To speak of Ingeborg Bachmann’s birth might seem difficult when it is death that so thickly suffuses her work. There is the matter of her literal death: a poet’s death might be a capstone to their life, a Parthian gesture that at life’s furthest reach hews its disarray into retroactive form. The horrific circumstances of Bachmann’s death are, however, incidental to her writing, and so no more need be said of them. Consider, for instance, the death of the unnamed narrator of Malina, her last completed novel. It is one of the strangest deaths in German literature, less an extinction than a strange resignation into nonbeing as she retreats into a crack in the wall. “It was a murder,” we are told in no uncertain terms by the novel’s final words. Yet this is a death that conflates her murder with a resigned suicide, a principled and deliberative abstention from the arrayed figures of oppression that have wracked and now cornered her over 200 preceding pages: the war’s aftermath, the depredations of technological society, and above all, men: Ivan, her inscrutable, capricious lover; and the aloof Malina, whose glowering figure looms as she slithers into blackness. It was a murder: a death ambiguous in many ways, but the culprits are, in any case, definitively arraigned before us.
Malina was intended to be the first in a trilogy of novels called Todesarten (Death Styles). Bachmann failed to complete it before her own untimely death. Death, unlike birth, has a style. This is the thrust of the tired truism that life is nothing but a preparation for death: if the former is defined by its narrowing frontiers of possibility, the latter is the horizon where these frontiers are whittled into a circle, possibility extinguished in the necessity of form. Death is the condition of life as writable, as biography. Death entails a style because it is legible to us negatively, presaged in life as an ineluctable fade-to-black. We confront it less as a finality than as an encroaching pall cast upon us in the future perfect. Bachmann writes, “Time’s arrow rests easily in the sun’s drawn bow […] Death is also the moment’s conspirator,/and you, towards whom it streaks, the target.” That is, death shirks time’s arrow. Our single certain prospect, it is the horizon that frames and so formalizes our precipitous hurtle toward it: paradoxically, it insinuates itself in our durational present because it comes to us from the future.
Birth, on the other hand, bears no such legibility. Despite dwelling in our past, it is a punctum, an infinitesimal yet infinite phase shift between darkness and light. Fiat luxis, properly speaking, miraculous: an unforeseeable irruption in Being without efficient cause. To speak of birth is to interrogate the possibility of poiesis—of creation, of shepherding something into Being—in the fullest sense. And so birth does not have a style because it is style’s zero-degree, a bald facticity from which the stuff of life, style’s substance, proceeds. Style implicates ethics: To sculpt the boundaries of the self is necessarily to negotiate our boundaries with others. Birth, therefore, is the inscrutable precondition of all ethics. It is the elusive deficit for which the entire drama of ethics is the recompense: original sin, the blunt knowledge that existence is somehow a curse.
It is, however, the sign of death that overwhelmingly presides over Bachmann’s critical reception. Born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1926, Bachmann came to epitomize a generation of Germanophone artists whose youth was stricken by the war, their subsequent vocations invariably overcast by questions of guilt, remembrance, national reckoning, and historical meaning(-lessness). It is in this regard that darkness and silence, the two most prevalent motifs of her work, are typically read. As figures of absence, the eclipse of sight and sound, they invite allegorical readings: They are both empty vessels into which we may not only project the pathos of what has been blinded or silenced, but also identify the culprits, those figures of affliction that blind or silence—personal trauma, social anomie, patriarchal oppression, historical atrocity, national guilt, political disenchantment, foreclosed utopias, or divine flight. These leitmotifs of absence are mobilized across multiple registers, ventriloquizing the mute speech of darkness and silence with a polyphonic metaphor of iniquity at once biographical, social, historical, and theological. Death, the thinking of ends, therefore, premises the rich polysemy, and so the ranging ambit, of her work.
