, the less likely it is that we will be able to deceive ourselves. If we spend enough time immersed in our hearts, we deprive the devils that live the chance of twisting them in unhealthy directions.

Yet is that all actually right? The first thing that you will have noticed when I suggested putting the mirrors right in front of one’s eyes is that this position completely obscures the light. Now, the soul is a murky place, but even so, doesn’t it need some light for us to actually see? What a hindrance the darkness is. Though we might be attempting to remove the rot from the floorboards, it is precisely the dark and the wet that the dark contains, which makes the rot exist, to begin with. We go into ourselves, find nothing, come out again and pat ourselves on the back, missing the obvious.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending deals with reflection as one of its central concerns. First, the narrator takes us on an introspective tour of his life, reaching one conclusion. Then, new information comes to light, and he does the same tour all over again, reaching a completely different conclusion. The process of reflection is the same both times. But what we see is that reflection of a certain sort can be an act of self-deceit. To continue the silly metaphor, how are things supposed to enter us if we have mirrors covering our eyes? Don’t we all cry out with despair every time Stevens fails to notice his life and his opportunities are slipping away in The Remains of the Day?

Introspection is a fairly useless thing when you put the mirrors in front of your eyes. Useless at its best, but often downright hostile. Turning our gaze inwards prevents us from noticing others or the world outside. These modern novels that are so deep within someone else’s head always bother me because they portray quite an unhealthy way of going through life. I confess I am probably more self-centred than most, but even I am more aware of the world and its inhabitants than the likes of Else in Schindler’s Fraulein Else. Of course, Else is not what we would call mentally O.K. But even the narrator in The Sense of an Ending is pretty bad at this. The deeper we go into ourselves, the less we seem to get out, and the less we act as members of the external community as well.

Who has not, on this score, found how utterly useless reflection is when dealing with depression? Thinking, reflecting, and ruminating, rather than actually using those CBT techniques to dismember one’s bad feelings, that is. When we reflect while depressed then it really is like we are in a hall of mirrors, because we only get dizzier and dizzier, and further and further away from what is real and meaningful.

One solution to ruminating depression that often works wonders is talking to others. Unburdening one’s soul is removing the feelings from the damp cellar I described earlier and shoving them into the light, where they are often quickly disinfected. Is there not a way of placing the mirrors that also does this?

Indeed, readers, I have determined that there is.

The optimal location for the mirrors when we are reflecting is right in front of us, just like when we are getting changed, but the mirrors in this case are also rather wide, so that we can see the world behind us instead of just ourselves and what we are wearing. When we reflect, we need to be able to place ourselves as a unit within a community. Reflecting when we only get deeper and deeper into ourselves fails to let us see how we fit into the narratives of others’ lives. Rather than binding us to others, reflecting in that sense divides us. Not so here, where we are obliged to see the connections between us all because we have to see others wandering about in the background, even as we focus on ourselves.

Does this mirror placement prevent hypocrisy or lies? Certainly not, but it also lets us see our actions as they are played out in the world, rather than only in our distorted memories. It becomes harder to hide from ourselves. Coupled with seeing ourselves as part of a network of human beings this mirror placement might make us a more responsible being too.

I was reflecting on reflection because I have been thinking about some of Adorno’s comments on fascism, namely how among those who fall victim to it their common characteristic is their inability to reflect. Reflection is obviously hugely important, but so is reflecting the right way, not just going into yourself and expecting that in itself to be enough to sort things out. Adorno, of course, understood that fact when he noted that working through the past is a process we must do every day, rather than simply do in one go and then move on. Here, however, I just wanted to have some fun thinking about what reflection might look like, and how we might want to visualise it.

We might go further and think about a form of reflection in which we ourselves are invisible (the mirror is placed alongside our eyes and takes in images from without). This we could equate to certain Buddhist teachings or else Schopenhauer’s own renunciation-orientated ideals of life. And there are things like music and literature and great art in general, all of which can also lead us to reflect in a way that removes our own egos from the equation.

But those are topics for another day.

Shadows, Objects, and Life Arguments – Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows

In many ways, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows can be read as a companion to Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea, which I read this summer. Where Okakura’s book is ostensibly about tea, Tanizaki’s essay is ostensibly about aesthetics – but actually, both are really about the differences between certain ideas of Western and Japanese culture, and more broadly about separate ways of life. In Praise of Shadows is a flowing work, one as hard to pin down as the shadows themselves. It ranges in subject from traditional Japanese theatre to Japanese architecture, from food to lacquerware. Yet certain repeated ideas make for an argument, at least for an implicit one, on a few key topics – the passage of time, the development of Japanese culture, and finally about objects themselves.

Time, Pessimism, Development

In Praise of Shadows is steeped in pessimism – Tanizaki is writing as a culture he loves is ebbing away – but he is not writing as a force of reaction. One tension of the essay lies between his desire to preserve the past and his unwillingness to completely disregard the present. Early on he describes the building of a house and the ingenuity one might employ to maintain the traditional shapes and forms of old Japanese homes while incorporating wires and electric lights, only to remark that an ideal of simplicity now can be a lightbulb hanging alone and unadorned – what previously might seem sacrilegious to a world used to candles.

