Cassandra

It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.

The man to whom she devoted herself (‘What a disgrace!’) ‘could not bear to see anyone extended beyond the limit he had placed on them.’ ‘Why am I hated, no not I, the Other in me.’

You can guess how it is when two lines from Musil’s poem ‘Isis and Osiris’ sound between the siblings as a recognition slogan and password, and as an assurance of unconditional mutual reliability.

Among a hundred brothers him I greet

who ate my heart and I his heart did eat.

It is a different kind of logic that comes from her, who perhaps better than any woman knows the male thinking process: the If this/Then that; Because/Therefore; Not only/But also. A different way of asking questions (no longer the murderous who did what to whom). A different kind of strength, a different kind of weakness. A different friendship, a different enmity. Whichever direction you look, whichever page you open the book to, you see the cave-in of the alternatives which until now have held together and torn apart our world, as well as the theory of the beautiful and of art. A new kind of tension seems to be struggling for expression, in horror and fear and tottering consternation. There is not even the consolation that this is still capable of being given form; not in the traditional sense.

Aesthetics, to the extent that it is a system of categorization and control, and especially where it advocates certain views about the subject matter of the various genres, namely ‘reality’ (I notice this word appearing between quotation marks more and more often in my writing, but I can’t help it) – aesthetics, I say, like philosophy and science, is invented not so much to enable us to get closer to reality as for the purpose of warding it off, of protecting against it.

Do you think that Bachmann did not know how Goethe wrote novels, as well as Stendhal, Tolstoy, Fontane, Proust, and Joyce? Or do you think she was unable to foresee that a creation like the one she presented in the guise of a ‘novel’ would dumbfound all duly qualified rules and categories of aesthetics – even if they were interpreted with great latitude!? And that encountering no net, however thin, to break its fall, it would catapult straight to the ground? ‘I am Madame Bovary.’ Flaubert said that, as we know, and we have admired this remark for more than a hundred years. We also admire the tears Flaubert shed when he had to let Madame Bovary die, and the crystal-clear calculation of his wonderful novel, which he was able to write despite his tears; and we should not and will not stop admiring him. But Flaubert was not Madame Bovary; we cannot completely ignore that fact in the end, despite all our good will and what we know of the secret relationship between an author and a figure created by art. But Ingeborg Bachmann is that nameless woman in Malina, she is the woman Franza in the novel fragment The Franza Case who simply cannot get a grip on her life, cannot give it a form; who simply cannot manage to make her experience into a presentable story, cannot produce it out of herself as an artistic product.

Dear A.: I have notified you that it is hard to define the limits of the theme which my thoughts are orbiting. Nevertheless, I will not yield to the urge to talk about ‘the position of women,’ to cite observations, to quote from letters. One day, no doubt, I must do so, if only to give legitimacy to what women write about women

I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions – ‘literature’ and ‘aesthetics’ are such institutions – must have experienced the desire for selfdestruction. In her novel Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann has the woman disappear inside the wall at the end, and the man Malina, who is a part of her, serenely states the case: ‘There is no woman here.’

Let’s take the things the man Elnis says to the woman Ebba in Fleisser’s Tiefseefisch: ‘A woman who loves a man can do anything.’ ‘I am so tender inside.’ ‘My sufferings are your sufferings. We are one body and one flesh.’ ‘You shall have no will. You shall no longer be there. I want to absorb you.’ ‘You must become completely my slave, and I must become completely your slave.’ ‘I have seized on you the way a male animal corners his mate. I defend my prey. I will think about you so rigorously that it will keep you at my side, spellbound.’ ‘You will forget that you are being sacrificed.’ ‘I am a magician.’ ‘You must trust in me blindly. Naturally I cannot have someone near me who doubts.’ ‘Put an end to yourself if you feel sorry for yourself. Hang yourself, walk into the water! Then there’ll be one less woman.’ ‘I will make a human being out of you yet.’

And what does the woman say in this forlorn landscape? What can she reply to this man who is diseased in himself? She says things like this: ‘I cannot see my way in my life anymore. Am I not a human being who feels things?’

HELEN: Then was I but a wraith, and with a wraith was joined.

It was a dream, the very words declare this true.

And now – I swoon, becoming to myself a wraith.

The word ‘wraith’ = ‘idol,’ from the Greek eidolon = image. The woman is deprived of her living memory, and an image which others make of her is foisted upon her in its place: the hideous process of petrifaction, objectification, performed on living flesh.

I will quote Faust, but unfortunately only a part of the speech of Helen. Now back in Sparta, whence Paris had abducted her, restored to the hands of her husband, Menelaus, after the fall of the fortress of Troy – Helen no longer knows who she is.

You have, in rough, unseemly wrath,

Evoked the frightful forms of images unblest,

Which hem me in, with fear lest Orcus and the shades

Snatch me away, in mockery of the fields of home.

Looms this from some past life? Or am I seized and crazed?

Was all this me? Is still? And ever shall I be

The phantom scare of them that lay proud cities waste?