Death in Bachmann is figured primarily as allegory. The method is essentially Baudelaire’s, a modernism whereby the tropes of Romanticism are recuperated by contemporary concerns, the latter allegorized into the former’s “forêts de symboles… les parfums, les couleurs et les sons.” Thus Bachmann’s affinity with the Romantics, both in form—her pointed adherence to traditional forms, regularized prosody and rhyme schemes—and topoi—a great number of her poems describe natural landscapes, but uncannily invoke the contemporary through the imagery populating these vistas. Among these are commonly the figures of Grimm-esque fairy-tale (trolls, sprites, guileless children, and animate flora) that take on more insidious connotations in their evocation of a pagan, chthonic strain in German culture. More unmistakable are the features of the camps that constantly reappear: railways, barbed wire, smoke, and guard towers. Bachmann’s work inhabits a kind of metaphysical pastoral, too surreal to be of this world, and yet populated by the most surreal and atrocious figures of our world by a kind of dream-logic. Her speakers traipse the primal scenes of poetry—departing ships, moonlit forests, rural quiet—smothered by an intractable dusk. Her constant genitives, the starkness and considered sequencing of her imagery, their clear and recurring connotations… all seem to insist on some meaning stalking the nether-reaches of its chiaroscuro, so that even if ultimately obscure, we are made to feel some meaning inhering in the darkness, death’s innuendo. And so death is Bachmann’s Stimmung, the sable mist hanging over her entire work. It is one of her poetry’s canniest feats that death persists so palpably without ever lapsing into gothic pastiche, melodrama, or cynical banality. It presides with an astonishing frankness, implacably there.
The darkness from which we proceed is at least as inscrutable as that to which we return: if death’s absence comes to us as the ungraspable thereness of an infinitely postponed future, birth’s absence is that of a bygone hereness as inconceivable as it is necessary. Birth, therefore, carries a different mode of legibility in the poem than death. The logic of this deathly, allegorical reading is that of the emblem. Bachmann’s oneiric landscapes, ravaged by unspecified wars, atrocities just out-of-frame, and small moments of dazed beauty, insinuate her historical environs: their curdling abominations and meager reprieves. Nature thus becomes a historical metaphor in Bachmann; its primary vehicle—darkness and silence—and ubiquitous tenor—death—conjugate in a circuit that we decipher as myth: myth being nothing less than naturalized history.
To mythologize death obviously carries a deep political ambivalence, perhaps for no one more than a Germanophone poet of the midtwentieth century. It has been well noted that what the Romantic Todessehnsucht, the pathos-laden longing for death, was recuperated and transmogrified by the Fascist aesthetic project into a full-blown suicidal fetish, purification perversely consummated in a myth of total destruction. Without drawing a causal link, we can at least note how this death-myth is a central trope of the poets of the generation preceding Bachmann, who were favored by or sympathetic to Fascism—Stefan George, Gottfried Benn, D’Annunzio—all of whom we must still read with a certain ambivalence. While Bachmann indulges this trope, what distinguishes her is that what was their entire purview is only one moving part of her poetics, an element within a larger critical apparatus.
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But that Bachmann is a poet of death, its mythologization, is a correct but only partial reading. Her real ingenuity, the tectonic drama of her work, is that the movement of death, legible to us as myth, is remanded by a counter-tidal reading of birth. If myth is our name for the mirage of identity cast when history is seamlessly superposed upon nature, birth is one name for the short-circuit of that mutual metaphor. Birth insists on nature and history’s non-coincidence, an indelible friction in the allegorical scheme—always foiling any simplistic reading where railway tracks are a straightforward symbol of Auschwitz, for instance, or where an eagle or smoke can be linearly and consistently mapped onto historical referents (the Führer or six million dead, respectively). Birth insists upon something of history otherwise elided in the image of nature. It is the steward of novelty, of history as the preserve of contingency, and so of a freedom otherwise occluded in the plane of natural necessity.
This counter-sway of nature and history is best metaphorized as a contention over the shape of time. Nature purports time as cyclical. Bent back upon itself, it mars its termini, birth and death, into indistinction, banalizing them as stations of an insipid, eternal drama of regeneration. In Bachmann’s lexicon, this is most often figured in the circadian rhythms of sleep or the cyclicity of the seasons: “Renew the summer,/renew the cycle,/birth, blood, filth, and scum,/death […].” Moreover, she displays an inveterate skepticism toward the two major modes by which Western culture ritualizes this geometry: soteriology and the carnivalesque. Theology is the endeavor to resuture the circle, history culminating in a comedy of rebirth. Images of redemption abound in Bachmann, but they are always mustered with ambivalence: often as pleas for it that are never explicitly met, or else ironically. Occasionally, her aversion is more overt: “Our godhead,/history, has ordered for us a grave/from which there is no resurrection.”
