Wo soll Ich werden: the transgeneric performance of Angst in Bachmann’s Malina

Abstract for Wo soll ich werden?: the trans-generic performance of angst in Bachmann’s
Malina



It is with caution that I approach Malina, even in the context of the poetics of contestation and its canalisation of affect. According to Dirk Göttsche’s 2011 review article, studies of this extraordinary work, the only volume of Bachmann’s Todesarten Projekt / Death Styles to be published in her lifetime, tended to stutter in repetition since the grand feminist critical efflorescence of the 1980s.1 But it is the poetics of formal fragmentation in relation to testimonial deictics that I wish to address here. I am certainly not the first to argue that in Malina it is the irruption of other texts uneasily hosted by the Ich-Figur that performs the anxiety of violent reminiscence and also effects its cover-up.

I would like to investigate the strategic adoption of the Ich-Figur as the site of terror through which the un-writing of the female2 subject is performed (“verschrieben”). In doing so, I hope to account for the particular kind of dread with which the ending resonates, with the realisation,
that all along, it is the imbrication of Malina’s “subjectivity” within Ich’s own that annihilates her, that makes impossible a positive legacy in her own name; that it is through the very navigation of fault-lines, or seams of trans-generic contiguity, that the anxiogenic power of the text can be explained.