Ingeborg Bachmann’s “The Book of Franza” (henceforth “Book”) is constituted by a tenuous interplay between the materiality of texts located within the corporeal world, and images that are generated whilst these texts are interpreted through the mind. Through the text’s self-reflexive formal structure, which traces the journey from the material sign to the literary image, Bachmann’s work itself becomes a Lacanian mirror. In other words, the text dramatises the relations between characters and the images of their own body that surround them, “establishing a relationship between the organism and its reality—or as they say, between the Innenwelt [inner world] and the Umwelt [outer world]” (Lacan 6). Yet, this same dialectic between inside and outside, catalysed by the text, also shatters the mirror across various interwoven patriarchal legacies and epistemes in the text, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, metafictive/literary and geological traditions, as well as the aftermath of war. The ultimate result of this breakage across patriarchy is the “fragmented body” of Franza: “the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits” (Lacan 6). In other words, Franza’s ontology is truly “fragmented,” but also exponentially “squar[ed]” unto itself, as the body’s relation to external spaces is split and proliferated across the interrelated, interdisciplinary strands in the text. This, in turn, enacts a shattering of the text-as-mirror, generating a breach in materiality and signification, wherein Franza’s Innenwelt and Umwelt become painfully compressed through her body.
Thus, the traumatic breach between material reality and signification articulates Franza’s condition across multidisciplinary frameworks within patriarchy, which serve as both analogies and metaphors for each other. Simultaneously, this trauma also scatters the fragments of her intratextual body across various moments in time and space, across both ontological materiality and literary signification. Like the Lacanian phallus which continually interfaces with Franza’s ontology through the patriarchal frameworks in “Book,” Franza’s body is “an originary site of erotogenization which subsequently becomes the occasion for a set of substitutions or displacements” (Butler 31, emphasis mine). The wound between inside and outside, then, also becomes symbolic of Franza’s feminine lack within the interstitial networks of patriarchal histories that the text mobilises. Yet ultimately, it is this displaced and castrated body that becomes Franza’s voice: “the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” (Caruth 2, emphasis original). Just as Franza’s voice is composed while her body decomposes, so does the text enact a decomposition of the phallus even as it materialises as a force through motivic repetition. Therefore, this paper argues that Franza’s psychosomatic symptom, fragmented across inner and outer worlds, is both an affliction of Franza’s neurosis and its expression, both a reification and breach of Franza’s body-as-text. Ultimately, her symptoms are also an articulation and disarticulation of patriarchal power structures, insofar as the metonymised phallus dissolves from the text whilst its binding hold over Franza is repeatedly concretised.
I begin by examining how the metafictive passage near the start of “Book” enacts a spatial-temporal compression between the leap from concrete text to literary image. This passage begins with a juxtaposition of two Viennas—one physical and the other a symbolic projection of this physical Vienna—but only to flesh out their difference. Bachmann writes, “And though it’s proven that Vienna exists, one cannot comprehend it through a single word, for Vienna exists here on paper and the city of Vienna completely elsewhere, namely at 48°14’54” north latitude and 16°21’43” east longitude” (8). The ontological materialities of two separate Viennas are emphasised: one corporealised “on paper” as ink on the page, and the other whose geographical physicality is emphasised in the precision of its coordinates. Bachmann then highlights how the Vienna on the page is more than just its materiality, “[t]hus the Vienna here cannot be Vienna, for here there are only words that allude to and insist that something exists, and that something else does not exist” (Bachmann 8, emphasis mine). Subsequently, Bachmann begins to question the very materiality of a text that straddles corporeal existence and non-existence, emphasising how the words gesture toward “something else” through their function as symbols. What is foregrounded is the act of reading—not just as epistemology but also as a metaphysical act of questioning. Reading is therefore not just a matter of interpretation. Rather, the reader of “Book” confronts ontological materiality, only for him/her to be pulled beyond the material geography of Vienna into a Vienna on the page, a symbolised realm of “not existing.”