Indeed, a particular suspicion is reserved for resurrection. For a poet so meticulously attuned to the reality of physical suffering, Bachmann treats the prospect of bodily repair with doubt, and is certainly opposed to the idea that spiritual grace could furnish any adequate recompense for it:
On Good Friday a hand hangs on display
in the firmament, two fingers missing,
and it cannot swear that all of it,
all of it didn’t happen, and nothing
ever will. […]
History is irreversibly written as a laceration upon the body; the soul’s acquittal is a moot eventuality beyond the poem’s ken.
The carnivalesque, meanwhile, dons an especially insidious motley. Scenes of pagan-esque festivity are scattered across her work: “And yet the feast must come!… Make way for our pleas, make way for the worshipers,/make way for joy music and joy!” Here, Saturnalia’s lure, the glee of upended hierarchies, is applied also to time: ends are twisted back into beginnings, and so perpetuity projects a path along this Möbius strip; the poem continues: “Our sparks crossed the borders… the procession withdraws and yields/time to the prehistoric world.” And yet revelry bleeds easily into psychosis. One such festival that begins with “the city fragrant with spice!/The scent of fruits [that] must drift through the streets” swiftly devolves into horror as this libidinal fervor is usurped for ulterior ends:
Renew the summer,
renew the cycle,
birth, blood, filth, and scum
death—sink into the welts,
[…] immerse them in danger,
the anger of the lava god,
grant smoke to angels
and the fire’s cursed aura!
Renewal ritualized by offerings to chthonic gods; blood that is yoked to soil as its nourishment, this bond the shibboleth of indigeneity; smoke that in Bachmann invariably carries one specific undertone… the connotations here could hardly be less subtle.
Against this, history sabotages the closure of that circle. It is a centrifugal force ever prying its junction with nature askance. It opens out the trajectory from origin to ends into an expanded, plastic field—if not to necessarily strongarm it into a rectilinear straitjacket of Progress, then at least to recommend that time bears multiple geometries. To acknowledge time to be malleable is to admit that men make it… and to admit that we are historical animals is to assume agency, and so the premise of any ethics. If origin and end, birth and death, are non-iterative, then they are singularized as events properly speaking: that birth always heralds what is nonpareil, commending us inexorably to its care; that death is without repeal and so indentures us to an interminable working-through, the labor of commemoration. CONTRA NATURAM: History is what denaturalizes; it proselytizes the nonfungibility of everything that exists and thus compels the moral law within us. In their partisanship of the disjunction of nature and history—the refusal to conventionalize iniquity; the assertion that it could always be otherwise—it is the mandate of certain modern genres of critique (dialectical materialism and modern poetry salient among these) to uphold the prerogatives of the historical, to ratify its autonomy and so our concomitant duties by tirelessly announcing its gap with the “natural,” that is to say its dissent from a given state of affairs. To think the origin is to apprehend inconsistency in an established order: “You wake in darkness, note everything is the same,/aware there still exists an unknown exit.”
For the poem, the simplest mechanism of this announcement is blunt assertion. It may make explicit political or conceptual claims: Didacticism is its most straightforward mode of intervention. Bachmann, however, does not so much make partisan claims as she encompasses the entire terrain of conflict. Her poetic vision is dialectical and subsumes an astonishing ambit insofar as it dramatizes this tidal sway between nature and history, at once performing the insidious temptations of myth just as it critically rejects history’s coincidence with it. To the romance of ends, it counterposes the unprecedented strangeness of origins. If, then, we read death in Bachmann primarily as symbol, it crucially remains for us to clarify the legibility of birth: how does the poem trace its provenance from its own lacunae, augur in blackness the question of its origin?
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Appropriately, the poems that open Bachmann’s two published collections, Borrowed Time and Invocation of the Great Bear, stage this driving tension of her work. Both evoke the great poetic topos of setting out to sea, a field so pregnant because it enacts a leave-taking that is at once a commencement: between the land left behind and the prospect of the sea’s yawning horizon, the speaker inhabits a richly liminal semantic field, a zone of indetermination where the ebb and overlap of origins and ends may be negotiated. Both “Journey Out” and “The Game Is Over,” however, evince less the enthusiasm of departure than an anxiety marring any fantasy of a clean break. The latter’s speaker falters beneath the inexorable claims of what is left behind: “My dearest brother, the weight’s too much for our craft/and we will sink and die.” Bluntly, she concludes: “The house is always haunted, say Father and Mother, when we exchange breaths at night.” Even upon the widest expanse, she is still weighed down by the private oppressions of the family romance. “Journey Out,” meanwhile, troubles the notion that the adventure of departure yields any real novelty, the sudden optimism of its last stanza deflated by the bathos of its last line:
[…] Best in the morning
to awaken clear to the first light,
to rise up beneath the immovable sky,
to ignore the impassable water
and to lift the ship over the waves
towards the forever recurring shore of the sun.
