Reading of the month

For months, I had been carrying this book around with me. That had never happened to me before. I either give up and move on to another, or persevere and only read it years later. With Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, it was different. The book interests me; the voice interests me, even when they demand things of me that I cannot always give. It made me sleepy, irritated and fascinated; it made me want to close it and open it again.

Bachmann reminds me of a friend of mine, likewise brilliant and very dear to me. I admire her intelligence, although her intensity sometimes exhausts me. Clarice Lispector, for example, possesses a similar intensity, but her thought moves in waves, opening spaces in which to breathe. Bachmann writes in whip-cracks. Her prose is a centrifuge that sweeps us along as it grinds us down.

The narrator was the main source of my exhaustion. Her consciousness is incisive, but the leaps between opposing impulses sometimes make her seem like a fool who does not know what she wants. One scene is enough: she enters a restaurant with Malina, rejects the table and the food she usually enjoys, thinks of Ivan, wants to leave, feels guilty, decides to return and resume dinner for his sake, when even Malina no longer knows whether he wants to carry on. Shortly afterwards, she sees her own head rolling across the plate. Blood everywhere. She finds herself lost in her own street, imagines a story based on a neighbour she passes, arrives home, lies down on the floor, hears Malina order, “Kill him”, and jumps to the memory of a man she met at the Institute of Psychology who asks her how many men she has slept with. All this in four pages. This dizzying succession is almost the rule throughout the book. At times it seduced me; at others it drove me away, because I was unable or too tired to follow her. In the end, we understand why. This woman is trying to construct a stillborn “self”: a female “self”, an identity for which there has never been any room. As she observes, this “society is the greatest crime scene of all”.

Ivan represents beauty, the only beauty, as she herself says. He also represents the comfortable banality of someone who demands from another what he will never have to endure. Elfriede Jelinek writes in the afterword that Bachmann regarded most people as being like Ivan. He tells his lover that she must be happy while she tears herself apart in order to find her way back to him. And he says it while eating sausages. The violence lies in the disparity. For Ivan, happiness is a piece of advice delivered over a meal; for her, it has become an impossible task upon which depends a love for which there has never been a feminine language. Every effort to fulfil his desire brings her closer to disappearance.

Malina offers her the security that Ivan lacks. She admires him and envies his ability to dispense with justifications, promises and explanations. He always says the right thing; no one questions him; no manipulation seems able to reach him. His supposed security comes from the position he already occupies. The rules of the world speak through him, simply because he is a man. It cannot be accidental that the novel bears his name. Whenever she tries to challenge him, a ready rational answer appears, as though society itself were speaking through Malina. The narrator hesitates, contradicts herself, feels several things at once. Malina commands the language recognised as coherent.

As the book progressed, I increasingly read them as projections of her inner life. Ivan embodied unattainable desire; Malina, the reason that allowed her to survive while also making her its prisoner. Over the course of the narrative, reason becomes cannibalistic and devours the woman’s identity until it alone occupies the centre.

The second part, dominated by the father figure, pushed me to the limits of reading. The images become progressively more violent and circulate within a claustrophobic atmosphere. I reached a point at which I could barely absorb any more of the violence. Reading became a psychological massacre, followed by a profound disinterest that repeatedly sent me to sleep. The coherence of the mechanism coexists with my estrangement from it. The father figure contains a biographical dimension and expands until he becomes the superego of an entire society. The mother at times turns into the father, to the point where the narrator can no longer distinguish one from the other. She is the woman who has learnt to survive by absorbing male codes and passes them on to her daughter with a zeal capable of surpassing the man’s own. Power has become impersonal. Anyone can reproduce it, because its rules predate those who enforce them.

The ending reorganised my reading of the book. “It was murder,” the narrator says. The crime takes place within the home, inside the old and very strong walls, as she describes them, in the narrow crevices where women try to survive, subjected from the outset to rules that even tell them what they are allowed to feel. The narrator disappears into a crack in the wall, and Malina receives the trace with the same composure with which he observes the stains above the radiators. The house, the space historically and symbolically assigned to women, absorbs her and remains habitable. Instead of a room of her own, like Virginia Woolf’s, she is left with a tiny gap in the wall, a nameless fissure in which the rupture at her core is completed. Man is the norm; woman is the Other, consigned to the interstices. The accusation in the final sentence reveals that the disappearance began much earlier, when the possibility of a female “self” was excluded from history and from the official narrative. All the protagonist’s dramatisation, at times so tangled that it exhausts the reader, is a mechanism for making palpable the agony of a “self” prevented from finding form.

I have chosen Malina as my book of the month because of the experience it gave me. I wrestled with it for months. It tired me, irritated me, sent me to sleep, made me laugh and make a fool of myself in public. It compelled me to return and, in the end, to see clearly. My copy is filled with underlining and notes. Bachmann’s intelligence never left me indifferent, even when the intensity of her writing drove me away. The ending illuminated the journey without undoing the intermittent way in which I had read it. I closed the book with relief, but with a broader understanding.

Malina will stay with me for the resistance it demanded of me and for what it forced me to recognise. It had never occurred to me that women are born already condemned by language. Bachmann made it plain. As a man, I am responsible for and complicit in a system that privileges me while continuing to open cracks and push women into them. The gains made since the post-war period are not secure. The extremist movements of our time want to restore the old order and once again wall women up in the home, obedience and silence. As Bachmann writes, “It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break through, from which nothing will ever be heard again.”