This tension between existing and that “something else” which “does not exist” extends to Martin’s body and his capacity for speech, threatening to disorient the reader with a concussive jerking back and forth between existence and non-existence. Martin, too, is revealed to be born out of a body of words, “meaning that none of it exists, not even this: He thought, read, smoked, gazed, saw, strolled, tucked away a telegram, then later said—therefore no one can be speaking if none of it exists” (Bachmann 8). With a series of verbs, through which the active voice shapes Martin’s physical movements and even his motorised authority over the telegram, Bachmann draws out the irony of writing out Martin’s body: while corporeally reactive, “none of it exists, not even this.” Indeed, the em dash cuts into Martin’s speech, censoring it from the text, and also abruptly disrupts his series of physical movements. The text enacts a mirroring “symmetry that reverses” Martin’s body, standing “in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it” (Lacan 4). Hence, the recognition of Martin’s corporeality in the text is misrecognition; there is truly no body. This is not Martin’s flesh, but its non-existent symbol lying on the page: “the imago of one’s own body in hallucinations and dreams” (Lacan 5, emphasis original).
Subsequently, this overturning of ontology is drawn out as a question of Martin’s voice or lack thereof, almost in the systematic rhetoric of a thought experiment: “therefore no one can be speaking if none of it exists.” Thus, Martin’s corporeality is fleshed out only to be undercut by the ontological disintegration of a speaking body. Yet, replacing Martin’s body, the words and paper as artefacts of writing begin to assume literal concreteness: “Only the rubble of words that tumbles, only the paper that turns over with a rustle, otherwise nothing happens, nothing is turned, no one turns and says something” (Bachmann 8-9, emphasis mine). Via Bachmann’s metafictive voice, the text becomes its own mirror and reflects on Martin’s ontology to enact a transformation across corporeality and intangibility: “namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Lacan 4). Even as Bachmann insists that “nothing” and “no one” has “turned,” the reader is confronted with a turn or ontological reversal: Martin’s material body dematerialises from the text, whereas the text becomes a material presence.
Similarly, the tunnel motif in this segment comes to embody not just the process of translating corporeality into an image, but also foregrounds writing and speaking as material processes. Bachmann begins by depicting how the words themselves enact a journey, imprinting the paper corporeally as they emerge from the unwritten darkness: the paper “is still not covered with words, and when it emerges, it is covered and its pages numbered and divided up. The words line up together, and [are] brought along out of the darkness” (Bachmann 9). What is emphasised here is not writing as imagistic projection, but as mechanised physicality: the paper is “covered” and “the words line up” and are “brought along.” Indeed, the journey is not just a process of writing per se, but also one that inextricably ties the mechanical pressure of the printing press to the flesh of an embodied voice: “The originals and the copies roll on, the illusions and true conceptions rolling into the light, rolling down through the head, emerging from the mouth that speaks of them and asserts them” (Bachmann 9). Again, with the “cop[ying]” of the word “roll,” the self-reflexive metaphor embodies an unmistakable corporeality, tunnelling through a literal body in the text. Thus, Bachmann imprints and reprints her text’s own materiality on the page, in the exact moment that her reader apprehends those same words.