A later poem, “Dead Harbor,” radicalizes this sense of the sea as a site not of the new but of an ailing monotony:
Not one land, not one remains untrodden!
The seaman’s tattered nets float in place
Of those explorers, laughing and wanton,
Who fell into a watery dead embrace.
This is a geography of disenchantment. All is already painfully known in a world pornographically clarified by the Enlightenment (“In an arrogant age/one must rush from one light/into another, from one land/into another”), a world surrendered to technological dissection where “light trickles from the gridwork/of new flight paths, which on the air are laid.”
And so the darknesses plumbed by Bachmann are also a respite from light’s tyranny. In “Departure from England,” the poem immediately following “Journey Out” in Borrowed Time, the destination and point of departure inhabit a blind spot: “I had barely stepped upon your land/silent country, barely disturbed a stone […] that I had already left you/the moment I set anchor.” The ligature of end and beginning, that point of rebound underwriting time regained, is elided: “Everything remained unspoken […] Was I ever here? […] I have never stepped on its land.” Bachmann punctuates the sleight whereby ends are otherwise seamlessly alchemized into origins. It is a critical intervention against the bleared continuity affirmed by a culture that cannot think birth except as return, and so death as vindication of the expendable life that was its preamble.
And so origins only avail themselves to us as indeterminate syncope. If it is not to be muddied into indistinction with death, neither is it to be brandished in the evaporating light of her poems’ landscapes. The origin may only suffer such evidence as a defilement. To broach it requires a certain tact, as advocated by the eponymous speaker of “A Monologue of Prince Myshkin,” the long masque that concludes Borrowed Time:
[…] The breath
that clings to my flesh, keeping it earthbound
is the breath that I will give back,
as evidence that my mouth didn’t ask about my life
and the terms by which
we were witnesses to the Creation.
“Settlement,” the poem that opens the second section of Invocation, might seem to imply an about-face from this attitude, its last stanza exhorting with strident optimism the poet’s prerogative to proclaim origins:
Wanting to fill this land
completely with music,
I blew the horn,
resolved in the rising wind
to live among the swaying grasses
of every true origin!
…until we recall that she initially arrived on this land “smelling the scars in the meadows… [where] Love no longer grazed.” And so in sounding this horn, reminiscent of the shofar that inaugurates each new year, an ambiguity persists as to whether this is an invocation to rejuvenate this land or simply a fantasy, blithely ignorant of the unspecified horror that has wracked it. Recall here, too, that the shofar’s blare is also an entreaty to repentance. And in any case, we are not informed of the consequence for the land, since the poem simply ends.
This ambivalence is far more pointed later in the collection in “The Native Land.” This land of origin is now not merely ravaged but actively hostile, the speaker seeking shade beneath “a skeleton tree… [where] no dream fell down… no bird/renews its song in spring waters.” She is bitten by a viper, at which point she closes her eyes and sucks the poison from her flesh “drink[ing] of myself/and my native land.” She opens her eyes to countenance if not a landscape redeemed, then one with which she has been subtly, obscurely reconciled:
Then life fell to me.
There the stone is not dead.
the wick flares
when lit by a glance.
If the pacifying illusions of dream did not fall down to her before, the hard reality of life does now, albeit with a kind of succor. Whereas the speaker of “Settlement” eschewed humility to flagrantly proclaim “true origins” and to uncertain effect, that of “The Native Land” obtains a halcyon, if cryptic, poetic image of her provenance. Moreover, it is one she obtains not by brash declaration but by a ritual performance: to close one’s eyes and drink poison… only then may her gaze, once restored, bestow light. Clearly, something of what enables or sanctions the poet’s disclosure of origins inheres in this strange gesture, at once a self-annulment and enfranchisement, an entwined healing and affliction.
