Introduction: A Sociopolitical Approach to Malina

MALINA, BY INGEBORG BACHMANN (1926–73), centers upon the enigma of a split personality: the female narrator (Ich), who is gradually supplanted by her male alter ego, Malina. Most interpretations of the novel have focused on the gendered aspect of this dislocation in the self, and indeed, the novel thematizes the imbalances of power as enshrined in normative binary models of gender relations. Georgina Paul, for example, reads Malina's appropriation of the narrative subject as a work of mourning for the lost “feminine” aspect within himself and takes the novel's absence of closure (i.e., the enigma of its final words, “Es war Mord” [“It was murder”]1) as an affirmation of a “feminine” plurality. Anyone studying Malina today must take account of the exponential growth in Bachmann scholarship if one-sided interpretations are to be avoided. As early as 1992, Sara Lennox and Leslie Morris asked feminist readers to abandon “wishful thinking” about Bachmann's politics, and to stop trying “to make her conform to our ideas.” More recently, Dirk Göttsche suggests that “it is time to move beyond the notion that there could be one single privileged approach or key to the meaning of Bachmann's work.” Like Kafka's, Bachmann's work is fundamentally open. But the fact that Bachmann's work resists interpretive closure does not mean that anything goes. Politicizing Bachmann may be a risky business, but to focus solely on aesthetics, without reference to the political and historical contexts in which they are embedded, is also questionable. In 1995 when Susanne Baackmann proposed a political approach to Bachmann's work, Albrecht Holschuh called for a “purely literary” reading. The tension in Bachmann scholarship between political and “apolitical” readings resembles an exchange between Ich and Ivan in the novel. Ich tells Ivan: “Gerade habe ich erfunden, wie ich die Welt doch noch verändern kann!” (M 105; “I've just invented a way to change the world after all!” Ma 64). Ivan replies scornfully: “Was? du auch? die Gesellschaft, die Verhältnisse? das muß ja heutzutage der reinste Wettbewerb sein” (M 105; “What? you too? society, relationships? these days that has got to be the biggest game around,” Ma 64).