Tanizaki is no fan of much that the West had brought Japan, however. He directs particular ire towards the electric fan. But still he notes that our opposition must be limited by each specific context. We can leave such things out of our own homes, but if we have a business operating in the summer heat we must also defer to the customer. This idea that we have to adapt and make compromises to the reality we face is a key idea within the text. He does not dismiss Western medicine or science or inventions out of hand, but rather notes that they bear with themselves an adaption to Western modes, and not his own in Japan. Hospitals, for example, need not be built according to Western models, but instead could use more bamboo and wood. The problem with all of this is that perhaps things would have been better if Japan had been left to itself. “We would have gone only in a direction that suited us.” Like Herder in the German lands, Tanizaki views each nation or grouping as having their own distinguishing characteristics which better internally developed than copied from others.

Western things bring western thinking. The fountain pen brings with it a different way of writing, and an implicit exhortation to copy Western literary modes. At times Tanizaki seems to go too far in these arguments, such as when he finds even paper bearing distinctive signs of whether it was produced in the West or Japan. Now, fountain pen users will know that Japan’s paper is extraordinary, such as that produced by Tomoe River. Indeed, Japan’s fountain pens and inks are also rather amazing – those of Sailor and Pilot are particularly lovely, and some of their pens have the most brilliant lacquer work designs. This is adaption in practice, taking a thing of the West and transforming it using Japan’s particular characteristics and modes. I imagine Tanizaki might have approved.

Still, In Praise of Shadows is a work where we are witnesses to something slipping away. Ways of eating, theatre shows, even the role of women, are being changed in ways that leave tradition in the dust. The essay ends with a hope that “perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them”. The mansion he refers to us that of artistic and literary culture, the area where he hopes resistance to Western influences may be most effectively pursued. It now makes sense to turn to that sphere and see what the fuss with shadows is all about.

Shadows, Objects and Life Arguments

Tanizaki defines Japanese culture as being one of shadows; the West as one of light. This seems slightly ridiculous at first glance, but worth taking seriously as out of this dichotomy Tanizaki draws all of his arguments about ways of living in the world. And is he not right, anyway? Our rooms are very bright – we certainly do not like the dark. We prefer spotless, shining cleanliness to the dirt that accumulates with age and contains within itself something akin to a history. (Think only about the hordes of servants who once went around polishing the silverware.) We are served food on white bowls, white plates; our bathrooms are tiled. We purchase great cleanliness with a great emptiness of character in many of our surroundings.

For light is a thing that reveals, whereas dark and shadows do more than that – they contain the space where the imagination plays. Puppets, Tanizaki notes, seem more real in the dark. They movements gain a certain magic. And puppets are not alone. Food can be supremely enhanced by the atmosphere of its serving. A dark lacquer bowl works better than a plain white bowl because in that darkness a soup’s contents are not on display as at market. Instead, there is an air of mystery – a taste of mystery, in fact:

“Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, or overtones but partly suggested.”

This imagination from darkness is connected very much to the arguments about simplicity that Okakura makes in The Book of Tea. There, one of the most memorable chapters concerned the decoration of tea rooms. To us Westerners, a room with only a single painting would strike us as sparsely adorned. But for Okakura, a single object focuses our attention on a single thing. It creates a much purer and more effective atmosphere – and thus a more pleasant tea-drinking experience. If adorning a room sparsely creates a stronger effect then why would we do anything otherwise? (The argument does not suggest that lush decoration is wrong, but rather than clutter is wrong – harmony is the lesson to be learned from this, and harmony is easier to achieve using simplicity).

But there is something else at play here, lying behind this argument about simplicity, something connected to Tanizaki’s pessimism earlier. What makes us value light, and the Japanese dark? In Tanizaki’s view, it’s a kind of stoicism:

“We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light – his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

We may disagree with this characterisation of the West – and people familiar with Japan may well disagree with Tanizaki’s view of his own culture. But once again we encounter an argument for making the most not just of fewer things, but also of present things instead of what we lack. Just as he regrets that Japan’s development has been so influenced by the West instead of Japan developing independently, we can see a corresponding idea in why we might choose to value shadows:

“The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.”

If we find beauty and value in what we have, we will have no need of anything more.

Conclusion

Tanizaki’s characterisation of the West as a collective block is at times tedious, but unlike Okakura he was writing for a domestic audience in his own language and we must forgive him that. What he says is interesting and worth reading because although we may have heard the ideas before – simplicity good, unthinking acceptance of foreign technology and influence is not always a great plan – by focusing on shadows he adds further depth to these arguments and makes them still more attractive to us. We may already know that objects can be better appreciated in isolation, but in In Praise of Shadows we learn about how shadows work to help objects make that better impression. In our quest to make a beautiful world, after reading this short essay we have another tool in our toolbox for making that happen.