And so the poem’s bind: it is as impermissible for it to smear its own origin into indistinction as it is to nakedly proclaim it. If the former is the dupe of mythic recurrence, the latter should remind us that for all the twentieth century’s perverse fervor for apocalypse, this was always grounded in a diametric zeal for (ethnonational) origins. Bachmann’s poems indemnify delusions of original purity. They contest that bête noire of Western metaphysics, creatio ex nihilo, and so also refuse its poetic epitome, the myth of Romantic genius, of poetry’s source in the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” And yet one cannot ignore origins. To overlook it would be an abrogation of a profound ethical injunction—one for Bachmann usually encapsulated in the word “witness.” To altogether disclaim the origin is to renounce the poem’s capacity to create, and so to renounce its capacity to fathom the possibility of an unprecedented act in a world administered by injustice. To curtail so severely its ethical ambit would be to leave the viper to roam and so make the poem merely beautiful… which is to say, in our age, barbaric. Once again: What is at stake here is what modern poetry means by “poiesis.” And so, if the poem is not to forsake but truly acknowledge its bequest, then birth, like death, must dwell poetically in it but under the sign of its own impossibility.
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The sign that Bachmann uses most conspicuously to this end is “guilt,” Schuld. Guilt here has nothing to do with the sentimental romance of slave morality: self-flagellating exhibitionism, mewling dirge, the underhanded melodrama of self-serving expiation. In Bachmann’s work, it is more rigorous, structural. Schuld, after all, in German carries a rich polysemy barely suggested by the English “guilt.” This is to say that Schuld is not simply a moral concept. It is a monosyllable wherein not only moral but also theological, financial, and legal connotations bristle: blame, debt, apology, and responsibility. Mitschuld—complicity; Schuldherr—creditor; Unschuld—innocence; Schuldspruch—conviction.
In its widest sense, Schuld signifies the travail of beginning, the irremediable freight of the past that weighs us in time, disallowing any truck with a source standing before or outside of it. It ruins any perverse pretense to some original purity but also names this negation: It denotes an empty set, a minimal gesture of language that marks the speaker’s boundedness in time. A signifier that is the gauntest presence enshrouding a void, thereby allowing it to enter the poem’s thinking. “Guilt” therefore designates the origin as negativity: deficit, failure, fissure. It attests to the finest cleft in what is, confiding to us that it is not-All. To purport the world’s finitude is to imply that being-otherwise inheres inextinguishably in it. Indeed, while we are accustomed to thinking of revolution under the rubric of ex nihilo messianism, a more subversive strategy resides in thinking radical change negatively. It is no coincidence that for most of Western history, it is the powers that be who have preached creatio ex nihilo as an incontrovertible tenet of Abrahamic orthodoxy, while they brand as heretical those who have dared to speculate on the paradoxical nonbeing of origin: Jakob Böhme’s Ungrund¸ Kabbalistic Tzimtzum, the rich tradition of Gnosticisms that conceive our world in default.
While the negativity of death is read as metaphor, the negativity of birth is legible not as a semantic procedure but a formal one. Its negativity is the founding mark of an apparatus by which we read it retroactively. We read guilt as we might triangulate the hypothetical center of an impossible three-body problem, as an origin intimated by the dynamic and articulated mechanism of which it is the prime mover. And crucially, it is a reading undertaken without telos: neither revelation—the origin substantialized, made flesh—nor absolution—our identification with it. The truest penance is the one that knows it is without hope. So guilt is only properly legible as a working-through, an interminable interrogation of the poem’s apparatus by which we may, if not reveal the origin, then trace its functional trajectory in infinitely resolvable detail… a poem being nothing in any case but a text that is infinitely rereadable.
This logical schema—of an original deficit equilibrated as the absent center of a system devolved around it—is understood by modernity by three major rubrics: economy, law, and psychoanalysis. These are not only the chief paradigms by which we can think origins in a materialist mode, but also our most incisive ways of thinking our social being-with-others, this being nothing but a negotiation of the genesis and so bounds of our finitude. If they are obviously not entirely superposable, their deep analogies mean that they can neither be entirely extricated from one another. To talk of any one is to implicate the others. Bachmann’s poetry incessantly cycles through all three registers. In a recent pamphlet, the novelist Tom McCarthy makes much of Schuld as it appears in the poem “Bread and Salt,” which he takes to be an ars poetica. This is yet another poem that deploys the topos of departure and homecoming to unsettle our thinking of indigeneity and origins. In it, the speaker leaves her house in the charge of a mysterious “rain man” who, in her absence, “will now manage/my darkened house and lengthen/the lines of the ledger that I drew up/since I stayed less often.” Following a journey of “troubled ills,” she collects salt gathered from “when the sea overcomes us” that, upon returning home, she lays across the house’s threshold before stepping in. Its final lines evoke a home somehow changed: “We share bread with the rain;/bread, a debt, and a house.”