Yet, this corporeality is foregrounded only to be deferred shortly after, as the text enacts a continual slip between ontological materiality and that image, which Bachmann renders as an anti-ontological non-existence. Even as the mouth “distinguishes [the words] from the tunnel inside of one’s head,” Bachmann is quick to assert that “this tunnel in fact does not exist, itself only an image appearing from time to time in a certain cranium, which if split open would reveal little, for there would be nothing there as well, neither of the tunnels” (9, emphasis mine). In other words, even as Bachmann’s metaphor powerfully concretises both the printing press and the speaking and thinking body, she quickly undercuts these corporealities. The metaphor itself is revealed as a bridging presence that is neither fully material nor fully immaterial. Two concrete Semmering tunnels—located in the geographical Vienna and the Vienna of the corporeal page—are simultaneously also that non-concrete “image” of a tunnel in the head. Hence, the mechanics of metaphor enact a split; insofar as metaphor takes flight from the concrete tunnel to the tunnel in the mind, the metaphor is both “the illusion and the true conception.” The metaphor tunnels through “the original and the copies” simultaneously, travelling through the head’s flesh, but also a “cranium” that is emptied out. This catalyses a continual feedback loop through the text, which circulates through the inner, mental world only to burst into the outer, physical world, and vice versa. On the one hand, a dialectic between materiality and its imagistic visages is established: “the facts that make the world real—these depend on the unreal in order to be recognized by it” (Bachmann 9). On the other, the flitting across materiality and symbolism also becomes that precarious balancing beam upon which “Book” itself rests. As Bachmann so aptly puts it, “[I]n relation with the train, as with all else, a confusion exists” (9, emphasis mine).
The text mobilises this journey between the inner and outer worlds as a trope, triggering that “confusion” not just with Martin and the reader, but also with and within Franza. Although Bachmann herself uses the word “intrapsychic” to describe Ways of Dying, arguing that “‘the real settings’ are ‘interior ones’” (cited in Lennox 37), I posit that the text fluctuates repeatedly between inside and outside, externalising the inside and vice versa. In other words, the intrapsychic is the extraphysical in “Book,” with both realms collapsing back and forth into each other through the tunnel of metaphor. For example, as Franza travels across the Mediterranean, she recounts her time in Vienna with Fossil to Martin. Her voice, then, enacts that abovementioned tunnelling across reality into a remembered image, and vice versa. Her narration not only carries herself back in time, but also thrusts her body backwards into space as she “came back to the apartment, . . . threw the door shut and left everything lying in the hallway and looked at the mess around” (Bachmann 76). Moreover, the body is foregrounded but its Innenwelt is also penetrated on a basic, physical level. The paper itself infects her with sensations: the “gust of wind . . . blown in from his room,” carrying a page of Fossil’s case study with it, enacts a literal bodily invasion of Franza (Bachmann 77). This wind without becomes the wind within Franza, transmitted through “the content, which swept over [her] like a chill wind, there being no better way to say it” (Bachmann 77). The textual tunnel, then, becomes a trope not only for that interplay between materiality and the image, but also a burrowing into the body, collapsing the Innenwelt into the Umwelt. The gust of wind is yet another form of tunnelling that carries the externalised pathogenic text into the body, where Franza experiences the text both on a readerly level and as a symptom or “chill.”
The literary trope of the journey also compresses the flight—between (corpo)reality and intangibility, between page and image—as a postcolonial fracture across space and time. More than that, Bachmann’s reification of the journey as a trope also connects various interrelated moments of trauma in the text. In other words, the journey as a motif is not just a metaphor, but also an “overdetermined” metonymy which is “not derived from a single element . . . but may be traced back to a whole number” (Freud 154, emphasis original). On the one hand, the Mediterranean sea, within which Franza’s recount is told to Martin, becomes emblematic of spatialised imprisonment and flux: “But if the Mediterranean doesn’t get any calmer, Martin, I won’t be able to stand it. I want to get out of here, I want to get out” (77). Subsequently, that turbulence of seasickness, then, is also metonymised and even conflated with the force enacted by the turbulent metaphor, functioning not just as a metaphorical image but also a metonymic trope: a multitude of related journeys which are duplicated across the text. In this multiplication across the page, the many iterations of the journey, proliferated as it expands into a recurrent motif, substitute for and point back to all moments of bodily suffering across both Vienna and Egypt. Across this postcolonial journey—also a spatial-temporal journey through vocalised narration—the journey trope is compressed into a composite of metonymies. Indeed, as Freud writes, “the threads of association do not simply converge, . . . they cross and interweave with each other many times over in the course of their journey” (154). Thus, the text is the tunnel is the sickness is the dream; indeed, after Franza finishes recounting her time with Fossil, she says, “It’s a terrifying dream (hand me the water, please), it’s something that I see played out inside my head, but I see now how it could be staged” (77). Likewise, as Franza and Martin travel within Egypt, the metaphor again gives way to a motif that fuses sickness and travel: “She had not arrived at Luxor but instead at a point in her illness” (105). Metonymies of travel, then, are also a tunnel that connects various traumatic episodes in the text that are all interwoven: the postcolonial flight from Vienna and from Fossil into Egypt, coupled with a nauseating return to Fossil and Vienna through narration; the body’s seasickness at this disorienting return; the sickness of being written as a psychoanalytic case study; and so on. The journey is an overdetermined organising force in the text, recursively gestured at and substituted for by all its derived metonymies.