McCarthy draws attention to the use of the unusual word “Schuldbuch,” “guilt-book,” here translated as “ledger.” His (entirely viable) reading, which sees its account-taking as a poetic paradigm, indulges his usual pet topics: the absence constitutive of the artwork, the metaphysical convolutions of inside and outside. And yet while cognizant of the poem’s economic motifs, he demurs from an actual reading of its economy, much as he is largely quiet about the four middle stanzas that comprise the poem’s majority.
Regarding the matter of economy, the poem is the narrative of a transaction: weighted with an originary (and accumulating) guilt, delegated to the rain man in her absence, the poet exchanges salt—the testament of suffering—for reentry to her home. While salt upon the threshold traditionally enacts a barrier, warding off evil spirits, the house becomes permeable upon her return: The guilt initially quarantined in the house is shared with the rain, the latter being that which the house is intended to keep out. The house’s—that is, the origin’s—debt is not repaid but shared across zones previously sanctioned, redistributed beyond its original containment. Inside and outside are rendered indeterminate.
There is, however, much more to make here. What has happened in those middle stanzas between her departure and return to ordain this exchange? A series of striking images gives some clue: a thorn torn from a cactus, “a symbol of impotence/to which we meekly bow,” and “stigmata/[…] healed in the violet of the volcano.” While the first invokes the defusal of power, the second is more ambivalent—a sort of healing, yes, but also an erasure of the mark that signals a debt repaid. If the Schuldbuch’s ledger lines were the writing of a cumulative guilt, stigmata are the writing that definitively absolves us of it… to annul them is to negate the negation of the negation and so refuse any relief from guilt’s mantle. Going out into the world, the speaker has renounced power and insisted upon a guilt analogous to the one she left at home. This, in turn, corroborates her claim as a witness: She speaks of “great storms of light,/[of which] none has reached the living,” and returning from this netherworld, she bears the salt, symbol of tribulation, that shall enable the guilt previously detained in the house to receive testimony outside. Indeed, it is distributed along with bread—sustenance.
The poem outlines an economy of debt whose actors seek not its forgiveness but its socialization. It does not seek to redress the negative with the positive, debt with compensation: Any one actor may only achieve this at the expense of another; the market can never eradicate debt but only relocate and so reproduce its inequalities. Indeed, the central item of credit (i.e., positivity), the poetic image of salt, is itself forged by a labor process defined by negativity: the negation of power in the thorn, the negation of redemption in the healed stigmata. Its exchange with the guilt accumulated within the origin dramatizes the birth of the poem as the sharing of guilt: the latter’s being made legible by leaving the house. It is, however, crucial not to make the poem a morality tale by reifying guilt: Again, “guilt” only signifies a negativity, the empty sign of a time external to the poem, not some claim of the superego devolved from atrocities past. The poem’s first lines—“Now the wind sends its rails ahead;/we will follow in slow trains”—certainly evoke the imagery of the camps, but to consequently restrict guilt to war guilt (or any specific guilt, historical, theological, or otherwise) is to vastly confine its scope: It is to fall back into the logic of allegory and metaphorize guilt much as we did death under darkness or silence. This is to reduce “Bread and Salt” to an admonitory fable preaching identification with the guilt of the Other.
The logic of birth, however, by upholding guilt as only a punctum, a negativity, asks us to map its circulation in form rather than consume it as meaning. The ethical project proper to the poem thus is not to encode historical or theological travails external to it that, once reified, may be read from it as a cipher. Instead, it is to document by its internal economy the circulation of the negative that is the mark of its exterior, that is to say, a history we cannot ever properly represent in however mediated a fashion. In doing so, it negotiates by its form a Schuldbuch with this outside: its duties owed and payments pending. “Bread and Salt” is an ars poetica because it explicitly outlines the genesis of the poem’s debt economy: The inscrutable guilt of the origin is brought outside the house, made legible, in exchange for the speaker’s labor, performed as a series of poetic images of negation that confirm her status as witness.
This is to say, the poem has two origins. It mediates two guilts. It is an accounting of the negotiation between two times that are foreclosed: that of the house, of the poem’s provenance as an act of writing, since this act must always precede the moment of inscription; and that of the journey, of witness, since representation can never fully do this justice. If the poem cannot represent its two originary moments, it can think them jointly by economically contextualizing them as the grounding negativities of a third time—the time of the poem. Poetic time is a liminal special economic zone that mediates two diametric alterities imported into it—the guilt of writing, of the present circumstance of its inscription that it constitutively cannot inscribe, and the historical guilt of the past, of the world witnessed outside the writing. A legible commerce is inscribed within the encounter between two forms of guilt. To wit:
To stay together, each must feel separation […]
And yet we are determined to speak across borders,
even if borders pass through every word:
in longing still for home, we will cross over,
and again with every place stand in accord
This could not bear more upon the central dilemma of any German-speaking poet of Bachmann’s generation: if it is at once barbaric to write beautiful poems in the wake of atrocity, it is also pornographic to represent the latter. Bachmann’s poems advise that representation is not, in fact, poetry’s purview. Its real ethical mission is not a question of its subject matter but of the range and perspicacity of its critical self-interrogation as it mediates that subject matter. Poetry invigilates the mode of production of beauty. If classical poetic economy naturalizes beauty, advertises an image of pristine eternity by obfuscating its relationship to history—whether through ignorance, suppression, or instrumentalization—then Bachmann’s poems, by asserting the prerogatives of the historical, critically demythologize that relationship. They attempt something like the critique of poetic economy. Just as the commodity’s secret is that it is riven by a fundamental negativity, the discrepancy of use and exchange value, a contradiction reproduced as a symptom in its circulation, so the act of witnessing—the poet surveying history from the frontiers of the poem—is also constituted by an insuperable gap: the minimal separation between seer and seen. The poet must furnish testimony while never fully conveying the event, do it full justice in representation, and so may only affirm her ethical fidelity to it in the negative as the humility of an originary guilt. Through critique, the poem may come to share in this guilt as it circulates poetically, but should it be profaned—whether fetishized in a positive representation or simply ignored—the repressed will inevitably return in more pathological symptoms.
An early poem, “Autumn Maneuver,” expounds this. Here we meet an anomic speaker lying on “the chaff of scorn… [a]nd the escape southward is not an option for us.” For this speaker, “sometimes/a splinter of dream-filled marble pierces me/in the eye, where I am most vulnerable to beauty.” Meanwhile, she is astonishingly insouciant toward the suffering around her, callously asking “Why should it be otherwise?” upon hearing of refugees, murder, and the dead; and in particularly flagrant fashion “in the face of the beggar/who comes at noon [she] slam[s] the door… one can spare oneself such a sight.” From here she indulges that “vulnerability to beauty,” abruptly exclaiming “Let’s take a trip! Let’s stroll under cypresses… see at reduced rates sunsets/that are beyond compare!” before this joy is swiftly curtailed: “Time works wonders/But if it arrives inconveniently/with the knocking of guilt: we are not at home.” This comeuppance leads her to find herself once “again/on the chaff of scorn.”
For a poet typically so oblique in her narrative logics, Bachmann is unusually unsubtle here. Furthermore, despite its use of monetary metaphors, the poem does not construct a formal economy such as “Bread and Salt” but is instead a more straightforwardly moralistic condemnation, laid out allegorically. The point, however, is clear: That beauty cannot be purchased by abrogating the responsibilities of the witness, thereby eliding the poem’s origin in historical tribulation. It clarifies those more obtuse poems, like “Bread and Salt,” that undertake through their formal economies a structural critique of what would otherwise be obfuscated by beauty. To praise the impotence of the neutralized thorn, to heal stigmata—“Bread and Salt” descends into the bowels of poetic production, identifies and negates the surpluses of power or wishful expiation. In doing so, it enables a transaction between the guilt of writing and the guilt of history so that, through the poetic act, guilt may in turn be communized, becoming the object of a shared intelligence.
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Yet an obvious question is begged: by what right? If the poet’s research into originary guilt makes her primary attitude one of humility, then this mission must entail a parallel one that reflexively interrogates its legitimacy to do so. If the former was an economic inquiry, this is one of the law. Indeed, legal rhetoric is abundant in Bachmann’s poetry, and tribunals a recurring topos. If economics, conceived in the widest sense, is the adjudication of geometry, a matter of how we organize space, then law is the adjudication of that other face of the Logos, language. Economics arbitrates the syntax of value, law its semantics. Neither is extricable from the other, a knot most famously dramatized in Eumenides where the law originates as the solution to an economic antinomy—the infinite exchange of blood libel.