The projection of Franza’s internalised illness into the world around her also displaces her own body, leading not just to internalised, psychic chaos, but also the chaos of a body ripped apart by this same overdetermination via recursive metonymy. First, the female body is duplicated through travel, becoming “the recurring image of the woman in Cairo” (118). Franza herself stands at the core of this feminine nexus of images; she “identifies with an array of victims that includes a butchered camel, a bound woman, Jews in the Third Reich, the Papuas and the ancient Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut” (Filkins xiii). Yet this is not identification in the mere sense of sympathy or even empathy. Rather, Bachmann dramatises these episodes as a material substitution of bodies. For example, as Franza contemplates an Arab master holding onto a woman by her hair, she states, “This woman will always be here...for I have become this woman...I am lying in her place. And my hair is twisted into a long, long cord that is held by him in Vienna. I am bound and tied. I will never escape” (132). Here, Franza’s patriarchal domination by Fossil is rendered in terms of the position of her body: whilst “lying,” Franza is literally put “in her place.” Strictly speaking then, Franza is not Spivak’s subaltern in the flesh; rather, she is the inscription of black subalternity into her own white flesh. Franza’s hair—also the Egyptian woman’s hair—is the meeting point of black and white, Egypt and Vienna, Fossil and the Arab master. And in her incorporation of the subaltern’s body—itself a postcolonial motif or “recurring image of the woman in Cairo”—Franza also incorporates that “violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third world woman’” (Spivak 102). Shuttling continually between her cord of hair which binds Vienna to Egypt, Franza’s own body becomes that interstitial tunnel “[b]etween patriarchy and imperialism” (Spivak 102), internalising other episodes of trauma in the text, thereby triggering a supplanting of her body via metonymic substitution.
In the same vein, other episodes of ontological fragmentation in the text are always mediated by penetrative probing across patriarchal disciplines. Patriarchy itself is overdetermined: an interdisciplinary force that cuts across both Franza’s body and mind. For instance, Franza’s recurring dream, wherein she becomes the gassed Jew, is a negotiation with accounts of the Holocaust that Fossil studies. As Franza says, “[I]n Vienna we all shook our heads over every single story that surfaced about the sufferings of the prisoners during the war. (I’m sounding like Leo’s book, which is not what I want. I want to get away from that.)” (Bachmann 70, emphasis mine). Thus, the intratextual shift from Franza’s body to the Jew’s is also an intertextual shift that pushes the reader from Franza’s autobiography into narratives of Third Reich history. Bachmann layers this history into her novella, through the figure of “Leo’s book” which is literally internalised into Franza’s corporeal-textual body: “The Book of Franza”. Moreover, this is not just history as story, but as an object of study: “[t]hey analyse and ponder it all” (Bachmann 70). This moment of Fossil studying the Jew’s textualised body is then translated into his study of Franza-as-Jew, who is also F., the psychoanalytic case study. He gasses her in the dream (“Jordan held the knob and was letting the gas in”) but also studies her as a psychoanalyst outside of the dream. As Franza writes, this is “[t]he strategy, the calculation . . . I’ve been used, I’ve been part of an experiment, an object for the private thirst of knowledge of a scientist” (71). Therefore, the supplanted body that is gassed—as well as both physically and scientifically split or “ana-lysed”—is a site of metonymic fractures writ on the material and textual body/bodies of women. Bachmann reveals a patriarchal epistemic network that is intersectional in reach, ultimately foregrounding feminine disempowerment in and as the object of study. Franza is the pivot, with the Jew and the Arab resting at opposite ends along her body.
Through this pivoting across epistemes, Franza’s body is subjected to scientific probing via a compound lens that compresses these disciplines into each other, even as studying Franza adopts corporeal registers. In addition to a conflation of the figure of the psychoanalyst with that of the war historian, “Book” also implicates other epistemes which study and (re)interpret the female body. For example, Martin’s geological study is mapped onto his study of Franza, in turn analogising geology’s own epistemes to Fossil’s own psychoanalytic study. Bachmann quotes directly from geological discourse, but only to recontextualise it immediately through Martin, as he attempts and eventually fails to apply the same logic to his relationship with his sister. She writes, “‘It must be concluded that both rock formations must have suffered (suffered!) a final metamorphism, and likewise a mechanical realignment as a result of subsequent overthrust.’ But could the same be said of human beings?” (49). Geology, then, becomes an analogy for human relationships (or even human “suffer[ing]!”). Through Martin’s musings, “The Rannach Line,” a geological formation, becomes “the Ranner Line” that “would soon run out” (49, emphasis original), thereby linking terminal and fractured familial genealogies to geological formations. Likewise, Martin’s geological attempts at studying his sister are tied to painting: “before Martin could know something of his sister and complete a portrait of her, he needed to find out just what kind of ground she stood upon” (48, emphasis mine). Thus, this is not just geology qua geology, but also the warped artistry of a geological psychoanalysis. The female body is compressed against all three disciplines via both a physical substitutability of objects of study (The Rannach Line that morphs into the Ranner Line, which then outlines a body “grounded” by Martin) and metaphorical leaps in compounded image-making (Franza’s body imagined as portrait, in turn symbolising that grounded body).
Similarly, Franza’s postwar interactions with the English soldier are rendered in terms of a materially invasive medicinal discourse, wherein “Franza allowed herself to be analysed . . . [S]he saw her English kisses weighed, cut apart, and pulverized, divided up and dead, herself now purified and sterilized” (46). The symbolic violence here is medicalised (“sterilized”) and conflated with the mechanics of an invasive dissection. Likewise, the concrete force of geology brought to bear upon her body is foregrounded when she smokes a clump of cannabis that is metaphorised as “a very good, hard, earth-brown chunk” (114). After Franza smokes, Bachmann then describes “all the arteries and veins, all the muscles, all the bones, feeling as if an Xray were piercing through [Franza], no one able to illuminate a body and dissect it in this way that this feeling probed through her” (116). Franza’s body thereby becomes a site of effacement through a reduplicated, academic probing: “my peeling skin, for I am peeling everywhere, the subject of a diabolical experiment” (62). Thus, she flits between a series of symbolic meanings that can only connote her peeling away from a cross-disciplinary, “objective” male gaze. On one level, this peeling is a form of bodily expression, an embodiment of the trauma within, which literally peels away from the inner world into the outer. On another, the peeling functions as a metonymic connection established between Franza and each discipline, evoking peeling paint, geological layering, and psychosomatic symptoms all at once. Thus, this peeling is the manifestation of the aftermath of male power, whose symbolic threads weave a network between psychoanalysis, visual art, medicine, geology. Yet, the excoriation is a symbol that abrades against the materiality of the body. That is to say, through Franza, the text peels back all interstitial layering between these disciplines, only to expose the penetration of patriarchal authority into these fields and, through them, unto Franza’s body as an object of study.