The origin is traditionally what confers upon the law its legitimacy. Whether natural law’s appeal to objective normativity or positive law’s to convention, the law garners authoritative force by professed fealty to some original, extralegal state of affairs. Guilt, then, taken as origin, declares poetry to be a legitimation crisis. Bachmann’s poems are a deposition in this midst, an anxious inquest into their own right to self-legislation. They record an extended litigation over the sovereignty of the lyric I: Who confers its right to speak and to whom, in turn, is it ethically beholden?
Bachmann’s programmatic statements on this front seem to belie the complexities of her poetry. A series of lectures given over the winter of 1959-1960 constitute her most comprehensive statement on poetics. One lecture in particular is devoted to this question of the “I” in literature, in which she advocates for the rights of “an I without guarantee”: the enunciation of the “I” as its own illocutionary justification where “there is no novel-I or poem-I that does not owe its existence to the claim: I speak, therefore I am.” While the lecture is largely spent on the precarity of the “I” in postwar, postindustrial society, she nevertheless concludes with an abrupt, humanistic profession of faith that “[i]t is the miracle of the I that, wherever it speaks, it is alive.” This is a logic shared with that other special, performative use of language: naming, the subject of the next lecture, and one to which she is similarly ambivalent. Again, she laments “a deliberate weakening of names and an inability to convey names” set against a basic, inexplicable faith that “loyalty to those names, character names, place names, is about the only loyalty that people are capable of.”
The “I” and naming embody a coincidence of law and language. Their claims to significance are apodictic. They are semantic autarkies. To simply say “I” or bestow a name in the world would certainly seem more palatable to modern sensibilities than claims of divine cosmogony or Romantic genius, but even in their recursive reference, they are no less claimants of ex nihilo self-origin. These are speech acts that can only justify themselves tautologically. Because they make no appeal to external authority, they are vindicated in the last instance only by raw power—who is saying “I”?; who bequeaths the name?—a justification that is extraneous to any question of Justice itself. Bachmann’s poems evince this anxiety precisely, her prose notwithstanding. In the pointedly titled “How Shall I Name Myself?” both “I” and name flail in the last stanza: “Perhaps I can once more see myself […] Words fail! How shall I name myself/without living in another tongue?” The name is not grounded in self-identity but is, in fact, available only through the alterity of another language from which the speaker is irreparably removed. The implication is that we do not come to language in immaculate innocence, emboldened to draw from thin air our vainest designs, but that we are already condemned to its slippage and fracture. We are consigned to language as a means that, since at least Babel, has been impoverished under history’s mutilation.
And so, in one more respect, the poem is constitutively bound to guilt. Poetry is grounded in the sober knowledge that to truly say “I” or name its world is an impossible task. It cannot broach these as origins but only conceive them by the sign of their prohibition. The poet comes to language already damned by the law: the first law that, after our expulsion from Eden, rived signifier from signified; and its corollary that, after Babel, resigned language to plural disarray. The law of originary prohibition enters the poem, therefore, as negativity.
This is to say, much as Bachmann’s poems cordon a zone of economic exchange, they also enact an arbitration between two legal regimes: language’s sentence to paltry finitude and the speaker’s petition for self-determination. And in this encounter, it is the former, the mantle of guilt we assume by our participation in language, that punctures any fantasy of that linguistic self-determination. Bachmann’s poems ratify a conviction that deposes the pretenses conferred by authoritarian equivalence of the Law and the Word, the force of Commandment. Against the myth of their joint origin, it asserts a critical interstice that is the habitat of the poem, drawing out and tarrying within the paradoxes that span this gap. And yet to capitulate entirely to the bondage of language would make only for prose.
In Bachmann’s inexplicable, hopeless articles of faith that one might somehow still say “I” or bestow a name, she bears upon an absurdity that is nevertheless always the poetic speaker’s basic rationale, even if she countenances inevitable failure. This is to say that there may be something like a lyric “I,” if only one that subsists in the ironic knowledge of its debility; that there may persist something like a capacity to name, if only one admits that there are only misnomers. This is a poetic subject that knows language to be not what conveys power but actively defuses it. In Bachmann, we are given the lineaments of an anti-authoritarian poetics that does not proclaim its legitimacy by diktat, but always short-circuits this relationship to power at its origin, founding its poetic sovereignty in a certain powerlessness: Schuld as finally neither guilt nor debt, but humility, that is to say, the condition of an ethics. Schuld as the sign of an impossible birth and thereby one that solicits infinite commemoration.
Richard Fegelman
R.K. Hegelman is a writer from London.