It is not just the female body, but also the phallus that imposes itself onto the female body, thereby condensing all these modes of patriarchal study. For one, Leo’s nickname Fossil conflates both psychoanalytic repetition and geological unearthing, insofar as both processes entail excavations of the past that are resurrected in contemporaneity. This compression of disciplines is even more telling in Franza’s encounter with the sea cucumber in the desert. The creature is configured as a “black stump,” “shrivelled-up monstrosity” and “barely alive” (119). As an “image” (a word which Franza herself uses), the sea cucumber thus functions as an infected phallic substitute for the missing material penis in the text. Her encounter with the phallus also catalyses a breakdown of ontological barriers: the Innenwelt literally encroaches on Franza’s Umwelt, warping her perception of her surroundings. Bachmann writes, “She remained lying there, suffering convulsions as she had in the hallway in Vienna, on a parquet floor, a linoleum floor, a hospital bed, and now again on the sand, on the sand bloodied by a camel, as she laughed and laughed and laughed—her laughter providing the opening for the decomposition that began” (119). The diseased phallus, then, is also a contagion that infects the convulsing Franza: each convulsion is also enacted by the spaces that seize her body as they flit past in quick succession. Thus, this is literally an episode of “repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of h[er] accident, a situation from which [s]he wakes up in another fright” (Freud 598). In other words, the hallucinatory image and the corporeal environment become indistinguishable; the Innenwelt is warped painfully against the Umweltand vice versa. The infection then, is not just a convulsion, but the ontological and textual “decomposition” between inner and outer worlds, between memory and tactility. More than that, Franza’s nausea, triggered by the phallus, also hurls her across the aforementioned disciplines: “a hospital bed” that evokes medicine, the “hallway in Vienna” wherein her psychoanalytic encounters with Fossil take place, and so on. The phallus is therefore not just an organising factor across patriarchal disciplines, but a quasi-deterministic binding force that pushes all these disciplines and images together, even as its contagion tears them and Franza apart. In Bachmann’s words, “The Arabian desert is surrounded by shattered visions of God” (119, emphasis mine).
However, even as the text’s metonymic and metaphorical mechanics reify the presence of the phallus, they also render it as tenuous and dissipating into immateriality. Through the sickly sea cucumber, what is enacted is “a conflation of the penis and the phallus” in the sense that the metonymic sea cucumber, physically standing in for a penis, is also a phallic image or symbol (Butler 31). Yet, this interplay between penis and phallus is also, as Butler puts it, the site of “a textual vacillation, [which] enact[s] the impossibility of collapsing the distinction between penis and phallus” (Butler 31). This “vacillation” manifests when the Lacanian Name of the Father is not only mobilised as yet another intertextual trope, but also materialises as a literal garment that both reifies and conceals the penis. As Franza immerses herself in the genealogical family names in the graveyard, the names become textual material that clothe her: “She looked backward, spinning amid the past, clad in those ancient names,... submerging herself again and draping herself with the last name that had in fact been her first” (Bachmann 34). On the one hand, the name of the father, like the sea cucumber and the probing male eye, is again equated with that totalising, phallic force of organisation that enshrouds Franza’s body across space and time. The names are “so total that they bring to [her] birth...the shape of [her] destiny” (Lacan 67). On the other, this symbolic-material fabric also unravels itself: Franza is “surprised that it no longer covered her entirely, but rather only the bare essentials” (Bachmann 34). The phallus is thus destabilised on two counts: first, through this act of unravelling and exposure wherein the fabric of the father’s name disappears, and also through the ambivalent phrase “essential bits.” The androgyny of this image connotes both the phallus and its female lack, at once the core organising principle (“essential”) but also its fragmentation and diffusion into the periphery (“bits”). The name of the father, then, enacts a covering up of the phallus, causing the phallus to disappear into a literal “textual vacillation.” In Butler’s terms, the phallus’s “claim to originality is constituted through a reversal and erasure of a set of substitutions produced in ambivalence” (Butler 33). Through imposing itself onto Franza’s body, then, the phallus dissolves even as it is reified. It collapses into a gap, slipping away between penis and phallus, between materiality and its symbol—perhaps even between existing and non-existence.
Even in the final rape scene, the phallus disappears through another “set of substitutions,” as metonymy is once again employed. Here, the phallus that is so central to the rape ironically registers only as an imagistic destabilisation: “the possibility of variable projections, variable modes of delineating and theatricalizing body surfaces” (34). Like Butler, who reads the pathologisation of homosexuality against itself, Bachmann thereby enacts a turn against patriarchal readings of Freudian psychoanalysis by inverting its own theories: “the point is to read Freud not for the moments in which illness and sexuality are conflated” through the phallus (Butler 35). Instead, both writers seem to advocate reading “for the moments in which that conflation fails to sustain itself, and where he fails to read himself in precisely the ways he teaches us to read” (Butler 35, emphasis mine). That conflation is enacted in the pressure of the rape, which compresses the library of Vienna into the Egyptian pyramids through the force of traumatic repetition. In other words, the textual force of the psychoanalytic archive enacts a repeated phallic trauma through Fossil, a “mechanical concussion”: “he had shoved her against the hard edges of the shelves and done it . . . the repetition meant to kill her” (Freud 597, Bachmann 139).
Yet, the force of “repetition” also erodes the phallus through a series of substitutions of mechanical force that supplant this originary phallus. For example, the force of the phallus materialises as the “stick” of the man in Egypt, in turn metaphorised as an “ax;” moreover, it is also the “shove” against the “rows of journals and reference works,” the intertextual weight of the archive itself (Bachmann 138-9). In fact, the physical penis is never shown, and the phallus must in fact be extrapolated from the censored presence of a penis; for all its impact in the rape scene, the penis only barely materialises in “how [the rapist] had buttoned up his tight-fitting jeans” (138). Likewise, the act of rape disappears into the word “it”; it connotes that which is never explicitly named. Fossil has “done it,” while the rapist in Egypt commits “[t]he same thing” that is later dismissed as “nothing, nothing happened, and even if it did, what does it matter?” (Bachmann 139). The blows enacted by these phallic symbols on Franza situates the phallus at the core of the rape, yet the rape and the phallus are both destabilised by this very act of imagistic displacement, also disappearing into an effaced “it.” Thus, patriarchal incursions on Franza’s body are destabilised even as they are repeated: this is a force that gains power across repetitions, but also begins to disperse itself through an incessant “in-out, in-out” [1] between materiality and flee(t)ing images.
In conclusion, Bachmann’s text sets up a metafictive tunnelling between materiality and image, as well as the world within the body and its surrounding environment. This tunnelling, as it passes through the inner and outer worlds of Franza’s embodied experiences, also transmits a patriarchal penetration across her ontology via the body. Thus, both the inner and outer worlds begin to leak into each other. This results in Franza’s traumatic neurosis, which is enacted in psychosomatic symptoms that recur across space and time, across Innenwelt and Umwelt. Her symptoms themselves are reified and caused by various disciplines that study, probe, and dissect her body, which in turn all point back to the phallus or the name of the father that organises patriarchal power. Yet, the articulation of the phallus is also its disarticulation: it fades away over a series of metonymic substitutions and metaphorical leaps in the text. Thus, just as Franza succumbs to this disorienting neurosis and is turned inside-out, so does the phallus become literally decentred even in its centrality, seeming “to lose its proper place and proliferate in unexpected locations” (Butler 30). As the Lacanian mirror that negotiates the inner and outer worlds begins to splinter, Franza and the phallus find themselves lost in that very gap between corporeality and the image. Ultimately, the reification and binding of patriarchal disciplines is also the same force that unravels these disciplines, decentring patriarchy even as patriarchal force is rendered the crux of Bachmann’s novel.
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[1] I adopt this term from Anthony Burgess’s novella, A Clockwork Orange.
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